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Japanese - where to start? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6951 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 9 of 36 27 May 2010 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In case you haven't seen it yet, this website provides awesome advice and motivation for Japanese learners, and language learners in general.
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about Edited by Lucky Charms on 27 May 2010 at 9:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kidshomestunner Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6407 days ago 239 posts - 285 votes Speaks: Japanese | Message 10 of 36 28 May 2010 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think In japanese there is a trap of getting bogged down in kanji and ignoring grammar. I fell into this trap. After I had mastered grammar and vocabulary I had to spend some very hard months tackling grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6474 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 11 of 36 28 May 2010 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Did you mean "kanji and vocabulary"?
I don't find Japanese grammar to be particularly difficult. The hard part for me isn't understanding the concepts, it's just getting used to it to the point that it feels completely natural. (Don't get me wrong, getting familiar with the concepts and knowing them up, down, and backwards are two different things. Japanese makes a lot of difficult distinctions, like the infamous wa/ga distinction, the different kinds of conditionals, etc. But you can really only perfect that through practice anyway.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 12 of 36 29 May 2010 at 5:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I had the opposite problem. You can internalize much of the grammar just by doing lots of reading, but you can't read productively until you know enough kanji and vocabulary. Edited by Captain Haddock on 29 May 2010 at 5:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kidshomestunner Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6407 days ago 239 posts - 285 votes Speaks: Japanese | Message 13 of 36 29 May 2010 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I sat down with Alexander Kask's kanji cards and learnt all the kanji but jhad problems with grammar. i just think that too many people over look grammar when studying Japanese. I disagree with your point about internalising by reading. If you don't know that ta is the past then you breally can't understand the sentence. I think you must have studied grammar from a text book before you start to internalise it. I think grammar like mashite and so forth really needs to be studied with books such as the advanced grammar of Japanese and so on. I really think that Japanese grammar is a difficult, confusing and important part of the language and needs to be studied. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kidshomestunner Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6407 days ago 239 posts - 285 votes Speaks: Japanese | Message 14 of 36 29 May 2010 at 4:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes. I type on here whilst doing other things. That was sloppy of me, I'm sorry (honestly). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Alptraum Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5505 days ago 19 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French, Mandarin, Japanese, Greek | Message 15 of 36 30 May 2010 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Having looked briefly at all aspects of grammar, I reckon (keep in mind, I haven't actively studied any of it, just looked over/read through a textbook to get a feel for its complexity) that it's really not very difficult... it seems to be very systematic and developed, with very little irregularity. The only things that confuse me at this point are the distinction between wa and ga, when they bother using an object particle (it seems to vanish from many sentences), and punctuation use - if any.
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| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6951 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 16 of 36 31 May 2010 at 4:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, I'd agree. I believe in university Japanese we focused on grammar only for the first year, whereas my university German classes focused very heavily on grammar for the first 3 years. It's confusing at first, but once you get it down, you never really need to worry about it again. For learning how to conjugate verbs and adjectives, I suggest you use a basic grammar. Beyond that, I don't think you need to go out of your way to study grammar by itself (once you get past the causative and passive). What they call 'grammar' after that (in JLPT prep books and such) can really also be called vocabulary - small things like ～のまま/[plain past vb] + まま 'while still in that state', whose meaning you can find in the dictionary and whose grammatical usage you can pick up from context. Studying these myriad little things as a dry list in a textbook will probably make you hate Japanese; it's much more fun to come across them on your own and judge for yourself based on their frequency how useful they are (e.g. まま is used extremely frequently, so if you expose yourself to Japanese enough on a daily basis, it will be impossible NOT to internalize it!) By the way, I used to swear by Japanesepod101.com as an intermediate student, although I'm not so fond of it anymore. Does anyone have experience with it as a beginner? Would you recommend it over the hundreds of beginner textbooks out there? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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