Learning Japanese

[Biondy]

I'd recommend 'minano nihongo' as text book.
http://www.amazon.com/Minna-Nihongo-Boo ... 250&sr=8-1

I recommend the book as well.

[OtakuViking]

The thing about learning Japanese is that many people will give you stupid advice or tell you stupid things like 'don't listen to the Japanese they speak in anime'. By all accounts it is still Japanese and it will help your vocab and listening ALOT.

From my point of view, differentiating between formal and informal japanese is rather unimportant for the beginner. I consider it a language finesse which should actually come rather naturally through proper immersion and study. Don't get text books that are boring and dry, use living japanese to learn. Don't concern yourself with the difference between da desu and all the other funky stuff which will soon (if you're studying like me www.ajatt.com), come naturally to you.

In the beginning it's all about learning the writing system basics and basic sentence structures and vocab. I will mention www.ajatt.com again because it's hands down the best website to help you with learning Japanese in existence.

Keep at it consistently bro. GL.

[arn214]

I started learning japanese 5 years ago, then stopped after a year because of busy schedule.
If anyone wants to learn japanese in a fun way, I'd recommend this site http://www.yesjapan.com/learn_japanese/pages/tour/
The site is not always updated, but it is still enjoyable. You can also check out their free videos

[cdybeijing]

I used anki when I learned the kana a couple years ago. I don't have my own computer right now though so I can't install any software and I don't have a smart phone so phone apps are out.

Edit: About Bill's suggestion. I saw a similar suggestion on another forum. It's basically suggesting to read through a website about Japanese grammer that's written entirely in Japanese after getting past the basics of he language. I don't know how helpful it is but if you can do it I guess your Japanese would be pretty good (at least reading would be).

Download and install Anki. Use it every day for a year.

[apetresc]

I would also highly recommend the Japanese Stack Exchange. It's built on the same engine (and by the same team) as Stack Overflow which you may be familiar with. It follows a pretty strict Q&A format, and they're not very tolerant of open-ended discussion, but if you have something you can phrase as a specific question it is almost guaranteed a very good answer (something like 98% answer rate).

[Atsumori]

I know I'm kind of bringing this thread back from the dead- I hope that replying to a thread that's two months dormant isn't considered rude here. I did want to toss my two cents in here though.

First off, it really is important that you not _emulate_ anime speech when speaking Japanese, if you don;t understand the implications of that speech. It's not just a matter of levels of formality. If you are a beginner at Japanese that's going to be pretty obvious to a native speaker of Japanese, and they'll likely forgive you for using plain speech rather than teinei (every-day polite) speech. I guess you know the old saw about the dog who speaks- it's not that he speaks well, it is that he speaks at all. So if you bust out some garbled Japanese you learned from anime you will likely just get a pat on the head, if the only problem with it is that it is too informal.

The problem is that anime characters often use language that is _really_ rude. In the worst case you might pick up the idea, from certain anime series, that it is OK to refer to other people as "kisama." If you actually do that you are not going to get a pat on the head, even if the Japanese person you're talking to realizes that you don't know any better. Just like a Japanese person who introduced himself to your grandmother by saying "Hey, how you doing, you [word that is pretty much the least acceptable word in American English, but is more widely used in British English]?" would cast a pall over the room even if everyone there understood that he didn't know any better. The difference is that you will hear language that rude in a mainstream show for Japanese teenagers, or kids, even, because rudeness in Japanese is more contextual than obscenity in English- it's fine to depict it .

Even if you know that kisama is verboten, you might pick up the idea that it is OK to call people "omae," for instance. You won't see anyone in HnG calling anyone "kisama," but _everyone_ is "omae" to Shindou. That's still pretty rude.

On the other hand, I think it's fine to pick up Japanese from anime, as long as it isn't your only source. I learned Japanese mainly by listening and reading, and a lot of what I listened to was anime. But I also got a couple of textbooks, meant to cover two years of intensive University Japanese. I didn't use them the way I think I was supposed to though- I read the first year's worth in about 2 weeks, skipping all exercises, and not worrying about learning the vocabulary from lists. Then I watched a couple of hundred hours of Japanese TV, and reread it even faster, and read through the second year text in a couple of weeks. I was simultaneously reading some parallel texts.

I took a couple of years of intensive Chinese in University, which was longer ago for me than I want to admit. My Chinese is pretty abysmal- that's partially because of disuse, but I was never able to just pick up a Chinese novel and read it, or just watch a movie in Chinese. But within a couple of years of starting to learn Japanese I was able to read contemporary novels and watch Japanese dramas without subs, and without missing all that much.

I might have spent more time on the Japanese than I did on the Chinese (or maybe not- I had Chinese Chinese professors who assigned an insane amount of drudge homework, so I really did spend a lot of time on Chinese when I was in school.) But the Japanese never felt like drudgery, since I never pushed too hard on any one thing (and also because I didn't have a Chinese guy shouting "dui bu dui?" at me, and spitting on me, every few minutes...)- if I had a hard time understanding a point of grammar I skipped it, and it generally turned out that a while later I had come to understand it without knowing when I had. The only thing I ever really studied was vocabulary, and I didn't do that until I already had a strong core vocabulary of a few thousand words- enough for most situations, but not enough to read literary novels from the early Shouwa period, say. Well, I still have problems with Souseki, to be honest.

I think it is really counter-productive to "study" a language. You want, I think, to treat the whole thing very lightly. Read through the text very quickly, get what you can get from doing that now. Watch some Japanese TV, and try to hear things you noticed in the text. Go back to the text for answers occasionally, and seek out more advanced texts (which are hard to find, since 99 out of 100 people who start learning Japanese never get past the two intensive semester level, which is maybe 15 kyuu in Go nomenclature, if we are being generous. There is a huge market for beginner books, but very little market for more advanced books, outside of Japan) when you can't find explanations for what you are hearing in the basic texts. And have some faith- what seems mysterious today will seem obvious in a while, even if you don't try to figure it out.

EDIT: BTW, most texts are also likely to lead you astray here. They tend to introduce the word "anata" as if it were equivalent to the English "You." If you take that literally, as most students of Japanese do for a while, the result is going to be very unfortunate. The texts should hang a sign on that word: "Be very careful about using the word 'anata'." But they don't, generally, and that is really worse than 95% of what you might pick up from anime.

[Kirby]

In my opinion, you should not care about the specific form you use. You are expected to make mistakes as a foreigner. As you practice speaking with people more, your mistakes will become fewer naturally.

My personal strategy is this:
1.) Get a really good grasp on how grammar works.
2.) Once step 1 is done, vocab, vocab, vocab! Memorize as many vocabulary words as possible.
3.) Throughout steps 1 and 2, practice speaking, writing, and reading as much as possible.

[gustav]

I warmly recommend Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide.
It does a good job at making you approach the language in a 'Japanese way', as opposed to trying to map your English to equivalent Japanese constructs.
It gave me more than any of the printed books I tried (including Genki) and I have a feeling it will appeal to other go players as well. Plus it's free.

[Atsumori]

In my opinion, you should not care about the specific form you use. You are expected to make mistakes as a foreigner. As you practice speaking with people more, your mistakes will become fewer naturally.

Well, I'd agree that if you are a complete beginner at Japanese you're probably fine using the dictionary forms- I actually kind of strongly disagree with the way some approaches teach Japanese, where they teach teinei forms (i.e. renyoukei+masu for verbs, etc.) first. This has the advantage that people are speaking reasonably polite Japanese from the beginning, and it is probably the right thing to do if you are trying to teach businessmen to stumble through a few greetings before reverting to English on a business trip. But it's the wrong way to learn if you intend to learn Japanese well, IMHO.

My point was that the problem with anime Japanese isn't just that it's in an informal register. Some of it is really rude. If you're still at the head-patting stage of learning Japanese people will forgive you for speaking informally. They might not forgive you if you speak insultingly. Even if they know you don't know better, it will color their perception of you. Learning Japanese from anime is fine, as long as you have enough context to know what bits are weird. You have to have that though, or you'll wind up calling everyone "omae," and that's really not acceptable, even if you're a beginner. Or you'll start calling yourself "uchi" because you recently watched an anime that featured a rough girl from Oosaka. That's not, at least, insulting, but it will make a very strange impression on whoever you're talking to, particularly if you're male.

My personal strategy is this:
1.) Get a really good grasp on how grammar works.
2.) Once step 1 is done, vocab, vocab, vocab! Memorize as many vocabulary words as possible.
3.) Throughout steps 1 and 2, practice speaking, writing, and reading as much as possible.

That's not a bad strategy, I think, if you modify it a bit. The thing is that trying to do 1.) before you start on 2.) and 3.) is hopeless. It's the equivalent of "Getting Strong at Go in Secret." Unless you actually need to use Japanese in your day-to-day life I'd advise you to learn to understand and read Japanese first. You'll naturally do that if you spend most of your free time watching Japanese media, and reading Japanese books. I wouldn't bother studying grammar (except for the very basics, of course) until you have questions that you can't answer for yourself. You can learn Japanese pretty well without studying, but you can't learn Japanese pretty well just by studying.

Study is important though- one sentence from a book can clear up a serious misunderstanding that you've had for a long time. Here's a good example that I wish I could give credit for, but I have forgotten who proposed it: What does the Japanese word "hotondo" mean? If you learn Japanese purely by listening you might think, for a long time, that it means something like "most." But it actually means something like "almost all." That's a pretty big difference in meaning, but it's one that will take you a long time to narrow down on your own, just through listening. It's really useful to have someone point that out, but it is most efficient if it is pointed out at a point where you already mostly understand sentences with the word "hotondo" in them.

You can't learn much about Japanese by simply studying Japanese grammar. You can't learn Japanese by exclusively studying grammar. You could learn Japanese without ever studying grammar, but that would be inefficient. So my advice is to learn Japanese by listening to an enormous amount of Japanese very attentively, and studying grammar when you wind up with questions you can't answer easily just by listening a little more. I'm tempted to think that there is a go-learning strategy like this, but I'm not a good enough go player to say much about that.

Edit: I guess what I am suggesting, shades of Fairbairn's recent epiphany, is that you take a holistic approach to learning Japanese. I am not crazy about the word "holistic" though, as it reminds me of all the damned hippies I was raised by who couldn't manage to get much done . Perhaps this is a prejudice I should get over.

[Kirby]

...
That's not a bad strategy, I think, if you modify it a bit. ...

I will try not to get emotional in my response as I have in the past, but it offends me when you word things like this, particularly since you likely know nothing of my Japanese ability, or how fast I learned it. Have you ever taken the JLPT?

Admittedly, though, I studied Japanese quite a bit while I was actually living in Japan, too, so that likely means that the method that I wrote was actually slightly different in practice.

Anyway, I believe that people can learn in many different ways. I was merely explaining what worked for me.

[Atsumori]

...
That's not a bad strategy, I think, if you modify it a bit. ...

I will try not to get emotional in my response as I have in the past, but it offends me when you word things like this,

To be honest, I can't see anything particularly offensive about the way I worded that. I try to avoid offending people when it is costless to do so, but if the cost of not offending people is never offering an opinion, I guess I will go ahead and offend them. Honi soit qui mal y pense and all that. I'm much more interested in talking about how one can effectively learn Japanese than I am interested in being offended by comments in that vein.

particularly since you likely know nothing of my Japanese ability, or how fast I learned it.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, tbh. You laid out a study plan, and I offered an opinion about it. I should add that the study plan you laid out implied that your Japanese was not as good as mine (my issues with Japanese are not much about grammar these days.) I offered you some friendly advice. You are free to take it, or not take it. You're free to be offended by it too, I guess, but I'm not sure I'm obligated to care.

Have you ever taken the JLPT?

No, I haven't. I'm not sure why I would bother, tbh- I guess if I had passed the JLPT 1 I could wave that in your face now, but that's not enough incentive. I can read "souroubun" style Japanese, and, given enough time, I can even decode kanbun (assuming I do a lot of research into its subjects, but that is a given.) I'm mostly interested in getting better at that, and I'm not sure how taking the JLPT would help me there.

Admittedly, though, I studied Japanese quite a bit while I was actually living in Japan, too, so that likely means that the method that I wrote was actually slightly different in practice.

Anyway, I believe that people can learn in many different ways. I was merely explaining what worked for me.

People might learn in different ways, to some extent, but I tend to get skeptical when I hear that phrase. I think there are certain ways of learning things that are generally better, for pretty much everyone. I'm inclined to argue for what I think those ways are. I understand that you might disagree with me, and argue back. I guess I don't understand why you would be offended. And, tbh, no matter what I say someone might be offended- unless I understand why they are offended, and agree that they are justified in being offended, I am not able to care much that they are offended.

[Jedo]

As for the order of learning things, I also tend to follow the idea that grammar is more important. You can always drill more vocab, and it's easier to pick up vocab from watching things than it is grammar. As for learning desu/masu first, I think it's for the best. If you were going to be sent to the hyperbolic time chamber to learn japanese for a few years, then I would agree that learning direct style first makes more sense for obvious reasons. But if you were to do that in school, you would have two problems. First, the vast majority of people who stop after one or two semesters would never be able to use their too informal japanese. Second, even those who stuck with it would have to wait a while before actually being able to talk to a Japanese person without seeming too forward.

The textbook that I used at first in college was one called Japanese the Spoken Language. It's pretty controversial for several reasons. First of all, the entire thing is in romaji, and a weird form of it at that ( mount huzi, siturei simasu) The book expects that you will be taught reading/ writing elsewhere, which is what the teachers did. The idea is for beginning students not to be distracted by struggling to read the kana, and being able to focus all their energy on the grammar/vocab. The other thing about JSL was that it stressed grammar over vocab; there wouldn't be all that much new vocab for every chapter/ but there would be pages of new grammatical structures.

While this book garners as much disdain as it does praise, I was thankful to it for receiving a strong foundation in grammar and speaking ability. While my vocab was generally more limited, this was much easier to fix than fundamental problems in grammatical understanding would have been.

[Go_Japan]

First, about me...
I speak Japanese rather fluently (in the technical sense... i.e. smoothly with a good accent). I do not have an extremely wide vocabulary of technical words. I do not have a large Kanji vocabulary for reading. I get by with average day-to-day activities, but I cannot read most longer texts or articles.
In terms of learning languages, I really think it is important to define the purpose first. There are different ways to teach/learn depending on the purpose.
For example, most Japanese students learn English through wrote memorization and vocabulary and grammar training in texts. They rarely use the languages. This is because they are being trained to pass tests and to read texts in English. They are not being taught to communicate with foreigners through conversation. If you ever taught English in Japan, you know what I mean. When I was a teacher, we had to separate "beginners" from "true beginners" because almost all the students were "beginners" (knew vocab and grammar but couldn't create a sentence verbally). I had one MD who could read journal articles from the AMA, but could not get through customs at the airport.
I started learning Japanese in College. We used two techniques: one is through grammar and vocabulary memorization by a Ph.D. in Japanese linguistics 3 days a week, and 2 days a week we had situational-functional education provided by a Japanese native speaker. This was intended to balance the communication/fluency aspect with the technical grammar/vocab/kanji aspect.
In the end, after moving to Japan, I completely stopped studying on my own. This meant a huge increase in my communication fluency (because I had to speak every day), and a severe reduction in my ability to read and write.

Depending on your goals with Japanese, there are probably a variety of teachers and textbooks that will suit your needs.
IMHO

[gustav]

Here are some word frequency lists for different types of go-related texts. The "Game Commentaries" frequencies are probably the most useful.

There is a little bit of documentation here and if you want to play with the code it can be found here.

[eoi]

Gustav, the frequency lists are really cool. I may turn the more frequent words into Anki files (ankisrs.com), my favorite way to learn vocab and kanji.

I'm an intermediate Japanese student (have taken evening classes for a little over 6 years, 2 longish trips to Japan). For me, I need a class, so I recommend Japan-American Society or other classes (in DC, I took ILI classes for a long time; we used "Japanese for Busy People"). I used the online JOI classes at japonin.com to prepare for the N3 JLPT classes (failed, alas, but passed all parts, even listening), and liked them as a good chance to speak (all in Japanese, usually 2-3 people, sometimes just yourself for an individual lesson, good nice teachers). I'm terrible at conversation, but in my JASW and JOI classes, I was strangely enough one of the best readers, I think because of using Anki files a lot (a spaced repetition computer flashcard system).

Right now my goal is reading 10 Japanese books this year, but I changed from "real books" like Soseki's to anything, so I've read 7 Hikaru no Go mangas, and have started a tesuji problem book 「ポケット手筋２００」 put out by Nihon Kiin. I use the "Termes de Go" list of Jerome Hubert which I printed out. Hikaru is great fun, and is all furigana, so I just need to use my Canon Wordtank. The tesuji book really doesn't require reading at all, so I have 2 placemarks, for go and for Japanese, but to read the Japanese without furigana I need to use a Nintendo DS with dictionary software that recognizes written kanji. Good practice for writing, too.

I found excellent advice somewhere about learning Japanese, that when you are stuck, return to the things you love, and I'm really enjoying Hikaru and studying go, which I haven't looked at in 5 years or more.

Good luck, everyone, on learning Japanese!