I’m looking for good resources for teaching oneself Japanese. Any suggestions? I’m unable to do a course right now, and am specifically looking for something I can do at home in my free time.
Learning Japanese I think I’m learning Japanese I really think so!
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I have been told that Japanese is one of the hardest to learn away from a classroom (no specifics why, but several people have told me that). The only suggestions I have are getting a language program for your computer and finding someone in your are that speaks Japanese you can practice with.
I paid for actual lessons, but I’ve always heard “Japanese for Busy People” is very good.
A number of my friends have spoken highly of the Japanese for Busy People line of textbooks. If you do buy them, make sure to get the kana versions. Japanese learning materials in romanization are pretty useless. There are a lot of learning materials out there aimed at beginners; any chain bookstore should have a decent selection.
Not to utterly discourage you, but if you’re seeking to do anything more than learn a smattering of Japanese for the purpose of personal interest, then trying to teaching yourself Japanese is a waste of time. It’s a very difficult language even within a structured learning environment.
Coincidentally, I just returned from my Japanese class that I’m taking at a local comunity college. I’m in my fourth semester and I tried to learn on my own but didn’t make any real progress until I started to learn in a classroom environment. I expose myself to Japanese constantly, working on reading manga every single day (it’s my main hobby at home) and watching and listening to Japanese constantly. And I’m still amazed at how much more I have to learn and how hard it is to motivate myself to study even though I’m so interested in the subject.
Anyway, best advice is to get a textbook that also has a CD and do all the exercises. My class uses Yookoso which is kinda dry but has good exercises. There are a lot of Japanese textbooks out there and I think most of them are very similar, it’s really a matter of doggedly sticking to it…
After 8 years of studying and passing the level 1 JLPT, I’m still that way.
I picked up Japanese quite easily! (Erm… When I was three and four years old.)
I took UCLA Extension class a few years ago. It’s actually pretty easy (at least at that level). No one to practice with though, so I’ll have to start again. I don’t even remember the hiragana alphabet anymore!
Here’s a link to the hiragana alphabet. There are some ‘tricks’ you can use with it. ‘Ah’ looks like an antenna. ‘Antenna’ starts with ‘a’. ‘Ra’ looks a bit like a rabbit. ‘Shi’ looks like a girl’s hair. ‘Ri’ looks like reeds. ‘To’ looks like a toe. ‘Hi’ looks like a big grin (Hee!).
Disclaimer: I still don’t know the language past the syllabaries, counting, and basic introductions, three years after I started trying to learn it. (But then, that hasn’t been a solid three years of concerted effort, either.)
With that out of the way: I took a weekend class at a small local Japanese instruction school, and the textbooks they used were Japanese for Busy People, which is clear, easy to understand, and recommended (by this non-speaker); and the not-very-optimistically named Basic Functional Japanese, which seemed more complete but dated.
(Several people recommended the kana version of Japanese for Busy People instead of the romanized version, and I’d go along with that – it’s a little more work up front, but it reinforces the memorization of the kana, and it supposedly helps with pronounciation and learning the kanji.)
For an interesting supplement to a “real” textbook, check out Mangajin’s Basic Japanese Through Comics and volume two. They’re not shooting for fluency, but drilling down on specific phrases, and I’m surprised how much of the vocabulary I have retained is from those books instead of from textbooks.
It’s not that difficult to learn hiragana and katakana; I picked up both just over a weekend of memorization exercises. Kanji is a lot more daunting – I can only recognize about 10 out of the 1500 that are required for basic literacy. Another supplemental recommendation for that is Kanji Pict-o-Graphix. It’s full of visual mnemonics that “serious” scholars may scoff at, but all the kanji that I have learned, I retained from that book instead of any other exercises.
Man, that’s so not encouraging. I’ve been studying on and off for maybe five years with goign on two years of classroom study and I think I would barely pass the JLPT 3. Sigh… I really want to get to the point where I could (with the help fo a dictionary) plow through a novel but that seem like it’ll take forever…
Japanese is hard, no doubt about it. I have learned some very basic japanese while visiting last month. Its definately easier to speak it than read it but there is much to learn in both areas. It is a fundamentally different language than English so you have to “unlearn” some of the assumptions you may have from speaking only English. A decent book (not necessarily for beginners) is “Making Out in Japanese.” It has lots of useful phrases you may not get from a dictionary.
I don’t have any specific recommendations for textbooks since I think that most textbooks are basically worthless. Almost all of them present material in a disorganized non-progressive manner because they’re based on situational dialogs. Situational dialogs are good only for teaching things that don’t vary much, like greetings (which tend to be highly ritualized in any language) or transactions. Once you get beyond shopping, buying tickets, getting directions, etc. this approach shows serious defects and it encourages bad habits like trying to memorize sentences or even whole chunks of dialog in an attempt to increase fluency.
What I do recommend is learning words. Lots of 'em. Vocabulary is absolutely the most important thing in learning any language. Grammar is also important, but without words to use in the structures, grammar is worthless. If you know 101 sentence patterns, but have a vocabulary of only 300 words, you can still only talk about subjects that involve those words. Sure, if you concentrate on grammar your sentences may be grammatically perfect, but you’re still severely limited in the subjects you can discuss.
Learn general words instead of specific ones, and don’t learn synonyms at all at first. For example, don’t learn “pistol” when you could learn “gun” or “firearm” instead. Pistol is good only when talking about pistols. If you want to say “rifle” you have to say something like “long pistol that you hold to your shoulder” if you only know the word for “pistol.” Learning synonyms is a bad idea at least at first because you can mix them up, you don’t know all the subtleties of when to use each word, and you’re wasting time learning words that mean almost the same thing when you could be learning a completely new word.
When I’m being a good boy and actually studying, I make up flash cards with new vocabulary or characters and learn about 10-20 a day. It’s not too hard to learn that many and review the last week’s worth in an hour or so a day. For me, I learn best if I study intensely for 20-30 minutes, take a short break of 5 minutes or so, and go back to studying for another 20-30 minutes. Doing one session like this in the morning and one with new grammar and to review the day’s words at night works really well for me. Most people can’t maintain good concentration for longer than about 30 minutes at the outside. I’m a visual learner, though I do remember sounds pretty well too, so flash cards work very well for me. Writing while trying to memorize things distracts me and I take twice as long to learn something by writing it over and over again than I do from looking at a flash card and saying the word to myself. Making up a story, finding a word that sounds a bit like the one you’re trying to learn, making a funny picture in your mind can all help you. Good visualization and association skills can be a huge help in memorization. Figure out what works for you.
Learn the most basic and most common sentence patterns and use as much of your vocabulary as possible in them. As a beginner, you will not really need the more esoteric patterns and you need to increase your vocabulary more than anything else. When you do need to start learning more grammar, I suggest learning based on function, as in “asking questions” or “connecting sentences.” Learn one or two points of grammar and practice using it. Everywhere you go, use the grammar point. Every new word you learn, try to use it with the grammar you’re practicing right now; that way you practice new vocab and new grammar at the same time. Do that until you can use that grammar well, and keep coming back to it occasionally for review. If it takes a week to be able to use the grammar with no problems and no fumbling, take a week. Try not to make yourself sick of it, but keep using it until you’ve got it down.
Do not learn similar concepts at the same time. Avoid the urge to immediately study related words when learning new ones. For example, learn “right” and “left” in different sessions. Even separating them by 10 or 15 minutes is okay, but whatever you do, don’t study opposites, synonyms, similar words, homophones, or similar grammar points at the same time. This will keep you from mixing the ideas up or being unsure about which is which. Once you’ve already learned and practiced similar concepts separately, you can go back and compare them to make sure of the differences, but you should have learned them thoroughly before hand.
Verbs are vital in learning Japanese, especially at first. Much of the basic grammar is tied up in learning verb forms. Every new verb you learn, you should practice running through all the forms you’ve learned so far so that you know how to conjugate it/use it. Don’t do this the old-school way, by doing a conjugation chart. Use the forms in a sentence, concentrating on the difference in meaning with each form of the verb. Use it with vocabulary you’ve already learned, or with new vocabulary, but practice, practice, practice.
As you go about your business during the day, manufacture opportunities to use your Japanese. Talk to yourself, narrate your activities, be like a 3 year old and say the words, and related verbs if you know them, for everything you see. You need to hear it or have contact with a native speaker if at all possible. Again, just like a kid, play with the sounds of the language. Make your mouth into weird shapes, fiddle around trying to get it to sound just right, and forget about being self-conscious. Everyone feels like an idiot or a child when trying to speak a new language. Get used to that and have fun with it.
Learn the kana as soon as you can. Hiragana is probably more important than katakana, but you need to know both. They shouldn’t take you more than a couple of weeks to master if you use flash cards and practice writing words with them for a little bit every day. Once you learn both separately, go back and learn them together. I had a problem remembering katakana because I learned hiragana first and rarely used katakana in class. I had to go back and re-learn katakana by making sure I could write and recognize the katakana counterpart to the hiragana.
Start learning kanji as soon as possible. You need to learn the basic parts that make up the kanji to make it easy on yourself. I tell myself little stories based on the meaning of the parts (if possible) and the meaning of the kanji. Learning the sounds is harder, but sometimes you can learn that as well by making up an associative story. As soon as you can read kana, use them as furigana above the kanji on the Japanese side on your flash cards. The kanji for useful vocabulary may be too complicated at first, and I don’t recommend trying to actually memorize kanji you haven’t studied in depth but you’ll be getting passive learning so that when you do study the kanji later, you’ll be able to memorize it easily since you already know a vocabulary word that uses it and you’ve seen it before when you were learning the vocabulary word.
Books I recommend highly are: The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary, a glance at the reviews will tell you why; and Kanji Pict-O-Graphix, it will introduce many of the bits and pieces that make up more complicated kanji and will get you used to the idea of associative and narrative memorization, which will help immensely in learning the kanji. A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is helpful when you’ve gotten beyond the very basic stuff you’ll learn in Barron’s Japanese Grammar. I have Kodansha’s Furigana Japanese Dictionary: Japanese-English English-Japanese, which I like because it had furigana (little hiragana written above the kanji as a guide for which kanji reading to use) instead of Roman letters, but since it’s meant to be only a basic dictionary, it is a bit limited. For a beginner it’s great, but you may need a more comprehensive dictionary eventually.
After I got the Kanji Learner’s Dictionary I used the usage ranking that’s included in the back to reorder the way I was learning new kanji. It gives the top 1000 kanji from one year of the Asahi Shinbun in order from most- to least-commonly used. In my opinion, it’s a much better way to learn than the Japanese elementary school ordering that most kanji systems use. I started out using the kanji cards published by Tuttle, but I found out that some of the kanji introduced even early on, like in 3rd grade, are in the D category of usage; as in, they are almost never used in normal written communication. I’d suggest using the dictionary and the Pict-O-Graphix book in combination to start studying kanji, and make your own flash cards rather than buying a set of flash cards. The kanji dictionary has better definitions than the Tuttle cards too.
All of the study recommendations are either based on things I learned in linguistics classes when doing my ESL certification, or are things I’ve learned from painful experience. My Japanese teacher in university, where I first started learning Japanese, was an older Japanese woman and unfortunately she was unduly influenced by Japanese teaching methods. (If Japanese knew how to teach languages well, I wouldn’t have a job right now; I teach English in Japan). Having a Ph. D. in linguistics, she should have known better. In fact, her book, Elementary Functional Japanese, which we used in class, is one of the worst textbooks I’ve ever seen for teaching Japanese. She didn’t even have an index or a comprehensive glossary. It was disorganized, she didn’t explain connections between concepts that would have made things immensely easier had I known them earlier, she concentrated more on grammar than vocabulary, we did way too much rote practice and copying, and while kanji was used, it wasn’t taught in a systematic way. I was truly pissed when I realized, through studying linguistics, how many bad habits I’d learned in her class and how many inefficient approaches to teaching she was using. When I came to Japan, I had to re-learn much of what I’d been taught in class because much of what I knew was completely disassociated from real usage and was so fragmented and compartmentalized that it took a long time to pull into a coherent whole. If I’d started learning using the approach I recommend above, I would have a much higher level of fluency than I do now. I wasted over a year doing things the wrong way and most of another year unlearning what I’d learned, and I still have slight problems in some areas due to bad early learning that became fossilized.
Gahh, I already wrote a #^¢*ing book in my earlier reply, but I just found something from one of my lingustics profs that might help you. Zev Bar-Lev was one of the teachers I respected most at my university and he came up with a teaching method called SILL that has some introductory lessons and methodology online. There’s a sample lesson for Japanese that might help you get started.
to echo others, this is not a language for which you can really learn anything significant without the guidance of a native speaker. I tried using www.japanese-online.com, but really all it did was make it a little easier to pick up on the same material when it was introduced in class… I retained nothing. also, it was flawed in that it did not introduce any kind of cultural subtleties that incorporate into the language: for example, the website used the Japanese word for “you” completely naturally; threw it around like English speakers do, when in reality this would likely seriously offend any Japanese person with whom you were not quite intimate.
if you’re going to try to learn anything at home, keep in mind you’re really only preparing yourself for a course later. otherwise it will be of very little/ no use to you.
that said, if you’re intent on it, start by picking up the Yookoso textbooks and workbooks. get a Japanese dictionary or two. focus on learning the writing system as soon as it’s introduced in the textbook, and do not move on until you have mastered it, both hiragana and katakana (katakana will likely be harder, because you’ll see it less, so practice it a lot). learn the kanji as it’s introduced in the workbook and quiz yourself on both reading AND writing it (separately… and writing will be harder, so practice that more). if you have livejournal, join the community called “japanese” or “correct japanese”, and you can ask questions you’ll have (trust me, you’ll have them) there; I’ve found that infinitely useful. once you’ve gotten through the first book, look for a Japanese penpal. constantly watch Japanese movies/anime, or read manga (which usually have the katakana for the kanji, so it’s far easier to look up words). take classes as soon as you have the time: you may learn to read and pick up things, but you will never learn to write, much less communicate with a Japanese person, without instruction.
good luck. =)
Hey, nevermore, so you’re taking Japanese at UT? How’s the Japanese program there? I just finished taking the last class I can at ACC and I’m trying to figure out what to do next.
Also, b]Sleel**, you’re teaching English in Japan? Are you enjoying it? I keep thinking if I really wanna learn Japanese, I’m gonna have to go there. So I’m considering taking a “sabbatical” from my “real job” and maybe going to teach for a few years.
oh, I highly recommend it. it’s rigorous, though; at least in the beginning classes: class every single day, homework every night except before tests, quizzes almost every day. the instructors are all great, very helpful and very enthusiastic about teaching, and there are several awesome TAs too. I’m in second-year, part II right now, and I’m so so anxious to start my intermediate classes in the fall. =D
how was the program at ACC? how far do they let you go?
I’m planning on teaching English in Japan too, once I graduate (hopefully December)… Sleel, what was the application process like? when’s a good time to start? where are new applicants likely to be sent, and where are good places to go, if you have options?
From my experience (from Chinese, but I think it’s still applicable), the only way to really pick up the language is:
- Practice writing the kanji like mad.
- Read lots. Comics, kids books, whatever.
- Listen to it lots. Anime might be a bit too “vernacular” and fast-paced to work, though. Try shows that have young target audiences.
- Live in Japan. Even if it’s only for a month or something, you’ll notice a marked improvement in your ability to communicate effectively.
I actually think the program at ACC is too easy. I’ve had the same instructor for all my classes and she’s totemo yasashii but she lets us get away with too much. We also don’t cover as much as at UT. Japn 1&2 are 5 credit classes and we cover about six chapters in Yokooso 1. Japn 3&4 are only three credit classes and by the time I finish Japn 4, we’ll only be through Chapter 2 in Yokooso 2.
I graduated from UT in 2000 and I’m working a “real job” but I’ve really gotten bit by the Japanese thing. I was thinking about either trying to work out a part-time thing so I could get a second degree at Ut or maybe just quitting my job and applying for JET in 2006 or 2007. I think my chances look good on paper…
I take it you’re an absolute beginner. Let me suggest that romanised texts may well be more suitable for you - they certainly were for me (and still are, for learning vocabulary items and similar). Starting with all-kana texts puts a huge obstacle in the way of learning anything. You can become proficient at reading kana later - I did.
An interesting approach to learning spoken Japanese is the “Teach Yourself Instant Japanese” tape and book set. It will give you a serious boost up the learning curve at the start, if you follow the instructions (45 minutes a day, 6 days a week, for 6 weeks). And not a kana in sight!
For learning kanji, I use the Tuttle kanji cards. They are Flash cards with the kanji on one side, and all the common meanings and readings on the other.
Japanese is very difficult to learn. I don’t know any way to sugar-coat this. If you want to achieve any kind of conversational level, or to be able to read anything written for adults in Japanese, you will need to commit to years of study. If you want to be able to see results in six months, Japanese may not be the right language to choose.