fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 5035 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes Studies: French
| Message 1 of 6 10 February 2011 at 1:21am | IP Logged |
Hi, I just started learning Japanese a little while ago. I’ve been doing lessons on livemocha, listening to Japanese podcasts, and Japanese music to keep my exposure up. I also just finished learning the hiragana symbols. I’m just wondering where I should go from here. Should I focus on learning katakana or kanji now? Also when I start Kanji I was going to use the “Remembering the kanji” by James Heisig, but now I’m not to sure. When I start to read kanji I want to be able to pronounce the words in my head, but "Remembering the kanji" says not to focus on the sounds but just the meaning of the kanji.
So basically I’m just hoping someone can point me in the right direction, and give me some kind of guideline for how to approach learning Japanese.
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TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5463 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian
| Message 2 of 6 10 February 2011 at 1:37am | IP Logged |
You should learn katakana after hiragana. A lot of people seem to neglect it, but it's
very important. At first you may be a little confused between hiragana and
katakana, but you will soon be able to tell the difference.
As for kanji, there are basically three groups of people: those who swear by Heisig,
those who hate his method, and those, like me, who somehow managed to study kanji for
years without once hearing his name. Try his method out to see if you like it. If you
don't there are plenty of other methods out there.
Definitely get comfortable with both hiragana and katakana first, though!
Edited by TixhiiDon on 10 February 2011 at 1:37am
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ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6141 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian
| Message 3 of 6 10 February 2011 at 1:45am | IP Logged |
I agree with TixhiiDon. All three scripts are very important because they're all used everywhere.
As for myself, I fall into the first category of kanji-learners that TixhiiDon mentioned. I loved working through RTK and found the method really worked for me (that is, if you can manage to keep up your momentum and continue to review the ones you've already learned). I don't think that the fact that the book doesn't teach the pronunciation is a huge problem, because I'm finding that learning the different readings of the kanji in the context of different words is working very nicely and painlessly, and I often surprise myself in being able to sometimes "sound out" a new word without even knowing that I would be able to do so!
頑張って!
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spirit splice Newbie United States Joined 5033 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German
| Message 4 of 6 12 February 2011 at 7:47pm | IP Logged |
Definitely start with hiragana, then do katakana, then kanji. I started with katakana because it looked
more "Japanese" to me, but doing so was a headache and made the hiragana more difficult. I took
blocks of 5 at a time (like all the k's or the n's) and it worked out well. Just keep practicing your writing
and testing yourself both ways (i.e. use the.symbol as the question to answer and use the romanization
as the.question to answer).
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vykis92 Groupie LithuaniaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5314 days ago 68 posts - 71 votes Studies: Spanish
| Message 5 of 6 13 February 2011 at 11:01am | IP Logged |
Does anybody knows any good site for learning kanjis?
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Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5134 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian*
| Message 6 of 6 27 March 2018 at 4:26pm | IP Logged |
vykis92 wrote:
Does anybody knows any good site for learning kanjis? |
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www.tanoshiijapanese.com
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