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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 5186 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 25 of 1702 02 June 2011 at 4:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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An Amazon purchase just arrived in the mail today. Elementary Japanese Volume One by Yoko Hasegawa. I saw this in Borders. Borders has free wifi so I deftly checked amazon.com on my ipod touch and unfortunately it was way cheaper so I have been waiting for some time for it to come. I've more or less been just winging it regarding learning. I've been memorizing vocabulary lists and listening to Pimsleur and some other podcasts. I do have the Living Language coursebook but I quickly discovered my initial intention of using romaji exclusively until I reached an intermediate level wasn't going to work for me and haven't respected it since because it has no japanese characters except for a kana chart at the beginning for unknown reference reasons.
I've been really intimidated by Kanji. I noticed right away that this book has plenty of Japanese letters which was why I wanted it. I am hoping that a nice structured approach to the kanji (and everything else) is going to make this more appealing to me than giving me a list of 2000 kanji and saying STUDY! Every other language I've studied my first steps were always in the classroom. After the beginner courses I pretty much set out on my own as my attention wanders and sticking to someone else's plan for what to study just didn't happen. However, I am having a pretty good respect for the difficulty of Japanese and especially its alphabet so I am going to embrace this textbook's structure with open arms. I really want to learn this thing. I might even look for courses near where I live too. Not sure if I mentioned that I have the level 1 Rosetta Stone course. While I'm looking forward to their tutors I know from experience what to expect and it would in no way prepare me to deal with learning Japanese. I need grammar and alphabet training - learning through osmosis like I did English as a kid is NOT going to cut it. It's a nice supplement though. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5186 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 26 of 1702 02 June 2011 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ok. I like the new text book so far. Its much more challenging than any other text book I've looked at yet.
They don't mess around - it's kana from page 1 albeit with Romaji under it until like page 4 where they give a chart of the kana. Then no more romaji. I find this motivating but hard . I have sound out the kana and it's slow where the romaji has no conversion process and is super fast to read for me. Whoever says that using romaji ruins your accent but using kana gives you native pronunciation is wrong. But I will never read Japanese text effectively until I master kana so may as well get it over with. I get frustrated whenever I see text I can't even pronounce so kana I will study. I'm thinking of tring the Asimmil program too as I'm seeing some good stuff about it in other logs ( although for other languages) but it has good reviews on amazon for the japanese version too. I'm a little modded that there isn't an mp3 version. I really hate CDs. Well back to work... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lasciel Groupie United States Joined 5375 days ago 55 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 27 of 1702 03 June 2011 at 12:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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While I agree that there will be very few occasions when you need to write Japanese (unless you get a penpal or live in Japan) learning the correct way to write the symbols is very helpful when you have a couple hundred kanji under your belt and you begin encountering a lot of kanji that differ in very small ways. Knowing how to write them really seems to help with being able to pick out those differences when reading.
Plus writing things down tends to aid in memorizing them :P 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5186 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 28 of 1702 03 June 2011 at 4:16am | IP Logged | |||||
I might cave and do this at some point. But not yet. When I get serious about reading kanji texts if I'm really struggling I may resort this. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5186 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 29 of 1702 06 June 2011 at 1:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's been a little over a month since I started this log. In terms of progress I've gotten mostly comfortable with the Hiragana alhabet, and have gotten through more than half of the katakana alphabet. I've read this is possible in just a couple days and I don't disbelieve it. So my progress isn't stellar by any means. I'm not doing an intensive study however but a part time one and I'm just happy I'm still keeping at it.
My study routine is pretty much flash card based. I've got flashcard sets for hiragana, katakana, a lot of vocab lists I've gotten from quizlet.com and I made some sets to go with Pimsleur and chapters 1/2 of the textbook I just started. I am using Flashcard Deluxe on my ipod for the flashcards along with TextAloudmp3 and the kyoko japanese voice from Scansoft to make audio for the flashcards. In the past I never really made headway with a language until I started reading fiction books in the target language. With a good pop up dictionary I can pretty much do this with any European language without much study at all but I've found that is definitely not the case with Japanese. The written language is simply too different from English. I did find a neat webpage that I'll be using I'm sure when I want to make another stab at reading. http://nihongo.j-talk.com/kanji/ It basically can convert regular text with kanji to hiragana or romaji or translate it to English. It can convert it to a translate html text with mouseover translations like a pop dictionary (but the translations are better than any pop up dictionary I've found yet). It can make a list of all the vocabulary with translations and pronunciations for you. This website is freaking awesome. I wonder if there's similar sites for Spanish/French/German... I would love the feature to make vocabulary lists for me that I can past into a spreadsheet without any effort.. man. Actually pulling it up to write about it I think I'm going to go ahead and make another flashcard set with that last feature and maybe start reading sooner. Well maybe not just yet. Looks nice though. I did find a great free app on ipod to listen to Japanese radio. So I've got some ambient Japanese talk radio. Can't follow any of it yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5186 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 30 of 1702 11 June 2011 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ok.. I got assimil and my ipad2 in the mail today. I am checking out the app store for cool apps related to
Japanese learning. A few look interesting but nothing is tempting enough for me to buy. Ive already got several on my iPod and they're interesting but nothing really compares to my old flashcards deluxe program I got for the iPod way back when. And the author just added a new beta feature for TTS. I forget the languages but it includes Japanese. They're the neospeech voices if you're familiar and sound great and are really easy to setup. Nothing makes flashcards more fun than adding voice IMHO and I already loved the interface. I'm a bit tired now but I'm thinking there's other posts on he for tips on getting h the most out of an iPad. I love this thing! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5651 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 31 of 1702 11 June 2011 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
You surely don't expect anime to be accurate in depicting real Japanese life. Go watch some Japanese dramas and you'll see. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5186 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 32 of 1702 11 June 2011 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah I'm a little naive I guess. I figured it was actually more or less the way they talk since the characters were Japanese and written by Japanese. I guess cartoons are different. Where can I view Japanese dramas via the internet? And when you say dramas are they basically soap operas or would you say they have more substance? One turn off for me with Spanish was their fascination with soap operas and e lack of other entertainment (aside from soccer which is cool but not the best for language studying). Edited by kraemder on 12 June 2011 at 1:59am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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