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Learning Japanese
Tatsujin:
--- Quote from: yellowtable on April 26, 2009, 06:55:08 AM ---
--- 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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Did I mention myself before? English is my 2nd language, I only took English in my country for like a year and we only learned the ABC's, how ot say hi, good morning, afternoon, good bye and that is it. I came to the US and I was taken to a class for two freaking years, the lady only taught me what words mean and she didn't teach me shit about grammar and that was only in 7th and 8th grade. I learned grammar on my own from playing games, watching shows, and listening to everyday conversations from people. I was shy to speak alot in 9th grade, but in 10th grade I started to speak more and more and my grammar kept improving. So I learned English grammar on my own, and English pronoun-cation is the shittiest I have to experience because I didn't have so much experience with it too and I hate pronouncing stuff in English. Japanese is easier, the only two things you need to nail down is 1) Kanji and 2) grammar. Hiragana and Katakana are a must as well but they're fairly easy. Kanji and grammar are the main dish course.
voltekka:
I originally tried to learn the kana the way I'm sure a lot of you did, in dictionary order, a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, et cetera. Then I thought about it a bit, got a hold of a couple PDFs containing Heisig's remembering the kana, and learned them out of order. I didn't use the mnemonics the books are famous for, just learned them in that order. I spent a day on Hiragana, and a day on Katakana, with only a few hours of actual study time. Ever since then, I've been able to read both scripts without any trouble. That's right, just changing the method, instead of taking more than a month to learn them, they each took only a few hours. They're really easy if you study them this way, at least in my experience.
Right after learning them, I would quiz myself at random times. I'd wake up and immediately write the scripts down in their entirety. I'd transliterate songs from romaji to kana and back with a pencil and paper. I'd read text, even if I couldn't understand what it meant just yet. This greatly improved my recognition speed, and at this time I can read kana at least as fast as I can speak it if not faster.
As for the language, I taught myself a fair amount of grammar through various means and through Tae Kim's guide. I learned a lot of different words just by listening. I can speak, read, and write at least enough to get around (I put that to the test this past summer, staying a month in Japan alone).
Going a bit off track here; the point is, those of you learning the kana, don't learn them in dictionary order! This is the most common mistake I see. People who learn them this way tend to have trouble remembering them individually, which makes them harder to memorize and slower to recall as a whole -- they remember them in sets. When you're trying to read/write "ke", you should NOT remember "ka", "ki", and "ku" first. Do you remember a, b, and c before you remember d in English?
Also, it's not that important I suppose, but I don't recommend learning the voiced/plosive versions until after you have all the core characters down. That is, dont bother with "ga", "da", and "pa" until after you've already learned everything, including their sources, "ka", "ta", and "ha". They'll come easily enough later.
Anyhow, I never really intended to post here, but seeing so many people looking to learn kana and taking the usual route, I thought I'd offer another one I found so much easier and more effective.
Have fun.
Tatsujin:
--- Quote from: voltekka on April 27, 2009, 03:49:19 AM ---I originally tried to learn the kana the way I'm sure a lot of you did, in dictionary order, a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, et cetera. Then I thought about it a bit, got a hold of a couple PDFs containing Heisig's remembering the kana, and learned them out of order. I didn't use the mnemonics the books are famous for, just learned them in that order. I spent a day on Hiragana, and a day on Katakana, with only a few hours of actual study time. Ever since then, I've been able to read both scripts without any trouble. That's right, just changing the method, instead of taking more than a month to learn them, they each took only a few hours. They're really easy if you study them this way, at least in my experience.
Right after learning them, I would quiz myself at random times. I'd wake up and immediately write the scripts down in their entirety. I'd transliterate songs from romaji to kana and back with a pencil and paper. I'd read text, even if I couldn't understand what it meant just yet. This greatly improved my recognition speed, and at this time I can read kana at least as fast as I can speak it if not faster.
As for the language, I taught myself a fair amount of grammar through various means and through Tae Kim's guide. I learned a lot of different words just by listening. I can speak, read, and write at least enough to get around (I put that to the test this past summer, staying a month in Japan alone).
Going a bit off track here; the point is, those of you learning the kana, don't learn them in dictionary order! This is the most common mistake I see. People who learn them this way tend to have trouble remembering them individually, which makes them harder to memorize and slower to recall as a whole -- they remember them in sets. When you're trying to read/write "ke", you should NOT remember "ka", "ki", and "ku" first. Do you remember a, b, and c before you remember d in English?
Also, it's not that important I suppose, but I don't recommend learning the voiced/plosive versions until after you have all the core characters down. That is, dont bother with "ga", "da", and "pa" until after you've already learned everything, including their sources, "ka", "ta", and "ha". They'll come easily enough later.
Anyhow, I never really intended to post here, but seeing so many people looking to learn kana and taking the usual route, I thought I'd offer another one I found so much easier and more effective.
Have fun.
--- End quote ---
and also, the best way is to find the way you most feel comfortable about. out of order/random is really a must. and once you know the romaji for the japanese character you are studying, implement the vowels/sound and character appearance in your head and forget the romaji, focus on speaking the japanese character and start thinking japanese rather than trying to translate it into english or whatever. i'm tired.
iindigo:
--- Quote from: anerph on April 26, 2009, 06:41:56 AM ---
--- 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.
--- End quote ---
Another AJATT guy here. I'm with yellowtable on this one.
Think of it this way: when you were a young one, how did you learn your native tongue? Did you sit down with books and audio tapes to learn it? Didn't think so. You were able to speak pretty proficiently, though, despite not understanding a single mechanic behind the language. This is because you learned through pure immersion (and lots of it). Grammar was something that was taught after you were able to decently make use of your language.
Same goes when learning secondary languages later in life. One should concentrate on becoming able to use their target language at decent proficiency by merely imitating natural speakers before diving into the mess of grammar and such. Learning grammar at the same time as the core language complicates things and stretches the process out for much longer than it would naturally take. Contrary to popular opinion, the language itself is the foundation of speaking and writing it, not grammar.
jamienumber9:
The best thing about learning it on your own is the fact that you have control over what you learn. In my classes I have had severall "WTF!?" moments (or weeks) where I've thought "what in god's name are they teaching us this for?"
A good example is when, toward the beginning of this semester's new textbook I was reading, translating, and struggling with the text and came across a word that was a little difficult to find - "通り一遍紋切り型". I found it, and it translates to something like 'conventional, stereotyped, formulaic(expression)'. But when I mentioned it to my girlfriend, who is Japanese, she'd never heard of it. She speaks to her mum back in Japan fairly regularly over Skype so she asked her mum about it and was met with a reaction that I assume was something like "えー？". Her mum then went and got their big dictionary off the bookshelf so she could look it up! We are talking a Japanese national who was born and raised there and has lived there for over half a century and she'd never heard this word that I am learning from my textbook.
So yeah, doing it outside of formal classes does have that advantage, but I feel like grammar is fairly important. I definitely like some of the ideas of AJATT, and have decided to take some of them on, like using anki (thanks tatsujin), and I'm going to try listening to Japanese while I sleep, but at the end of the day I feel like my lessons have been very valuable.
Bold = 紋切り型
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