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Is Japanese ridiculously hard? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5208 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 17 of 60 01 September 2010 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well, first of all, it's helpful if you completely switch over to Japanese for all your entertainment. That makes it easy to get as much listening exposure as possible every day. It's ok to listen without understanding at first. If you've been watching things with subtitles, you've probably already picked up a few phrases. If you think an audio course will help you, start with that. I would recommend the realkana site I mentioned before for learning hiragana and katakana. For the kanji, I wouldn't recommend Remembering the Kanji unless you are a very dedicated person who can finish it all in a few months. It might be good to start off with that book I mentioned before, and then use something like www.readthekanji.com to learn some initial vocabulary. The JLPT4 level starts you out with 103 kanji and 525 words, and readthekanji is the best site I've found for quizzing yourself on them until you know them. Every kanji is part of a word, and they show a sentence for each word, so it's not as overwhelming as learning them individually with no context. Since you have to type each word when you see it, that will reinforce your memory much more than flashcards would. They have everything through JLPT1, so you can get all your core vocabulary from there, and then pick up other things depending on your areas of interest. It can be hard at first, when everything you hear is more than 90% unknown words. When you get used to the grammar structure and have a bigger vocabulary, it's easier to learn new words because you will understand the context a lot better, and you can infer meanings based on that. One thing that will be fun later on is when you can go back and listen to something from when you were first starting out, and find it hard to remember what it was like to not understand it. Music can be one of the easiest things to start understanding, just because a lot of phrases and word choices get repeated in many different songs. Listening to music and reading along with the lyrics can also help you pick up new kanji. I'm not really sure what else to recommend, since I haven't used any textbooks. I would suggest jumping right in and getting over the initial uneasiness with kanji. When you get past that, everything else is just a matter of gradually adding to your knowledge. You are primarily interested in being able to understand spoken Japanese, which is my main focus as well. However, the kanji will actually help with your listening as well. Like I said before, it's mostly about passive memory in the beginning. The really challenging part is getting your knowledge to a point where you can use it to write and speak, but you don't have to worry about that until you're ready. Also, after you've gotten past the complete beginner stage, you might find the Rikai-chan add-on for Firefox useful. It tells you what any kanji or word means when you mouse over it. It can become a crutch if you rely on it too much, but it makes navigating Japanese websites a lot easier when you're starting out. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5612 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 18 of 60 01 September 2010 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Assimil Japanese has both kanji with furigana as well as romaji, so that'd probably be good for you. If you decicde to learn the kanji then you can easily switch.
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| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 19 of 60 01 September 2010 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Regarding the writing issue, I think you have 4 choices of how to start.
1) no writing at all 2) romaji 3) kana 4) kana & kanji 1) would be very difficult for most, as there is nothing visual to help remember. Plus there is the problem with homonyms. 2) is a very easy way to start, but if you do it you are delaying actually learning the script, which means you may get too comfortable and never learn it. Plus there is the problem with homonyms. 3) is probably the most widely recommended way to start. You are delaying usage of kanji, but at least this delay is not as drastic as choice 2), Plus there is the problem with homonyms. 4) is by far the most difficult way to begin, but may actually be the fastest path to fluency in the long run. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5208 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 20 of 60 01 September 2010 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
3) is not really as different from just using romaji as some people make it out to be. I've seen people struggle through entire paragraphs written in hiragana with maybe 4 kanji thrown in, and that is a total waste of time, since they aren't reading the words the way they are normally written. An easier way is to use something like http://hiragana.jp/ to add furigana to anything. I think the main issue is how much of a visual learner you are. For me, having a visual representation of each vocabulary word really helped cement them in my mind. Ridiculous amounts of listening were very important for me, but reading made it a lot clearer how everything was supposed to fit together, and improved my listening comprehension also. Some people might find it better to start with only the spoken language, and learn vocabulary purely phonetically before they tackle the written system. That's the way kids would learn in school, since obviously they can speak at an age-appropriate level before they begin learning to write. For me, written language is too important to leave for later, but I don't think everyone should be forced to start with kanji. Even so, it still might be less painful to just learn a whole bunch at the beginning, together with important vocabulary. That first batch is not hard to learn, because they are all common and show up all over the place. The rest can be learned at a slower pace while concentration shifts to listening, if that's what feels more comfortable. It takes a long time to get to a point where reading kanji feels natural and smooth, so putting it off until some point in the future won't necessarily make learning Japanese simpler or easier. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 21 of 60 01 September 2010 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't think there's anything wrong with your way; it may very well be less painful for some. But I feel you are a
little over-critical of 3). Plenty of people start with texts like Genki, which begin with a mixture of romaji and kana, very quickly weans one off of romaji and start adding kanji. The method apparently works pretty well - I've heard lots of success stories. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5612 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 22 of 60 01 September 2010 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Genki starts with romaji and then moves to kanji with furigana (and spaces). There's a big difference between kana and kanji with furigana. It's actually more difficult to read Japanese only in kana. Since it's written without spaces, unless you have a large vocabulary and know your grammar well, it's almost impossible to tell where one word ends and the next begins. At least with kanji you know more or less where the words are.
It's either option 2 or 4 in my opionion. The problem with 2 is you'll run out of romaji texts after a while. Here's how 4 works, first you get a Japanese text with furigana, like a lot of courses or Harry Potter or whatever. You have a sentence with furigana, so it reads like: 私（わたし/watashi/I)は(wa/as for)学生(がくせい/gakusei/student)です(desu/am)。 (obviously without the romaji) (I am a student.) So the first couple of times you read the sentence or see these characters, you don't know how to read them, so you read the furigana instead. Sooner or later you just remember the character, and you can just ignore the furigana, and lo and behold, you're reading kanji. Of course not everything has furigana, but a lot of manga does, and books for kids, like Harry Potter. Personally if you're going to learn kanji, I'd recommend using some type of SRS. Perhaps not to start with, because courses tend to reuse kanji to make it easier, but defintely later when you need to go through 2000 of them and know their readings. EDIT: I should point out 2 extra things, that furigana are the hiragana characters that are written above kanji that show the pronunciation. Also it's not possible to read Japanese with just kanji or just kana, you need both. Usually the root of the word is written with kanji and the suffixes with hiragana. For example 読める (to read) the 読 will always stay the same but the める will change depending on what you're trying to say. Not reading would be 読めない. Edited by t123 on 01 September 2010 at 11:35pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 23 of 60 02 September 2010 at 3:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I can't confirm, but I'm pretty sure this is not true - meaning genki is not fully kanjified.
This is false. Edited by leosmith on 02 September 2010 at 3:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5612 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 24 of 60 02 September 2010 at 9:35am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
No, it's not. Some words are written with kana when they could be written with kanji, the majority are written in kanji though. One of the points of the book is to teach the 400 most basic kanji, what would be the of writing the entire book in kana. Genki Dialog Chapter 1: (starts with kana) すみません。いま なんじ です か。 じゅうにじはんです。 ありがとう ございむあす。 いいえ。 Genki Dialog Chapter 10: (lots of kanji, in the book with furigana) 寒くなりましたね。 ええ。メアリーさん、冬休みはどうしますか 。 韓国か台湾に行くつもりですが、まだ決めて いません。 いいですね。 韓国と台湾とどっちのほうがいいと思います か。 うーん、台湾のほうが暖かいと思います。で も、スーさんは韓国の食べ 物はおいしいと言っていましたよ。 そうですか。ところで、たけしさんはどこが に行きますか。 どこにも行きません。お金がないから、ここ にいます。 そうですか。じゃあ、たけしさんにおみやげ を買ってきますよ。 わあ、ありがとう。
Ok, it's is possible, just not likely. If you read the entire explanation you can clearly see why. Japanese do not write with just kana, if you can find a Japanese published book in just kana I'll be pretty surprised. I've seen books meant for 4 years old that include kanji. As you can clearly see from the dialog above, if you only know kanji or only kana, you wouldn't be able to read it. Edited by t123 on 02 September 2010 at 9:36am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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