9 year old wants to learn Japanese
MagicToaster
JapanRegistered User regular
JapanRegistered User regular
My nephew is 9 years old and is really interested in learning Japanese. I gave him a vocabulary list, not expecting him to actually do anything with it, but to my surprise, he memorised the whole thing and is making simple sentences. It sounds like he really wants to learn, so I'm looking for resources that are appropriate for an 9 year old.
He is crazy about his 3DS XL, but I'm not sure if there are any games or apps that I could give him. If you guys have any website suggestions or books, I'm all for it.
He is crazy about his 3DS XL, but I'm not sure if there are any games or apps that I could give him. If you guys have any website suggestions or books, I'm all for it.
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This let the students pick up random Japanese children's books, to use as study aids, which was more helpful than you'd think for a college student.
Kana de Manga: A Fun, Easy Way To Learn the ABCs of Japanese!
They're specifically to teach the writing systems, though, and not how to speak it. But they're presented in a style suitable for a 9 year old.
On my sleeve, let the runway start
One thing that could be fun for reading is for him to learn the katakana alphabet. That alphabet is what's used when spelling out foreign loan-words, aka English (often, at least).
So he could see:
マカロニ
Then work on sounding it out...
ma... ka... ro... ni...
macaroni!
For learning, Heisig's Remembering the Kana worked great for me. The mnemonics it gives are totally made up and not based on the actual character origins, so language purists may scoff, but hey, if it works it works.
I'm not sure where else to go from there, maybe some Japanese comic books or video games? If he learns those two alphabets, he'll at least be able to at least pronounce just about everything he sees.
Then watch some more TV.
Then watch some more TV.
You can pre-watch whatever you're going to show him to pick out some vocabulary or sentences that show up in the program, and pre-teach these, then make it into a challenge. For example, "how many times did they say this word?"
Either that or get him some Japanese friends.
Or find an exchange program to send him to a Japanese school for a year.
EDIT: I say this because I sincerely doubt that your 9 year old cousin is interested in learning written Japanese. Thus your primary objective should be exposure to the overall "sound" of the language, with a smattering of vocabulary. If I'm wrong and your cousin is super into kanji or whatever, you can introduce him to shoji (painting kanji with a brush).
Most of my competency with english came from actually reading a lot. (Even if it was trashy fantasy franchise fiction.)
You could do worse than have him speak whitebread Japanese.
Sad as it is, people do judge you on accent, so if you're involved in technical fields, a southern twang in english works against you.
It's better to be perceived by other Japanese people as being a foreigner with academic leanings than come across like you just watched too much anime.
I'd suspect Japanese daytime would also have a tone of speech that wouldn't really work with actual conversation. Especially where a comical or exaggerated cutesy tone is involved.
There's the internet. So my thought is to get him set up with some sort of language exchange with a native speaker over voice chat. I imagine there are plenty of children his age in Japan who'd be learning english anyway if only for academic reasons.
Why not? One of the best ways to learn a language is to read lots of that language. It's either that or you expose him to a full audio environment, which is arguably harder to do.
Japanese is relatively easy to learn for kids by reading. Heck, manga is one of the easiest ways to get a kid hooked into the language. It will also set him up quite comfortably to learn kanji if he ever wants to really pursue Japanese.
If you're worried about it messing with his native language development, don't be. By 9 years old the linguistic roots are strong enough that the to languages won't interfere with each other too much.
EDIT: I don't want to ruffle feathers by making this sound like a "We're telling the OP to do exactly what he doesn't want to do!" thing. Rather, as somebody familiar with linguistic development, the desire to separate the learning of the text from the learning of the language is very puzzling to me.
Because I know this boy and this is not the way to get him interested. As I said before, it would frustrate him. C'mon, HA... don't keep pushing this way. This is the third time I said this.
In addition to garroad's recommendation for Japanese TV shows, there are also audio-only lessons you can get. I'm a huge fan of the Pimsleur language products. It's all audio only, broken up into half hour lessons. It does a good job starting you off with basic conversations and then building on the foundation to introduce more topics of discussion, more aspects of grammar, and more vocab.
I did the first two of three units of Pimsleur Japanese in preparation for a 3-week trip Japan, and with an electronic dictionary to supplement my vocab I was able to make my way around the country and have conversations with locals and such.
Looks like some of the lessons are on youtube, so you could have your nephew give this a try and see if the approach works for him:
edit: over the top anime character is the youtuber's addition, and has nothing to do with the actual Pimsleur program
More links:
http://www.humanjapanese.com/download
http://tangorin.com/
http://www.japanese-lesson.com/characters/hiragana/hiragana_drill/hiragana10.html
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQC11PHdkS2tcTM2ZgZBWyA
Some of that is probably over his head and I know you said no written stuff, but these are all free and helpful in some way hopefully. I also second the Pimsleur CDs are great too, worth it for learning basic conversation.
It isn't that rigid, though yes the action (verb) of the sentence is usually at the end (unless you are talking about Te form verbs which allow you to "list" multiple actions in a sentence ex: I woke up, ate breakfast, went to school). Other than the verb at the end, almost every other part of the sentence structure is modular as far as the order of parts of the sentence go (subject, time, place, most denoted by a specific particle).
Edit: for me, the difficult part was memorizing vocabulary.
I really enjoyed learning hiragana and katakana from this beginners book Hirigana and Katakana for beginners. It uses fun mnemonics to learn them. I was able to learn both alphabets within a few days. It really opens up learning if you can read these two alphabets.
We are also using Textfugu, an online textbook for grammar. This is a paid service. A free alternative that we are using in conjunction with textfugu, is Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide.
If he gets serious, and even wants to learn Kanji, we are using another website made by the same guy who created Textfugu called Wanikani. This has a few lessons that are free, but to continue on you have to pay either a monthly subscription or a yearly, or lifetime fee. These are all directed for self teaching. We're enjoying it right now, and making steady progress.