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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 9 of 1702 09 May 2011 at 4:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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Updating. It's been a bit of time. I decided to tackle Hiragana. It's a work in progress but it's not as bad as I feared. I think I know about half of them so far. I got a book on it for Kindle - Hiragana the Basics of Japanese. It mostly has some silly memory devices to help English speakers remember the sounds. It seems to work though. I also got a few apps for my ipod - a dictionary app called well Japanese. Not very creative I guess. It's nice though. It has the romaji, Hiragana, and kanja for words and tons of example sentences and you search by English/japanese without having to specify which. It lets you save words for flashcard lists too.
I looked for something like this for Windows but have yet to find it. The dictionaries I find are either Kana/kanji or romaji but not both and they don't do example sentences as well as this app does. I also got a flashcard app called jFlash. I don't know how many thousands of cards it comes with. I chose to buy it since it has the Kanji and Kana and Romaji spellings of words. It uses an algorithm based on Leitner. It comes with a lot of sets. I did the Animals one today which is 36 words. I am partway through the Common Verbs one which has 54 words. Next up... Common words set with 9852 words... followed by Common Words 2 with 10,000 words and when I've knocked those off I'll finish with Common Words 3 - a mere 2782 words. There's plenty of more sets as well for the ambitious but I modestly think the Common Words trifecta will keep me occupied for a while. I also grabbed the Pimsleur course on Audible. I wanted an all audio course to listen to while I play computer games or whatnot. It's ok so far. I listened to the 1st lesson free and decided it was something I'd use. I tried Pimsleur before for German/Spanish/French. But I think my language level was already advanced enough that it was boring. Pimsleur really is for someone just starting out at a language who doesn't bring anything to the table already I think. Which is perfect for me and Japanese. I'm still just touching on grammar but I'm blown away with how easy it seems so far. I can't get over the fact that there are no conjugations. This is so shocking. English doesn't have much for conjugating and so I've always resented it for other European languages. Japanese seems to be even easier than English in this respect. It's terribly shocking. Also the nouns have no gender. Amazing! Along with the lack of conjugations is a lack of verb tense. Amazing! Mind I'm just starting so as I get more into it I'm sure I'm going to find really hard grammar stuff. The language seems so wonderfully easy at the moment. Except for the alphabet of course. I am making good progress with Hiragana and I can see myself learning this alphabet pretty quickly and katakana probably won't be much more difficult. But the Chinese characters could be trouble. I haven't touched on them except to stare dumbly on my flash cards that my program has. I can see that words are made up of -both- kanja and hiragana which makes no sense to me at all. Of course I haven't read about it but if the kanja is supposed to be a picture image representing a word unto itself why the heck is there a need to add letters symbolizing sounds onto it? Weird. And the symbols number in the thousands. I read that knowing 2000 is sufficient and 1000 is not bad. Yikes. I guess I should be happy I'm not studying actual Chinese? I can't understand what the Japanese are thinking keeping this archaic foreign and inferior alphabet around in the language. It should have died a nice death when Hiragana came on the scene - except for scholars, hobbyists, and other masochists imho. But I do agree it does seem cool. Just hard. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 10 of 1702 15 May 2011 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I hate the Japanese alphabets. I hate them. If I were studying a nice easy European language things would be so nice. I could jump right into reading stuff on my computer using a nice pop up dictionary.
I was trying out Lingoes with some Japanese news. Of course I'm really ignorant but aside from Kanji characters making life really difficult I can't even tell where one word ends and another starts. If you double click on Japanese text the dictionary really has no way of knowing either. Frustrating. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5641 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 11 of 1702 16 May 2011 at 4:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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Once you get better at Japanese, you'll learn how much of a nightmare hiragana is and wonder why you hated kanji in the first place.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6574 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 1702 16 May 2011 at 7:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, that's something the techies need to work on, then. Mandarin doesn't use spaces, either (and that's ALL kanji), but my iPhone will pick out the words when I tap and hold over them. Have you tried it on your iPod touch? There might be a similar function for Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 13 of 1702 29 May 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
I haven't tried on my ipod touch. What app are you using? I'm thinking it would be nice if there were a program to take Japanese and put the spaces in for me so I read it. I love this little pop up dictionary program for every other language and it's free too.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 14 of 1702 29 May 2011 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Short update. I'm still plugging along. I have a fantastic flashcard app on my ipod called Flashcards Deluxe. I know folks on this website use Anki but I can't see myself switching. Anyway I decided to try adding audio to my flashcards using my textaloud mp3 program and my Japanese TTS voice from scansoft. I setup a small 20 card deck of verbs from Quizlet.com very quickly and smoothly and was extremely happy with the results. The flashcards are in romaji/english. With the audio it helped me to concentrate better and I got through vocabulary faster.
So I decided to do it with the biggest deck of cards on Quizlet that I could find. It was just over 1000 cards. There was a lot of repetitive tasks involved that didn't see like much of a big deal for 20 cards but turned into a very very big deal at 1000 cards. But with the help of a windows macro recorder and excel for dummies I managed to pull through and avoid a lot of the repetitiveness. I haven't used a spreadsheet program before and in fact wasn't even using Excel but something from OpenOffice I got free online. So it took a while to learn but I'm really really pleased with the results. I've added audio to 3000 cards on my ipod app now. Fantastic. If anyone knows of any additional TTS Japanese voices I'd be interested. I'm using Scansoft Kyoko (purchased through TextAloud 3). It's a pretty good sounding female voice. I've gotten pretty good at Hiragana and have started in on Katakana but I have yet to go beyond Mountain and River for Kanji. I got a book at Amazon called Essential Kanji by P.G O'Neill. It has 2,000 basic Kanji that are sorted in the recommended order of learning from 1st to last. I read through the introduction and frankly I'm really not liking Kanji at all. I still think they're quaint and pretty and stuff but from a practical standpoint I am rather resentful of the Japanese for using them. Apparently they use the kanji symbol to represent any of the following - A: the concept or word involved, B: The modern Japanese pronunciation of the Kanji (not the concept), C: The archaic old Chinese pronunciation of the Kanji (not the concept), D: and they can be combined with other Kanji to mean something completely different than they would alone. This was a brief introduction at the front of the book and wasn't really meant to teach you the nuts and bolts of Kanji. They leave that to other books or teachers. I ordered a couple of these other books too but they haven't arrived yet. I'm a little surprised I haven't given up with all the frustration I'm having with the writing system. I guess I have faith that the reading will come - if the system works for an entire nation then you'd think it would have to be learnable eventually... I'm going to spend some time today playing the computer/ipod trying to get a pop up dictionary to cooperate with me and let me read something. That would be a huge breakthrough for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 15 of 1702 29 May 2011 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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ok google translate does an awesome job for what I want in a pop up dictionary. It doesn't require double click and so when I hover it parses the text itself pretty well. Lingoes used to be able to hover too from what I read but unfortunately the new browser versions don't let it (or babylon pop either). I don't know what's up with that.
I would prefer Lingoes over Google Translate if possible because it uses an actual dictionary with better explanations and it lets me control the size of the font so I can make it nice and big and easy on the eyes. But this is great. I've started my own list of vocabulary - woohoo!. More fun than using other people's lists heh. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 16 of 1702 29 May 2011 at 11:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm curious of other learners of Japanese (or Chinese for that matter) actually take time to sit down and write out words in the target language and their notorious alphabets. All the authors of the language texts I read seem to assume I will write in Japanese with my bare hands...
I did want to learn to type it on the computer which turned out to be really easy. Just turn on Japanese language keyboard, type in Romaji and the computer switches it to Katakana. If I were taking a Japanese class I would probably need to write in Japanese to make my teacher happy for tests. Beyond that what possible use is there to write Japanese by hand especially as an American? Living AND working in Japan I could see it having a practical use but even then only occasionally - and since I believe all Japanese learn Romaji (how else would they type on a computer) then I could just write in Romaji for those rare occurrences when I actually needed to write something down. In English I hardly ever write stuff down by hand. I write numbers down that people say over the phone and really small notes for other people occasionally. This is all very much informal - so even if I were living in Japan whatever I wrote I'm sure Romaji would be fine. I'm speculating. Hmm maybe filling out paperwork say for applications would they let you do it in Romaji? That'd be annoying if not. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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