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Learning How to Learn Japanese

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Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#21

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

You either really missed out on something when learning Chinese or you are in for a realization in Japanese. (Probably you just simplified your explanation)

The problem with Japanese kanji vs Chinese Hanzi is not just that Japanese has two (or more) common readings for every character, it’s that they don’t follow the phonetic element to nearly the same degree as Chinese.

In Chinese you really do have a fighting Chinese of reading a word out loud that contains never by you seen before characters.

In Japanese you will regularly come across names consisting only of known to you characters and you will still have no chance of knowing how to read them out loud.

But I totally agree with your main point: Japanese is not as difficult as it’s reputation will lead would be learners to believe but it does have some road blocks (mainly the writing system) that will stand in the learners way.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#22

Post by wodenokoto »

rtpg wrote: post #20

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 bor…

I enjoy watching terrace house, and I think that is much closer to real life conversation I’ve had than any anime or variety show. I also feel that many dramas are pretty down to earth in how characters speak.

Anime is by far the most over the top, but I do find variety to also be over the top. Or maybe I’ve only been looking at the comedy ones.

Do you have any recommendations?

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#23

Post by wodenokoto »

teleforce wrote: post #18
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...

I don’t fully agree with the trope of learning the writing system in one day kinda false.

I mean you can learn to map it to alphabet in one day, but unless you can grasp the subtleties of the pronunciation of the similar sounding vowels and consonants have you really learned what the characters represent?

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#24

Post by GoblinSlayer »

rtpg wrote: post #20

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 bor…

Can't imagine why one would want to learn real japanese instead of anime japanese.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#26

Post by imtringued »

wodenokoto wrote: post #23
teleforce wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don’t fully agree with the trope of learning the writing system in one day kinda false. I mean you can learn to map it to alphabet in one day, but unless you can grasp the subtleties of the pronunciation of the similar sounding vowels and consonants have you really learned what the characters represent?

Are you trying to create a strawman? How do you learn characters without their pronunciation? There is nothing else to learn other than that. If you know the "alphabet" equivalent then you can pronunciate words written in that alphabet. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There is one exception which is Japanese where many characters merely have a meaning associated to them which need to be combined to form words. Sure, you do have to blindly memorize that but often the kanji on its own doesn't have one pronunciation, it has many and therefore it doesn't make sense to memorize all of them. Instead you just have to associate the pronunciation of the entire word with a given combination of Japanese characters.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#27

Post by imtringued »

brendyn wrote: post #17
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/

My experience is that this takes an absurd amount of time to learn anything. Sure you can probably learn Japanese in one year by staying in Japan but only because you have effectively spent 5000 hours doing nothing but Japanese. My learning efforts haven't even scratched 10% of that yet I am much further along the journey than 10%. My own estimate would be that I'm 50% the way to fluency.

If it works for you then fine, but it doesn't work for me.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#28

Post by samsari »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #24
rtpg wrote: post #20

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 bor…

Can't imagine why one would want to learn real japanese instead of anime japanese.

On the off-chance you aren't just being ironic: what a horrifying lack of imagination!

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#29

Post by ellipsis_12 »

teleforce wrote: post #18
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...

> Compare this to Korean where you can learn the writing system in a single day

I really, REALLY wish people would stop saying this about Korean. Sure, there's a couple of dozen letters and you can learn their individual default pronunciations in a single day, I'm not doubting that.

But that literally doesn't get you even close to being able to correctly pronounce many common words, because, guess what, when these letters are together in a word they influence each other in different ways and their pronunciation changes or they may not even get pronounced at all.

There is a reason why all these "learn hangul in 1 hour" web pages/videos never mention the existence of four-letter syllables. ;)

Learning Japanese phonentic alphabet(s) on the other hand, really can be done in one day and they are consistent and phonetic and there's no weirdness in pronunciation, but of course then you have to deal with thousands of kanji too. So I guess from that perspective, Korean really is easier, but learning to correctly pronounce the sounds and words in Korean is in my opinion much harder than in Japanese.

Re: Learning How to Learn Japanese

#30

Post by robotmay »

majewsky wrote: post #6
robotmay wrote: post #5

I started learning again last week. This is now attempt #3 to learn Japanese for me and this time I'm coming at it differently to before. I tried using WaniKani in the past, and although it was good it wasn't quite what I needed. This time around I'm instead primarily using Anki, and I have 4 main decks. A hiragana/katakana deck, a WaniKani kanji deck, a KanjiDamage deck, and a custom deck for anything else I want to…

That's interesting. For me, it's the exact opposite way. Kanji are actually the easiest thing for me. Does the WK deck or the KanjiDamage deck include mnemonics? If not, I highly highly highly recommend you get something with mnemonics. If not WK or KD, then get yourself the RTK book (Remembering the Kanji) and study with it. There are Anki decks with Kanji in RTK order, too.

It does actually have mnemonics! However they're mostly for remembering the onyomi/kunyomi rather than how to remember how to draw the kanji, which is something the hiragana/katakana decks have (they use the mnemonics from https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/). And I mostly remember the onyomi/kunyomi better by working through sentences that use that kanji I must admit.

I do quite like the KanjiDamage method so far, in that it teaches you lots of kanji that use the same radicals early on, even if they're obscure kanji. If I find I'm getting stuck on one repeatedly I just mute it if it's an obscure one rather than getting caught up on it.

I'll probably start on a RTK deck too because I'm not finding the numbers of cards overwhelming yet. And I have bought a book and pen for learning to write them out, as I figure that will help a lot too :D

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