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Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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| I'm going to start learning Japanese this summer, and I'm looking for some good books/websites. I already know hirigana and katakana, but I want to learn everything else. Anyone know any good books to teach myself Japanese? |
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Re: Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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*bump* same question.... |
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Re: Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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by
 
on 2009-01-31 10:12:00 |
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Are you sure you could handle learning only by books? I'mma suggest that you should go learn at a seminar/classes/center/ something school like. There you would be taught one-on-one and then there would be someone to correct your mistakes. They are professionals who really knows the language and it is their job to teach you. So you would probably learn a thing or two from it. Having a book with you is good in small ways, it's gonna take a lot more patience though... you need to work harder in order to learn from it. Though if there's no choice left but books... It would be nice if there would be other media aside from teh book: Recordings, etc. 
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Re: Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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Learn Hiragana. Right now. I got taught it first.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
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Re: Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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by
on 2009-02-07 11:59:14 |
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Keiri's right about the book thing. As with many subjects, it takes discipline to teach yourself something from a book. I don't really know of any books off hand, but I'm guessing that one that contains conversational phrases will be really helpful for you when you go to Japan. Not just to learn from, but to have as a convenient reference to look to while you're there. Also I think that one of the most thorough ways to learn is either from a class, or from Rosetta Stone. It's really expensive, but I think if you have that kind of money, it's a very good investment, and you can learn a lot pretty quick from it. Or you could always download it from a torr---ACK Anyways there's my two bits. GOod luck! |
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Re: Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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by
on 2009-02-09 10:22:40 |
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try NHK Japanese lessons its good for learning basic conversations. |
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Re: Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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| Try Tofugus Top10 online resources for Japanese learning sites. |
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Re: Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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http://www.guidetojapanese.org/start.html, one of the best guides online if you're really interested in taking up the language. The style of teaching is pretty different from other classes/websites/textbooks, but... ok this is hard to explain. I'll just paste this from the site, it should explain everything. - The problem with conventional textbooks is that they often have the following goals. 1. They want readers to be able to use functional and polite Japanese as quickly as possible. 2. They don't want to scare readers away with terrifying Japanese script and Chinese characters. 3. They want to teach you how to say English phrases in Japanese. Traditionally with romance languages such as Spanish, these goals presented no problems or were nonexistent due to the similarities to English. However, because Japanese is different in just about every way down to the fundamental ways of thinking, these goals create many of the confusing textbooks you see on the market today. They are usually filled with complicated rules and countless number of grammar for specific English phrases. They also contain almost no kanji and so when you finally arrive in Japan, lo and behold, you discover you can't read menus, maps, or essentially anything at all because the book decided you weren't smart enough to memorize Chinese characters. The root of this problem lies in the fact that these textbooks try to teach you Japanese with English. They want to teach you on the first page how to say, "Hi, my name is Smith," but they don't tell you about all the arbitrary decisions that were made behind your back. They probably decided to use the polite form even though learning the polite form before the dictionary form makes no sense. They also might have decided to include the subject even though it's not necessary and excluded most of the time. In fact, the most common way to say something like "My name is Smith" in Japanese is to say "am Smith". That's because most of the information is understood from the context and is therefore excluded. But does the textbook explain the way things work in Japanese fundamentally? No, because they're too busy trying to push you out the door with "useful" phrases right off the bat. The result is a confusing mess of "use this if you want to say this" type of text and the reader is left with a feeling of confusion about how things actually work. The solution to this problem is to explain Japanese from a Japanese point of view. Take Japanese and explain how it works and forget about trying to force what you want to say in English into Japanese. To go along with this, it is also important to explain things in an order that makes sense in Japanese. If you need to know [A] in order to understand [B], don't cover [B] first just because you want to teach a certain phrase. Essentially, what we need is a Japanese guide to learning Japanese grammar.  |
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Re: Recommendations for Learning Japanese?
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Yay thanks for those extra links, I'm already taking classes but this will do just right to add up.
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