I’m planning on going to Japan in a couple years, so this could prove very helpful. Thanks.
That would take the beauty out of it if they didn’t exist! =^_^=
Knowing the meaning of radicals let me understand stuff I couldn’t read per se. In all, knowing how to read Kanji improved my vocab considerably while I was over there.
How long did stay over in Japan for?
1 year and I had been studying for 3 years prior to that.
I see. That’s great. Do you plan to stay over there long term?
holy fuck, you know 40+ languages? thats pretty insane.
I probably won’t be moving there. I enjoyed my time there as a student and I’ll definitely be going there on a regular basis for vacation and what not but I also need to focus on graduating from college. Plus I already own a nice home stateside so I don’t want to give up a good thing. Still studying the language though, probably going to start studying for ?? after I pass the CPA exam.
lol good luck with 1kyuu, its a whole different beast.
I see. Good luck with everything man.
Four-Zero???
yes this is true. also the more characters you learn, the more you start paying attention to how they are composed of smaller characters. the canonical cliche example is forest is made out of multiple tree characters. by recognizing the various individual characters in the character it helps you memorize them more easily.
yo, laoshuu, so I’m steadily learning japanese at my own pace but there is the 1 thing I have trouble with that I know you mentioned before…
I forgot what you called them, but the “ands” “therefores” “so” “perhaps” “insteads” etc. etc…I really have a lot of trouble when these come up…I just don’t really study them. like all the soretomo’s soredemo’s demo’s kedo’s node’s nara’s etc etc and pretty much all those little (but BIG) sentence spicer-uppers.
is there somewhere online to really get a good knowledge of them all (or most)?
Great stuff! I’ve been doing Japanese since October but taking a break and doing it on and off 'cos of Uni (and laziness) though I’m going to Japan next month so it would a good time to re-practice! ???
I read what calibur and duck were saying earlier, so you probably don’t need me to suggest that starting from polite form would be better. 
A couple of links for you guys incase you didn’t;
Denshi Jisho - Online Japanese dictionary --Probably the best japanese online dictionary out there. It’s got such a good kanji, sentence and word database that I sometimes use this over my books.
??? - Nihongoresources.com – Another great website with a ton of resources. It’s got a pretty interesting section on how japanese as an language was born and evolved. The dude’s also published a book, which looks pretty good.
aside from jisho I find myself going a lot to timwerx.net for verbs/adjectives info (so much) and to yamasa.cc for stroke order
Thanks for your contributions.
Protips for anyone starting to learn japanese seriously.
- Don’t bother with romaji and don’t buy any books with any or mostly romaji in it. (Romaji is basically japanese written in roman letters like this)
- Before opening any textbook or whatever, learn and master hiragana and katakana. Its real simple and easy and will get you use to reading simple japanese stuff fast.
- Anime is not a good source to learn japanese, if anything, i’d listen to it just so that you could familiarize yourself with the tonality and pronounciation of stuff but don’t talk the way they do in anime to real life japanese people. Watch movies or dramas if you can stand it.
Also, don’t know if anyone tried this, but the “Genki” workbook/book/audio is real good, requires you to know the hiragana and katana prior. If you can get it from a friend or find it online, its really a good friendly beginners book if anyone tried it. Expensive though i find but i got it from friend.
This leads me to my question. Does anyone know of good books/audio/workbook like genki except for mandarin ? My friends are trying to teach me, they are fluent in the language but are not good at teaching it lol. Beginners level stuff.
I think ‘‘Teach Yourself Chinese’’ would be a good start for learning the language. The only thing, it uses simplified characters. I’m not sure if you’re interested in learning those or not.
There’s no way.