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Learning Japanese

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jamienumber9:
Np

I dunno if it's been posted or not, but google "rikaichan". It's a plugin for firefox that automatically translates japanese that you mouse-over. It's great if you know grammar, but not certain words, or know words but not their Kanji etc. You do really need some grammar skills for it to be really useful though. It really helps for reading japanese pages.

Aneroph:
I bought "Japanese for busy people" when I first tried teaching myself. It was okay I suppose, a lot of the sentences they used were a bit odd or a bit old but it did allow me to learn Hiragana katakana and about 20 kanji before I went into classes. After going into classes I have found many good resources. The book we use is Nakama which is fairly good (better if you have a teacher). Here is a list of some helpful stuff:

www.jisho.org - A GREAT dictionary. You can type in Japanese or English and find any detail you can imagine.
www.lang-8.com - A free journal website where you write whatever you want in your language of study and people native to the language will correct it with red/blue text and crossouts, additions, subtractions, etc. It doesn't change your original post so you don't have to worry about it. They can also give you helpful comments. This is more for the advanced learners though.
www.smart.fm - A good site to study words and kanji for specific books and a little more. There are even word games you can play to help your memorization. If you register then you can make your own list of words/kanji and play the games with your specific words.

yellowtable:
I've bought into the AJATT ideology, I don't think that studying from a 'teach yourself' book or software will really get you very far. If you really want to learn the language, then full immersion, learning the kanji and imitating native speakers is the only way to actually learn a language. So no learning grammar rules etc, just getting used to them after repeating examples a trillion times.

I'm only learning the kanji at the moment (I'm up to 250, but it's incredibly easy, and has only taken me two weeks), so I can't really say if it works or not yet. But visit the website, and make your own mind up. I'm certainly going for native proficiency, rather than just being able to get by and sounding like a noob foreigner.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/

Aneroph:

--- Quote from: yellowtable on April 26, 2009, 05:52:57 AM ---I've bought into the AJATT ideology, I don't think that studying from a 'teach yourself' book or software will really get you very far. If you really want to learn the language, then full immersion, learning the kanji and imitating native speakers is the only way to actually learn a language. So no learning grammar rules etc, just getting used to them after repeating examples a trillion times.

I'm only learning the kanji at the moment (I'm up to 250, but it's incredibly easy, and has only taken me two weeks), so I can't really say if it works or not yet. But visit the website, and make your own mind up. I'm certainly going for native proficiency, rather than just being able to get by and sounding like a noob foreigner.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/

--- End quote ---

Grammar is the basics for expressing yourself in your own words. Without grammar you are just repeating what everyone else has already said. Immersion is great, but should really be combined with formal teaching or else you really are not going to learn a lot of the basics, a lot of grammar, and a lot of rules. Of course, the same can be said about teaching. Formal teaching should be combined with a bit of immersion to help with listening and speaking skills. Self study should, and is used with both of these forms of learning, but is pretty much useless by itself.

yellowtable:

--- Quote from: anerph on April 26, 2009, 06:41:56 AM ---Grammar is the basics for expressing yourself in your own words. Without grammar you are just repeating what everyone else has already said. Immersion is great, but should really be combined with formal teaching or else you really are not going to learn a lot of the basics, a lot of grammar, and a lot of rules. Of course, the same can be said about teaching. Formal teaching should be combined with a bit of immersion to help with listening and speaking skills. Self study should, and is used with both of these forms of learning, but is pretty much useless by itself.

--- End quote ---

It's not that you don't learn the grammar, you just learn it passively and naturally. So you don't think about it, you just assimilate it. This might sound as if it's the shakey way around, but it's quite the opposite. Learning it naturally, you get a feel for it, and can predict where exceptions fit in, not having to think about it. But I can't explain it as well as the site creator can, so check out the website, particularly the articles 'why lessons suck' and so on.

Funnily enough, I've learned a language just from a book and a few audio lessons. But that language is esperanto (kiun mi parolas flue  ;)), which has no exceptions, and very few grammar rules anyway. For learning a natural language, it just doesn't work.

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