2013-01-13, 08:16 | Link #3561 |
Some Random Guy
Join Date: Dec 2012
Location: Australia
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You might also want to consider getting a tutor that way you can make sure that your pronunciation etc. is correct or acceptable. I find it is alot easier learning from someone face to face so they can give their perspective and pointers as well than just listening to audio and books from software. But whatever works for you better in ways of learning is always the best method.
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2013-01-13, 08:25 | Link #3562 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2007
Age: 40
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2013-01-13, 08:38 | Link #3563 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2007
Age: 40
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Also I want to mention, I now have lots of free time and I can finally concentrate 100 percent on learning japanese, so I dont care if it takes 2 or 3 years to learn it, I wanted to learn it for 15 years now but never had the time available to be able to dedicate myself unto learning that complicated language. I just need to find a good software that teaches japanese... I looked on amazon and there is Rosetta Stone, Transparent Japanese, Human Japanese etc. I have no idea which one I should get though.
Last edited by Lawfer; 2013-01-13 at 08:48. |
2013-01-28, 15:53 | Link #3564 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2010
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japaneselevelup.com
Delete if this is considered an ad. There are some articles on there like: "Are you really sure you want to learn Japanese?" that you should read before doing anything else. Your first step is to learn hiragana. There are many sites available. I liked (and learned from) thejapanesepage.com. English is hard to pronounce compared to Japanese (at least "standard Japanese," i.e., Tokyo dialect). If you natively speak English then you don't need pronunciation help. Not sure about other languages. What makes Japanese hard is kanji. Literally everything else about Japanese is dead simple. I think Japanese grammar is much simpler than English grammar and I'm a native English speaker. I can't be the only one who thinks this. You will of course run into some of the same problems when you learn any language like proverbs. The software you need to learn Japanese is Anki (google it) and it's free. Last edited by jcdietz03; 2013-01-28 at 16:08. |
2013-01-28, 17:52 | Link #3565 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2009
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2013-01-28, 18:20 | Link #3567 |
思想工作
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Vereinigte Staaten
Age: 31
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When I read Japanese, I
- Look at the kanjis for meaning. In this phase the kana just looks like scribbles in comparison. - look for grammatical particles in the hiragana, as well as nouns that weren't written in kanji - look at the katakana and try to figure out what it says. - scratch my head over kanji that I am unfamiliar with (i.e. the usage is different from Chinese or it got simplified out of recognition) - put the whole thing through google translate if it still isn't clear basically I am not reading it so much as deciphering it. In a weird way the kanji are my best friend and worst enemy, while the katakana are just annoying. I like hiragana because they are easy to tell apart, but I wish Japanese was more like Korean where the words were more compact so that it would be easier to tell nouns/verbs/adjectives apart from supporting words. When reading hiragana I can't help but think that a bunch of space is being wasted. I think it would be best if the Japanese would only use kanji for on-yomi and hiragana for kun-yomi (because having more than one syllable per character is really confusing), but they will probably do it only when my proposal that the Chinese start using the zhuyin phonetic for loanwords is adopted, i.e. never. |
2013-01-28, 20:04 | Link #3568 |
18782+18782=37564
Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: InterWebs
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Agreed. Often, I can guess what a sentence says without actually knowing how to read it, if it has kanjis that I know of. Katakana and hiragana are just as annoying for me if a sentence consist wholly of them.
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2013-01-29, 06:22 | Link #3569 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2009
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Last edited by Kudryavka; 2013-01-29 at 07:38. |
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2013-01-29, 07:31 | Link #3570 | |
18782+18782=37564
Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: InterWebs
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2013-01-29, 07:34 | Link #3571 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2009
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2013-01-29, 07:36 | Link #3572 | |
reading #hikaributts
Join Date: Feb 2009
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2013-01-29, 10:56 | Link #3573 | |
今宵の虎徹は血に飢えている
Join Date: Jan 2009
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A different sound has so many different meaning differences, Japanese grammar is closer related to a phonetic language than a symbol based one like Chinese At this stage you just need to do it more often and with greater immersion including other aspects like listening and writing (ideally speaking too but yeah..chances for that are hard unless you are in Japan). "Deciphering" would then become so natural once you are familiar enough with the grammar and vocab that it would become proper reading soon enough
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2013-01-29, 13:59 | Link #3574 | ||
思想工作
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Vereinigte Staaten
Age: 31
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Katakana is the worst part about Japanese. Even when it is "English", it is often a bitch to figure it out. Take the word 加速度 (acceleration), for instance. If I see that I go "ah, kasoku-dou" and carry on. Now let's say some scientist spent too much time in the States and decided to write アックセラレシオン (akkuserareshion), I do not see the word, instead my brain explodes. Disregarding the fact that 加速度 takes only three spaces to write while that thing needs ten, it is also harder to read. If I encountered that word out of the blue I would probably spend more than a minute at least figuring it out. What's worse, you can't just pronounce "acceleration" the correct English way or else they won't understand you, you have to add the mistakes to make it "Japanese". I know the Japanese themselves find this sort of thing rather trendy but it's a real pain to try to learn it. |
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2013-01-29, 14:58 | Link #3575 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2009
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For starters, Chinese (I'm talking Mandarin here, but the others are similar I'd assume) sentence order is SVO mostly, but Japanese is SOV. Japanese conjugates verbs all the time, but Chinese doesn't do so nearly as much except for past tense. And most notably, Japanese is in the Japonic language family, but the Chinese languages are in the Sinitic family, which is in the Sino-Tibetan family. Heck, you know more Chinese (and Japanese?) than me so you know the first two already I'm sure. How are those two languages fundamentally similar at all?? Last edited by Kudryavka; 2013-01-29 at 15:54. |
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2013-01-29, 17:40 | Link #3578 |
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
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Personally I find Characters to be clunky at best. It's not even a perfect system either, in Chinese the meaning of the characters often has no direct correlation to the meaning of the word, they're just put together in a quasi phonetic fashion. So you don't even get the benefit of people being able to read Chinese without being able to speak it.
Japanese should certainly have ditched characters in favour of Hiragana (much like Korea ditched Hanzi in favour of Han'gul). Whether China should have done away with characters I don't know, but they certainly could have done a better job of reforming them when they went to the trouble of switching to "simplified" characters. |
2013-01-29, 18:41 | Link #3579 |
思想工作
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Vereinigte Staaten
Age: 31
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You can't ditch characters unless you want to ditch most of the language's literary vocabulary. I'm not sure how the Koreans manage (my guess is a full-on vernacularization, but I've heard that Hanja are still used in some circumstances), but I know for a fact that Japanese is full of phrases that sound exactly the same but mean totally different things on account of the characters used. You see this kind of joke in anime and Jdramas quite a bit actually - someone will make a pun, usually based in a pair of some higher-level terms, that in normal usage would be written and read instead of spoken and heard.
Sure, characters take quite a bit of time to master, but the Chinese whose entire language is made of them seem to have no real trouble with it. There is the question of expedience - it is true that an English speaker is theoretically fully literate after second grade (in comparison to a Chinese who reaches the same level probably a couple years later) - I say, why bother? There is culture in the characters. You can still read the texts of the ancients even though the spoken language is now completely different. Using a phonetic system it would be impossible to understand their words as every tenth one would have the same reading. There is no hindrance other than to people used to alphabets complaining about the learning curve. |
2013-01-29, 18:45 | Link #3580 | |
Banned
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Dai Korai Teikoku
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Korean: 東 is read only as "Dong". Japanese: 東 can be read as "Tou", "Higashi", and "Azuma". |
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hiragana |
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