Language discussion

[Jedo]

I actually would definitely recommend going from hiragana --> katakana --> kanji. If you can't read the phonetic alphabet, how can you be expected to learn the non-phonetic one? I was glad I had a firm understanding of the two alphabets first. And I also wouldn't really worry about learning to write until you can read both alphabets, and then learning how to write katakana first since its easier. I'm also a proponent of learning from romanji for a few reasons. First of all, if you don't then you can't learn anything until you know hiragana well enough to read it automatically which will slow down your grammar/speaking ability relative to someone who does. Second of all even after you've "learned" to read, the slowness of reading hiragana will be another thing to work through when you're trying to learn basic speaking patterns. Both methods have their advantages. I'm also an advocate of learning desu/masu form first, which is what I assume you're doing. If you're serious about learning, you also might want to think about getting a textbook which will consolidate a lot of the necessary information.

[HermanHiddema]

@hailthorn: Check your messages!

[hailthorn011]

@HermanHiddema: I sent a message to my opponent. I'll post a message in the tournament thread when I get a schedule for the game (I forgot to add that in the PM)

@Jedo: When I said I wasn't going to bother with Romaji, I guess I stuck my foot in my mouth by saying I wouldn't use it "at all" because that's obviously not true. I'm using it to learn the sounds of words, and I'll probably have to use it when I initially begin learning sentence structure and things like that. Like I said, I'm an utter beginner at this stuff. So I imagine I'll likely go about things wrong quite a bit. By the way, I'm using a program for Japanese by Living Language. Ever heard of them? It seems pretty good. It has several books, a complementary audio CD, and I just noticed it actually came with a writing book as well. And there are supposed to be flash cards and games available. Haven't looked into it yet. I also got an addittional Japanese-English dictionary and a grammar book.

[Kirby]

Of course, learn hiragana and katakana before kanji. That shouldn't take that long, thoughh. I'm just saying that, in my case, I wanted to just learn vicab and grammar after learning hiragana, and I don't think that it was a good long-term approach.

If you are serious about learning, kanji is inevitable, so I'd get started as soon as I knew the phonetic alphabets.

[Buri]

Greetings,
I found the fastest way to securely learn both Katakana and Hiragana was the 2 books by James Heisig(Remembering the Katakana/Remembering the hirakana). he gets away from the usual rote system using imaginative memory in a unique way. One learns both systems solidly in about six hours spread over a few weeks. From there I learnt to write and read about 4000 kanji using his Remembering the Kanji books. Of course it is not always true but my consistent experience has been that those people I meet with fluent kanji reading and writing at a high level IE dissertation in Japanese , have all used these books. The other interesting thing is they still -enjoy- kanji whereas most students find them a real chore and quit fairly early on.
Sadly, of all the kanji I know, most Japanese　people don`t use them anymore.....
Best wishes,
Buri

[hailthorn011]

Greetings,
I found the fastest way to securely learn both Katakana and Hiragana was the 2 books by James Heisig(Remembering the Katakana/Remembering the hirakana). he gets away from the usual rote system using imaginative memory in a unique way. One learns both systems solidly in about six hours spread over a few weeks. From there I learnt to write and read about 4000 kanji using his Remembering the Kanji books. Of course it is not always true but my consistent experience has been that those people I meet with fluent kanji reading and writing at a high level IE dissertation in Japanese , have all used these books. The other interesting thing is they still -enjoy- kanji whereas most students find them a real chore and quit fairly early on.
Sadly, of all the kanji I know, most Japanese　people don`t use them anymore.....
Best wishes,
Buri

I've seen that name several times now. I'll definitely have to check into it on Tuesday when I'm downtown for school (during a break of course).

[Phelan]

So, you wouldn't consider it a good idea to simply learn Hiragana, then jump to Katana, and finally onto Kanji?

Please don't jump into a katana, that would (at least) severely slow down your learning.

[hailthorn011]

So, you wouldn't consider it a good idea to simply learn Hiragana, then jump to Katana, and finally onto Kanji?

Please don't jump into a katana, that would (at least) severely slow down your learning.

Oopsy, you're right, I highly doubt that would be a very good idea!

[Bill Spight]

So, you wouldn't consider it a good idea to simply learn Hiragana, then jump to Katana, and finally onto Kanji?

Please don't jump into a katana, that would (at least) severely slow down your learning.

Except that go terms are often written in katakana.

[Kirby]

Another reason to study kanji: How easy is it to confuse 片仮名 and 刀? (Though, I wouldn't necessarily prefer the former to カタカナ.)

[Li Kao]

So, you wouldn't consider it a good idea to simply learn Hiragana, then jump to Katana, and finally onto Kanji?

Please don't jump into a katana, that would (at least) severely slow down your learning.

Except that go terms are often written in katakana.

If somebody were to write go terms with a katana, I'd worry.

When learning Kanji, don't memorize their readings in isolation. I recommend only learning readings as a side-effect of learning the same word both in kana and kanji.

[hailthorn011]

Well I plan to eventually study them all. But I think if I try to learn multiple sets of characters at once, it could get quite confusing very fast.

[xed_over]

Well I plan to eventually study them all. But I think if I try to learn multiple sets of characters at once, it could get quite confusing very fast.

nah, its not as bad as you may think

think of hiragana as cursive and katakana as printed versions of the same character. (that may not be how you should really think of them, but doing so can help ease the feeling of being overwhelmed with "so many characters" -- i.e., in english we have 104 characters: cursive upper and lowercased, 52, and printed upper and lowercased, 52)

[hailthorn011]

Well I plan to eventually study them all. But I think if I try to learn multiple sets of characters at once, it could get quite confusing very fast.

nah, its not as bad as you may think

think of hiragana as cursive and katakana as printed versions of the same character. (that may not be how you should really think of them, but doing so can help ease the feeling of being overwhelmed with "so many characters" -- i.e., in english we have 104 characters: cursive upper and lowercased, 52, and printed upper and lowercased, 52)

<< I'm not too good with cursive, to be honest. Then again when I learned it back in grade school, I hated writing (and love it now. Go figure). So I never really tried to learn it. But I see what you're getting at. And that brings me to one of my prominent questions about Hiragana and Katakana: Are they interchangeable when it comes to writing Japanese specific words(Not foreign based words)?

For example. I could write:

こんにちは。(Hiragana)
OR
コンニチハ。(Katakana)

Both mean Konnichiwa.

Edit: Actually, this gives me an idea. What if I learn the Katakana characters that correspond with the Hiragana characters I'm learning? For example, I'm learning 5 key Hiragana characters this week (as mentioned before) so I figure I could also learn the matching Katakana characters as well. This would make the process a lot faster. Not easier, but faster.

[jts]

As a learner, you can certainly write in either style, so long as you pick one or the other. In actual Japanese usage, hiragana is used for normal writing and katakana for foreign loan words (in much the same way that we italicize laisser-faire or Schadenfreude). They also use katakana in the contexts where we might use block letters, I believe - filling out forms and so on.

If you can see clearly the difference between the angular, simplified katakana and the flowing, curvy hiragana, learning the pairs at the same time makes perfect sense. If you can't immediately look at one an identify which type of kana it is, then you might end up getting confused about which is which.

If you want to be really ambitious, you might also consider pairing each kana pair with the kanji on which it is based.