Learning Japanese

[Brickman | 3,983]

7 hours ago, A_Feisty_Pickle said:

I'm a beginner as well, about 6 1/2 months in (but who is keeping track?). I would say I am learning at a fairly standard pace, although I am putting quite a bit of time into it.

During work breaks // lunch I do my Anki reviews, learn 20 new items in Wanikani, and do all my Wanikani reviews. Currently level 20. I would say some of the harder levels so far are around 7-8, and around 15. I think overall it has become easier with time as I'm getting more used to it. This takes ~2 hours per day.

Then in the evenings I do my Genki lessons // reviews (chapter 22 so almost done!), reading and listening practice. As I have progressed I have been spending more time per day reading / listening and less time with Genki, partially just because I'm able to understand input a little better now. I do roughly 30 minutes of Genki, and 1.5 hours split between reading and listening. 

For reading I've been mostly going over "Japanese Short Stories for Beginners" which is make for English speakers. It has 20 stories where for each story it has the text, the translated text, a summary in English and Japanese, a list of vocab words used in the story, and some review questions. I think it is probably a little lower of a level than I need. It's very accessible for beginners. I also have a native Japanese kids book with 100 short stories but it's a little harder, I poke around that occasionally. Also I read NHK Easy.

For listening it's mostly been simple anime and Hololive. Right now I'm watching Shirokuma Cafe which is kind of the most recommended anime for beginners I have seen. Might be a little excessive, but I watch the same episode once a day for seven days. Each day I pick up a little more that I missed previously. As I get better I assume I'll be able to drop it down to 3-5 viewings per episode and eventually (hopefully!) 1 viewing. Finally for Hololive I've been watching Okayu. She is probably the most calm and "normal" sounding member which I figured would be better for learning. I watched her Mother 3 playthrough and currently her Dragon Quest 4 playthrough. 

This is pretty much dead on my routine as well haha. Glad to hear it is working  I’m just about to hit WK level 8 so I’ll see how I go with it. I agree that it gets easier as you go and the vocabulary really enforces the kanji. Are you doing kaniwani as well? I do but don’t do it but leave it about two levels behind WK.

I hadn’t heard of that beginner anime so I’ll check it out

[Brickman | 3,983]

3 hours ago, fcgamer said:

I agree, yet also strongly disagree.

If you are at an intermediate level, or are studying a language that has a written form quite similar to a language you understand, then this works out okay, i.e. because I studied German, I can watch a movie with Dutch subtitles and feel quite alright with it.

But this is totally useless for a language that is very different from your own. For example, take the character 西 , which means 'west'. If you don't know this character, you would have no idea of it's meaning, and there's not even a radical to give you a clue to its pronunciation. As far as I'm concerned, it's an f'ing TV set with a mathematical "pi" symbol coming out the top. It would be impossible to derive the word 'west' from that.

Similarly, you want to avoid translating in your head, which a lot of folks tend to do. So it's better to know that XYZ, which you are hearing, is equivalent to ZYX, which you see written in your native tongue. If someone asks me what a single word means in Chinese, sometimes I can't give them a proper translation, as I know it's meaning within the context of the language, yet generally don't "translate" between languages. This is a good thing though, as I'm exclusively thinking in the language.

IMO, nix the writing, full stop. Learn how to input it into a computer, and maybe compile some texts via computer, and leave it at that. In this day and age, how many times do folks sit down and write things by hand? And even when they do, how large is the assortment of words that they write?

Plain and simple, for most, it would be a waste of time with little to be gained. Now learning to speak, yeah that's important.

Again I disagree strongly. Grammar is man-made, it's not natural. If you asked folks here on this very board a grammatical question, we'd all have different answers based on our ages, education, country, region, mother tongue, etc. 

Children learn languages by mimicking what they hear their parents and others say. Then, if they make grammatical errors, their parents will correct them, choosing their battles as not to discourage or overwhelm the child. Then the child adapts, naturally, by hearing the correct pattern.

For Chinese I had a book that threw are me a list of counters to pair with nouns in one unit. Maybe fifteen counters with descriptions of when to be used. It was a nightmare, even native speakers found it to be too much. But now I am using those flawlessly, without memorizing large pages of grammar rules, just via conversations and corrections. For example:

I'd like two pages of water.

Two glasses of water?

Yes, please. Two glasses of water.

Much more natural way of learning.

Definitely start now, see the part I wrote above...

I'd personally recommend you listen once or twice at most, then move on. I'd reckon the vocabulary is going to be somewhat equivalent throughout the whole series.

What you want to do is not get hung up on the details of what you didn't catch, rather focus on what you initially did catch. Switching to this approach will help you much more in daily usage.

100% dead on everything you should do when learning a new language. I struggled a lot with German in school because I was taught incorrectly. It took me years to realise this is the proper way to learn a language. 

I can only imagine your English class does a lot better than others in the area

[fcgamer | 4,723]

I made the mistake of grabbing this set of books a week or two ago. From the description I saw, it said that these would be great for those wanting to learn Taiwanense, who already had basic knowledge of Mandarin (like me). 

Well the books arrived, the first several chapters focused exclusively on pronunciation and tones, with large tables and exercises focusing on this. The book also uses a modified version of the god-awful romanisation scheme that the missionaries used in Taiwan during the 1800s.

The whole thing basically goes entirely against my main language-learning philosophy, and even worse, if I showed the book to most Taiwanense, I don't think they'd be able to read it either. 

Gonna try to take a closer look this upcoming week, but I really don't look forward to it

[Brickman | 3,983]

4 hours ago, fcgamer said:

I made the mistake of grabbing this set of books a week or two ago. From the description I saw, it said that these would be great for those wanting to learn Taiwanense, who already had basic knowledge of Mandarin (like me). 

Well the books arrived, the first several chapters focused exclusively on pronunciation and tones, with large tables and exercises focusing on this. The book also uses a modified version of the god-awful romanisation scheme that the missionaries used in Taiwan during the 1800s.

The whole thing basically goes entirely against my main language-learning philosophy, and even worse, if I showed the book to most Taiwanense, I don't think they'd be able to read it either. 

Gonna try to take a closer look this upcoming week, but I really don't look forward to it

Damn, sorry to hear that. Maybe give a review so other people can avoid them.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

3 minutes ago, Shmup said:

Damn, sorry to hear that. Maybe give a review so other people can avoid them.

Well the problem and is for an obscure / minority language, there's not a lot of resources available and most look inadequate. I think this one looks better than most of the other resources, available in English, but it's definitely not user friendly for self study it seems

[BouncekDeLemos | 82]

Hajimemashite!

I've learned a small amount of Japanese back in high school 20-something odd years ago, not as an elective or anything, but just for shits n' giggles. Most of my studies came from library books. ( Because internet wasn't the same in the "before Dreamcast" days? lol)

I'm not fluent by any means, (I'm still very amateur) but I now study it every now and then in my off-time. Mainly due to life, work and other distractions taking over most of my attention, it's very difficult to maintain. But I still do love studying it. I've forgotten how to read it, and mostly stick to the verbal aspect of it. So far I can ask where something is, show where something is at, name certain objects, and identify various certain onomatopoeia.  Maybe very small greetings and stuff. 

My only advice, study anything and everything. Download tons of apps, read books, talk to people who are fluent, find many dialects, etc... I don't think there's a right or wrong way since everyone takes in learning differently, but eventually you'll find something.

A kind of related, but unrelated protip: If video games are your thing, and you're into imports, and there's a game you'd like to play, but don't know the language? Just Download the google Google Translate app. It's much better than the web-based translate. There's an OCR camera viewer on it that translates text in real time. I usually slap my phone into a tripod, point it at the screen, and let it do it's thing. It's not perfect, but it'll give you an idea what's going on somewhat. lol I'm sure outside of that, there'd be other uses for a OCR reader, so have fun with that.  
 

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

This thread inspired me to casually jump back in to Japanese so I've been listening to a lot of podcasts during my daily hour-long drive. I've been primarily listening to Learn Japanese Pod which is great for picking up more natural, conversational Japanese. It would probably be tough to follow if you didn't have a good grasp on grammar and sentence structure, but the hosts do an amazing job breaking everything down. Highly recommended as an adjunct to actual studying.