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Learning Japanese?
Zell
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Have no opportunity to study it anywhere, nor to travel to Japan. But I still want to try to learn it. I'm 22 years old. I seem to learn things best by writing them down or remembering "images" of what I'm supposed to remember. Not sure how helpful either will be in a study situation.
What I'm wondering is two things:
1: Where do I even start? (beyond learning the two non-kanji alphabets)
2: Assuming I'm an average person how many hours of study time would I require to be able to understand enough to follow an anime, a book, a Japanese TV show, a video game, etc..?
What I'm wondering is two things:
1: Where do I even start? (beyond learning the two non-kanji alphabets)
2: Assuming I'm an average person how many hours of study time would I require to be able to understand enough to follow an anime, a book, a Japanese TV show, a video game, etc..?
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I studied Japanese in college for three years. The first two years (4 semesters) the classes were 1 hour a day, 5 days a week. The third year (2 semesters) was six hours a week of class. Lots of studying time outside of class as well (I did one hour minimum per day). In addition to self study and class, I ran a study group three nights a week for an hour and lived with three roommates that we're also taking the same Japanese classes. Combined, an average week would be around 20 to 24 hours spent on Japanese and that got me to a bare minimum of proficiency.
How long it will take you for the competency you want will largely depend on how much you put into the study of the language and how well you are at learning a new language. For myself, after the three years of study I could do alright with reading but was pretty bad at listening to spoken Japanese. I fault myself for not putting enough effort into it as the school did a good job of teaching. Then again, I've never had much luck at spoken language study but have picked up reading rather quickly.
The most annoying part for me was katakana. Katakana is used for "borrowed" words from other languages and there are sometimes variations on the accepted spelling for a word (and sometimes you just make it up and hope for the best). It gets especially frustrating when learning a word and the base word is from something other than English (I'm looking at you French!).
I'm not trying to be discouraging by bringing up the difficulty, but you do need to be aware that it probably won't be something that will come without a good deal of effort and practice.
and
http://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ba8ua/online_resources_for_learning_japanese/
Plus, you need to have someone to talk to. Just learning to read or listen won't help you with speaking very much.
The biggest effort will probably be your upkeep. You have to practice it all the time, or you will lose it. That's the biggest problem with learning on your own.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C
Subscribe to http://www.yookoso.com/ 's newsletter, they send you daily grammar lessons. Written in hira/kata.
Buy children's education books. Ones that have pictures of a scene in a classroom with words pointing to each item in the scene. This is good for basic vocabulary.
But don't forget a rough road leads to the stars.
There are tons of free resources online to help you learn, but the biggest problem will be listening unless you're living in an area where you can immerse yourself in Japanese. The best thing you can do is start watching as much Japanese material as you can (anime is ok, but watching TV Dramas/movies will probably be best). Slowly weening yourself off of subtitles to pure Japanese will also help a ton. I don't watch dramas/movies with any English subtitles any more, and while I don't understand all of the technical terms, I can follow what's going on fairly well.
Also, keep in mind, I suck at studying >.>
If you're serious about learning Japanese, some other resources that are great are Lang-8 (your foreign language journal posts are corrected and commented on by native speakers), Tae Kim's Blog (Japanese grammar explanation), and Anki (space repetition system flash cards). All are free.
Mistook a hospital for a train station.
It's a rough language for a non-native speaker, so those Reddit links are probably best treated as supplements.
Don't fret though- there are ways for a 22 year old to go to japan. If you are a university student, look up your universitys exchange programs, for starters. There may well be one that is quite afordable. Baring that, there are multiple programs that pay Americans, Australians and other english speakers to teach english at japanese schools, (Such as what the author of Gaijin Smash did), so look around for one.
I don't advise short holidays in order to learn languages, though. I took me over six months before I started to really pick up the language while in Japan, and even my older sister (one of those excels at everything types) took three.
Also, when you want to practice your japanese, don't try watching your favourite animes and reading your favourite mangas in japanese- at least at first. There is some decent kids animes that have much simpler japanese (such as those by Studio Ghibli). It can also help watching them in english first or watching them with subtitles at first, so that you have something english to conect the japanese to. Or, alternatively, buy or borrow some japanese picture books and read them with the aid of a dictionary, noting any word you dont understand and then memorising the list you make. I found it helped, even though it made me feel pretty dorky.
My main point, is start small. I still struggle with more grown-up books and shows and stuff, even after studying japanese for 4+years, as well as living there for almost a year. But don't give up because it isnt easy... its worth the hard work.
Also, I help many of my friends with japanese homework from time to time, so feel free to message me with questions if you need help.
It took me 3 years to start to understand spoken Japanese without struggling. When learning Japanese, or any other language, the trick is to be dedicated.
Studying X amount of hours won't equal learning a language, you have to make it a part of your lifestyle and gradually you'll improve. However, you have to always challenge yourself. I started when I was 18, I am turning 28 soon. I have never stoped, but despite the fact that I've been at this for almost 10 years, I am still learning something.
Why do you want to learn Japanese?
Learning the vocabulary, katakana (useful if you stay in Japan for longer periods so you can recognize stuff like 'shanpu' and 'kurimu' in stores) and speaking the language (albeit broken and slowly) should definitely be doable, but if you're not in Japan you won't be able to practice those easily. Listening to spoken Japanese can be difficult and reading a game or book of course requires knowing kanji.
I live in Japan at the moment, University exchange program - and I can't speak a word Japanese. If you're going on an exchange program, you don't need to know it.
Some stations like the one near my place are named after hospitals, though! (handai byoin mae)
If you have a DS, the My Japanese Coach game is a good introduction to the basics.
I use jisho.org as my Japanese-English dictionary and for looking up Kanji.
And if you have an interest in travelling to Japan, you can consider becoming an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher). Outside of the government JET program, there are companies that hire and handle native speaking English teachers. The usual requirement is only a 4-year college degree; there are teachers who come here without knowing a word of Japanese. They often enroll in community classes for learning.
Lastly, I would say it takes a long time and a lot of work to become comfortably fluent in Japanese. I studied for 3 years in college, then came here a year and a half ago (with a 2 year break since my last Japanese class). I get by comfortably, but there's a lot of Kanji I can't read, and my ability to hear correctly and carry conversations isn't that great; but with the aid of gestures, a dictionary, and drawing crude pictures, I've been able to manage everything from hospital visits to taxes to discussing recipes with little old ladies at the market.
So what is your purpose for studying it? If it's just a hobby, you will probably find it a lot harder to instill that sense of "oh fuck I need to learn so I can buy food to survive" urgency.
And if by some twist of fate you manage to come to Japan, do yourself a favor and don't live in Tokyo, at least not at first. It's too easy and tempting for westerners to survive with English there.
And here are some interesting articles from that blog:
How to practice a foreign language for free without travelling
Why it doesn't matter whose or what method you follow
Why studying will never help you speak a language
This guy's method is to spend time actually speaking the target language to native speakers as early as possible, within the first day of picking up a phrasebook ideally. He says that studying is important but you can spend years and years studying and be no closer to actually speaking. His method takes a lot of dedication though, but it's pretty motivated to read through his blog even if you don't necessarily agree with him.
But I do recommend taking a class of some sort.