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Learning How to Learn Japanese

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Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#11

Post by kater006 »

I’ve been learning Japanese on my own for 6 years, no teachers. In the beginning I used iknow.jp which worked very well for a little more than basic kanji and vocabulary. From there I moved to Japan and messed up my study of kanji. On second year living here I started with RTK and I wish I had done that earlier. Even though I procrastinated a lot, that book has been most successful with my retention.

Now that I’m learning Korean also as a beginner I googled sentence mining and downloaded Korean deck which after 2 months of using seems to work well and now I’m at the point where I will start study of basic grammar once a week to support the anki study

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#12

Post by buu700 »

I actually just started learning Japanese in my free time a few nights ago. (No particular reason aside from that it seemed like fun.)

I've got nothing really to add here, except that I've been using LingoDeer (another app in the same category as Duolingo) based on recommendations in /r/LearnJapanese, which if nothing else has made the process feel less like schoolwork and more like a game.

Hiragana and katakana weren't hard to pick up at all — I can read and type them comfortably now without too much latency — and I'm 62.5% through the intro course that LingoDeer claims to be N5-equivalent. Picking up enough kanji for this to become a useful skill does seem a bit daunting, but as others have said, rote memorization is only a matter of time and consistency.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#13

Post by njacobs5074 »

musicale wrote: post #10
presentation wrote: post #7

Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper, and for that kind of challenge this stack seems OK so long as they index much harder on the NHK Easy News after getting a basic level of kanji and grammar knowledge (they already claim to know 1000 so they should be fine). But if the author wants to have any chance of understanding spoken Japanese or speaking, this will…

> Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper Newspapers? How boring. I would want to be able to read the text in video games and manga! On a semi-related note, I heard of someone who learned English largely by playing Final Fantasy 7 with a dictionary in hand. [Also learned practical bonus vocabulary like "mako energy" and "materia" I assume. ;-) ]

So being able to read a newspaper will enable you to chat with people whom you're not super close to.

Reading and understanding video games & manga is more challenging in that the way the people speak in these situations is much more informal, i.e. lots of slang.

You won't be able to get to the latter without spending some time on the former because the grammatical structures in idiomatic Japanese are full of contractions that arise from the spoken language.

Just as an aside, if you actually spoke like a manga/game character, you'd definitely raise some eyebrows. Probably not in a good way ;)

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#14

Post by SomeHacker44 »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #4

I wish that people referring to Japanese as "the most difficult language to learn..." could add the important caveat "...among major global languages". There are thousands of languages spoken on Earth, and some of them involve complexities that would daunt speakers of English or other Standard Average European languages more than Japanese. As just two examples, I remain daunted by the morphology of Skolt Saami and Ng…

Having studied both Mandarin and Japanese, not to mention Latin, Spanish, French and English, plus looked into myriad other European languages...

Mandarin is an order of magnitude harder than Japanese. Japanese is easy to speak and hear. It has two phonetic alphabets, and fewer pictograms in its Kanji than Mandarin. It has a highly regular grammar. So much easier than Mandarin. Just my 2c.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#15

Post by presentation »

njacobs5074 wrote: post #13
musicale wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depends what your goals are - it sounds like the author is aiming to be able to read a newspaper Newspapers? How boring. I would want to be able to read the text in video games and manga! On a semi-related note, I heard of someone who learned English largely by playing Final Fantasy 7 with a dictionary in hand. [Also learned practical bonus vocabulary like "mako energy" and "materia" I assume. ;-) ]

So being able to read a newspaper will enable you to chat with people whom you're not super close to. Reading and understanding video games & manga is more challenging in that the way the people speak in these situations is much more informal, i.e. lots of slang. You won't be able to get to the latter without spending some time on the former because the grammatical structures in idiomatic Japanese are full of contrac…

Though not verbally, as verbal communication is a separate skill altogether from reading comprehension, especially for a language like Japanese that uses Chinese characters. Your bang for the buck in terms of verbal progress will be very low with the approach the author describes.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#16

Post by PinkMilkshake »

I'm taking the mostly immersion approach to language learning. I just watch hours of Japanese gaming youtubers and whenever a word starts to stand out, I look it up if it wasn't obvious from the context. I estimate that I learn a new word every 2 hours of content

I looked into traditional methods, I also know about Antimoon, AJATT, MIA, RTK, WaniKani, Anki/SRS, etc. But I'm too low in conscientiousness to stick to a plan, and I burn out on SRS and mnemonics after about 500 cards, even with reasonably low card rates. The mnemonics become a frustrating scramble of meaning in my head.

Just last night I learned the words for mirror and crime with almost no effort and I still remember them today. That's two words learned, both only encountered once, in context. I even have the image in my head of one of the in game mirrors. That kind of "fast mapping" just doesn't occur any other way (that I can find). I've also picked up plenty of written Japanese, including kanji, from menu screens, subtitles, etc.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#17

Post by brendyn »

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #16

I'm taking the mostly immersion approach to language learning. I just watch hours of Japanese gaming youtubers and whenever a word starts to stand out, I look it up if it wasn't obvious from the context. I estimate that I learn a new word every 2 hours of content I looked into traditional methods, I also know about Antimoon, AJATT, MIA, RTK, WaniKani, Anki/SRS, etc. But I'm too low in conscientiousness to stick to a…

You're doing precisely the correct thing to learn a language the right way: Stephen Krashen is an expert on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBuQ61lSIBI He rambles on about dementia and reading ant the start but i think he explains Comprehensible Input here. http://sdkrashen.com/

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#18

Post by teleforce »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #4

I wish that people referring to Japanese as "the most difficult language to learn..." could add the important caveat "...among major global languages". There are thousands of languages spoken on Earth, and some of them involve complexities that would daunt speakers of English or other Standard Average European languages more than Japanese. As just two examples, I remain daunted by the morphology of Skolt Saami and Ng…

I agree with your opinion that the reputation of Japanese being hard is mainly due to its arcane writing system, and sorting Japanese writing is practically an unsolved problem [1].

Compare this to Korean where you can learn the writing system in a single day [2].

[1] http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/13/sorting-in-ja...

[2] https://www.meridianlinguistics.com/news/learn-to-read-korea...

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#19

Post by rtpg »

presentation wrote: post #8
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #4

I wish that people referring to Japanese as "the most difficult language to learn..." could add the important caveat "...among major global languages". There are thousands of languages spoken on Earth, and some of them involve complexities that would daunt speakers of English or other Standard Average European languages more than Japanese. As just two examples, I remain daunted by the morphology of Skolt Saami and Ng…

Yeah, I actually find a lot of the grammatical rules to be pretty straightforward and generally there aren’t many weird exceptions. Distinguishing sounds is pretty easy too, unlike Mandarin for example. The levels of formality are tricky at first but you quickly adapt to it, and they also follow well defined rules. A lot of the odd pronunciations of words like you mention are generally things you can just memorize bl…

echoing this, getting to a "everyday discussions doable" level for the spoken language is a relatively quick affair. There are very few sounds in the language, and the hardest thing for native-english speakers is perhaps the double-vowel timing and like trying to decipher loan words/overwrite the "original pronunciation"

The writing system is hard, but learning it helps complement your vocabulary in the same way that learning greek and latin prefixes/suffixes expands your english vocabulary.

Not even to get into the fact that, as a high context language, you can get away with extremely simple sentences and rely on context way more than in other languages.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#20

Post by rtpg »

The thing I wish I had known originally is that Japanese talk shows are probably the best source of "normal spoken Japanese" out there. Definitely better than youtubers (TV people speak with better enunciation and less weird net slang), and 100x better than any anime.

On top of that the shows tend to have a lot of text on screen to emphasize points etc, and will cover really easy to understand topics.

It might be boring/low brow, but you'll absorb a lot more in shorter amounts of time IMO. And like... who wants to read the news?

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