Quote:
Originally Posted by tripperazn
My suggestion: watch more raw anime. Especially ones that take place with high school kids. You'll hear so much of this slang, it sounds natural after a while. Tae Kim's guide does a pretty good job of covering general Japanese slang for such a short section.
My problem is the exact opposite of yours, grammatically complex sentences give me a headache, especially descriptions!! I can easily pick out what いっすよ。 means though.
It's a problem for me since I'm afraid of talking to native speakers now. I just KNOW this anime slang is going to pour out of my mouth without me even noticing and I'll come off as extremely rude.
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i've been focusing on doing just that as of recent, as not only is my knowledge of slang abysmal, but i have terrible listening skills. i'd say my knowledge of japanese is about 90% reading&writing, and 10% speaking&listening, as i am much, much more of a reader of manga than i am a viewer of anime.
one trick that i learned regarding japanese grammar that helped me out a lot--and that i still fall back on from time to time--is to read sentences backwards. for example:
「もちろん，世界中の人が血液型で4種類の運勢に分かれているなどということを信じているわけではないが。 」
but it is not that / i believe in things like / separating into 4 different categories / by blood type / the people of this world / of course
"of course, it's not that i believe that the people throughout the world should be separated based upon their blood type." (my translation is not verbatim, obviously)
it's a little sloppy, and it may seem like a bad habit to develop, but i actually find it helped me early on.
i'm actually rather afraid, myself, of what it will be like if i ever try to communicate to someone in japanese, because i think of everything in dictionary terms, rather than in polite terms (i mean, for example, 「いる」 rather than 「います」). i don't know if i will be able to switch back and forth so easily between formal and informal speech.