the more and more kanji I learn, I figure I may as well (as other japanese language learners have) start learning a little bit more and more chinese. since I’ll already have (sorta) half of it done.
It’s not that bad if you really want it.
I wouldn’t say slang. It’s just a casual way of saying it whenever the ‘‘dictionary form’’ is used. I could ask you ‘‘Wakaru??’’ or ‘‘Wakaru kai?’’ these are just casual ways of saying it. Thanks for bringing that up.
Chinese video is almost done uploading. I will be posting it here soon. I hope we can get a large crowd to join us in learning these 2 languages.
Sounds good. I watch your channel sometimes, so I’ve been waiting for this.
4 years for me… and counting. fuck my life.
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OP, good stuff you have there. i will check it out when i have some free study time. thanks for your resources.
Chinese video is up guys. let me know if you have any questions about anything. I just put the thread along with the script with the Japanese one.
[media=youtube]R_u67UdhvbU[/media]
My only gripe with learning Japanese was trying to be able to read enough Kanji to be considered literate. That’s the biggest hurdle imo and the area I’m still absolutely horrible at after 3 and a half years.
Other than that it was pretty comparable to learning Spanish and simple enough to break down and understand over time. Hopefully after graduating I’ll have a bit more free time to actively practice it again.
Where have you been learning it?
Out of curiosity, do you study Japanese in school? I know for a fact that most Japanese courses stick with polite form (-masu) verbs even though you’re pretty much never, ever, going to hear them being used except for a few fixed expressions. To quote a friend of mine (in response to a question in our textbooks) “Japanese people don’t talk like this at all… and I actually have to think to understand this”.
What’s your take on “polite speech” Laoshu? I pretty much ignore it entirely other than to take note that it “exists”.
@ Beats: I use Anki. I guess I’ll just keep with it for now then.
yeah i take it in school. i just thought it was interesting that when they say ‘know what im sayin’ wakaru appears in the subtitle
There’s never going to be one on one slang correspondence between any two languages. ‘know what I’m sayin’’ roughly equals “understand?” in English which happens to be “wakaru?” in Japanese.
I misunderstood you though. I thought you were surprised that they used “wakaru?” instead of “wakarimasuka?”
Here at my school at Unc. I just finished my minor in it this semester. I don’t think I’ll plan on majoring in it though since I’m focused on just finishing up my actual major now and getting out of here.
Ahh, nice. I’ve been teaching myself Japanese for the last month or two, mostly from audio CDs. So I’ll definately have to check out your YT account. Reading Kanji at the moment though, is beyond me. I figure I’ll go more in depth once I’m a little more comfortable with speaking 
Oh, I see. Yea, I guess that’s probably ideal for now. School takes up too much time to really get into language study.
I definitely think that we should acknowledge and understand it because we never know when we’ll bump into someone of a higher status who’s Japanese. However, I really do feel that one should put a lot of time into learning the casual speech because like you said before…Japanese people just don’t talk like that on a normal basis. That tends to be the problem when learning the language at a university. They focus on too much grammar and too much polite style. Like I said, it’s definitely important to know it because it’s part of the language, but…using masu form with a Japanese friend the whole time can become quite annoying. That’s just my opinion.
well it all depends how you use it (the decks and your edits)
I am learning by means of RTK…but I also am learning japanese and kanji in general by other means. I also have other japanese vocab decks in anki including RTK decks. so the kanji has so far has been not too bad to get.
Yeah, I’m about 1000 into RTK and I’ve got the first 600 or so down pat.
The thing is, I found that the Kanji I studied in school were just way easier to remember. I think it might have to do with never coming into contact with the RTK Kanji I’ve learned so far as they aren’t introduced until much higher levels of education. I might do both then, keep plugging throw RTK while getting vocab from official kanji lists.
Keep in mind that context is also very important. You could learn a lot of Kanji/vocab from an actual context. I think it’s a more natural way of learning those characters as well.
Keep in mind that context is also very important. You could learn a lot of Kanji/vocab from an actual context. I think it’s a more natural way of learning those characters as well.
What’s context though? reading articles on Wikipedia? Playing through an RPG game in Japanese? Readings Japanese Subs?
I’ve tried all of those but I’m always just terribly lost and having to refer to a translator for literally every word.
Lately I’ve been trying the Khatzumoto “sentence mining” approach, just building up my vocab/grammar through sentences I’ve found listed in dictionaries, whether I was searching for a particular Kanji or a new word I just learned. Eventually I do plan on doing way more context readings than I am now, but I always felt like I lacked the foundation for anything to be really beneficial. Basically I feel like with enough flashcard reps, all of these words/Kanji/grammatical structures I keep forgetting will become like second nature and from there I can focus on the (hopefully) few phrases I don’t know in a given context.
By the way, there was one video you made that I found particularly useful, but I can’t find it. It was about the usefulness of learning the interogatives, therefore’s, and however’s in a language early on. Do you know what one I’m talking about? I noticed that whenever I try to speak Japanese I lack any real “structure” in my speech. It’s just point, point, point, without any real linking of one sentence to another.