t1234 Diglot Newbie South Africa Joined 4136 days ago 38 posts - 83 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans Studies: Turkish, Polish
| Message 9 of 15 20 February 2014 at 12:08am | IP Logged |
Try Ilya Franks site.
There is some sort of encoding issue with the pages, but the DOC and PDF formats are fine. The stories are mainly kana, the kanji have furigana and the sentences are repeated in
romaji with English explanations. The entire paragraph is then repeated in Japanese only.
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Melya68 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 4289 days ago 109 posts - 126 votes Speaks: French*, English
| Message 10 of 15 20 February 2014 at 12:57am | IP Logged |
Wow, these stories are pretty hard to understand. Even the English vocabulary is really advanced. I did learn a couple of Japanese words, but I'll have to start with something simpler. I might actually do a few JapanesePod lessons. Yotsubato! is really cute, but the dialogs are longer than I imagined. I'll keep looking for easy manga, and I should probably learn more kanji too.
Does anyone have advice to get used to the different fonts used for hiragana? When the font changes, I'm completely lost!
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CaucusWolf Senior Member United States Joined 5270 days ago 191 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Written), Japanese
| Message 11 of 15 20 February 2014 at 6:48am | IP Logged |
I recommend that you get the wordpower Japanese app and a book/dictionary for rote
memorization. The app has both furigana as well as Kana and Kanji readings. A native speaker
for pronunciation and sentences to show you how the words and Kanji are used. In fact I was
able to figure out the grammar this way fairly quickly. Furthermore, I found that this app is
benificial in understanding Kanjis application in the language.
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Melya68 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 4289 days ago 109 posts - 126 votes Speaks: French*, English
| Message 12 of 15 20 February 2014 at 11:34am | IP Logged |
It looks really interesting, but I don't have a tablet or a smartphone, so I'll have to pass. :(
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Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5907 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese
| Message 13 of 15 20 February 2014 at 12:37pm | IP Logged |
Melya68 wrote:
I might actually do a few JapanesePod lessons. |
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I like JapanesePod101 more than I thought I would, so I can definitely recommend that. I don't remember how much you get access to without premium though... Anyway the Beginner 1 course (which is 170 lessons long) covers a lot and should give you a good basis.
Thanks for posting this thread - plenty of ideas here for me to steal as well ;-)
Liz
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 14 of 15 20 February 2014 at 1:18pm | IP Logged |
Have you considered different techniques, like for example LR? Shadowing can also be massively fun, for example.
Also see whether GLOSS has lessons of a suitable difficulty level for you. If not, come back to it later.
In short, incorporating native materials doesn't have to be a serious, radical step.
Edited by Serpent on 20 February 2014 at 1:58pm
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rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4545 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 15 of 15 24 February 2014 at 8:03pm | IP Logged |
When I was trying to get faster at reading hiragana/katakana and basic kanji, I found
Read the Kanji useful. They split up by JLPT level, so you can do just N5. You
don't have to read the whole sentence if you don't want to, it just asks you to identify the word, but I used the Rikai
browser plugin to quickly look up other words in the sentence I didn't know, to start learning them for when they
show up later, and read the whole sentence each time which helped me a lot. Since it's just a sentence at time, it
felt less overwhelming than trying to read a whole page at once to me. The downside is that there's a free, limited-
time trial, I believe, but then you do have to subscribe to have access.
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