/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>8356420

So my idea is to complete the Genki books so I'll have that half-learned grammar background thing I had with French, and then purchase Final motherfucking Fantasy VII on Japanese PSN, and then do the dictionary thing with it. I know some people think it sounds horribly boring, but I get the same satisfaction from it that I used to get from crosswords when I was too young to realize how meaningless it was ... So, to tell you the truth, I enjoy it. It's just that. Them kanjis. Don't they have a million meanings and stuff? Will I be able to do The Crossword Experience if I learn stroke orders, and then draw kanjis into those online kanji dictionaries you can draw them into? Or is there some reason this wouldn't work with Japanese?

Thanks a thousand in advance for your thoughts~

>>8356423
doo it.

>>8356423
why don't you just play a vn with a text hooker and a dictionary?

Remembering a few kanji is the easiest part, it just takes a bit of effort

>>8356423
Not to discourage you, but i did the same thing and still i can't find the meanings for some kanji/grammatical parts...
Anyway maybe you will have better luck than me.

>>8356463
vocabulary is the hardest part of learning any language

vn+ text hooker + anything that will display the kanji when you move the mouse over = fun easy frustration less Japanese learning experience

>>8356499
And Japanese has a HUGE vocabulary, especially compared to French.

>>8356499
No it isn't, it's just memorisation.

>>8356499
Yes, and there is so much more vocabulary than kanji.

>>8356520
so? if you aren't dumb you can learn grammar in a couple weeks. the more languages you learn the less time it takes. vocabulary takes months of study with no shortcuts possible.

All right!

I'll give this a try. Complete the Genkis -> Crossword Experience games and books -> Get frustrated about not knowing kanji -> Do RTK while continuing to wrestle actually Japanese stuff -> Wake up one morning and think, "Hey, I'm actually pretty good >:3" -> Read the next Murakami a year before everyone else

Wish me luck *__*

>>8356546
I was with you up until you said "the next Murakami."

Why the fuck would you do that to yourself?

>>8356546
>RTK
Yeah, you'll need that luck.

>>8356559

... Maybe because I like his books? ;__;

>>8356433
At first I thought it was a great idea, but then I remembered how impossible it is to look that shit up without knowing how to spell it in romaji, or what it means.

I will probably try this too, on 2chan, rather than vidya. I figure that would give more commonly used kanji at the risk of me forever talking like an anonymous faggot.

>>8356572
All Murakami books can be found in English sooner or later.
I dont know about you but I sure find reading something faster and without checking the dictionary every 10pages or so much more enjoyable.

>>8356600

Not really the reason I want to learn Japanese. Just a fun perk :)

>>8356580
Learn to use radicals and stroke order for hand writing recognition.
Midori on the iPad is pretty awesome for that.

Murakami is boring though. I thought /jp/ would be against ultra-mainstream things.

>>8356572
Well stop it. It's really rather pop-drivel type stuff.

>>8356618
I'm not against him because he's mainstream.

I just could never understand how he became mainstream.


OH WAIT. Norwegian Wood. His least "surrealist" and most lament book.

>>8356618

I'm actually from /lit/ :D

https://market.android.com/details?id=org.nick.kanjirecognizer&hl=en
Use this for android.
Work with wwwjdic.

>At the end of Le Petite fucken Prince
>Le Petite Prince
>Petite

>>8356618
I enjoy him, but I'd hardly call him mainstream.

What is the point of this thread? All I see is a very very very obnoxious post.

>>8356631

OP here, and I'm majoring in literature. This might be the safest thing to study in the US, but I'm not there, so it's pretty cool and all that. Anyway, my point is that if there's anyone who has the background to be elitist in this matter, it's me. Like you've maybe played all those visual novels I haven't gotten around to playing yet, or watched the animes I want to watch but never end up watching, I've probably read all those books you've been wanting to read forever, but never gotten around to because it's not one of your primary hobbies. Or maybe you read lots of books too, but anyway -- despite having read loads, Haruki Murakami is in my opinion one of the greatest contemporary writers.

First of all, he is not pop-drivel type stuff. This is basically like claiming Obama is a communist. You're buying into the rhetoric of his critics without seeing what his critics actually stand for. When Murakami first started out, Japan hadn't gotten around to postmodernism, so there was a very powerful literary establishment. If something didn't fit into their expectations for literature, it wasn't. It was pop-cultural garbage. What Murakami did was not give a fuck about Japanese literature. He read Western literature, and when he started writing, he wrote like a Western writer, taking his cues from Kafka and Salinger. When the Japanese literary establishment saw Murakami writing in an informal language ("boku" instead of "watashi"), and getting surreal, they refused to see this in terms of Western literature, but automatically labeled it as decadent pop-drivel. That his books gave up the world, encouraging escape into love, music and literature, didn't help much either, since literature was supposed to have a morally constructing function in society.

>>8356720

But note that this was when Murakami first started out. Today I don't think there's a single Japanese book industry person that doesn't somehow respect him, and though his writing was always awesome literature, in my opinion, he has also matured greatly. Since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles's main character walked out the door looking for his cat, but really himself, and came home with the war crimes of ye olde Japan, there's been a clear, moral nerve to all his work. He's even written non-fiction, like Underground, where he concretely attacks certain aspects of Japanese society and culture. And the so-called literary establishment? Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, one of his greatests critics, said The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles was an important and great book, and publicly congratulated Murakami for winning some prize. Murakami is not pop-drivel, or at least claiming so is very controversial, so if you are doing so, I think you should have a good and clearly expressed reason for thinking so, at least if I am to respect your opinion.

Also. Norwegian Wood is in my opinion not only his best novel, but also my favorite of all time by any writer. I think it's everything a good book should be. Completely magical.

>>8356720 >>8356725
What do you think of Finnegans Wake? I felt that character development of secondary characters was a bit weak. And the main character was a total Mary Sue.

>>8356734

Hahah, you're kidding me. I haven't read that monster ... yet at least, and even if I had, I don't think you could talk about it in such terms, you silly person :3

>>8356725
>Norwegian Wood is in my opinion not only his best novel, but also my favorite of all time by any writer. I think it's everything a good book should be. Completely magical.

My point being that it was a good novel, but that he laments it because it's not only his most popular novel, but his most accessible.
I'm really not going to bother arguing with you about your other points. I just find his obscurantist style and needless symbolism (as prone with many attempted surrealist writers) to be kind of grating. I have admitted Norwegian Wood was a good book, but like I said--least "surrealist."

Whether or not he's been good for Japan's literary community or not is not something I care to argue. I honestly prefer the works of Dazai and other old fogeys behind the whole "I novel" movement.

Then again, I also read Bukowski, so, well, fuck, my opinions aren't really opinions in the first place.

>>8356684
>most popular novelist in Japan
>not mainstream

>>8356785

I think you've misunderstood Murakami. His prose is extremely clean, and poetic in its content, not in terms of the words he picks and the ways he places them. This is the reason why he in fact allows the translations of translations. In other words, he is hardly an obscurantist. He writes it like it is. Neither is he a symbolist. It's about reading, and feeling. His type of surrealism doesn't represent this or that. It's really realism, because he's using surrealism to allow us to see our society, the one where we don't even know where our breakfast comes from, through a different lense. To experience it anew. And that's sort of one thing very good literature tends to do ...

But each to ones tastes, I guess! :)

>>8356423

Be careful to avoid the trap of 'learning the kanji' through flashcards and stuff. They're likely teaching you the Chinese meanings, which are somewhat helpful, but not how they're actually used in Japanese. Kanji aren't often just disconnected things floating around in a sentence, they're attached to each other or other kana for grammatical purposes.

For example, 寿司 is not longevity + govern, it's, sushi. The kanji are involved only because 寿 is pronounced 'su', and 司 = 'shi'.
Another example: 侍 is Samurai in Japanese, but 'Serve' in Chinese, which is somewhat loosely connected but not the same.
Now, there are kanji which carried over their meaning, like 犬, but they're certainly not everything.

So, my point is to avoid memorizing strictly Kanji unless you feel the loosely grounded meanings help you learn. At least, keep in mind that the Japanese and Chinese use Kanji in very different ways.

I have yet to find a source that actually teaches Japanese words though, other than a dictionary....