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Colloquial Japanese | ||
Tags: Colloquial (program) | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5405 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes  Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 1 of 10 25 January 2012 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I started learning Japanese with Colloquial, plus other resources to supplement, like
Rosetta Stone. Plus I use Anki where I created my own deck of words from the Colloquial lessons in addition to decks with the Kanas and some basic Kanji. Did anyone else use Colloquial Japanese and what is your experience with it? I originally wanted to use Teach Yourself, but it is all in Romaji, and Assimil, but this I could not acquire at the moment. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 10 25 January 2012 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I started with Teach Yourself. It allowed me to get a quick base while I learned kana on the side with other online resources. It's important to learn kana early on, but too many people let that delay them -- the earlier you can get started the better.
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| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5405 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 3 of 10 25 January 2012 at 5:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't use Romaji at all, only Kana and Kanji. I'm sort of a grammatophile (if such a
word exists) and I always liked to learn foreign scripts even though I didn't know the language, so I learned Glagolitic, Greek, Arabic, Devanagari, Avestan, Norse Runes, but not languages that use them. I learned Kana some time ago, when I first tried learning Japanese, and now I already find myself reading some words without focusing too much. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7123 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 4 of 10 31 January 2012 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
I disagree. As long as you understand what the romanisation represents, you don't really need kana until you really want to start reading. However, with kana all you can read are books for very young children. It isn't until you really learn kanji that you are going to be able to read anything, so I wouldn't delay learning basic Japanese from a romanised book with learning kana, if speaking is your immediate priority. One of the best books I've ever come across in my learning of Japanese is the Hugo '3 Months' course (previously 'Japanese Simnplified') which is entirely romanised. I used 'Japanese Simnplified' before I came to Japan in 1998, and I wouldn't say that learning kana later hobbled me in any way, after all, the Japanese all around me is also in kanji. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 10 31 January 2012 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps I should clarify my earlier post. The most important thing is to get started, and if the only way you can get started right now is by using a method that has romaji, then do it. Many people advocate that it's best to start with hiragana right away; that's fine, but this idea prevents too many people from starting at all. However, any serious study of the language will quickly require you to know hiragana, quickly followed by katakana and kanji, so I would recommend you start learning these on the side while you use the romaji material. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7123 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 6 of 10 31 January 2012 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That is what I did, as it happens. I suppose I am reacting to the argument (not posed on here, just for clarification) that learning through romaji somehow creates a disability for kana. Not so. I think, no matter what language you learn as a foreigner (very young children excepted) you will always function through that first language. Guess what! When I'm driving in Japan, after all these years, and all the Japanese I have learned, if the road-signs are romanised, my eyes go straight to the romaji anyway.
So we are on the same page. What I will say to anyone wanting to learn kana fast is to get hold of Michael Rowley's 'Kana Pictographix'. It makes learning them so much simpler! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6439 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 7 of 10 02 February 2012 at 7:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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Colloquial Korean was terrible. That's the only "Colloquial" series I've used. I know that most Korean learning materials are terrible anyway, but I don't know if the rest of the series in other languages is any better.
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| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6552 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 8 of 10 02 February 2012 at 11:39am | IP Logged | |||||
I've never heard anybody say that starting with romaji made it more difficult to learn kana, other than the motivation issues mentioned by other posters. I learned with romaji first too. Learning the script is a hurdle. One can face the hurdle in the very beginning, or in the not-so-very beginning. I've heard that poor mastery of romaji leads to pronunciation issues. I believe that. Even though it's pretty easy to master romaji, I've heard from several Japanese teachers that westerners starting out with romaji are more likely to have pronunciation problems than those who use kana from the beginning. I doubt if they are lying, but I think that a student with half a brain can avoid this. However more than issues I've mentioned, I believe first recognizing a word in its most common form, whether it be in kana or kanji, has an advantage over forever having the romaji imprinted in my brain. But I'll never know, since I started with romaji. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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