Discussion The Japanese Study Thread

[Subito]

Re: Help with learning japanese

I wouldn't mind but when i start thinking about how long it'll take i start to get put off learning it. On top of that i've been checking out all of the sites people have posted and i'm still looking at them with a giant question mark above my head haha.

You might want to check out AJATT (All Japanese All The Time) -- it has a bunch of entries on motivation and how to not procrastinate and stuff. (It doesn't really explain grammar or anything though--it's more a blog about how to learn than anything else.) In particular, this one about how small victories=big win, this one called "Just Do It," and this one, which is about just keeping at it.

 

[Soggy]

Re: Help with learning japanese

Well motivation has always been my biggest problem so this will help a lot. Thank You

 

[ayumu]

looking for advance japanese topics

hello everybody!!!
i'm a japanese student,i have reach an advance level,but i need some help,cause i'm looking for any document or whatever about japanese learnig but for an ADVANCE LEVEL,i hope somebody can help me,THANK'S

 

[mikkih]

Re: looking for advance japanese topics

How about cnn.com (in English) and cnn.co.jp (in Japanese)? You will be knowledgeable while learning the language.

<Newspapers in Japan>
Yomiuri Shimbun: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/
Asahi Shimbun: http://www.asahi.com/
Kyoto Shimbun: http://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/

If you are manga fan, you may enjoy reading JUMP j BOOKS (these are novels, not comic books). I only have a Bleach novel, but it does not have a whole a lot of furigana/yomikana/ruby in the book. It should be easy to understand the book though when you already know the story line. (You can try reading some at their official site http://j-books.shueisha.co.jp/webyomi/ )

 

[sindergi]

Re: Help with learning japanese

Im a little bit confussed - im using two sources for learning japanese
1. : http://www.guidetojapanese.org/
2. : Pomax-Guide/Book

Here is my Problem : They explain how to "build" the stem of u-verb different.
Pomax´s Guide :
He says you just have to remove the last う-vowel-sound and then you have the stem.
Tae Kim´s Guide :
He/she says that you have to remove the last う-vowel and replace it with い。

Which one is correct ?

 

[Subito]

Re: Help with learning japanese

Depends on what they mean by "stem," I guess.

For example, we have the u-verb (go-dan 五段 verb) 書く　（かく）.
書く --> 書いて、書いた
書く --> 書かない、書かず、書かれる、書かせる
書く --> 書き、書きます
書く --> 書け、書ける
書く --> 書こう

For the most general "stem," I think you'd remove the last う. When you replace the う with an い, you have the "~ます stem."
Although there are some weird u-verbs, like 行く and 問う.

So, they're both correct, but maybe just not worded in a user-friendly way.

 

[nood22]

Re: Help with learning japanese

There are some good videos that teach Japanese. It is a nice break from constant reading.

http://learning-japanese-easy.webege.com/tv-video/lets-learn-japanese - Let's learn Japanese[URL] is great for beginners

[URL="http://learning-japanese-easy.webege.com/tv-video/nihongo-dekimasu"]http://learning-japanese-easy.webege.com/tv-video/nihongo-dekimasu - Nihongo Dekimasu[URL] is my favourite because it teaches Japanese in Japanese. But I think students need a bit of experience before starting.

 

[sei-star]

Re: Help with learning japanese

I'm also around a kindergarten level of Japanese, give or take a year or two. I personally find THIS site very handy with Furigana-less kanji... I actually just found it a few minutes ago!

I purchase Japanese manga as well as English manga, so I can read both. (for example I have Shinshi Doumei Cross volumes 7 and 11 in both English and Japanese) I often practice Japanese that way.

If you learn better by hearing what you read, watch a LOT of subbed anime or J-dramas. But if you learn best by trying yourself, I suggest getting a group of friends all trying to learn Japanese and carry on portions of your conversations in Japanese with them.

I also use a lot of references like Japanese grammar books and the like. They're pretty handy, since the sentence structure is different than English. (English is SVO and Japanese is SOV)

My favorite way to learn Japanese, and maybe one of the most fun ways, is interactive programs or games. For example, I use both Rosetta Stone and a Nintendo DS game called "My Japanese Coach". They both help me quite a bit. They do cost money (obviously) but if you're serious about learning like I am, you won't regret buying them. You can order a free trial of Rosetta Stone but the trial isn't in Japanese - it's a general idea of how the program itself works.

A quick and easy way to look up short words or phrases is sites like Google Translate. Those kinds of things aren't always 100% accurate, but if you have something you just want an idea of then that's a nice way to figure it out. Not complicated - just type in the word you wanna translate.

Hope some of this helps!

 

[jakelong00]

help with japanese

hi
i had sometime in my holidays so i thought y nt giv japanese a try.
so i started learning japanese from a book called japanese in mangaland.
i could easily memorize the hiragana n katakana but the problem came wen the real part of language like intro n all usin kanji came.
so i was hopin that u ppl could give me some advice or help on how to go abt it
thnx

 

[sindergi]

Re: help with japanese

a good way to learn vocabs is http://smart.fm.....

give it a try - it helped me a lot. And maybe another - evertime you learn a vocab, write down the kanji - this helped me a lot to memorize the kanjis......

 

[jakelong00]

Re: help with japanese

the site u gave here looks nice.
thnx for dat bt can u tell me from wer to start considerin i just know hiragana n katana, i mean wer to start for d basics of japanese language itself?

 

[Syphilias]

Re: help with japanese

just read every single day and it'll just click. There's no quick way to success in learning any language, you just have to integrate it into your life and keep at it every day. I haven't missed a day in the past 6 months out of my 8 years total of studying and I still have some confusion while reading some kanji pairings.

The key is that each kanji has a general meaning, and when you "stack" the kanji together with others, you can change the different "shades" of its meaning.

Just keep reading, you'll get it naturally.

And it looks like your English could use some polishing... hopefully Japanese can be a fresh start for you in the world of language!

 

[takayuki]

Re: Help with learning japanese

Hi everybody, I think minna no nihongo is good enough for the beginners. Its easy to understand, has various useful newwords. Anyway, if anyone has facebook, just tell me. I'll give u my japanese friend fb. He is maybe a bit old but a very enthusiastic teacher. His name is Takano, means Great eager^^

 

[takayuki]

Re: Learn how to read Manga: The Japanese Study Thread

uh.. I haven't looked through all the pages of this thread so I don't know if a Japanese person came up, but if anyone needs help I can help since I'm Japanese. and wow last post August 14.

Thank god you came ninkun ( can I?). I'm looking for some japanese newspaper online to improve my reading skill. I learned jp for 4 years and stopped when I nearly got level 1 so I want to maintain and if possible upgrade my level ( 4 skills). I really need your help. Thanks in advance

 

[Kazekeshi]

Help please?

I'm starting to learn Japanese but it's getting frustrating.

I want to speak, read, write the language because I'm tired of waiting years for like oh say, a novel to be translated, relying on others to translate something for you and my fandom I'm mostly active in tends to get all crazy and all with translations and the people usually start fighting which translation is more accurate. I also want to learn the language at an early age, my own pace, and interpret Japanese in my own way.

Any help is appreciated since I'm really, really desperate to understand the language.

 

[cmertb]

Re: Help please?

I don't think there's anything more complicated than learning a foreign language, and Japanese is one of the most complicated languages out there. I think you'd need about a year of studying 2 or 3 hours every single day to be able to even begin to read manga, and even more than that for novels. So are you sure you're up for it?

If you can't study on your own, enroll in a class. That's usually slower than doing it on your own though. If you can, there are plenty of free beginner resources out there, although eventually you will have to buy some books. Start by learning hiragana before you do anything. If you find it too difficult, then give up on the idea of learning Japanese, as all of hiragana amounts to probably around 0.1% of what you will need to memorize eventually.

 

[Kazekeshi]

Re: Help please?

I don't think there's anything more complicated than learning a foreign language, and Japanese is one of the most complicated languages out there. I think you'd need about a year of studying 2 or 3 hours every single day to be able to even begin to read manga, and even more than that for novels. So are you sure you're up for it?

If you can't study on your own, enroll in a class. That's usually slower than doing it on your own though. If you can, there are plenty of free beginner resources out there, although eventually you will have to buy some books. Start by learning hiragana before you do anything. If you find it too difficult, then give up on the idea of learning Japanese, as all of hiragana amounts to probably around 0.1% of what you will need to memorize eventually.

I'm up for it. I definitely, surely want to learn the language even if it kills me.

There aren't any class I can enroll in right now since I'm barely in middle school and Japanese is a rare language to learn in my area and learning a foreign language at a young age is better than learning it when I'm an adult.

I'm learning hiragana right now and it's quite easy but of course there will be some mistakes here and there.

 

[Tran Linh]

Re: Help please?

my sincerest advice:

_ Take up your pen and start writing. 2 or three hours a day, constantly over a year, then you can do it.
_ Drill as hard as you can, please, I myself am a slow learner so I made up for it by increasing the time I learn to 6-7 hours a day (I even purchased an e-dic and a simple manga to read on the train / bus...), constantly in a year and 3 months (up to now). I gave up my favorite Call of duty, and even deleted my Paladin in Wow. Some people called me weird, since it's not normal. Screw that, a year later, i'm way better than those who laughed at me.

So, it's all about your efforts.
Cheers.

P/s: Just reading manga and watching anime simply never mean to be good at learning Japanese. They are good for memorizing the language though. Anyways, good luck

 

[Kazekeshi]

Re: Help please?

my sincerest advice:

_ Take up your pen and start writing. 2 or three hours a day, constantly over a year, then you can do it.
_ Drill as hard as you can, please, I myself am a slow learner so I made up for it by increasing the time I learn to 6-7 hours a day (I even purchased an e-dic and a simple manga to read on the train / bus...), constantly in a year and 3 months (up to now). I gave up my favorite Call of duty, and even deleted my Paladin in Wow. Some people called me weird, since it's not normal. Screw that, a year later, i'm way better than those who laughed at me.

So, it's all about your efforts.
Cheers.

P/s: Just reading manga and watching anime simply never mean to be good at learning Japanese. They are good for memorizing the language though. Anyways, good luck

Ah yes. I've read that you can learn the language faster by how much effort I you put in.

How can I learn by writing when I can't really understand sometimes what I'm writing? XD; And there are some really confusing ones that just seems like they are the same?

For some reason, I'm really freakin' excited to learn the language because I will be able to read what's in manga but it's taking too much time it's wearing out the excitement. XD

 

[cmertb]

Re: Help please?

Yeah, before you write, learn to read a little. So once you're comfortable with hiragana (forget about romaji, never ever use them or think about them until you know how to read at least at a basic level), learn katakana, and then try this: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar It's a very decent intro to give you a taste of the language and some basic vocab. The examples there use romaji, kana, and kanji. Ignore the romaji and the kanji lines, just look at the kana.

In any case, this should keep you busy for a while. After that, you can try reading some texts for children here: http://life.ou.edu/stories/

If that goes smoothly, you can start on memorizing vocab and kanji. Ask again when you get to that part. Kanji in particular will determine if you learn Japanese to some usable extent, or quit. Since you don't live in Japan, reading will probably be the most important aspect of the language for you to master. To master speaking, you'd probably need to actually go to Japan. Or just find lots of native speakers to victimize... I mean talk to wherever you live.