Poll of the Day > I've been doing my best learning Japanese for a couple weeks now.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm actually sticking to it longer than I expected. Certainly longer than any of my other attempts.

Currently learning to write Hiragana, and booooy is it messy. Also ordered a $30 drawing tablet today so I can just practice writing on the computer rather than printing off some practice sheets. (I'm mean, I wanted one for a couple other reasons too, this was just the final reason that made me decide to get one.)
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

learning to write Hiragana

それ で いい と おもいます。 きほん で はじめて どんどん じょうきゅう へ すすんで いきます 。
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I can read some of those symbols, and checked the rest, but I don't know any of the words they form...
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I seem to remember an rpg where you had to learn hiragana to do damage. Looked interesting.
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ボクは はじめに かたかなを べんきょう したんだけど, ゲームを しなければ ひらがなの ほうが いい とおもう
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Boku no Pico desu kawii.
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You're half way to a cute Japanese maid wife. Don't give up.
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slacker03150 posted...

I seem to remember an rpg where you had to learn hiragana to do damage. Looked interesting.

Yeah, I remember seeing that on Steam. It didn't look very interesting to me.

acesxhigh posted...

%u30DC%u30AF%u306F %u306F%u3058%u3081%u306B %u304B%u305F%u304B%u306A%u3092 %u3079%u3093%u304D%u3087%u3046 %u3057%u305F%u3093%u3060%u3051%u3069, %u30B2%u30FC%u30E0%u3092 %u3057%u306A%u3051%u308C%u3070 %u3072%u3089%u304C%u306A%u306E %u307B%u3046%u304C %u3044%u3044 %u3068%u304A%u3082%u3046

Is that all Hiragana? There are a couple symbols I don't remember seeing at all. %u30DC , %u30AF , %u30B2 , %u30FC , and %u30E0

Blighboy posted...

You're half way to a cute Japanese maid wife. Don't give up.

Getting one or being one? Eh, I guess I don't mind either way.
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those are katakana, which are characters used primarily for foreign words and onomatopoeia. the reason I learned them first is because they help tremendously with import games.
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

Also ordered a $30 drawing tablet today so I can just practice writing on the computer rather than printing off some practice sheets. (I'm mean, I wanted one for a couple other reasons too, this was just the final reason that made me decide to get one.)

Link to the drawing tablet you bought? I'd like to get one as well!
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I've been doing the same Im visiting in a couple weeks.
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Japanese has always been the language I would like to learn most.
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

ordered a $30 drawing tablet today so I can just practice writing on the computer rather than printing off some practice sheets.

Just buy notebooks and write it all out by hand, it helped me learn.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

Mario_VS_DK posted...

ordered a $30 drawing tablet today so I can just practice writing on the computer rather than printing off some practice sheets.

Just buy notebooks and write it all out by hand, it helped me learn.

That's what he said he's going to do, just on a digital tablet. He also said he already wanted one for other reasons as well.
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acesxhigh posted...

those are katakana, which are characters used primarily for foreign words and onomatopoeia. the reason I learned them first is because they help tremendously with import games.

Ah, thought so. I just wasn't sure.

AllstarSniper32 posted...

Link to the drawing tablet you bought? I'd like to get one as well!

This one.

https://www.amazon.ca/Huion-Graphics-Drawing-Digital-Anti-fouling/dp/B01DZ9942W

I don't really need or even want all the extra stuff that came with it, but it was only an extra 3 dollars and wouldn't ship to my PO Box if I was buying the one without it all. :s

JaH Reborn posted...

I've been doing the same Im visiting in a couple weeks.

That's pretty sweet. You were the guy who had a topic about your progress in learning Japanese, right?

Well, I hope you have fun on your trip.

OneTimeBen posted...

Japanese has always been the language I would like to learn most.

Yeah, Japanese is a pretty cool language. If I'm mostly successful, I'm also eventually going to try and learn Korean, Chinese, German and Russian. Just figured I'd start with Japanese because anime.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Just buy notebooks and write it all out by hand, it helped me learn.

I'll be getting this so I can write it by hand without wasting paper (and ink.) Also, I'm left handed, so things tend to smudge a lot. Besides, there's a few other reasons to have a drawing tablet as well.
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

acesxhigh posted...

those are katakana, which are characters used primarily for foreign words and onomatopoeia. the reason I learned them first is because they help tremendously with import games.

Ah, thought so. I just wasn't sure.

AllstarSniper32 posted...

Link to the drawing tablet you bought? I'd like to get one as well!

This one.

https://www.amazon.ca/Huion-Graphics-Drawing-Digital-Anti-fouling/dp/B01DZ9942W

I don't really need or even want all the extra stuff that came with it, but it was only an extra 3 dollars and wouldn't ship to my PO Box if I was buying the one without it all. :s

JaH Reborn posted...

I've been doing the same Im visiting in a couple weeks.

That's pretty sweet. You were the guy who had a topic about your progress in learning Japanese, right?

Well, I hope you have fun on your trip.

OneTimeBen posted...

Japanese has always been the language I would like to learn most.

Yeah, Japanese is a pretty cool language. If I'm mostly successful, I'm also eventually going to try and learn Korean, Chinese, German and Russian. Just figured I'd start with Japanese because anime.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Just buy notebooks and write it all out by hand, it helped me learn.

I'll be getting this so I can write it by hand without wasting paper (and ink.) Also, I'm left handed, so things tend to smudge a lot. Besides, there's a few other reasons to have a drawing tablet as well.

Best of luck in your languic adventure.
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

This one.

https://www.amazon.ca/Huion-Graphics-Drawing-Digital-Anti-fouling/dp/B01DZ9942W

I don't really need or even want all the extra stuff that came with it, but it was only an extra 3 dollars and wouldn't ship to my PO Box if I was buying the one without it all. :s

nuuuu! "This item does not ship to your selected location."

D: D: D: D: D:
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OneTimeBen posted...

Best of luck in your languic adventure.

Thanks. It took me how many years to actually get started on Japanese, let alone motivated to actually practice at it though... I doubt I'll start on any of the other languages in the next maybe even 10 years.

AllstarSniper32 posted...

Mario_VS_DK posted...

This one.

https://www.amazon.ca/Huion-Graphics-Drawing-Digital-Anti-fouling/dp/B01DZ9942W

I don't really need or even want all the extra stuff that came with it, but it was only an extra 3 dollars and wouldn't ship to my PO Box if I was buying the one without it all. :s

nuuuu! "This item does not ship to your selected location."

D: D: D: D: D:

I can't remember if you're Canadian or not, but that's the Canadian site. If you are, try this one, it's the same thing without all the added junk.

https://www.amazon.ca/Huion-H420-Express-Signature-Digital/dp/B00FS4JQG2/
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

Japanese is a pretty cool language. If I'm mostly successful, I'm also eventually going to try and learn Korean, Chinese, German and Russian. Just figured I'd start with Japanese because anime.

You picked three of the four S-tier difficulty languages for English speakers plus an A tier and a C+ tier one haha. Best of luck man. I put in 3 years to get conversational in Japanese and I'm getting there in Korean now too. After spending the lion's share of a decade on those two its more satisfying to just chunk through an easy language like French or Dutch just to prove that learning to speak doesn't have to be a constant uphill battle.

Mario_VS_DK posted...

I can't remember if you're Canadian or not, but that's the Canadian site. If you are, try this one, it's the same thing without all the added junk.

https://www.amazon.ca/Huion-H420-Express-Signature-Digital/dp/B00FS4JQG2/

Nah, not Canadian. That one also won't ship to me....
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I'm currently in a similar place. I've learned to read and write and type hiragana and katakana over the past three weeks. I practice writing the letters daily, individually, in the common combinations that make different sounds (such as combinations of characters for ki, shi, ji, chi, etc. with ya, yu, and yo), and various words. I also sometime practice writing out the charts of the letters by memory to test my knowledge of them all. I also use a website, Tanoshii Japanese, which has games for practicing memory.

This is all in preparation for a course I'm taking in a few weeks, at which point I'll be following an instructor's curriculum and a textbook. I've picked up on some of the grammar points and vocabulary already, but that is largely either things that are similar to Korean or loan words from English.

Knowing Korean already helps a lot I think. The grammar is extremely similar and many of the grammatical particles have direct equivalents between the two languages.

Either Korean or Chinese would be the most natural choice of a next language to learn if you want to capitalize most of what you learn from Japanese, but learning any foreign language typically gets easier once you have learned at least one other, as it conditions your brain for it.
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SomeUsername529 posted...

You picked three of the four S-tier difficulty languages for English speakers plus an A tier and a C+ tier one haha. Best of luck man. I put in 3 years to get conversational in Japanese and I'm getting there in Korean now too. After spending the lion's share of a decade on those two its more satisfying to just chunk through an easy language like French or Dutch just to prove that learning to speak doesn't have to be a constant uphill battle.

Sure says a lot about my life choices, eh? I don't think I'd want to learn French again though. They tried to teach that in school and I just had an all around bad experience with it.

AllstarSniper32 posted...

Nah, not Canadian. That one also won't ship to me....

Then try and check the American site.

Deganawidah posted...

I'm currently in a similar place. I've learned to read and write and type hiragana and katakana over the past three weeks. I practice writing the letters daily, individually, in the common combinations that make different sounds (such as combinations of characters for ki, shi, ji, chi, etc. with ya, yu, and yo), and various words. I also sometime practice writing out the charts of the letters by memory to test my knowledge of them all. I also use a website, Tanoshii Japanese, which has games for practicing memory.

This is all in preparation for a course I'm taking in a few weeks, at which point I'll be following an instructor's curriculum and a textbook. I've picked up on some of the grammar points and vocabulary already, but that is largely either things that are similar to Korean or loan words from English.

Knowing Korean already helps a lot I think. The grammar is extremely similar and many of the grammatical particles have direct equivalents between the two languages.

Either Korean or Chinese would be the most natural choice of a next language to learn if you want to capitalize most of what you learn from Japanese, but learning any foreign language typically gets easier once you have learned at least one other, as it conditions your brain for it.

That's cool. How long do you practice each day, because I've been trying for about 2 weeks and can only remember about half of the basic hiragana and some of the, I think it's called dakuten? (The characters with the two tiny lines or the circle in the upper corner that change the beginning sound.) Though, I only started trying to writing it a few days ago.

Good luck on your course though.

Yeah, if I do try and learn another language after, it'll probably be either Chinese or Korean. Chinese, because Kanji is, I think, Chinese characters, so it'll pretty easy to remember it all if I already know it. And Korean, because from what I understand, it's a fairly easy and very well designed language.
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

That's cool. How long do you practice each day, because I've been trying for about 2 weeks and can only remember about half of the basic hiragana and some of the, I think it's called dakuten? (The characters with the two tiny lines or the circle in the upper corner that change the beginning sound.) Though, I only started trying to writing it a few days ago.

Good luck on your course though.

Yeah, if I do try and learn another language after, it'll probably be either Chinese or Korean. Chinese, because Kanji is, I think, Chinese characters, so it'll pretty easy to remember it all if I already know it. And Korean, because from what I understand, it's a fairly easy and very well designed language.

I put in the equivalent of a few hours a day because I practice reading and writing it throughout my downtime while doing other things like TV and internet. It's better to take it an easy pace and be sure to do it regularly, everyday ideally, rather than cram a lot of study in one day and then not do it again for days. Repetition and regularity is important for long-term memorization.

I started learning dakuten (the dots) and handakuten (the circle) from the beginning. This is something where it helped to have knowledge and experience of Korean. While they aren't exactly the same, Korean writing (Hangul) has a similar concept of letters which are formed by adding a line to existing letters to indicate aspirated versions of the consonant. In Korean, these are treated as a separate letters now rather than modifications, but that is their origin. But having this experience with Korean allowed me to more readily associate many of the same sounds together that are tied together in Japanese (B-P, T-D, K-G).

Yes, kanji are Chinese characters. You have to know more to read and write Chinese than for Japanese and, of course, learn new pronunciations, but individual kanji will carry the same meaning. Some words may be formed from different combinations of characters, but there is a lot of similarity. Also, many words that are based on Chinese characters have similar sounds across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Korean traditionally also uses Chinese characters (called hanja in Korean), though it is no longer necessary to know them to be proficient in Korean. But much of the vocabulary is still rooted in those characters, which is the reason for many words sounding similar across the three languages. Learning to read and write Korean is very easy. Hangul is a phonetic alphabet with distinct consonants and vowels and each block you see in written Korean is actually made up of multiple letters. You don't have to memorize nearly as much as you do for Japanese. The grammar is the most difficult part, but if you learn Japanese first, you will be familiar with it.
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

Yeah, if I do try and learn another language after, it'll probably be either Chinese or Korean. Chinese, because Kanji is, I think, Chinese characters, so it'll pretty easy to remember it all if I already know it. And Korean, because from what I understand, it's a fairly easy and very well designed language.

Korean and Japanese share a lot of words and grammar. It's like French and Spanish. My Japanese is mad rusty and its still helping my Korean a lot.

Kanji is literally "Chinese letters" in Japanese. Modern Chinese uses simplified characters though so some stuff is different. If you were properly fluent in Japanese you'd be able to mostly power through but if you get like a year under your belt and get cocky you might screw up both languages with bad habits.

Kanji can get pretty difficult but one upside: If you know Kanji pretty well, you have an easier time reading Chinese. Mandarin and Japanese are two of my favorite languages and I know a bit of both, at least enough to get my point across with a shopkeeper in Little Tokyo\China Town (LA) and to translate\quote my favorite passages from San Guo Yan Yi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) in Chinese.

I'd like to suggest you look into NJStar, it's a word processor availabe in Chinese, Japanese and (I think) Korean. The Chinese and Japanese WPs have a complete dictionary that you can use both in Chinese\Japanese and English (The Japanese WP also has a name dictionary, you need to download it separately), though with English translations the free trial version (don't know about full) has trouble looking up a translation for more than one word. The results still give you anything that contains that word.

I'd suggest giving the trial version a try. After thirty days, well, in my history of using the trial version since high school one of the following things will happen:

-You can no longer save (ctrl + s) unless you're closing the program (it still prompts "do you want to save?")
-You lose access to the dictionary...button. You can still right click on a Kanji\Hanzi to open it up.
-You need to wait one minute to close an ad for the full version after opening the program.

It's a really good WP and learning aid in my opinion, I've always kept it on one or more of my computers for years. My one complaint though is that the current version of the Japanese WP no longer gives you the Pinyin (Mandarin Chinese reading) reading for Kanji.
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I have learned all the sentence being use in conversation and I got A in the test. But somehow i forget all that in just 3 months
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Ugh. All the K sounds are so difficult to write in hiragana. Ka, ki, ku, ke, and ko. Ki would be easy if not for the weird loop at the end which is supposed to be part of the third stroke but also it's own line. Well, practice makes perfect I guess...

Deganawidah posted...

stuff

Yeah. I for sure agree that practicing every day for little bits of time is a lot better jamming a lot of time into one day every so often. I just need to get more in. I've only been practicing about 10-30 minutes each day, and most of that is memorizing the same stuff until it's drilled into my head.

I knew that Korean was written like that though. I watched a short 10 minute video on how to read the sounds and thought it was pretty neat the way they write. I've forgotten all written sounds though. Didn't know they used used Chinese characters though.

SomeUsername529 posted...

Korean and Japanese share a lot of words and grammar. It's like French and Spanish. My Japanese is mad rusty and its still helping my Korean a lot.

Kanji is literally "Chinese letters" in Japanese. Modern Chinese uses simplified characters though so some stuff is different. If you were properly fluent in Japanese you'd be able to mostly power through but if you get like a year under your belt and get cocky you might screw up both languages with bad habits.

Yeah, I'm certainly not going to rush anything and mess up.

Kenji_Kotaro posted...

stuff

That's neat. I'll try and keep that in mind when I think I'm ready to start learning Kanji.

ha21nagamas posted...

I have learned all the sentence being use in conversation and I got A in the test. But somehow i forget all that in just 3 months

Yeah, that certainly tends to happen when you don't practice things.
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Yeah, that certainly tends to happen when you don't practice things.

Yeah certainly and with tings like having to learn 15 other disciplines in school doesnt help either. So im f****** anyway
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

Ugh. All the K sounds are so difficult to write in hiragana. Ka, ki, ku, ke, and ko. Ki would be easy if not for the weird loop at the end which is supposed to be part of the third stroke but also it's own line. Well, practice makes perfect I guess...

My problem with first learning Hiragana was that I always confused Chi and Sa since it's the same character but facing the opposite direction. A trick I used was this: "Ki and Sa face the SAme way." Another one I liked using was the Katakana for MA looked like a MArtini glass.

If you live near a place like Little Tokyo (LA's Japanese community center) or just any Japanese markets: Try to find a Shitajiki (plastic writing pad) with the Hiragana\Katakana alphabet on it. They're fairly common, inexpensive and easy to carry around in a backpack. They usually include stroke order, too. It's basically the same thing kids first learning how to write in Japanese carry with them.

Oh, one last NJStar note: If you encounter a Kanji\Hanzi you don't know in (for example) a book or just any situation where can't copy\paste it from a website: There's a radical look up you can use (radicals are the little strokes that make up the Kanji like how the Kanji for "middle" is a downward line through a rectangle: Those are the radicals that make it up). It helps a LOT, they're sorted by number of strokes.

It takes a little work to figure it out but it's saved me SO many times when trying to romanize Chinese song lyrics from a CD booklet.
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Mario_VS_DK posted...

I knew that Korean was written like that though. I watched a short 10 minute video on how to read the sounds and thought it was pretty neat the way they write. I've forgotten all written sounds though. Didn't know they used used Chinese characters though.

These days, Korean is no longer typically written in mixed script (mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic writing system) as Japanese is. In the early 20th century, that was more typical. Nowadays, you usually see Chinese characters (called hanja in Korea, which is the Korean pronunciation of the same characters for kanji in Japanese) usually only appear in parentheses after the hangul spelling of the same word (to provide clarification of meaning), on some signs or banners (and usually this is only the most well-known hanja), or for aesthetic purposes. In certain fields of work or in more advanced language usage (scholarship, study of old documents, reading genealogies, etc.) you will of course need to know more hanja, but knowing them is no longer essential to being functionally proficient in Korean.

Historically, both Korea and Japan wrote using Chinese characters, combining usage of characters for meaning (as they would be used in Chinese) and adapting some characters for sound to express elements of the Japanese and Korean languages not present in Chinese. Both countries later developed their own phonetic writing systems, with obvious aesthetic inspiration from Chinese characters.
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