/jp/ - Otaku Culture

kill yourself now

Japanese school uniform ska moe~

Not OP, but also wanting to learn. I just don't know where the fuck to start. I feel that having a teacher is an absolute must., but then people tell me that resources on the internets are more than enough.

If so, where should I be looking then?

>>3904515
agreed

Kill yourself.

Buy learnings from College.

third from the left looks like clare

Japanese will probably be the most difficult language you have ever learned, barring stuff like mandarin and russian. Do not assume that just because you slept your way to an A in High School Spanish class, that you'll be in any shape to learn Japanese. No matter what direction you go: internet, books, classes, etc., it will require obsessive practice and memorization. You cannot take shortcuts at any time. Those will only hinder your learning and make your new language useless. Learn Kanji. Above all else, learn how to read Kanji. Listen to native speakers. Japanese is a language of tones. There are many words that have completely different meanings depending on HOW you say them. The only way to learn proper pronunciation is to hear a native speaker.

Get a book. If you're not of asian background, you should probably take a class.

Live there or get to know Japanese people.

I'm in the early stages of learning Japanese myself, but I can tell you from experience that there is no way in hell any normal person will learn any language to fluency without forced immersion. I wouldn't have learned English had I stayed in Russia. Schools over there always require English, but the people can't communicate in it. If you're obsessive and are immovably determined to learn a language, you could do it, but that's almost never the case when it's voluntary.

genki
that is all

>>3904627
This.
You'll never learn unless you throw yourself into Japan or immerse yourself in so much weeaboo shit that you end up having to listen to Japanese way more than English in your day to day life. If you're a NEET or shut in, that's perfect for you.

Stay cooped up in your room. Visit Japanese sites more and more as you learn. Listen to only Japanese shit. Try to keep English as far away from you as possible.

Of course, that is, after you've gotten some of the language under your belt to start off with.

Download the Genki textbook, there's torrents going around for it everywhere. Learn the hiragana and katakana first, they take like 2 days to memorize, unless you have shit memory like me. In that case it's like a week or so.

Read a bit of Genki to better your understanding of the language. GO OVER IT DAILY. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE, YOU LOSE INTEREST AND END UP FORGETTING SHIT.

Very much stress this, because this is the only reason it took me so freaking long. Procrastination, because I wanted to read my (translated) mango, or play my fucking game (which are packed with kanji that intimidate me so I don't bother attempting to read).

Don't be lazy. Every fucking day. Even if it's just half an hour a day, it helps.

After you've got some vocab an grammar under your belt, head over to http://www.hellodamage.com/kanjidicks/main.htm for some kanji learning. This dick can really teach you the kanji real good.

So really, just study every day, keep up with it, and gradually force yourself into an environment where you'd have to know Japanese to understand shit going on around you.

>>3904680
Practice even when you're not reading Genki. See a Japanese word? Try reading it. Even if you only know 2 words in the sentence, just reading those two out loud a few times and getting a feel for them is great practice.

Stuck on a kanji and too lazy to look it up? Get the furigana injector plugin for Firefox, if you use Firefox. Just don't rely on it too much. Getting too attached to furigana is like getting too attached to romaji, so be very careful not to overdo it.

i'll bite.

genki 1 + work book

http://rapidshare.com/files/163436035/Genki_I.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163444902/Genki_I.part2.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/163459427/Genki_I_Workbook.RAR

genki 2 + workbook
http://rapidshare.com/files/163499107/Genki_II.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/163509582/Genki_II.part2.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/164330124/Genki_II_Workbook.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/164335174/Genki_II_Workbook.part2.rar

answer key for both workbooks http://rapidshare.com/files/283962757/Genki_Answer_Key.rar

pass: genki

other resources: http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/ -who the fuck doesn't use it?

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/completeguide.html
read above

http://www.jlptstudy.com/4/index.html
has basic practice on particles and shit.

use keyhole tv. listen to japanese music and shit.

don't expect to just jump into advanced kanji. i'd suggest to start by using the jlpt kanji lists. jlpt4 contains 103 and jlpt3 contains 181. don't get mindfucked by all the different readings of a kanji learn the main readings. and as you come along a new compound you'll pick it up along the way.

genki is an easy modo text book that is used in my community college district. at sdsu, (inb4 party school and worthless degree) we use Elementary Functional Japanese. it's an ok book that's written by our department head.

it'll take a long time to learn so don't be discouraged. tl;dr.

>>3904549
I hope you're trolling.

>>3904825

How is he trolling?

>>3904812
Thanks for all those but FFFFFFFFFF RAPIDSHARE

Guess my night is gone while I download all these.

>>3904839
By greatly exaggerating the difficulty of Japanese. Alternatively he's an idiot.

Chinese here.

Japanese is much harder...too many ways to say something, and too many levels of politeness/rudeness.

>>3904857
Learn only the rudest way to say everything to save yourself some time.

>>3904856

Japanese is considered one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers by linguists.

forgot to mention.

i suggest learning polite form (~masu) mostly because if you ever wish to practice your japanese at a restaurant or a store talking in the most informal form will make you look like a dick.

of course if you ever make japanese friends, they'll think it's so weird that you're talking polite. so just learn informal as you go along. keigo is funny shit. you'll need it if you ever plan on going to japan-land and speaking in japanese the whole time.

when my friend went for his study abroad in gunma the cellphone salesman only talked in keigo.

>>3904857
>Japanese is much harder the Chinese
Unsurprisingly you're retrded. Chinese use 3000 moonrunes on daily base, while Japanese use about 2000 kanji.

>>3904869
What's the easiest?

>>3904885

Because how many characters a language uses decides it's difficulty?

>>3904812
Anyone got these on megaupload or mediafire?

Rapidshare is a cunt and always freezes my downloads and makes me wait an hour for any download over 50MB

>>3904907
I think the point is that one of the difficulties in Japanese is remembering all the kanji. This being said, Chinese will be harder due to more to memorize.

Except memorising the kanji is the easy part of Japanese.

>>3904902

Pretty sure other West Germanic languages like German, and Romance languages like Spanish.

gahhh fuck you guys

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=D67WP1FX

pw:theseekersoasis.org

could only find genki 1.

>>3904881
You need to learn both plain and polite form.

>>3904925

Thanks.

>>3904812
Who the hell put this on rapidshit.

Get a better site. Also, requesting these on a better site.

>>3904885
but in japanese, almost every kanji has at LEAST 2 readings that are used commonly.
And once you've spent a bit of time figuring out a mnemonic method, learning the readings is much harder than learning the shapes.

What worked for me:

For kana, just use http://www.realkana.com/ until you've memorized them reasonably well. Groups of 5 at a time until you feel you remember them reasonably, and add more and more together as you feel you got them, until you simply got everything. Shouldn't be too hard or take you too much time.

For grammar, go through every chapter in http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar and take notes. If you're like me and can't stand reading too much grammar at a time, you can try doing a certain amount of chapters every day rather than trying to read from start to finish right away, but most likely, the faster you get done, the better.

For kanji, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%8Diku_kanji and start with grade 1, before moving through them all. Take a good look at each kanji, memorize it, write it out if you have to (learning stroke order will probably help you a little, but it's not absolutely necessary). Then go to http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C and find a common word that contains that kanji (if you don't know how this works, just search using the kun reading from the wikipedia page or something), read some example sentences, note the reading of the word, and put the full word, its meaning and its reading into Anki ( http://ichi2.net/anki/ ).

It's okay to neglect vocabulary a little at first, since you're technically learning it by studying kanji that way, but you have to remember immersion. You'll never understand a word properly before you've encountered it in 100 different contexts, and there's no practical way to do this through just studying. Besides, assuming you're learning Japanese for the right reason, the immersion should be the most fun part, since you get to learn from just reading/watching/listening to entertainment you enjoy.

>>3906390
How long till you could read some japanese games, or eroge anon? I got a good 5-6 months of free time so I figure I can try this out for a while and order ToV PS3 to try out when I think I'm ready.

>>3906412
Depends on how much time you dedicate each day and all. Technically, I started a year and a half ago, and learned the kana in a few days, tried to do some other stuff, but got demotivated for about half a year, before I started trying a little again with mostly poor study methods, which led me to failure again, and a month or two ago, I started with this new routine, which finally works much better. I have probably spent more time testing out study methods and perfecting my routines than I have spent actually studying (that's the major pitfall of self-study, but at least you have the chance to correct your study habits).

Rather than months or years, you should think in hours, since someone studying 2 hours a day would most likely take half the amount of months of someone studying 1 hour a day. For that, you could check out the study time estimates for the various levels of JLPT, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Language_Proficiency_Test#Format

>>3904480
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>>3904482
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>>3904482
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>>3904481
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>>3906486
Thanks Anon, your case sounds extremely similar to mine so I guess I just need to just work out the kinks in my studying habits. Since I have almost all my time free for the next 5-6 months I should work on some sort of immersion.

>>3906521
That's a good idea. Don't let that nigger on alljapaneseallthetime or whatever convince you it's all or nothing, though. Just try to focus on non-translated Japanese entertainment, and just force yourself a little into it even though it's bothersome using the dictionary all the time. And maybe wait at least 2 months first, and tell yourself that at that exact date, you won't be reading translated stuff anymore, so you should study hard to prepare for it.

>>3904483
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>>3904480
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>>3904912
The hanzi is really the only difficult (albeit incredibly) part about learning Chinese.
Otherwise, language is really quite forgiving, as the most anyone has to worry about is vocabulary. There's no past or future tense. No conjugation. And no annoying male/female nouns like in some western languages.

The greatest thing I ever learned was that it's ok to forget something. When I started off I would sit there and go over the same phrase 50 times, or the same kanji and write it 200 times. I'd never learn anything new. After a month my vocabulary was still shit and I couldn't understand anything. The most important thing is to just keep going and realize you will forget, but that's fine. Keep going.