/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Because learning languages is fun.

If I told you my reasons I'd be laughed at.

because learning a mildly hard language to almost fluency in a little over a year while getting math and physics degrees makes me feel even more superior compared to the masses.

Your image just made me realize why I gave up on kanji.

>>4590726

Eroge.
Just eroge.

How many kanji are there all together in that pic?

I suddenly realized that the subs weren't adequate.

>>4590741
This

To read untranslated VNs and japonese websites, what the hell did you think I do it for?

I learn it so I can read Japanese web sights.

felt like it.

>>4590779
Nice one, Miguel.

It also distracts you from fapping too much and it feels less a waste of time than lying around doing nothing does.

>>4590753
>>4590741
Same

Like many teenagers growing up in the 90s, I was pretty much always obsessed with Japanese culture. Whether it was catching a Godzilla movie on TBS or just watching Ronin Warriors at 6AM before going to school, it was always Japanese things that made me go "holy shit, this is fucking awesome!" The fact they were the prevalent game developers (at least back then) and we missed out on plenty of good, untranslated games certainly didn't hurt either.

So with the advent of the internet and in recent years sites like nico and pixiv, was there any reason NOT to try to learn Japanese? It's not like obtaining the resources to learn it are difficult, a $5 pocketbook or even the internet itself are more than adequate for learning at least basic Japanese. And besides, it's not like a true NEET has anything better to do with their time anyway.

That, my friend, is why I started learning Japanese.

I want to play a shitload of untranslated games that never left Japan. I don't like reading and waiting for translations (especially for light novels) because it feels like some shitty filter clogging the source material. Or translations that go from Chinese -> English. Which is what most unofficial light novel translations are.

What are good books/sites for starters?

>>4590824
> light novels) because it feels like some shitty filter clogging
You are going to be very disappointed ;_;

>>4590827

get Genki I & II. A fine site for grammar lessons is http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar, but you can find all kinds of similar ones by a simple google search. Get Rikaichan and/ or JWPce to look stuff up. Join a forum where you can ask questions (never, ever ask here).

I'm still on Chapter 3 on Genki I. I can't really remember all this information ;_; I hope FF13 is still on sale by the time I'm done. I'm passing up on the English release solely because I want to listen to Maaya sakamoto's voice

Genki is great.

>>4590934

Because I have too much shit to do than study Japanese for the sole reason of reading shit when nobody wants to translate it for me.

Full time student and pretty much full time worker kind of fucks things over.

so i can talk with my girlfriend better

> why not?
I already know a language. I don't need a reason not to learn another one.

>>4590860
I heard good things about Genki I, but bad things about Genki 2. The reviews I read said the grammar explanations were pretty bad. Should I just ignore it and study it anyway?

Japanese was extremely easy to learn, it's nowhere near as complex as English. I did it on a whim.

It's too much of a bother, I have more important shit to do like playing games.

>>4590669

Holy... I just realized that the kanji are arranged RTK-style. Thanks for the new wallpaper OP.

I'm learning it for VN, anime, manga, jrpg, etc... One day I had enough of being dependant of the shitty companies like Atlus, Jast...

Also it can be useful if I go to Japan someday to pick up prostitutes.


>Japanese was extremely easy to learn, it's nowhere near as complex as English. I did it on a whim.
They see me trolling...

I started because I had to pick a language to study and figured Japanese would be most rewarding. Not really the best choice in that situation, since I could be done ages ago if I had just stuck with something simple, like Spanish.

Now I'm mainly motivated by untranslated eroge, and the idea that I might someday master what's considered one of the hardest languages to learn for people who just speak Western languages.

>>4590808
>And besides, it's not like a true NEET has anything better to do with their time anyway.
Speak for yourself, I'm trying to become a concert pianist.

>>4591194
What's RTK?

>>4591284
Heisig.

>>4590669
Are the characters in your pic supposed to represent anything in particular or they're just randomly thrown there?

To play eroge and read doujin books and games of course.

This is also one of the few rewarding endeavors I have undertaken. Most everything else has ended with failure and left me feeling frustrated.

>>4591235
What makes you think I'm trolling, good sir? Japanese is not a complex language, if anything it's rather subtle and non-invasive.

>>4590969
>English
>complex
choose one, it's extremely simple to learn compared to most languages

>>4591327
You must be a native English speaker
>>4591311
You must be native to some Asian language, like Chinese or Korean.

It's all somewhat subjective anyway. Japanese is going to be difficult for native English speakers because of the completely different writing system and the degree to which subjects and whatnot must be inferred.

>>4591327
That is a common fallacy propagated by people with lower intelligence.

>>4591340
>You must be native to some Asian language, like Chinese or Korean.

I am an Amerikkkan, and a white-devil at that. Sorry~

>>4591346
Then you're a retard. You and this guy up here
>>4590725
can fuck off and go suck eachothers' e-peens.

By the way who have good scans of Remembering the Kana/Kanji by Heising?

>>4591358
If anything, it's the contrary. I am of superior intelligence than most human beings on this earth, which is not condescending to say.

Japanese is a simple language, but most people are put off by the "foreign"-ness of it. Once you become comfortable with the language, mastering it is rather easy.

Maybe it's because I'm around it all the time? Oh, I do not know the answer to that question.

>>4591327, >>4591378
Japanese has simple grammar, medium lexicon, and difficult writing system.

English has difficult spelling, the greatest number of non-scientifical terms in any language (about 250,000), but a simple writing system.

>>4591393
I concur, writing is the hardest part of the language... but even that was not too much for me to grasp within a year or so.

English is easy to learn if you're willing to actually immerse yourself in it. That's how I learned it, playing Pokemon as a kid and watching American sitcoms. Maybe I was lucky to start out early with it, but it felt like it all went automatically. I've spent pretty much no time studying grammar or memorizing vocabulary.

Problem is, people expect to be able to learn English with absolutely no immersion at all. They just study grammar, which is like trying to learn how to play tennis by studying aerodynamics.

Japanese is a little easier for this kind of studying, because the grammar is much more simple and consistent. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to learn by immersion alone, since you don't just memorize a kanji by encountering it 5 times within different contexts like you can do with any English word. Even that guy over at all Japanese all the time or whatever the site is called, who throws out 5 walls of text a week on how important immersion is and how it's the best way to learn a language, recommends learning kanji through Heisig, which is a very non-immersive method.

It's too much trouble learning a language with an all-different alphabet (let alone the tons of kanji), that's not spoken outside its country of origin, IMO.

I might reconsider it someday, though.

>>4591393
and one of the most simplest grammar and syntax

I know enough to understand most hentai (spoken), slowly working on the kanji now.

I learned English starting 3 years ago and now I live in England and people don't even know I'm not English until I tell them.

I think English is easy because of all the television and everything in English everywhere, you can pick it up without trying too hard.

Not learning Japanese, don't see the point of learning a language from a country that will ever really welcome me when I visit.

I speak German and French, planning to live in Germany for a while after Uni.

I'm learning it because I like to pretend I'm really Japanese.

>>4591499
French might have some usefullness when you need to brag in front of high-class people but German ? What the hell would that ever bring to you ?

People who like japanese stuff but don't learn the language will always be among the ones crying : "when will x game be translated bawww."

For someone willing to buy the material, whats suggested outside of Genki I & II?

I'd be a hell of a lot more motivated if I had something physical in front of me ;_;

>>4591520
Well, better wait for decent translations than spending a lifetime learning a language whose only usefulness in the west is the understanding of jrpg and eroge.

>>4590824
My advice, think twice about it.
Learning to speak japanese is one thing. Learning how to read japanese text with ease is quite another story.

>>4591542
Well, there's also understanding the lyrics in Japanese songs..

>>4591445
That's absurd. Most alphabets can be learned in like a day or two. They hardly contribute to the difficulty of a language at all (except maybe for abjabs because the consonants are implicit). I learned the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets just by messing around on wikipedia.

>>4591520
>planning to live in Germany

French is useless, horrible country, horrible people. Everyone and their dog can speak French, so it's no good for bragging either.

>>4591562

>>4591556
True. Most people really overrate the difficulty of learning an alphabet. I thought it would be really hard too before I started, but learning the kana was by far the easiest part of learning Japanese.

Kanji is another matter, though..

>>4591556
Greek and Cyrillic script specifically have much less letters a single -kana does. And what's more, japanese makes extensive use of kanji in everyday script, leaving almost no comparison to the difficulty.

Kanji and all that shit is easy, you can just look it up... but the grammar... Jesus fuck, this shit has no fucking rules and everything is ad hoc, and of course only about 10% of it is documented anywhere, the rest you have to learn while living as a homeless on the streets of Saitama, running from kids who want to set you on fire.

Because I want to be able to read un-translated VNs.

Oh what I wouldn't pay to get back all those hours I spent studying Swedish and use them to study Japanese instead.

Fuck this country.

>Kanji and all that shit is easy, you can just look it up

yeah, that'll work fine, won't slow you down when reading a kanji-heaving VN or anything.

>>4591645
If you did that, you'd be about 20% into fluency in Japanese.

>>4591646
You will eventually pick them up.

>>4591646
VNs aren't a problem thanks to agth.exe. The problem is manga and shit like that.

>>4591645
Finnish?

>>4591663
Read shounen with furigana in it.

>>4591672
>reading texts in all hiragana
In the time it takes you to get through it you might as well have learned a few dozen kanji.

>>4591602
>Greek and Cyrillic script specifically have much less letters a single -kana does.
Doesn't matter much, still pretty easy.

>And what's more, japanese makes extensive use of kanji in everyday script, leaving almost no comparison to the difficulty.
I said alphabets which doesn't include logographc systems like kanjis.

I can read Japanese actually and learning kanjis was the hardest part for me.

>>4591586
>Greek and Cyrillic script specifically have much less letters a single -kana does.
Doesn't matter much, still pretty easy.

>And what's more, japanese makes extensive use of kanji in everyday script, leaving almost no comparison to the difficulty.
I said alphabets which doesn't include logographc systems like kanjis.

I can read Japanese actually and learning kanjis was the hardest part for me.

>>4591678
Not really since the kanji are still there but there's no need to look them up in a dictionary.

>>4591656

yeah, the same way you'll eventually pick up grammar and vocabulary by watching subs.

>>4591698
No, you will only pick up phrases, and maybe some of the small parts of the grammar that are easy.

I studied a little Japanese. The spoken language is relatively easy, but the writing system is by far the most vile in the world. It looks sloppy as crap and even far surpasses English in needless complexity. (English kanji are at least far easier to look up, because there are only 26 possible radicals, and they’re all strung along in a neat line for easy lookup in a dictionary.) In all honesty, kanji is a totally unsuitable writing system for Japanese, which would be far better off written in a European alphabet. Kanji was made for the Chinese languages, which are SVO isolating languages unlike Japanese, an SOV inflecting language. Also, hardly anyone in Japan, if anyone at all, knows all the kanji, and they’re still learning to read and write well into high school. If they’d just pull their heads out the sand of silly tradition over there and switch to Latin, Greek or Cyrillic script, they’d be done learning to read and write by the end of first grade.

>>4591870
>Japanese using Greek script

lol

Why Kanji?

Some people feel that Japanese should have just switched from Chinese to romaji to do away with all the complicated characters that was bewildering the foreign white devils. In fact, Korean has adopted their own alphabet to greatly simplify their written language to great success. So why didn't it work for Japanese? And I ask this in the past tense because I believe that the government did attempt to replace Kanji with romaji shortly after the second world war with little success. I think anyone who has typed at any length in Japanese can easily see why this did not work. At any one time, when you convert typed Hiragana into Kanji, you are presented with almost always at least two choices (two homophones) and sometimes even up to ten. (Try typing kikan). The 46 or so character alphabet of set sounds in Japanese makes it hard to avoid homophones. Compare this to the Korean alphabet which has 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Any of the consonants can be matched to any of the vowels giving 140 sounds. In addition, a third and sometimes even fourth consonant can be attached to create a single letter. This gives over 1960 sounds that can be created theoretically. (The sounds that are actually used is actually much less than that, though I don't know the exact number.)

>>4591934
Since you want to read at a much faster rate than you talk, you need some visual cues to instantly tell you what each word is. You can use the shape of words in English to blaze through text because most words have different shapes. Try this little exercise: Hi, enve thgouh all teh wrods aer seplled icorrenctly, can you sltil udsternand me?" Korean does this too because it has enough characters to make words with distinct and different shapes. However, because the visual cues are not distinct as Kanji, spaces needed to be added to remove ambiguities. (This presents another problem of when and where to set spaces.)

With Kanji, we don't have to worry about spaces and much of the problem of homophones is mostly resolved. Without Kanji, even if spaces were to be added, the ambiguities and lack of visual cues would make Japanese text much more difficult to read.

>>4591910
I beg to differ, sir. Japs would be better off using some Korean script.

Kanji is good for reading.

When you know them you can read a lot faster than with any other system.

>>4591870
Agreed.

>>4591942, >>4591981
I'd much rather read a little bit more slowly than having to spend 3x more time having to learn writing.

>>4592012
After you learn it though, it's like speed reading for everything.

If you read a lot in the long run it may even save you time!

kanji aren't even that hard. it is purely memorization, and my only issue is that i don't stick with it hard enough so i go through three weeks of not studying and have to relearn a bunch.

kanji is easy. it's only difficult because you allow it to be. japanese grammar is more difficult than kanji.

>>4591870

no, kanji does work. learning a few hiragana does not mean you learned the language. the only people who believe than switching to a european alphabet would make japanese easier or better are people who've had little experience with the language. and it's not like it's something you can simply do overnight. i love how you people come in and act as if you can simply change a fundamental aspect of a language in this day and age.

>Also, hardly anyone in Japan, if anyone at all, knows all the kanji, and they’re still learning to read and write well into high school.

and? do you know every word in the english dictionary? no, you come across words everyday you don't know.

No. Not enough time. I'm swamped under work already, any cut to my taking easy time will break me.

>>4590667
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'Fighting waitress' = 戦うウエイトレス vs たたかううえいとれす vs TATAKAUUEITORESU

And this is why all three writing systems have their use.
God forbid, it wasn't long ago when Japanese computer systems could only display katakana, as then it'd be タタカウウエトレス. It's no wonder alien/robot voices are more than often rendered as katakana.

>>4592219
Actually, "Tatakauueitoresu" has as many letters as "fighting waitress" and you need less strokes to write "Tatakauueitoresu" than to write "戦うウエイトレス".

itt nerds with no girlfriends

Why not? Look at all them runes. Shits just whack.

>>4592270
>itt nerds with no girlfriends

Why would someone prefer having a girlfriend over learning one of the greatest languages that will open up for you the door to the best that humanity has to offer ?

i want to learn japanese one day
but first i want to go deeper into english :)))
i read 4chan every day for practicing

>>4590669
Reading books. Also, I want to be a professional translator at one point in my life.

Why didn't they just make all the kanji pictograms? At least then they'd be easy to remember.

Cause im awesome like that.... and so I can confuse all the Koreans that live around here <_<

>>4592581
Kinda this, translating is a lot of fun.

On a side note I guess..
I'm currently taking Japanese classes at my university and I'm looking for ways to supplement my learning. I'm looking for methods to learn kanji and the ones I found were

Heisig (rtk)
Kanji ABC
De Roo 2001 Kanji (hard to find)
Henshall-Guide to Remembering

Heisig seems like it wouldn't pair well with my class. I was thinking of using Kanji ABC along with the Kanji Learner's Dictionary and maybe a copy of Henshall's book. Any thoughts?

>>4594083
Forgot to say, Nakama is the text book we're using.

>>4590725
>Implying you can do this lurking on 4chan.

>>4594083

Kanjidicks, but it doesn't mesh well with learning vocab

>>4594083
Kanjidicks is pretty good.
www.kanjidamage.com

>>4590675
>>4590808
Basically combine these and you have my reasons.

First started learning it for eroge. Now I actually think the language is really cool. But I'm still mostly learning it for eroge.

I started learning Japanese to play Visual Novels and got pretty far, read a couple in Japanese. Then lots of good VNs started getting translated and I stopped.

Japanese would not work without kanji. There are way too many homonyms.

Ok first, everyone who is saying the language will not work without kanji, fuck off. The Japanese don't run around with a pad and pencil because they are unable to communicate otherwise because of ALL THOSE HOMONYMS. Believe it or not the Japanese got along fine for hundreds of years before they stole Kanji from China.

Second, to those who say kanji is hard. Fuck off. Kanji is easy. It's not like every kanji is a unique snowflake. They all share radicals and elements. Also once you learn them they make reading a lot more enjoyable.

I'm in an American high school.
I'm learning Latin as my foreign language elective. I'm taking AP English Language and Composition. I'm learning Japanese through self-study. And my first language was Chinese, which I'm slowly trying to completely master.
Languages are fun, and learning a few more of them helps me overcome this creeping feeling that I'm inferior to everybody else.

I'm actually planning on starting this summer after College classes are over. Any opinions on a good starter book?

>>4595862
leave

I study Kanjidicks just because it makes me laugh my ass off

>>4595862
>bragging about taking AP Comp

>>4591910

It’s doable. Japanese has 21 phonemes, one fewer than Spanish, so an alphabet with 21 or more letters can be used. Here’s how:

あ=α い=η う=υ え=ε お=ο か=κα が=γα さ=σα ざ=ζα し=ση じ=ζηす=συ ず=ζυ た=τα だ=δα ち=ξη つξυ てぃ=τη とぅ=τυ でぃ=δηどぅ=δυ な=να は=χα ば=βα ぱ=παふ=φυ ふぁ=φα ま=μα や=ιαゆ=ιυ よ=ιο ら=ρα わ=λα ん=ν しゃ=σια

See? I prefer Latin script though.

>>4596040

Genki I & II

Thanks for playing.

>>4590936

(屮゜Д゜)屮 MEARII-SAN!