help me learn japanese

can i make relevant suggestions based on my chinese learning?

Yes indeed!

I'm a fan of the mandarin thread.

i was going to say a combination of flashcards (with sound) and writing characters was a huge help to me. if you want to remember kanji you really need to write them down, again and again and again.

also, heuristics that combine the complete meaning of characters (i.e. the components) and their associated sounds. idk japanese but you might say e.g. 語 is five words that go out of the mouth.

and yeah, get a touchscreen smartphone/ipodtouch/tablet and a flashcard app that lets you write the kanji/kana on the screen with your finger. transformative.

Enjoying reading both the Mandarin thread and this thread. Although I've got my hands full so won't be trying to learn either in the near future. Also there's this quote from Babel No More:

The great Mezzofanti himself suffered a nervous breakdown after struggling with Chinese in Naples and lost every language he knew except his mother tongue, Bolognese.

That flashcards/writing idea is a good tip. I think I read somewhere that Japanese people themselves practice writing kanji in the palm of their opposite hand on the subway.

Yea, Mandarin bros have a Sisyphean task.

i keep seeing japanese out-sisypheing chinese on charts of languages that are sisyphean for english speakers

Also, can confirm that Kodansha's Hiragana/Katakana workbooks are working much better, more expediently for me than with Heisig.

heisig's technique is at least twice as useful as the actual books imo

My wife's nephew is visiting this week from Shanghai, where e has been living for 5/6 years, he's now fluent in Mandarin (not sure about writing tho') he's trying to learn Japanese and is saying that it's 'just not going in', I'm going try to find out why when we meet up.

(by that i mean there's greater power in building mnemonics that are meaningful to you personally than just relying on someone else's)

(also you'll remember something loads more effectively if you manage to put say some turds or a dick or a blowjob in there)

xp ooh very interesting

I've said this upthread I think, but his image associations just don't connect with me at-all.

Yea! I have heard that elements of rudery work somehow.

the whole point of mnemonics is to strengthen memory by building multiple associations with things that are already connected in your own brain, so it stands to reason that pre-baked mnemonics are never ever going to do that job as well as those that you come up with yourself. took me a little bit too long to come to that conclusion.

xp rudery works because it's hilarious and wrong. if you're struggling hopelessly with one kanji, turn the whole thing into a macarbe orgy. you will never forget it again.

Thanks for the advice, I'm in the early stages with Katakana, it's pretty austere by comparison. I wonder how far I could go to extrapolate something orgiastic from ツ :)

Maybe Katakana is more oananistic

Hi all, I usually lurk but as a long, long-time Japanese learner I couldn't pass up posting in this thread. I've been struggling with Japanese for years and years, including a five year stint living there. I've been back in the US for a couple of years now so my main goal is not forgetting everything I've learned.

Early on in my Japanese learning career these flashcards were an immense help. I remember trying electronic flashcards like Anki later on, but I was never able to focus as much as I was able to with real, physical flashcards.

Also I really, really recommend using the JLPT to set goals for yourself. I know the availability of the test outside of Japan is not great, and it is just another dumb standardized test, but it gives you something to work towards, broken down into steps. Because language learning goes so slowly it's almost impossible to notice your own improvement, it's nice to have some objective evaluation of your progress.

Also the rikaikun/rikaichan browser extensions are amazing, no matter what level you are at.

Some people warn and some recommend - I've got Heisig's book ready for my Kanji studies to set off anyway so we'll see how it goes. Think it could be a bit overblown when you're doing Kana. Anyway, whether his stories are good or not I got the official ios app which does feature the kind of finger-writing Kanji tools described above.

I had great success with mnemonics once when I wasn't learning language and just went at it for fun, reading a book about it - learned 800 decimals of pi and lots of cities in Middle America. No use for that knowledge so it's forgotten now but it was a fun experiment.

hiragana and katakana can be learned in a day each imo

In my experience it's not learning them, it's remembering them!

true

My two cents is that, yeah it's easy to learn them once and then start forgetting them but avoid the tendency to overstudy them- I think this is what I did. Instead just force yourself to read- and write I guess- using them, avoiding romaji when possible, and start learning the Kanji as soon as possible, which will make the kana seem that much easier.

Also I really, really recommend using the JLPT to set goals for yourself. I know the availability of the test outside of Japan is not great, and it is just another dumb standardized test, but it gives you something to work towards, broken down into steps.

this times a billion. if you pass, you feel ace. if you fail, literally nothing happens. you can't lose.

Now considering the JLPT, not ready for a good long while yet tho'.

Has anybody ever heard themselves speaking and flipped over the amount of fucking um-ing and ah-ing and errrrrr they do while parsing, I record all my lessons and can't bear the way I sound, like I don't know what the hell I'm talking about even when I kinda do, there must be a way to dial this out.

replace the ums and ahs with ano and eto, it's good for your language confidence to feel like you're still in japanese even when you're making mistakes/being slow.

So desu ne / nn / e are all useful for killing time while you're brain kicks into gear too. I'm sure there are more.

replace the ums and ahs with /ano/ and /eto/, it's good for your language confidence to feel like you're still in japanese even when you're making mistakes/being slow.

brilliant! thank you

and from me too!

i've been working 40+ hour weeks since i started my two jobs, but my commute is 1 1/2 hours each way, so i've been cramming in as much 日本語 as possible on the train/bus. i am kind of enjoying the challenge of writing 漢字 in a rocking train car, and walking around with the pimsleur lessons on, not caring who hears me repeating the lessons. :D

ス is my favourite character to write so far, only 25 in mind, maybe RO will be bitchin', also my Hiragana handwriting is getting totally baddass.

Remember to get yer stroke order right at the beginning, otherwise you'll get into terrible handwriting habits like I did.

i am fond of ネ as far as kana go.

Remember to get yer stroke order right at the beginning, otherwise you'll get into terrible handwriting habits like I did.

― OORT (Matt #2), Tuesday, 4 June 2013 00:41 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is so very important. even if you're one of those people who 'nah i don't need to handwrite, everyone types anyway', try writing a kanji in your phone in the wrong stroke order and see what happens.

ネ is really just a showoff ス

ヘ is the same for both, wonder why.

http://i40.tinypic.com/30rpevd.jpg

hiragana and katakana へ are both formed from shorthand for the character 部.

Both hiragana and katakana evolved as shorthand for kanji. Writing in Japan was at first in Chinese: before the invention of the kana, if japanese sounds needed to be expressed in writing, they used kanji phonetically. Since no-one had agreed specifically which characters would be used to represent which sounds, there wasn't a one to one correspondence. A sound could be represented by a number of different characters, usually not more than 5. So, e.g., the sound we write as え might be represented with 衣, or 江, or 得 -- usually in a reduced or simplified form. え itself is a simplified form of 衣; エ is a simplified form of 江. By the 9th century or so people were quite consistently used the simplified forms that we know as kana, but (especially in the case of hiragana) the choice of characters was a matter of style more than anything else. As late as the 19th century people were still using multiple characters to represent the same sound (and a lot of those variant hiragana look the same as the modern katakana).

Katakana were used for annotation and thus tended to be smaller and neater: they are by and large taken from small elements of the kanji associated with a sound. Hiragana tend to be formed from the whole kanji written cursively, and were used for writing running text and as an all-purpose syllabary for people who weren't in a position to learn kanji.

Really interesting ty! Do you know when and by what process Katakana were assigned to loanwords?

got into a conversation w/ a native 日本人 on the bus who noticed my flash cards :3

I never realised that back translating loanwords in Katakana would be as tricky, did anybody else find this a problem?

In what way?

Just simply figuring what the loanword is after it's been a bit mangled by Katakana.

It's okay with more common words, but something like ロッジ isn't so obvious

yeah, reading katakana words ends up as the hardest thing, soz like.

the process of assigning katakana to loan words: hm. you find katakana being used for grammatical information in official writing all the way through the tokugawa period - and it's used for official announcements written up on boards well into meiji - but maybe that's just in its role as the clearest and most legible of the scripts. It's being used for loanwords from Dutch and Portuguese in the 18th century at least. Loanwords could also pretty often have kanji characters assigned to them either by sound or meaning, e.g. lamian / ramen 拉麺, tobacco / tabako 煙草 ("burning grass"), holland / oranda 阿蘭陀, coffee / kōhī 珈琲 --- you'll still see these on e.g. signage, because they look cool, but since the early 20th century and particularly since the script reform of the 1940s they aren't in common use. (chinese words are often left as kanji, but subsequently can end up being given a japanese pronunciation)

The thing to remember about loan words into Japanese is that often they do not come from English - e.g. エネルギー is from German, ビール is from Dutch, タバコ is from Portuguese, レストラン is from French. So you can't necessarily use English pronunciation to predict what the loan word will sound like, or instantly tell from the katakana word what its source was.

Also you get just frankly weird ones, the way one does in any language that incorporates foreign words -- for example, the last time I was in Japan I went into a public toilet in a station and found a sign up saying something that I translated to "it is a crime to use the consent in these facilities" - with this katakana word in there, コンセント, that I didn't recognise but certainly read as "consento". So I was a bit baffled and maybe slightly worried by it? But eventually remembered that I had a dictionary and could look the word up, and it turns out that "consento" is short for "concentric plug" and means "the wall outlet", and so it was telling people not to, you know, charge their phones there.

コンビニ

I have trouble with some of the English ones! Was stumped by ボランティア yesterday, thought it was a proper noun.

http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef017eeb2b0a9d970d-pi