EPT
Any experience Learning Japanese?
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Deltawolf
United States105 Posts
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Sufficiency
Canada23833 Posts
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Cambium
United States16368 Posts
How determined are you in learning it? If you are not 100% motivated, I would not bother. It's not an easy language to learn by any stretch unless you are Korean or Chinese (even then, it's still a bitch). | ||
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Deltawolf
United States105 Posts
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DCLXVI
United States729 Posts
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da_head
Canada3350 Posts
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rauk
United States2228 Posts
but if it's for something like manga, they generally have furigana except for the most common kanji. | ||
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kainzero
United States5211 Posts
First of all, if you're gonna go for 2 weeks to a month, you'll be fine knowing very basic Japanese. With enough pointing and charades and very limited Japanese you can live there just fine. My cousin is doing that right now, and he lives in the countryside. There are many different ways to start learning. I recommend taking introductory classes at community college, and supplementing it with self-study. Classes are great because they give you an overview of everything you need to know, and you can meet people in class. For self-study, I use a program called Anki to help me study, which are the smart flashcards I'm talking about. Instead of reviewing piles of sentences and words every day, Anki uses an optimization formula in order to help you memorize things for the long-term. Kanji isn't as big a problem as people make it out to be. Read Kanjidamage. It makes perfect sense out of kanji and turns it from a pile of pictures into things you can easily understand. I would probably start out by taking classes and using the sentences and vocabulary words from Kanjidamage in Anki. For additional practice with written Japanese, use Lang-8. If you need to practice spoken Japanese, make friends on Lang-8 and Skype with them. Many will be happy to help you out. As you get better, you'll start hitting a stride and it will become easier to pick up new concepts and vocabulary but in the beginning it's just a grind-fest. | ||
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Cambium
United States16368 Posts
On November 04 2010 12:06 Deltawolf wrote: This is my first foreign language. I take a martial arts that I am passionate about, and I'd like to train in Japan for a 2 week - month long period. I am hoping to travel there about a year from now, so I'd at least like to be proficient enough to live and operate comfortably even if I'm not 100% fluent. To live and operate comfortably have more to do with understanding the Japanese culture and social norms than being able to speak the language. For example, I think my language skill is pretty awful, but I know I can live very comfortably in Japan. I think it's a good idea to take a few classes to get started, they provide structure, which is very important in starting a language. After you have a decent grasp on the basic grammar, you can probably try to learn it through a language partnership program (basically find someone who wants to learn English and do a verbal language exchange). Half of the battle is knowing enough common phrases. Also, if you are not Chinese, you'll have a lot of problems reading signs in Japan. But luckily, almost all train stations have signs in both English and Japanese. | ||
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Deltawolf
United States105 Posts
Thanks guys you answered my question! Suck it up and learn it because it's not THAT hard but it isn't essential to my main mission :-p @KainZero - checking out Lang-8 and kanjidamage as I will need to know Kanji down the road for some of the older manuscripts from my martial art. | ||
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Shana
Indonesia1814 Posts
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Takkara
United States2503 Posts
You can make it surprisingly far in Japan as a tourist with just English. Learn just enough Japanese to be polite in very common social situations and then just fudge the rest. Like foreigners going to Korea, you can pick up some of it as you go along if you're motivated. Otherwise English, humility, and pointing can take you a long way. | ||
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Deltawolf
United States105 Posts
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KurtistheTurtle
United States1966 Posts
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Cambium
United States16368 Posts
On November 04 2010 13:16 Deltawolf wrote: Thanks for that Takkara. Training is sometimes out in the countryside though where English isn't as prevalent. So depending on the time of the year will greatly determine the amount of translators available when they are teaching. That is my main concern :-p That and ordering food lol Where exactly? I was in Tottori for four months, and even there, people spoke enough English for me to get my points across most of the time. The thing about Japan is that people have to learn English in high school and University; they aren't actually that horrible at the language, they are just horribly shy. | ||
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Deltawolf
United States105 Posts
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Zerokaiser
Canada885 Posts
Japanese is definitely one of the hardest languages to learn for an English speaker, but it's perfectly doable, you just need to apply yourself to it. But I'd be confident in saying 99% of people absolutely can not become anywhere near fluent without spending at LEAST over a year in Japan. If you're serious about learning the language, then go to Japan and really apply yourself to learning. Don't try to get by on English and avoid tough situations. The fact that so many Japanese people can speak English is an invaluable learning aid for you, ask a ton of questions. | ||
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fredd
Estonia256 Posts
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Zerokaiser
Canada885 Posts
On November 04 2010 14:33 fredd wrote: all these people saying japanese is one of the hardest languages have no clue really spoken japanese is relatively easy, and that's all you pretty much need from what you said. Japanese has a completely different grammatical form, and most of the language is completely alien to an English speaker. The toughest languages for English speakers to learn are those like Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Polish... | ||
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Shiragaku
Hong Kong4308 Posts
It also teaches Chinese, Korean, Geography and other subjects as well. Very very good site. | ||
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madnessman
United States1581 Posts
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Deltawolf
United States105 Posts
@Zerokaiser I will make sure to take the time to do that when I get there  I think once I get off the ground it'll be much easier to stay dedicated when you have that foundation to work with.Night and thanks again! TL community is wonderful and so splendidly diverse | ||
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hazelynut
United States2195 Posts
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chocopan
Japan986 Posts
Japanese is not particularly difficult, to start with. The grammar is different from English, sure, but unlike English, IT ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE. Which is to say, it's quite logical and consistent. This is good for the language learner. In the same way, pronunciation is very straightforward. Of course, once you hit kanji, it's a whole other story. But you can be a perfectly competant casual speaker of Japanese with only limited kanji knowledge; so don't let that mountain put you off starting. As regards the whole romaji thing - get off it now. No, I mean now. It might feel like a "soft start" using roman characters will make the project easier for you - it won't. Suck it up, learn the hiragana and katakana, and then only (only) use them when studying. Sure, it will slow you down for the first week or two, of course it will. But it will pay off hugely later on. Studying Japanese using roman characters is like I don't know, learning SC2 using mouseclicks and telling yourself you'll just add the hotkey and control group stuff later. No no no. Don't do it. And to be honest, yes, learning the kanji is hard, but learning the phonetic alphabets really it isn't anything to get hystical about, it's not that hard. Last thing - keep yourself motivated. Take any opportunity you can to make it fun for yourself. Don't punish yourself with it. Yeah the more I think about it learning a language is totally like Starcraft. glgl!!/がんばってね～! PS Oh yeah, what other people said is true, all public signs like streets and stuff are in Japanese and English, so that's not problem for visitors. Other than that though it can get a bit hard, if you are Chinese or can read Chinese it's definitely a help, you can make a good guess at stuff pretty easily. (I'm not a Chinese speaker but I know that's definitely the case the other way round, so I'm presuming it applies both directions.) | ||
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rauk
United States2228 Posts
On November 04 2010 13:43 Cambium wrote: Where exactly? I was in Tottori for four months, and even there, people spoke enough English for me to get my points across most of the time. The thing about Japan is that people have to learn English in high school and University; they aren't actually that horrible at the language, they are just horribly shy. horribly shy to the point that trying to converse in english is pretty pointless; when i went to sapporo and tokyo store clerks would hold up little signs if you tried to talk to them in english, with instructions and FAQs on them. being able to speak mandarin was actually more useful than english, since there were so many chinese expats there. | ||
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fredd
Estonia256 Posts
On November 04 2010 14:35 Zerokaiser wrote: spoken japanese is easy. the grammar is logical and the words are pronounced as read. it's really not that alien, try learning icelandic or finno-ugric languagesJapanese has a completely different grammatical form, and most of the language is completely alien to an English speaker. The toughest languages for English speakers to learn are those like Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Polish... | ||
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Zidane
United States1689 Posts
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tofucake
Hyrule19162 Posts
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Cambium
United States16368 Posts
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chocopan
Japan986 Posts
On November 05 2010 01:24 Cambium wrote: I don't understand why people keep on saying grammar is easy. This is only true in the very beginning, when you only use -masu, -shita and -te (+iru/aru), but it becomes impossibly difficult as you learn more and more, as they all compound on each other. Also, whatever you learn in school is almost never used by people on a daily basis, because written grammar is different from colloquial grammar. Well, "easy" relatively speaking. When you are trying to learn a foreign language, any consistency or internal logic is gold. English, for various good reasons, is a real mess of grammars, which makes it very challenging to learn. Japanese, on the other hand, is highly regular and predictable. This doesn't mean that, for example, learning polite verb forms, is a trivial exercise. But the existence of reliable grammatical rules makes it "easier" than learning English, with all its exceptions and special cases. It is certainly very true that as you say, the language and grammar in spoken "everyday" Japanese is pretty different - but that is true for any language. As a learner, you'll do just fine speaking "textbook Japanese". Baby steps. | ||
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Kanin
75 Posts
www.alljapaneseallthetime.com - Click Table Of Contents Now, I don't recommend you to follow his examples of completely cutting English from your life and working 24/7 in Japanese, but he has some very VERY good information and guides for you. He's also extremely motivational. Additionally, within 18 months he attained fluency and was hired by a Japanese software company. It is an astonishing feat to gain that command of an East Asian language in such a short amount of time when your native language is English. All of this was done without him even setting foot in Japan He was very hardcore about it though. | ||
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VarmVaffel
Norway378 Posts
On November 04 2010 14:38 Shiragaku wrote: There is a wonderful Japanese site called Smart.fm that teaches Japanese. It mainly focuses on memory and speed learning. It also teaches Chinese, Korean, Geography and other subjects as well. Very very good site. This, absolutely this. I cannot emphasize enough how good this site is for learning, absolutely amazing. Also, it's completely free! (And no, I don't work for them :p) I would also, like most others here, recommend that you learn hiragana and katakana before studing much further. It's very easy to learn, and it will help you a lot with all sorts of things around spelling and reading. The smart.fm site have a perfectly good way of learning this as well, all though I haven't used that course in particular as I learned the kanas by myself before I started using this site. Also, if you just wanna learn the words, then the site app can be configured easily to do that as well. Really recommend it in any case! | ||
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kainzero
United States5211 Posts
On November 05 2010 08:40 Kanin wrote: Take a look at this website: www.alljapaneseallthetime.com - Click Table Of Contents Now, I don't recommend you to follow his examples of completely cutting English from your life and working 24/7 in Japanese, but he has some very VERY good information and guides for you. He's also extremely motivational. Additionally, within 18 months he attained fluency and was hired by a Japanese software company. It is an astonishing feat to gain that command of an East Asian language in such a short amount of time when your native language is English. All of this was done without him even setting foot in Japan He was very hardcore about it though. There's a number of flaws (such as the supposed "fluency," or that getting an IT job in Japan requires that much language skill) but there's also a lot of good stuff in there. I worked through RTK1. It's very inefficient for what it is, but what I got out of it was being able to identify radicals in kanji, which is very useful. It teaches you stroke order, and if you ever see a kanji you'll be able to reproduce it by hand. Jumping from RTK1 to sentence mining is just entirely un-fun and ridiculous. You're struggling through grammar (because AJATT does nothing to address grammar), working through rough translations that you may not particularly understand the nuances if you do decide to sentence mine, and you're armed with nothing but stroke order and useless English keywords. Later on, with a solid grammar foundation and vocabulary base, it's great. That's why I recommend taking a class and many people actually work through grammar textbooks and vocab lists before starting the whole sentence mining thing. The notion that "If you listen and read often enough, writing and speaking will become natural" is bogus. I can read somewhat decent, but that doesn't make my writing good. Nor does reading remotely help me with speaking, and I confused a lot of people on Lang-8 after meeting them in real life when they learned how bad my spoken Japanese is. Lastly, what matters is how much time you invest in it and not so much the method. I've been studying for about an hour a day and it's starting to pay off, but I also really wish I spent more time and I'm trying to ramp it up. It's not gonna come overnight and the more consistent you are with it, the more you study to keep everything long-term, the more benefits you'll get. I can deride AJATT for not being a totally efficient method, but you know what, it's working for other people. As they say in weight training circles, "If you put in a lot of effort for even the dumbest workout routine, you'll make a lot of progress." | ||
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Galaxy77
Hong Kong256 Posts
Good luck though, if you are passioniate enough to learn, you can always succeed | ||
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Sufficiency
Canada23833 Posts
On November 04 2010 12:06 Deltawolf wrote: This is my first foreign language. I take a martial arts that I am passionate about, and I'd like to train in Japan for a 2 week - month long period. I am hoping to travel there about a year from now, so I'd at least like to be proficient enough to live and operate comfortably even if I'm not 100% fluent. I guess you should just start by memorizing the hiragana then. Try to master it and be able to read a string of hiragana with relative efficiency. | ||
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Kanin
75 Posts
Learning grammar (unless you're advanced level) is a truly awful idea. Learning vocab lists is also a terrible idea. You learn vocab from context, not reading long lists You learn grammar from reading thousands of properly constructed sentences Of course reading won't help your speaking. That's what listening and shadowing is for. Reading most definitely helps your writing though. If you think jumping into sentences is "unfun" then you're mining the wrong sentences. Time and dedication is more important than all of this though, I agree. | ||
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Peanutsc
United States307 Posts
Livemocha and rosetta stone (if you can afford it) seem like a good combo - it's really good to be able to correspond with actual native speakers in a language learning community, and maybe if you make some friends it'll help with the motivation part. I did rosetta stone for a little while in Japanese and found it pretty good for practicing basic concepts and vocabulary (grammar I kind of knew already from studying Korean) in a really polished multimedia experience. If you can set down a certain time period every day (say a couple hours in the evening) just for reviewing and practicing Japanese, you'll make good progress. If you can get external motivation (a great language learning partner or community, for example) for sticking to it, you'll make even better progress. Good luck! (background: I have a BA in linguistics) | ||
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kainzero
United States5211 Posts
On November 05 2010 10:12 Kanin wrote: I think reading technical material, conducting business correspondence and job interviews counts as fluent. Unless you think a Japanese company will hire someone with bad knowledge of Japanese when they could hire the thousands upon thousands of native speakers proficient in programming. IT is not programming. IT generally doesn't require any JLPT certification. You can easily find criticism of AJATT if you just Google it. Learning grammar (unless you're advanced level) is a truly awful idea. Learning vocab lists is also a terrible idea. You learn vocab from context, not reading long lists You learn grammar from reading thousands of properly constructed sentences Really? Where do you get properly constructed sentences? Oh, that's right, grammar books. AJATT even promotes the use of All About Particles (a grammar book!) and Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar (gee, I wonder what this book is about?). And you would be stupid NOT to study grammar. I don't know how many times I stared at ～にする and ～になる and wondering what the difference is when they're translated the same way. A quick look at Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and I learned a grammar point that I'll never forget now. I can go on and on. ～みたい and ～ような and ～らしい, 「動詞」＋の and 「動詞」＋こと, etc. etc. The point is, before you start jumping head first into sentences, you need to know how a basic sentence is constructed. I don't know why people would mine sentences if they don't know basic Subject + Object + Verb construction or basic declarative sentences. It just doesn't make sense and it makes things harder than they need to be in the beginning. RTK + kana does not even remotely prepare you for that. As for vocab, I'm thinking of lists that include example sentences, and Kanji in Context or Kanji Odyssey 2001 are usually used for that purpose. | ||
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EsX_Raptor
United States2802 Posts
I briefly skimmed it once and to this day I can still remember some of them because of the vivid little stories the author created for each kanji. | ||
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Ymatostacraft
Japan4 Posts
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