|
Post by jameseightbitstar on Jun 4, 2006 6:00:41 GMT -5
So I've been trying to learn Japanese. I have a small vocabulary of words, and overall I don't really feel like I've made that much progress in the one year or so that I've been trying. I haven't taken any courses (can't afford them) and the few computer programs I've been able to get my hands on haven't been very effective.
Why learn Japanese? Well, besides the usual reasons of loving anime, manga, and video games, I've already made several plunges already. To whit:
-I own 28 volumes of the Yu-Gi-Oh manga in Japanese. -I own a PC Engine, along with the following games: Ys IV the Dawn of Ys, Snatcher, Dragon Slayer: Legend of Heroes, Neutopia, Hanii in the Sky (I could probably beat this one without much knowledge but I'd really like to know what the hell everyone is saying), and several other games that likely are not as Japanese-intensive. -I also own Dragon Quest III for the Gameboy Color. Quest, not Warrior.
So, I figured, maybe someone here would be interested in offering suggestions on things I can do to learn the language faster and more efficiently, suggesting courses I could take (I can save up), or perhaps someone else here is a learner themselves and we could, I dunno, form a club where we try to have conversations in Japanese or something?
|
|
|
Post by kinopio on Jun 8, 2006 9:28:06 GMT -5
Haven taken 4 years of Japanese in college myself, I suggest signing up for Japanese courses offered at your local college or Japanese community center. The 1st year (elementary) of material is essential in learning basic structure and reading hiragana and katagana, and without it, it would be impossible to understand anything in Japanese.
A lot of Japanese from say games, or Anime, can be difficult to understand/translate since it is written in "pop" style and a lot of the vocabulary is either slang or made-up words that are only familiar to native Japanese or Moe culture.
There is really no fast way of learning the language, but studying it professionally will be the most efficient.
|
|
|
Post by bioniccommando83 on Jun 14, 2006 4:05:11 GMT -5
Funny story- Spent the past summer studying abroad in Tokyo. My goal was to teach myself enough Japanese to get by over the summer, and pick it up as I was there. In the end, how much Japanese did I learn? Nada!
If anyone's planning to travel abroad to learn the language, Tokyo, besides being a wonderful city all around, is awash in English, even if very few people actually speak it there, allowing you to get by without having to learn more than a few phrases.
|
|
|
Post by Discoalucard on Jun 14, 2006 11:30:16 GMT -5
I am awful at speaking or writing or understanding spoken Japanese. I took it for two years in college (plus an extra year of independent study), which helped quite a bit in grasping the basics, but so much of my knowledge just comes from playing video games that most typical Japanese just goes way beyond my scope. Plus the grammar always confused the hell out of me, which is why I need time to process it. I NEED to play Japanese games with subtitles to even remotely understand anything, mostly because I'm more familiar with the meanings of a lot of kanji as opposed to their pronunciaton. That Yu Gi Oh manga might not be too bad, because it probably has furigana by all of the kanji, which will make your life A LOT easier. Most video games don't have this, so you're outta luck when it comes to looking up the meanings of words. I also recommend a shareware program called JQuickTrans. You should be able to find it here: www.coolest.com/jquicktrans/You can look up words in both English and Japanese, as well as look up kanji by radicals (which is a massive pain in the ass but necessary sometimes.) It's helped me a lot though. I'm pretty sure Dragon Quest 3 is going to be all hiragana/katakana, which...is technically easier, since you can at least look up stuff, but I find a lot messier. Snatcher is written on an adult level (and no subs for the voices) so that might be a bit beyond your scope. Anyway, like Kinopio said, learning hiragana and katakana ASAP is essential, and from there, maybe dive into a bit of kanji. I used to have a "How to Learn Japanese from Castlevania" guide as the Castlevania Dungeon but ultimately wasn't happy with it, so I never reformatted it when the site was redesigned. I've been thinking of doing something similar for this site if I ever get the time. Just, like, essential kanji you need to know to play video games and stuff.
|
|
|
Post by Shinigami on Jun 14, 2006 16:43:52 GMT -5
I loved that "How to Learn Japanese from Castlevania" article. That's where I picked up the word Shinigami.
|
|
|
Post by jameseightbitstar on Jun 14, 2006 20:23:36 GMT -5
I already know hirigana and katakana. There's a fun program that makes that easy. lrnj.comYes, Yu-Gi-Oh has furigana next to the kanji, except for in certain miniature thought/phrase bubbles which are written in goofy handwriting (some sorts of emotional exclamations). Dragon Quest III... I'm playing the Gameboy Color version, which sadly has kanji. The original Famicom game was Kana-only though, and I do have several kana-only games (Neutopia being one of them). Anyway, I find Kanji pretty easy to pick up, both the words and meanings. In my mind I either see a kanji so much that I have it memorized, or it has some visual association--the kanji "Kata," for example, vaguely resembles a martial artist performing his katas, so... *Sigh* right now I'm saving up in hope of being able to take a good course, or get some Rosetta Stone software (which I hear is quite good), in the meantime I'm learning Japanese simply by trying to memorize a Japanese-English dictionary. I hear a Trekkie became fluent in Klingon that way, though I'm honestly only doing it to pass the time. I'm not stupid enough to think it'll actually work. JQuicktrans is good, but I have a word processor called JWPce which includes a built-in dictionary that I find to be more helpful. However, JWPce doesn't translate English into Japanese, so that may be one point in JQuickTrans' favor. Grammer has been hit-and-miss so far. I've got some of the particles memorized, but I need practice on verb forms. And as for understanding spoken Japanese... I've made it a habit to watch anime with my back turned to the screen, in order to attune my ears to spoken dialogue (if you watch with subtitles, you'll tend to tune the audio out, and its more of a test if you have no visual reference). Words I know I can pick out easily, but the rest is gibberish to me.
|
|
|
Post by kyouki on Jun 15, 2006 14:31:51 GMT -5
I took Japanese for 5 years in school, and that was good for learning the basics but not much else. The last year was a self-designed course where I translated stuff. The best thing I did was download JWPce and find something I really liked: Hokuto no Ken aka Fist of the Northstar. Over one summer I plowed through all 16(?) volumes of the deluxe rerelease of the comics whenever I had time to do so. I learned a ton of Japanese that way, much of it useless in polite society. I went to Japan one summer for 3 months (stayed in a very rural area) and learned a lot that way. Bioniccommando is right... if you plan to do something like this, stay away from large cities as it's very easy to fall back on English as your crutch if you get frustrated (very easy). I think the absolute best thing you can do in learning a language is the following (which I read from the jacket of a book I saw at a store about how to learn languages quickly): When you are sitting around doing nothing (waiting for a bus, waiting in traffic, wating in general), try to repeat everything you think to yourself in Japanese. Keep a little notebook handy in your car or whatever. This helps in three ways: -You'll get used to the grammar because you'll slowly get more accustomed to thinking in Japanese -It will really focus your studies, as by the nature of the exercise you will be concentrating on studying things that are useful in everyday speech and thought -You'll become more creative. You may not know the Japanese word for "engine" but you'll be so desperate just to get the thought out that you'll substitute "thing that makes cars go" for engine. You can look up "engine" later but the important thing is to get your meaning across. This will map Japanese to your brain When I went back to Japan for two weeks last November I studied like this and I can tell you that it was extremely effective.
|
|
|
Post by jameseightbitstar on Jun 16, 2006 0:21:52 GMT -5
Oh Wow. Thanks Kyouki... that last thing, geez I'm glad someone told me that (I'm too dense to think of it on my own).
Can you describe your experience with Hokuto no Ken a bit more, please?
|
|
|
Post by kyouki on Jun 16, 2006 7:18:58 GMT -5
Well, once upon a time I was big into anime. My classmate got me into it. He recommended Ghost in the Shell, Ninja Scroll, and Fist of the North Star. The first time I saw FotNS I thought it was pretty awful. However, for some reason I kept going back to it and something was really neat about it.
I found the english graphic novels at a bookstore (they only did the first few chapters) so I picked those up and found that the comic was much better than the movie (which I do enjoy now). Since the english translation ended so soon into the story I tracked down some of the original Japanese comics.
So anyway, a few years later I had gone through a few years of Japanese at school and had a job where I was allowed to study as long as there wasn't aything to do (80% of the time). I figured that would be a good time to finally read through the Japanese books. Armed with JWPce I was able to get one book read per day. It was slower at first, but once I got used to the rough language used in the story it got quicker. If you like FotNS/HnK I recommend tracking these books down... they are the deluxe semihardcover versions. Each book is longer than the typical manga book, but because of that you get the whole story in around 16 books rather than 30-40.
Then I got the PSX HnK game (which is awesome and deserves an article on HG101 btw), and finally the HnK TV series on DVD. It took me 1.5 years to watch the whole thing...
|
|
|
Post by jameseightbitstar on Jun 16, 2006 11:17:59 GMT -5
I asked because the JWPce thing sounds like what I was trying to do with Yu-Gi-Oh. Sadly I tend to get distracted easily, but methinks I should give it a shot again if it worked for someone else. Actually I'm not all that familiar with Hokuto no Ken outside of having seen one of the anime. Right now my main squeeze is Osamu Tezuka manga, along with Ranma 1/2, Yu-Gi-Oh (of which I lack the final ten volumes of the original manga), Tatsuo Yoshida for Mach Go Go Go, and... well, more than I can think of right now. Also I really, really want to see this, but this hasn't been released in English at all (searching through CDJapan for the name "Ougon Bat" though shows me that it's available in Region 2).
|
|
|
Post by kyouki on Jul 5, 2006 9:59:33 GMT -5
Hey, here's something I found that's a little helpful- Get yourself an RSS feed reader, and then go to yookoso.comOn the left are some kanji feeds. If you subscribe to each of the 6 grade level kanji feeds, you'll learn 6 new kanji a day. So that's a good 180 a month! The feed also provides compounds which will help you recognize the kanji as you see how it interacts with other kanji. You can then use a program like JFC to create flash cards to test yourself on these kanji to make sure you are retaining the knowledge. JFC has a pocket PC version that works very well with JWPCE word processor. Just throw JFC in the same folder, and list the kanji in a .jfc text file. JFC will actually use the JWPce dictionary file to generate meanings and readings for the kanji. NEXT! Go to www.jgram.org/There is a list of RSS feeds on the left side of the screen, sorted by difficulty (with level 1 being the hardest). So, subscribe to all four levels and every day you will learn about/be refreshed on four grammatical constructs. The feed provides the grammar, examples, etc. So if you subscribe to all of these, every day you will learn 6 kanji and 4 grammatical constructs, all with examples. You can then load them into JFC to create flash cards to test yourself on. Another helpful hint: You can learn a lot by playing old Japanese ROMs... I find that SNES games are perfect for this as the resolution is great enough where some kanji can be shown, but not great enough where you are overloaded with kanji. Also, that was pretty much before games got to be so damned verbose. Finally, one of the best things I did was to start doing fan translations for games. I worked with a couple people and did some translations for everything from side scrolling fighters to RPGs. Don't do it for fame or glory- there's a bit of an ego thing going with many of these groups, and the translator often gets very little or no credit, while the person that does the actually programming and inserts the translated text generally is seen as the person responsible for the translation. However, it's a good experience and you'll learn a lot of Japanese. A lot of groups will offer the extracted scripts up on their sites and you can just download them, load them up in JWPce, and start working on the game bit by bit. RPGs are actually not that bad to start with because you'll have to translate all the battle stuff, the store stuff, etc, which means tons of repetition... so you'll likely remember a lot of it.
|
|
|
Post by Akirasfriend on Jul 5, 2006 13:07:41 GMT -5
(Off-Topic: I are back- long time no post, huh? ;D)I have never taken professional courses, and can't read/write any Japanese text for shit. I can, however, pronounce it perfectly (not just my opinion- I've been told so by Japanese-speaking people). Bizarrely, my accent makes me sound a bit like a 40 year-old man... This is the 15 year-old speaking I suppose I just picked up some sort of gruff tones from old Kurosawa films. Oooh, Toshiro Mifune= the cool!
|
|
|
Post by vysetd on Aug 28, 2006 2:07:53 GMT -5
I don't know if this will help anyone here, but when I'm translating a game, I found this site to be extremely valuable. www.jisho.org/When I was unclear on somethings, this site came to my rescue. You can type Japanese (Very useful for me as I know all the hiragana and Katakana as well as some kanji) or English to get the Japanese equivalent. You can even get Japanese sentences, and "bad" words. I was shocked really. I think it's a fantastic site. It shows all the hiragana for a word or katakana, or even the kanji equivalent of a word (if one exist), and they enlarge the kanjis because they know they are the hardest to read...what with some of them being 15 or more strokes.
|
|
|
Post by kyouki on Sept 2, 2006 23:45:03 GMT -5
The new Kanji dictionary for the DS is a great tool. I bought it recently ($40 shipped from Yes-Asia!) and it's pretty much the same exact thing as my Canon V80 (a $300 electronic dictionary). In fact, they use the same exact J-E and E-J dictionaries.
Just make sure you get the latest one (the first version did not have kanji handwriting recognition)!
|
|
|
Post by jameseightbitstar on Sept 3, 2006 0:23:38 GMT -5
Whoa, there's a Kanji dictionary for the DS?
God, that almost makes me want to get a DS.
|
|