/jp/ - Otaku Culture

kill yourself and reincarnate as a japanese person

>>3774679
Move to japan with no money. Work shitty jobs. Learn japanese.

It can't be helped. Move to japan. immersion is the fastest way.

Kill a Japanese man and consume his brain.

Pay someone to translate everything for you.
This assumes you have easy access to money.s

>>3774685
I want to learn it myself, but it's such a pain in the ass.

smart.fm is a good place to start.

if you can memorize the hirigana and katakana, you'll know the ABCs, and then it's just vocab and grammar from there.

>>3774735
AND THOUSANDS OF KANJI

Japanese God here : Japanese is not harder nor easier than anything else.
Which means THERE ARE NO EASY WAY of learning it.
It's not hard per se, but you have to be ready to put your ass into it everyday for at least 1 hour (not necessarily in 1 session, 4 sessions of 15minutes being much more efective).

Fact : people looking for "easy way " to do things usually don't do anything at all.

http://www.hellodamage.com/kanjidicks/main.htm

Good site for kanji learning, this guy does it right in my opinion. Currently using it and trying to learn about 15-20 kanji a day

>>3774862

Japanes God here : THE point abotu kanji, and that's something 99,9% of people got wrong, is that THERE IS NO USE in learning them for the sake of knwing X kanji.

If you learn a kanji without its contexte you'll soon forget it and have spent time for nothing.

TH best way to learn kanji is to read manga, or start with kanji of everyday use, like numbers, directions, things written onyour bottle of milk, etc.

Learning all the names of fishes in kanji or all the names of flowers is useless unless it's your hobby.

And THE MOSTR IMPORTANT THING about learning Japanese, is that you have to WRITE every single word you learn.
To lazy to write = "oh shit, I used to know that one"...

>>3774884
Fascinating.

>>3774862
But how do I memorize it?

>>3774903

Japanese God here :
Are you FUCKING SERIOUS ?????

How did you memorize the name of your grilfriend, her phoen number ? how did you memorize every single shit you've learned at school ?

Also, WRITE WRITE WRITE.

>>3774913
>how did you memorize every single shit you've learned at school ?
I didn't, that's why I finished with a 2.1 GPA.

>>3774884

So basically get out an untranslated light novel and grind though that shit like no tomorrow even if you barely know any kanji, then?

I've tried this method before with manga and it helped me learn hiragana, katakana, a little grammar, and maybe a kanji or two.

I didn't think it would do any good on actual novels or VNs with walls of kanji but judging from what you say, it would probably work if you really sat down for 4-5 hours a day (not all at once of course) and used a dictionary to look everything up while attempting to read through.

It probably just takes a lot of time, which most people would rather spend doing other things, like trolling on this board.

>>3774903
Repetition, repetition, repetition. He tries to make it easier by making often humorous mnemonics for the GO pronunciations.

>>3774884
I know. That's a fear I have as well but I think learning it this way while supplementing it with actual practice via reading will be fine.

>>3774919

I said manga, not novels (even visual novels).

I didn't say you have to start with manga, but it's the best way to learn kanji in context and you can have access to manga content faster than newspaper content.

Plus, 99% of kanji in manga have their pronunciation written, so you can chek the meaning in a "normal" dictionary.

Start with a simple manual or sentences on the intenet, use Firefox+rikaichan to get readings easily, and after some months, you could go for manga, really.

I started by translating a videogame booklet after only one month of japanese learning. It took me 8 hours for the first page, that had merely 2 sentences.
At the end I could translate 3-4 pages in 2 hours, only few weeks later.

japanese is no different than anything else, and the best way to learn fast is to do it full force from the beginning.
I mean, if I kicked your ass to Japan and you haven't learnt Japanese yet, how would you survive there ?
You'd go full force from the very first second, that's how.

whatever you do use an SRS like Anki

Also, THE mistake of 99% of Japanese learners : "hey, if I get a Japanese girlfriend, it will be easier, right ?".

Wrong : Japanese don't know shit about grammar and they will be unable to explain to you when you're wrong and why you're wrong. They will spend a whole lot of energy in trying to understand what you want to say rather than correct you.

>>3774947
I get a feeling you're an advocate of alljapaneseallthetime.com huh? Not that that's bad at all, it just seems like you're talking about his method.

>>3774981
>"hey, if I get a Japanese girlfriend, it will be easier, right ?".
Good thing this problem doesn't apply to at least 90% of /jp/.

>>3774983

Actually, I've only know his method last year and I've been using Japanese for 10 years, so it's a bit late.
His approach is a bit extreme and implies that you have TONS of time ahead of you for the assimilation process, whereas my method is dealing with the written language as soon as possible.
You could also chacke what Tim Ferris has to say about learning a language (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/01/20/learning-language/))

>>3774999
I agree that taking care of the written is more important and that's why I'm doing Kanji now (although I have my kana and some decent grammar from long term but casual studying). While the idea of reading kanji in context like manga seems like it would be an effective method it's still kind of intimidating when you have little to no knowledge of any kanji and have to constantly go to the dictionary to look it up.

I like Schultz because he basically teaches you the building blocks via radicals and explains how they work so you can see a kanji and more or less grasp what it's talking about, even if you don't remember the pronunciation.

So I'm going to try it for awhile but I will also take a couple days to read some raw manga i've never read before and use your method.

If you have any other tips and tricks for my journey I'd love to hear them.

My point about Japanese learning is that :
1) there are no more "easy way" with it than with a diet.
2) it's not hard at alla, but asks you to be dedicated = writinig EVERY SINGLE THING you learn.
3) learning kanji for the sake of it is stupid. If you see someone brag about his kanji, you can call him a pompous fag. Learning tons of kanji has NOTHING to do with Japanese production ability, though it's obviously a plus when reading and for understanding.
4) The secret to memorize is : associate emotions. you probably remember the shame of your life, even if it was 10 years ago. Same for the kanji : be ashamed of your mistakes in order not to forget them and practice with a lot of enjoyement (video games, manga) so you can remember character's lines and the kanji/expressions they used.

>>3774676
yeah im lonely too i submitted an add on http://www.iwantapal.com/ tho maybe itll work out for me

>>3774999
Also, I just downloaded Rikaichan. Wow, this is a handy little tool. Thanks for that.

Here is an example of something I did at the end of my first year of Japanese learning (http://s3.archive-host.com/membres/up/2147051904/ff9.zip))

The transcription of every dialog of FF9, kanji dictionay on the lap, using the "start" button to pause the game and all.
It took me 33 hours to end the first CD.
But man, was I a complete beast after that.

>>3775077
I gotta say that's... pretty impressive.

>>3775045
Ah, using shame, truly the most Japanese way to learn Japanese.

>>3775077
So let me get this straight. What you did was sit down with a kanji dictionary and rewrite the script while gathering definitions, trying to notice patterns in how things are pronounced when and why?

>>3775132

Yeah, it wasn't a translation, just a transcription.
You may ask : "WHY THE HELL ?!"

The reason is simple : dialogs are REAL Japanese, even in a video game. So you have people talking for real, and not starting their sentences by "watashi ha" like it is in your manual.
And the use real expressions and real words, not the kind of digest you got when you learn at school.

So it's the same as writing thousnad of sentences, except since they are real sentences, you can't help but noticing idioms and patterns of speech.
I can't remember the number of times I thought "Oh, so you say it like that in Japanese !" and I wouldn't forget it.

If there is one thing you need to know, it's that Japanese and your language, whatever it be, ARE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES.
And more often than not, we try to say what we rare thinking by applying Japanese to our thoughts, rather than putting our thoughts into real Japanese.
Writing thousands of sentences out of that game and tryning to understand their meaning and the way they were built helped me tremendously to achieve that.

I actually tried to translate a video game juste 1 month after I started Japanese, but it was way to hard. After a year, though, it's far for impossible.

>>3775159
Yeah I know what you mean. I don't try to read japanese as if I'm trying to translate it into english because it's just long and often doesn't make sense to me. When I read japanese I'm trying to read japanese and understand what they're saying IN JAPANESE.

My reaction was more just aimed at how that's a pretty massive task to do, but then saw you said you did it towards the end of your first year. It's not something I'd try to do in the beginning. Up until then were you just reading manga and the like?

>>3775175

I'll be honest with you : for my first year, I was mainly using my manual (I attended university) and I had the chance to have real teachers I could ask questions to.
So I learnt my first year of Japanese "in the books", while playing video games and trying to understand the most I could with what I knew.
Learning what I had to learn at school was already massive and provided good bases for grammar and vocabulary.
But not expressions, idioms and such. That, you'll have to find in anime games and manga.

Another thing is that japanese media work like American television : when you have the Power Rangers, you need to have one black dude and soem asian chick to represent the population, right ?
Japanese have the same criteria with their language, so in manga, anime and video games, you'll find peopel who speak the osaka dialect, some youngster who use a colloquial Japanese, some old dude that uses "old dude" dialect, etc.
Things you will NEVER have in a manual.

I have to say it was one of the main hindrance when I started translating Chrono Cross when i was only a beginner, because i couldn't understand all those forms in "-chau / chatta", I was like WTF , what kind of Japanese is that ?!! it's NOT in my dictionary !!!" ;-D

>>3775191
Hah. The only "chau" I recognize is Kansai's version of "chigau". Thank you Lovely Complex for that.

So for me, a beginner with very limited vocab and grammar. What would you say is my best set up?

Here is something for you, it's a word I learnt in the very first minutes of FF9 : "suki".

If you have a sentence like "he stole the cookies while I wasn't looking", you tend to translate that "while" by "aida" which means "the moment, the interval".
This is correct, but in Japanese you can use a much more precise terme, "suki", which means precisely "the opening (in your guard, for instance)".
that's why you often read fighting characters say "suki ari !" before striking.
I learnt that word with FF9 and have never forgotten it since, because I was like "wow, that word is sooo much cooler than "aida", seems really useful too !".

And that's how you build a real vocabulary and that's the cool thing about learning Japanese : playing video games IS doing your homeworks ;-D

>>3775219
So wait, pictured that's an example of when it's "suki"? Because when I read it I default on "Sono aida ni" which I remember hearing a lot.

And now I know why Bang says suki ari all the time in Blazblue.

>>3775207

The "-chau" I was reffering to is actually a contracted form of "-te shimau".

If you're a beginner, here are some recommendations :
1) Japanese, unlike English, uses a lot more adjectives than verbs. So if you have the choice of learning one more word per day, learn an adjective.
2) stick with the basics until you got a good grasp of various tenses (2) modes (5), particles (I don't know how many there are, less than 10, I think) and until you can read simple sentences and understanding them completely.

One good exercice would be to go on a japanese website about a topic you like, or on some news site (like the mainichi shinbun site) and read short articles with the help of Rikaichan (avoid economics and politics at first !). I like the "poeple" pages, because the articles are short and sometimes use trendy words.
If you do this EVERY DAY one short article everyday, honestly it won't be long before you rock.

As long as you're solid with the particles, you know who does what in the sentence, and after that it's just a matter of vocabulary, but with Rikaichan it's a breeze.

aida = 間
suki = 隙

The kanji used her is "suki". Same construction, but more precise meaning.

"Sono suki ni" meaning "taking advantage of that opening", it's no wonder you've heard "sono aida ni" more often ! This is what you usually use whan you want to say "while, in the meantime" ;-)

>>3775237
>various tenses (2) modes (5), particles

Where can i read more about this?

>>3775237
Particles are fine. It's more just an issue with some tenses and vocab.

Hey /jp/, what are some good nootropics to take while trying to learn Japanese?

>>3775259

Well as for tenses, there are only two in Japanese "accomplished, or non-accomplished", so it doesn't work like the preterit, present perfect, simple past or future.
If there is one book every Japanese student shoudl have, it's this one (http://www.amazon.fr/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546).).
I'm sure you can find a second-hand one at a good price, but even at full price it's a wonderful piece of work. reading the whole introduction will calrify every thing you want to know about grammar and the annexes are also full of informations.

Thanks for your help mate. I'll try what you've said out and see where it goes.

You're welcome.

the best way to learn japanese is keep your fucking fat ass sit on your chair and asking /jp/ everyday about how to do it. you'll acidentally learn it one of those days.

>>3775263
Amphetamine works pretty well for me.
If you're too poor high dosed caffeine (200mg+) works too, but tolerance develops really quickly.

I've been learning Japanese for a year now and the best tip I can give you is just to start learning it and not worry too much about doing it the fastest way possible (because more than often it's just an excuse for not giving time to something). Using a textbook like Genki can get you started on simple sentence construction + vocab, but I recommend getting out of textbook japanese as soon as possible and then just go onto practicing Kanji/Vocabulary + Grammar separately and go out there and read some real japanese, be it from manga or whatever and transcribe Kanji, vocab etc.

I think the best resource for Japanese grammar on the net is www.guidetojapanese.org, once you've gone through all the grammar there you'll be pretty good at japanese (I still haven't covered everything myself but I'm soon there). Personally I use "Kanji by radical" function at http://jisho.org whenever there's a Kanji I don't know that I want to transcribe from a game or whatever, it's real convenient (not to mention the awesome dictionary on that site too). I also separately practice Kanji on www.readthekanji.com (great site).

A tip I can give for you who want to play a game in Japanese is the game Fortune Summoners for PC. All kanji in the game has furigana so it's real easy to take out the Kanji in the case you wouldn't recognize it.

A little messy, but hope it helped :)

Looking on Mainichi news trying to find a "people" page but all I've found are the obituaries... Apparently a well known foreign female judo practitioner died...

Oh, and for learning hiragana/katakana, you can use www.realkana.com

Happy learning :)

>>3775369
readthekanji.com also works for that, as well as kanji.
It also sort of tracks your progress.

>>3775377

Oh yeah that's true, I have just never used it for that myself so I forgot about it

Hey OP,

Second post answered your question.
Have you got a degree?
It doesn't matter what in.
Just come and teach English.
Immersion is the besat way to learn.
Most of the people ITT will never go outside,
let alone come here.

Grammar is easy to get a handle on but it's the vocab that kills me. And counters, those fucking counters.
Also, take a class where you actually talk to people. It helps a lot.

Hate Kanji. ):

>>3775696
Necessary evil, plus it's easier than reading a long string of hiragana/katakana.

>>3775698
Errm, just Hiragana. Katakana = loan words fuck I can't believe I screwed that up.

The worst thing about learning Japanese is to be thrown back and forth between the differing opinions on how you should learn the kanji, the memorization approach without context, or the context approach without memorization.

Both suck. Why the hell don't anyone consider memorization with context?

>>3775765
What's the method of memorization with context?

Well I learned Hiragana, I'm half-way into Katakana. Trying to learn both alphabets before venturing much into grammar.
I think I'll leave Kanji for after I've learned quite a bit of grammar.

>>3775819
Well, I was thinking something like this: Do a typical memorization method like Heisig, just don't use Heisig's own mnemonics, they suck. And for every kanji you get to, find the best full word for it. If the kanji itself is a word, just use that, but if it's just in compounds, use what seems like the most useful compound. Then you find some example sentences for the word, get a little familiar with it, and try to get the reading of the word too, and add it to a separate SRS deck.

Some more work for each kanji, but this way, you have an actual word you can use for each kanji, and you have a general idea of how the word works, rather than just knowing the English equivalent. Oh, and if you remember the reading, you have another way to look it up other than by looking up radicals. I hate radical lookups.

I think since I'm just starting out I'll try reading Yotsuba raw first. There can't be that much difficult kanji in there...