Best place on the net to learn japanese
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Join Date: 2002-11-04 Member: 6944Members
Join Date: 2002-11-04 Member: 6944Members
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<div class="IPBDescription">Just looking in case I want to</div>What's the best place on the net to learn japanese ?
I'm kinda geting interested into learning it to listen and speak it, not to write it (at least for now).
I am not saying I will do it. It will depend on what I find and if I have the time. I have no money to pay for courses.
I'm kinda geting interested into learning it to listen and speak it, not to write it (at least for now).
I am not saying I will do it. It will depend on what I find and if I have the time. I have no money to pay for courses.
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Secondly and most importantly,
<img src="http://www.pbfcomics.com/archive/0PBF61009BC-Weeaboo.jpg" border="0" alt="IPB Image" />
I still don't get it :<
- Shockwave
Yes that's a threat.
How hard could it have been?
Hard. Very very hard. The language itself is reasonably straight forward, especially compared to the very confusing Irish language. The grammar structure of Japanese is mildly interesting to computer programmers, and we even took one class to examine the similarities of Japanese and stack based data management. The aspect of the course that caused problems for me was the written language. With two phonetic alphabets and the symbolic Kanjii, I ended up with more Japanese coursework than all my other subjects combined. I was kind of allergic to coursework at the time, and spent more time in the pub than the library and I really regretted taking the subject on. If you plan on learning Japanese, then be prepared to take on the monumental task of learning a couple of thousand symbols. This comes easy to people who practice it from infancy, but if you take it up after the age of about 10 you are going to have to grind it.
Needless to say I dropped the course at the first possible moment and managed to persuade my course leader to count my two terms of Japanese as meeting my quota of Language studies. I never really learned to speak the language to any great degree. Just the usual stuff. I knew how to find noodles, the post office, and all that. The course was actually "Japanese for Engineers" so we did a lot of really odd stuff about how to formally conduct yourself around people you need to impress or lead. That side of it was probably the most interesting ( and certainly the most entertaining ) part of the course. We also got asked to show a visting group Japanese students around, which is another very strange story for another time, but in general the entire thing was a disaster.
Anyway, if you're going to study Japanese out of personal interest, just get stuck into it now and don't wait for formal opportunities to study it. All experience you gain in reading and writing a pictographic language will stand to you in the long run. But when you finally take it as a course, be prepared to put in crazy hours to get even average grades.
Anyway, I've forgotten it all at this stage. I only ever really used it once to real benefit. We were on a 36 hour train journey in India and there were two Japanese girls with very poor english sitting opposite to us. We managed to explain the rules of the card game ishhead ( aka 2s and 10s ) and another really simple kids game called 'cheat', which they were terrible at. I'm not sure they got the concept of bluffing, or maybe they just couldn't bring themselves to lie for fun.
You'll have to know off by heart...
1) all the hiragana (basically like remembering an alphabet)
2) all the katagana (basically like remember a second alphabet in which some of the symbols remind you of the first one but some are for different letters)
3) all the Kanjii (basically like remembering wellll over 500 different pictures associated with words.)
The sentence structure shouldn't be difficult to learn (I found it fairly easy) but some of the concepts for some of the words might take a bit of mind bending to understand (... wa ... desu is to be in a descriptive sense and is usually for people, ... wa ... arimasu is to be in an existing sense and is more for inanimate objects).
It's just a case of putting the work in, as puzl says. GRIND!!! XD
I was thinking about trying to learn Japanese since I've been watching a lot of subtitled anime lately but then I remembered I can be rather lazy and I would probably give up after only learning the most basic things.
Is there anything puzl hasn't done XD
I was thinking about trying to learn Japanese since I've been watching a lot of subtitled anime lately but then I remembered I can be rather lazy and I would probably give up after only learning the most basic things.
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No.
I planned on learning some of it since no one wants to employ me for 2 months, and then I figured I'd be better off trying to memorize as many German words as possible since I'd have no use for Japanese in Germany (...well, none that I foresee, anyway). I figure it could have all kinds of business type uses, old SNES Japanese RPGs playing uses and potential 'spend a paycheck in 1 day in Tokyo just by buying a sandwich' uses.
English has a lot more phonics than japanese. They have 78 basic sounds with some more modifications of them, but this is tiny compared to the very confusing system of sounds and the inconsistent way we spell them. Silent-P and the i-before-e exceptions are just some of the things people find difficult about learning english.
A lot of Japanese courses start off with Hiragana (which was originally made to write words they couldn't find in the original Chinese Kanji), later moving on to Katakana (made for things they couldn't write in Hiragana, so foreign words and names). I'd say learn these before anything else: <a href="http://www.saiga-jp.com/img/character/japanese_language/hiragana_katakana_list.gif" target="_blank">click</a>. Take note: it would be possible to learn Japanese without learning Hiragana/Katakana, but it makes it so much easier.
So let me get this straight. They made an entirely new alphabet to replace the Latin one, just so the words could 'look' Japanese? <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
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No, my understanding is that they made a new alphabet so the words that were transliterated to japanese didn't look traditional. I studied Japanese in 1994, so this info is dulled by time.
Basically, all languages borrow words from other cultures. In Japan, these words have their own alphabet, that is identical in every way to the traditional phonetic alphabet except in how they look. Each hiragana character has a matching katakana. I'm not sure how much you know about Japanese history, but at the time this was being developed they were very isolationist and deeply protective of their culture.
Is there anything puzl hasn't done XD
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He's probably the only admin yet to ban me, kudos.
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So, within the last.... 2000 years or so? <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
I took Japanese for 4 years in High School, and it wasn't that bad. You can learn the Hiragana and Katakana in about a week each. Grammatically, it's not all that difficult either. Most people in my classes had no problems with pronunciation. As for Kanji, I had little problem reading them since I spent a considerable amount of my childhood in Taiwan.
Edit: Don't try to learn Chinese, ever. Japanese is a cakewalk compared to it.
but if u are aiming for business japanese, be prepared that it is very difficult and annoying. With different forms of verbs, sonkeigo, kensongo and teichōgo, it may take u a lot of time to understand how to use them. even a considerable amount of local japanese are not sure how to use the last 3 and ignore them whenever possible.
although it is suggested not to take chinese, if u can manage chinese well, japanese is a piece of cake.
u may want to know the <a href="http://www.geocities.com/learnkana/index.htm" target="_blank">basics</a>, get a anime or japanese drama to hear how people speak before you start learning it. <a href="http://www2.2ch.net/2ch.html" target="_blank">This</a> is the biggest forum in japan where u can see how people write on the net.
most importantly, if u dunno where to use your japanese, dun waste time learning it just because someone else know it.
the concept of learning a language online boggles my mind =d languages are hard enough to learn in an organized classroom setting...
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TBH classrooms do not help that much with learning a language, most of what you learn is done out of class (yay for memorization...). classrooms are good for making sure you haven't compleatly farked something up and are learnign something incorectly.
One of the oldest <a href="http://pepper.idge.net/japanese/" target="_blank">Links</a> I know, yet still one of the most true.
- Shockwave
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XFD
And a breif history of Japanese Writing. First, when the kanjii came over from China, the Japanese used them solely for writing, then they took a few of them, and decided to use them phonetically to make reading easier. They deduced that writing the kanjii was a pain in the ######, so they took bits of the kanjii, cut them off and made katakana. Someone else decided to scribble the whole kanji, drastically reducing the nmber of strokes used, and hiragana was created. Or smething like that is how it was explained to me.
And yeah... stick to the polite forms until you have a good grasp of social hierarchy and what form should be used in which situation.