http://tunein.com/radio/Japan-r101255/
Streaming radio stations. Honestly all of the good stations (like InterFM Tokyo) have this annoying regional lock outside of Japan.
I’m trying to get back at this again but i’m lacking the motivation. I’ve been stuck in the upper beginner forever now.
any tips?! how do you keep things fresh? what do you guys recommend to keep studying when you don’t have much time?
Motivation… look, I’ll just keep saying that, imo, kanji (including radicals) is The Key. Yes in capital letters. Anki, KanjiDamage, Heisig method, whatever. I used koohii.com’s flash cards and cycled through a deck of 3000. It took me about a year to remember (not “master,” but correctly identify) about 1500. Other than learning kana, nothing helped me on my path to literacy better than reaching a “comfort zone” with kanji.
Also, the AJATT guy said he reached fluency in 18 months… okay, that doesn’t sound realistic to me, but what about 3 years? Or 4? That frame of reference helps me look at learning the language as an attainable goal, instead of something that just takes forever to figure out. I’m basically following what Khatz preaches, with a few modifications.
Finally, the koohii.com forum is a (pro-Heisig) community of folks who self-study. Do a site search (site:koohii.com ) on Google or another search engine, along with your question, and you can find some useful info/discussions on whatever you’re looking for.
EDIT: One more (intermediate) tip, then I’ll quit for now. Use Google to learn Japanese. It’s how the Transformers learned English! Find a word, phrase or part of speech you aren’t familiar with, paste it in a search engine, and see what sentences or discussions come up. I site search Japan Yahoo Answers ( site:chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp )-- the dialogue is casual but the politeness level is usually appropriate for colleagues and strangers. Sites like 2ch are all over the place with politeness levels.
Not only are these pretty funny, they speak in common conversational Japanese(mostly) and have English subs. Not the greatest subs, but good enough, and definitely good for an intermediate. Search Youtube for “Peeping Life” for a ton more, I just linked that list because it has Eng subs.
actually I’ve realized that in general the hardest part of Japanese grammar for me right now is understanding really casual speech. Does anyone have any resources on that?
This book cleared up a lot of phrases I couldn’t understand (not just in anime which I don’t watch anyway, but in TV shows and radio). But a really good grammar book should help you make sense of colloquialisms. I had a hard time reading the Tae Kim book, but An Introduction to Japanese Grammar Language and Syntax was helpful for me (and absolutely/legally free!)
Yes! This looks really useful, thanks dude.
that book looks pretty good
Taito I heard you. You know I think is just me being lazy. I’m well aware of the resources: koohii website, the tae kim guide(I even printed out a furigana version), anki,rikaichan,visual novel translator,html books etc,etc. I finished my beginning and elementry japanese clases years ago. I have spent quite a few hundred dollars through the years on books to keep me motivated, I also have an electronic dictionary that I use more for the english-english than the jap-engl or engl-jap. I have everything and I still suck,lol.
My main goal is to be able to read it, so I thought it was a good idea to spend more on the grammar than anything else but I think i’m going nowhere. I don’t understand many words if not most of them. I feel is dragging my learning a lot because i’m using the dictionary for every freaking word I encounter. That’s one of my main gripes with japanese because it’s a very poor language phonetically, a lot of words sound the same. You need to have the kanji to get a clue of what is trying to say or read it from the context. I have finally understand the importance of kanji, japanese without it will be unreadable.
I think I’ll give it a shot, i’m not that bad with kanji recognition anyway and is something I could study every day.
Thanks for your input.
That grammar book is a fairly quick read as well.
R_K, how many kanji do you think you know? Have you counted?
I mean, I kind of get what you’re saying. Japanese is still fuzzy to me, especially if it’s an opinion or a conversation. But understanding the subjects and verbs in a sentence gives me a general understanding, at least, of what’s going on in an article or dialogue.
I think you agree that most of the time, kanji doesn’t have to be read to be understood (as long as it’s a literal term, and not an old saying, a play on the readings, etc). So just learning the meaning of various kanji was an alternative to memorizing a bunch of vocabulary. With at least 1000 basic kanji learned, that means you potentially know thousands of words that are represented in compound kanji… or at least what they “mean,” until you learn the readings. As prohibitively difficult everyone told me kanji is, it can be looked at as a shortcut.
Probably more than a hundred or maybe less…OMG 
i’m awful
I haven’t really studied kanji pass the first level to be honest i thought it would come along as i advance with the grammar but i was wrong.
I didn’t have this problem when i was learning english because of the similarities it has with spanish. But japanese is very different i felt i needed to have a familiarity with the words first before i could advance to more complex topics like grammar.
I realized this late.
What I did was learn the kana’s, read up as much grammar stuff as I could handle(which wasn’t much), then learning the radicals and using that I switched to kanji(which includes vocab) cramming. I basically just go back and forth between kanji and grammar, incrementally increasing my knowledge, while listening to JP music, shows, and doing translation for practice.
As you now know, it doesn’t really make sense to only learn grammar first or only learn vocab first, you just have to learn them both at the same time as you go.
yeah I never wanted to leave kanji behind per se it just that it happened. I felt comfortable putting kanji to the side because there’s quite a handful of resources with furigana like for example all shonen manga I could read if I knew the grammar only.
anyway my lack of dedication is my main problem I suppose, I haven’t touched a book in months.
Wondering if anyone actually improved their Japanese since someone last posted in this thread.
What books, websites or material are used to get started nowadays. Are the genki books still legit for beginners?
I didn’t know the answer to this before, but I’ll try now… if you aren’t native-level, already familiar with the flow of conversation and sentence patterns, text with all kana tends to be ambiguous. And as already mentioned, in real-world use, you’ll have to avoid the kanji that you never learned, and the text will remain unreadable. Kanji removes the ambiguity in text that hiragana isn’t capable of clearing up.
Also, your JSL peers didn’t learn Japanese starting from birth, they weren’t raised in that language and educational system. So your learning path and experience differs from that of a native literate. Honestly, the best insight you can gain from native Japanese speakers is to check whether your words are broken or your accent sucks. To reach your goals, you gotta pay more attention to people like you, who were raised in another language and started learning JP as teens and adults.
I think I went overboard with my endorsement of kanji, I was just adapting to an overload of information that I finally understood, and how much my vocabulary improved… but 2000 kanji is probably the best target. After your literacy improves, you can move on to collegiate-level or archaic kanji.
My revised recommendations towards high school-level literacy (feel free to disagree or discuss):
stage 1: Genki books (learn hiragana/katakana, sentence structure, particles, verb conjugation, early vocabulary)
stage 2: Memorize 214 radicals and 1000 elementary school kanji (Anki is fine, but I used Koohii’s online flash cards). At first, the readings of the kanji aren’t as important as simply recognizing them.
stage 3: Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide (it took me a while to warm up to it, but it’s great)
stage 4: iKnow’s Core 6000 vocabulary (either free with Anki, or use their paid iOS/Android app)
-Between Tae Kim and iKnow, you should get exposed to most of the high school-level kanji, upping your recognition count to 1500-2000.
-Supplement with reading websites like http://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp, listening to audio like Japanesepod101, using language exchange chat like Lang-8.
Congrats, you’re now immune to Sega’s terrible Western localization plans.
Eastern languages are very difficult and you aren’t going to pick them up using Rosetta or Pimsleur. I’m not sure either of those is really good for any language, but they might be okay for Romantic languages because you have a base in English already.
There is really no way you can learn an Eastern language without a course. Even if it’s a video course, you still need an instructor to show you a lot of things. I am learning Arabic now and there’s no way Rosetta Stone would have worked.
Now what Rosetta Stone, and Anki as someone listed, are really good for is vocabulary AFTER you already know all the rules and have a strong base. So it’s really not worth the pricetag if you think about it, because if you just need to get some words you can learn that with a dictionary and flash cards (which is what anki is really).
Vocabulary is far more important then grammar while starting to learn a language. How do you speak a language with no words and how do you make words with no alphabet?
In this order you learn a language by learning: Alphabet, Vocabulary, Grammar, Diction
Just like you learned your primary language. Nobody teaches you the rules to your language before they teach alphabet and basic words.
Well the problem with Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone is they don’t teach you an alphabet. And that’s why I state you can get away with it easier for a Romantic language, like Spanish, because you already have the English alphabet to help you.
For Japanese there is no way around learning the alphabet set(s) before you can seriously learn the language at all.
And for these Eastern languages, unless you understand the rules you also won’t be able to learn much vocabulary because you won’t understand conjugation and different forms of words. How can you learn vocabulary when you can’t even recognize the word you think you’ve learned in sentences? How would you even know what to learn if you don’t know how you’d use it?
You’d only be able to learn very, very basic words and not be able to use them well.
Obviously you need words to start with. But grammar drives language especially for Eastern languages. At least, that’s what it feels like to me. I don’t think grammar is as important in the English language. There is a lot more leeway in English. Although it’s also possible that, as native speakers, most of us just don’t know consciously the rules we are using, or we don’t adhere strictly to them. Native speakers of any language are actually generally more imperfect than those that have to study it. Hence why a lot of times people with too perfect language are suspected of being spies, because most of the time they are.
[details=Spoiler]誰でも、会話練習をしない？
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Didn’t even know this thread existed! I’m learning vocab, Kanji and the kana’s all at once.
I was told by a Japanese teacher to start learning Kanji as soon as possible, otherwise it’d become a barrier for learning. Been learning since roughly the end of July and progressing quite well with reading and vocab. Struggling with writing.
3 main tools on my phone:
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Audible: Listening to a vocab lesson a day using Pimsleur. Typically listening to it once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Impressed with it’s layout. As mentioned here, it’s best as a supplement to other stuff, since it’s pure vocab. (at least in phase 1, not tried intermediate or advanced yet).
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Tango Master: Impressively comprehensive reference guide, covering everything from stroke order, to Jinmeiyou, to tests that correlate with a bunch of Japanese language courses and books, including Japanese for Busy People 1-3, JLPT N1-N5, Jouyou Kanji grades 1-6 and High School, Kanji in Context and Remembering the Kanji. Additionally it also has the top 20,000 Kanji and Kana phrases used in Japanese newspapers, which is a great indicator of what’s important to learn if you’re doing it under your own steam.
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LearnKana: Basic Kana quizzes, not worth the time, but the drawing test is a great tool for learning the writing basics.