Advice on learning Japanese

In My Humble Opinion
1

Or at least trying to, anyway. Once again i’m attempting to transform my incredibly rudimentary knowledge into something actually usable beyond recognising a few odd kanji.

Anyone have any advice as to particularly good books or methods of learning? Eventually I would want to be able to understand both script and the spoken language, but would it be better to focus on one or the other seperately first for any reason? Any general thoughts? The only thing i’m not all that interested in is actually learning how to write script properly, because I have horrible handwriting at the best of times.

2

Try immersion. Here’s my experience with a sample lesson.

3

I can’t help you much with tips for learning kanji, since I suck at them myself, but I can point you in the right direction for everything else ^^

First of all, take some classes. Self-study is great, but it’s really beneficial to take a class, if only for ready access to somebody who can answer questions that may arise.

Hmmm… if you had to choose, I’d focus first on speaking and listening, but ideally you should be learning reading/writing at the same time, although speaking and listening will naturally outpace kanji learning if my experience is in any way normative.

I didn’t particularly like any of my textbooks, but they all got the job done. If you don’t like textbooks, I do recommend studying from guidebooks. I have a collection of about 10 guidebooks which are useful from beginner to advanced. Here are their names. You can find them on Amazon I reckon.

Barron’s 501 Japanese Verbs
Japanese Core Words and Phrases: Things you can’t find in a Dictionary
Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks don’t Tell you
Love, Hate, and Everything in Between: Expressing Emotions in Japanese
An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions
Beyond Polite Japanese: A Dictionary of Japanese Slang and Colloquialisms
Barron’s Japanese Grammar: Second Edition.
Aaand lastly, a pseudo-textbook, Basic Japanese through Manga.

All those combined with a dictionary and textbook should give you all the written material you’ll need, except for whatever Japanese publications you choose to practice reading with.

Here are some websites I have also found useful:

Online Japanese Dictionary
Visual Grammar Lessons
Blog about learning Japanese
Online Kanji Translator
Kanji Practice
Japanese pronunciation drills

What else… what else… Oh yeah! Make some Japanese friends! www.mylanguageexchange.com costs like 15$ a year, but I’ve made some wonderful friends (and one GF) from it. Also, once your reading gets better, you can join MIXI, which is the Japanese version of Facebook.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions. My Japanese is not fluent, but I can speak and listen at an advanced level, so feel free to PM me for my hotmail addy. がんばれ～！(gambare - try your best!).

4

You’re going to need time. Lots and lots of time. In order to be able to be able to participate in a casual conversation and reach the level of functional illiterate, I had to take university-level classes for three years and spent four months in complete and utter immersion. And I’m a gifted language learner.

A lot of people decide to skip on the written language to focus on speech but in the end, this usually comes back to bite you. Once you get past beginner level, knowledge of kanji will greatly help you learn vocabulary.

Take classes. You will need them. I’ve never met anyone who was in any way fluent who was completely self-taught.

Use the internet. It used to be that getting your hands on reading material was difficult. Now it’s just a few clicks away. Try to find a site that deals in a subject that interests you. Something you would want to read if you could. Try to read it as best you can. Even if you can’t, you’ll probably notice that certain words and kanji appear more often. Make note of them and learn them first. When you will get better, make note of words, idioms, and grammatical constructs. If all you use are textbooks, there is a risk that you will become very good at reading… textbooks.

Beware of “slang” books. I caught a television show some time ago that featured reverse-engrish: weird Japanese found abroad. They introduced a number of particularly bad Japanese textbooks and one of them was one of the more popular slang primers. It’s good for laughs but don’t try quoting it. Japanese slang, like all slang, is highly regional and highly, highly fluid. K-Y-go might be all the rage right now in Tokyo but it didn’t exist a few years ago and will likely be forgotten in the near future. Slang is an advanced topic that is best tackled through immersion.

Immersion. Eventually, you will need to send some serious time in Japan. Partly because necessity will force you to improve. However, most importantly, because it is impossible to dissociate a language from its culture. A language is a set of rules for communicating that goes beyond grammar.

5

Of some 3 years of learning Japanese in college, I would say that the toughest things are kanji and humble and honorific verbs. The latter two can be memorized after a while, there’s a definite pattern (I’ll admit I just haven’t yet because I’m a slacker). Kanji is difficult because of the sheer number and the fact that the sounds change all the time with the different combinations, it drives me nuts! The best advice I can give you for that is to learn the radicals of each kanji. It will save you a lot of time in the long run to look at a kanji and be able to say “Ah, the kanji for “truth” is the radical for person smooshed in with the kanji for “say”…” At the least, I find it easier to memorize them when I can associate them in that way, or make up my own personal way “Oh, the kanji for “fast” looks like a rocket ship on a launch pad…”
I second immersion, if that’s possible. I learned more in one year abroad than all my other classes combined; nothing can substitute actually being there and being surrounded by native speakers, signs, and Japanese media.
I will say that knowing the stroke order for kanji will be important if you’re attempting to look them up in a dictionary sometime in the future.

6

There’s a book that’s all about these kinds of mnemonics.

7

I agree with everything that’s been said above. Also, if you do spend time on kanji, I’d spend more of that time on learning the vocabulary words that use those kanji (either in pairs or on their own), rather than trying to memorize every possible pronunciation or meaning that an individual kanji can have. In the wild, kanji hunt in pairs, often with meanings that aren’t intuitive from their individual meanings. I spent too much of my time studying kanji one by one only to find that I knew a lot of things of little utility, and was greatly lacking in things everyone else thought was essential.

I recommend taking the time to practice writing the kanji (with the proper stroke order) many times each. It will a) burn it into your brain more effectively than just reading, b) make it much easier to look up unknown kanji in a dictionary by stroke count, c) give you a good feel for the radicals that make up the kanji, which will make dictionary searches even easier, help in guessing the meaning or reading of new kanji, and make it easier to describe a kanji to another person (what’s fun is watching two foreigners have a smooth conversation about kanji that leaves native speakers baffled: “It’s ‘wait’ but with a hand” “You mean motsu?” “Yeah!”)

And avoid the Making Out in Japanese books. They’re cute, but very out of date and tend to give inappropriate phrases without context that will just make you sound ridiculous. You’ll get further asking if her hovercraft is full of eels.

8

What is K-Y-go again? I can’t remember >_<

9

It’s a form of slang that’s apparently the “in” thing amongst Tokyo youths. It’s roman alphabet abbreviations of Japanese phrases. For instance, the “K-Y” in K-Y-go is short for Kūki ga Yomenai, which translates literally as “can’t read the air” and is said of someone who has trouble judging what’s appropriate to say. (This was used by some political commentators about former PM Abe.)

Some other examples:
MM: Maji Mukatsuku -> “I’m seriously pissed off”
3M: Maji de Mō Muri -> “I seriously can’t take anymore”
GMM: Gūzen Machi de atta Moto-kare -> “Former boyfriend I ran into by chance on the street.”
IM: Imi Wakannai -> “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
ZT: Zutto Tomodachi -> “Friends forever”
MK5: Maji Kireru Go byō mae -> “I’m five seconds away from seriously blowing my cap.”

These sort of started out as a form of leet speak but they crossed over in the spoken language. What’s interesting is that the same sort of slang was apparently popular among Imperial Navy officers during WWII. An example:

FFK: Furarete Furarete Komaru -> “I don’t know what to do, girls keep turning me down.”
MMK: Motete Motete Komaru -> “I don’t know what to do, girls are crazy about me.”

10

Awesome, I’m totally going to buy that book!

11

My parents gave me that book when I first started studying. I remember at the time I didn’t think it was all that useful, but a lot of the mnemonics have really stuck with me.

12

I’ve got a lot more experience with the written than the spoken. Set aside time everyday to work on it. I read manga everyday and even though I can’t read every word, I look for words I do know and I can follow the story (after about five years of on and off studying). But the constant exposure really helps me retention and I try to read them outload to reinforce pronunciations. For kanji, I really like the Basic Kanji series. Yes, you learn how to properly write kanji but I think that helps you remember them.

I also really liked the Eleanor Harz Jorden Japanese books. The written language ones have a lot of great example sentences that I find very helpful especially when I read them outloud. The spoken language ones can’t be beat for good clear grammar but they’re a bit controversial because they use romaji (roman characters) instead of Japanese script.

BTW, if you have an ipod, there are some free podcasts available.