Language discussion

[hailthorn011]

As a native speaker of English, I don't think there is anything special about English.

So, my first week of study has proven successful so far. As noted, I learned the following characters: こ (Ko), ん (N), ち (Chi), は (Ha), に (Ni).

Tomorrow I will pick 5 more Hiragana characters for the next seven days! And of course I'll be learning some key words along the way.

[Jedo]

In terms of Hiragana, I think it's a good idea to learn them in order, as in a i u e o ka ki ku ke ko. Of course the disadvantage with this is that you can't really learn vocab/grammar until you've finished the alphabet, but that's the argument for using romaji.

[yoyoma]

In terms of Hiragana, I think it's a good idea to learn them in order, as in a i u e o ka ki ku ke ko. Of course the disadvantage with this is that you can't really learn vocab/grammar until you've finished the alphabet, but that's the argument for using romaji.

I really dislike the idea of learning a language without learning their alphabet. IMO Romaji is good for people who are *not* trying to learn Japanese, and just need to read/write simple things like names of people and cities. But if you plan to learn more than a handful of Japanese words, why not learn the alphabet first?

[palapiku]

I learned all of Hiragana in a day. I don't see why you would want to spend months on it. Leave some time for the kanji.

[hailthorn011]

I learned all of Hiragana in a day. I don't see why you would want to spend months on it. Leave some time for the kanji.

Not everyone can learn at the same rate as you. It's fantastic that you could do that, but I cannot.

[palapiku]

Well, have you tried? I assure you that you can learn much quicker than five characters a week.

What I did was create a deck of flashcards (cutting the flashcards took like half an hour...) with hiragana on one side and romaji on the other, grab five or so flashcards, go through them until memorized, put them aside, grab five more, go through those, return to the original five, mix these together, go through them a few times, grab five more... Stop whenever it feels like too much and then just keep going through the ones you have already covered until you're okay with them. Then add more.

This way you can memorize things incredibly quickly, but they will also slip away very quickly. So you have to keep doing it the rest of the day. And the next day. And go through the whole deck once in a while to refresh them. A physical deck of flashcards is incredibly useful to have and if nothing else, I strongly recommend that you get one.

You have to be willing to put some effort into it because if you want to learn Japanese, you still have to memorize several thousand Kanji, and Hiragana is simply child's play compared to that...

[hailthorn011]

Well, have you tried? I assure you that you can learn much quicker than five characters a week.

What I did was create a deck of flashcards (cutting the flashcards took like half an hour...) with hiragana on one side and romaji on the other, grab five or so flashcards, go through them until memorized, put them aside, grab five more, go through those, return to the original five, mix these together, go through them a few times, grab five more... Stop whenever it feels like too much and then just keep going through the ones you have already covered until you're okay with them. Then add more.

This way you can memorize things incredibly quickly, but they will also slip away very quickly. So you have to keep doing it the rest of the day. And the next day. And go through the whole deck once in a while to refresh them. A physical deck of flashcards is incredibly useful to have and if nothing else, I strongly recommend that you get one.

You have to be willing to put some effort into it because if you want to learn Japanese, you still have to memorize several thousand Kanji, and Hiragana is simply child's play compared to that...

My objective isn't to "memorize" Hiragana. It's to know it. Know it like I know English. When I type this sentence, I don't even have to think about what I'm writing. The letters, words, grammar, ect. all come naturally to me because I've had years and years of having it pounded into my head. This is what I plan to accomplish with Hiragana. And yes, I've created flash cards for the first five. That's for sound recognition, of course. But then I flip them over and if it says "Ko" I write こ.

An example of this was when I was learning German. I used that German as often as I could. I greeted people in German (my folks got sick of me talking in German). I sang the alphabet. I counted in German. The result? I don't remember a lot from those classes, but I can still count in German, still greet someone no matter what time of the day it is, and even recite the alphabet (the characters are pronounced differently) even if it's been a week or a month since I last tried.

And I don't want to just know Hiragana. I want to be able to write it. So while learning the 5 Hiragana per week, it gives me time to learn the strokes necessary, have extensive practice with writing them, and even learn words that use these Hiragana.

The fruit of this labor is that I can now write Konnichi wa in Hiragana without even having to think about it because I took the time to drill those characters into my head.

So my opinion that memorizing something and knowing it CAN BE different. I'm not trying to call your method wrong by any means. But I'm going by what has been successful for me (which it has proven to work thus far).

Besides, whatever I learn now is more of a leg up because I'm going to be taking several Japanese courses throughout my college career. TCC is very limited in what it offers though: Japanese for business, and Japanese for tourism. However I plan to take these just to have that behind me. And then I'm going to take a full on course once I get to ODU (a four year college).

So yes I'm definitely making it unnecessarily long. But I'm not trying to learn it as fast as possible. Right now, I'm learning Japanese for pleasure essentially so I can go at my own pace. And 9 weeks isn't too bad. That's just a little over 2 months.

Could I go faster? Yes, undoubtedly. I had the 5 characters memorized in three days. But as I've said, I want to take it slow and make sure it really sticks.

As for Kanji, yeah, that will be fun to learn. I know that already. But I at least want to know Hiragana before I move to Kanji.

[Jedo]

I really dislike the idea of learning a language without learning their alphabet. IMO Romaji is good for people who are *not* trying to learn Japanese, and just need to read/write simple things like names of people and cities. But if you plan to learn more than a handful of Japanese words, why not learn the alphabet first?

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting ignoring the Japanese written language. The idea is that if you learn grammar/vocab from romaji for a while at first, you will be able to learn that stuff much faster and more fluenty than from kana. Of course reading practice is also important (which can be done separately), so at the end of the day it comes down to wether you want to focus on your writing ability or your speaking ability.

[Kirby]

...The idea is that if you learn grammar/vocab from romaji for a while at first, you will be able to learn that stuff much faster and more fluenty than from kana. ...

In my opinion, learning directly from romaji might be slightly faster at first, but I don't think that it will lead to greater fluency at that grammar/vocab in the long run. Compared to the rest of the language, it takes very little time to learn hiragana, for example.

Added to this, fluency comes from practice. So by practicing reading hiragana through your study, you gain fluency in reading it.

Personally, I recognize a Japanese word faster in hiragana than in romaji (except for words like "sushi", which are adopted into English), and in some cases, it's faster to read text with kanji than if it were written purely in hiragana (kanji breaks up components of a sentence so nicely). Anyway, learning a new alphabet indeed involves a learning curve, but if you desire to achieve fluency in the long run, I feel that it is great to get started on it as soon as possible.

Regarding fluency in writing vs. fluency in speaking ability, if you want to increase your speaking ability, I would gather that the solution is not necessarily to study romaji, but rather to... practice speaking in Japanese.

tl;dr: Study what you are interested in becoming proficient at. If you want to be proficient at reading text naturally written in Japanese... Practice reading text written in natural Japanese. If you want to get good at speaking... Practice speaking.

Learning stuff seems hard at first, but with practice, you can do anything.

[BaghwanB]

My favorite anime language scene comes from "Samurai Champloo" where the illiterate character says "I can read! That's "no" and that's "no"!" while pointing to the round "no" kana on the menu (IMO, one of the easiest to recognize since it looks so different from all the others).

For the kana, I took a set of 5 each day and copied them down 5-10 times in a notepad and then built on a new set each day (reducing the frequency when I was up to 30+ kana). If I'm not in practice a few still throw me, but I was able to get a firm grip on them in under a month. "Hiragana Gambatte" and "Katakana Gambatte" were great book aids for me. Your mileage may vary...

Bruce "That's a ko, and THAT's a ko" Young

[hailthorn011]

Week Two Studies: Chapter 2

Hiragana Characters: 8. Yes, I know this is 3 more than the specified 5 per week, but I added Ba, De, and Ge since I'll be focusing on learning the vowels as well. I and U are ones I'm also already very familiar with. So really, I'm learning 6. I added them just to practice using them and drawing them. This chapter also lists several more Hiragana I may add to my list of Hiragana flash cards. I'll decide based on how well I do with the following 8:

い = I
あ = A
う = U
え = E
お = O
ば = Ba
で = De
げ = Ge

Key Words: Last week my key words were based around common greetings, asking how someone was, and learning to say goodbye. This week will focus on the following words.

1. さん - San (Mr.)
2. せんせい - Sensei (teacher)
3. ひと - hito (person)
4. おんな - onna (female)
5. おとこ - otoko (male)
6. おんなのひと - onna no hito (woman)
7. おとこのひと - otoko no hito (man)
8. がくせい - gakusee (student)
9.~ではあるなせん - de wa arimasen (to not be)
10. ~がいます - ga imasu (to have/there is) (For people or animals)
11. か - ka (Question particle)
12. はいますか - wa imasu ka (Do you have...?/ Is there...?(For a person or animal)
13. いいえ - lie (no)
14. ~はいません -wa inasen (to have not.../There is not...(For a person or animal)
15. きょうだい - Kyoodai (siblings, one's own)
16. ごきょうだい - gokyoodai (siblings, someone else's)
17. あに - ani (older brother, one's own)
18. おにいさん - oniisan (older brother, someone else's)
19. おとうと - otooto (younger brother, one's own)
20. おとうとさん- otootosan (younger brother, someone else's)

One thing I didn't do last week (which I will incorporate into this week) was fully learn the Hiragana representation of the words I learned. Some I will recognize, but some I will have to learn. Inevitably this means I'll probably be learning even more Hiragana each week. (I know the following Hiragana spellings for: Konban wa, desu, watashi wa desu, Konnichi wa,

So the aforementioned key words will be learned strictly by Hiragana. Some of the characters I can already recognize. Obviously I'll rely on the Romaji at first. And I will of course still be going over what I learned the previous week.

By the end of this week, I should be able to:
1. Address and refer to people.
2. Express to be and not to be.
3. Use the particle の no
4. Use basic vocabulary related to the family.
5. Express, I have, There is/are (people and animals)
6. Ask questions.
7. Use the particles が ga and か ka
8. Begin to describe who people are and what they do.

Anyway, this chapter has a lot of vocabulary for me to learn so I will likely break this up into 2 or three weeks. Sure that's probably far slower than I need to go, but there's a lot of information to process here as you can tell by the things I should be able to do. So I may also simply learn all of the Hiragana in the aforementioned vocabulary words. However there are even more vocabulary words for me to learn. I simply listed 20 of 30.

The reason I want to take around 3 weeks for this is because I also have college and that cuts into my Japanese learning time. That and homework. So I figure 3 weeks SHOULD be enough to learn all that I need to. If not, what's another week? The easiest part will be learning the Hiragana. So I'm not too worried about that part. It's the grammar and the vocabulary words I'm mostly concerned with.

[Jedo]

Looks like you're off to a good start!

I'm glad to see that you're differentiating between ingroup/outgroup stuff, which is very important in Japanese. The order you're learning hiragana in seems a little strange though. Why で　before て? I know that learning them in the ka ki ku ke ko order helped me the most.

Also, where you wrote わいます　／わいません　think you mean はいます／はいません。　Same thing with ではありません。

Anyway, keep at it!

[hailthorn011]

Looks like you're off to a good start!

I'm glad to see that you're differentiating between ingroup/outgroup stuff, which is very important in Japanese. The order you're learning hiragana in seems a little strange though. Why で　before て? I know that learning them in the ka ki ku ke ko order helped me the most.

Also, where you wrote わいます　／わいません　think you mean はいます／はいません。　Same thing with ではありません。

Anyway, keep at it!

ありがとうございます！ I was still sort of waking up when I wrote that so I kept saying "wa" and put "wa" not "ha" lol.

[badukJr]

My suggestion is to stop learning the hiragana randomly and start learning them by their normal groupings. Many conjugations modify words in a way that moves up and down the groupings systematically. Information in Japanese is also grouped together by these groupings, so knowing the order is important. The ordering of the syllabary is even more important than the ordering of the alphabet in English.

Another thing, in general, is to not worry so much about having a 100% lock on everything before moving on to the next topic. It is possible to do this now, but soon the breadth of the language will explode and if you try to lock down everything 100% you'll get frustrated and maybe give up. Language learning isn't a memorization game, its more about using it and screwing up 100 times to get things right.

[badukJr]

Here is an ok hiragana chart

http://hararie-japan-tokyo-tokyo.com/ja ... ichida.gif

Its good to use resources that have no roman characters present at all, as your brain will always try to find a way to cheat.