I was trying to write “I am…a man.” I realized that I spelled “otonokohito” wrong. I wanted to write “I was once a man” but I haven’t advanced that far yet.
^ Think you got it a bit mixed up. You mean otokonohito, not otonokohito. In any case I think you can just use otoko for man. And to make it pass tense just change desu to deshita. Though I’m not sure how to say “once” the way you’re trying to express it.
I’ve been trying to shine the @[wintermute] signal for some real knowledge, but maybe he saw one too many Complex hover ads and quit the site.
Isn’t it katsute? I can never remember when to use katsute or izen.
Noooo you gotta be kidding. He’s always helpful shedding light on us japanese nubs. If he left, the world would succumb to darkness.
@ 0sh maybe haha. Again my japanese is nearly non-existent.
My own Japanese was limited to what I learned when I was doing Karate. I learned the names of techniques and how to count to ten, but I can count way past that number now.
If I want to say 1980 (my birth year), would it be “sen kyu hyaku hachi ju”?
Yep, sounds right to me.
EDIT: Although if you want to specifically state that this is the year 1980 and not just the number, you need to add the counter *nen *to the end.
Does anyone know of a good website where I can watch TV shows dubbed in Japanese?
Do you mean foreign TV shows dubbed in JP? Or just any show in Japanese? Youtube has the latter, and many of them are officially hosted so Youtube won’t pull them for copyright shit. I’ll list a few if that’s what you meant.
You could also try music videos (and study the lyrics) which Youtube has tons of.
Yo I just want to back up the ANKI recommendation, that shit is useful if you are someone that can learn that way. This is just what I do but I’ll list it anyway:
Read these for grammar:
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/AMB_Japanese_Verbs.pdf (wikipedia is the shit for language learners)
Vocab/definitions:
http://jisho.org/
http://translate.google.com/#ja/en/ (careful with this, it should really only be used by an intermediate.)
Get a job at a Japanese restaurant or business in general if the owners are cool and they have actual Japanese customers. I have worked at 2 ramen shops in SoCal and they have definitely helped get me a bit more comfortable with trying to speak it and asking questions.
JOIN SOME KIND OF JAPANESE SOCIAL GROUP IF POSSIBLE. There’s a local Christian college here that has a Japanese fellowship, and going to that is helping me out a freaking ton.
As others said, immerse yourself in the language. Listen to Japanese music, read Japanese if it has furigana, and watch Japanese shows. If you’re a beginner, subs are fine, I learned really natural pronunciation through anime, and have had almost every JP person I talk to comment on my surprisingly natural accent.
At an intermediate level definitely add that news site someone linked that had furigana in all the articles, and if you like manga, definitely start reading basic shonen level manga.
In addition to all this, I also do private translations of manga, just for practice not with any group. It’s a really good practice to think about what things are really trying to say, and it can help you understand how to speak in JP the way YOU speak naturally in English. For example, in my case I do not really use simple speech even in English when I am conversing normally, and I don’t plan to change that when I speak JP as well. So I am trying to learn as much vocabulary as I can, as long as it’s not straight up archaic.
accidental post before finished one was done, feel free to delete
Any american shows dubbed in Japanese.
might be kinda hard to find that omni.
Yeah I figured as much. I guess I’m going to have to watch pure Japanese TV and like it. Which it seems like it’s also pretty hard to find. Any sugestions on that? I thought crunchyroll would have had me covered, but they seem to only have butt load of Korean tv. I’d love to get my AJATT on, but when you have work and school it’s tough. If I forced Japanese into damn near every facet of my life, I would take me forevor to get stuff done. I’ve been sitting about an hour each day memorizing words, but I know there has got to be a better way. It seems like the only better way is your own way. It’s just to bad that learning a language isn’t like learning math.
Yeah pretty much if you already know the kana’s from there on you just have to figure out what’s best for you. Personally I didn’t want to spend any money almost at all, at least on books like most people do. It’s way to inconvenient to carry around and most of the time they end up not really teaching what I want to know or how I want it taught.
Pretty much every US TV show in the DVD/Blu-ray era has a Japanese dub track. I used to have Fox Japan, a cable station that played 90% of every modern American TV show (not just Fox shows-- ABC, CBS, HBO etc), with JP dubs and subs.
I don’t know of a place that streams shows online, but yesasia.com and rakuten.com sell Japan dubbed box sets of Dexter or CSI or How I Met Your Mother or Chef Ramsey whatever else. And there’s always eyepatch-pegleg alternatives to buying the videos.
Mind if I hijack this thread for a second? Is Anki locked in “SRS” mode? Every time I tried to use it (on PC or the Android app), it locks me out from of the deck after 20 or so cards. I want to review 500 items at a time if not more.
Does anyone know any streaming radio stations I could use? I’m want to try this immersion thing out.
you should always be able to choose to study more, but even then there’s the “options” and “preferences” I don’t remember which has it, but it’s there, and you can definitely change it.