Can you teach me how to speak japanese

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Earthshine
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Postby Earthshine » 10 years ago

I took Japanese for 5 years so I got pretty efficient (no where near fluent or translation worthy though, but enough to get the main point). I found the language to be pretty simple actually, the hardest part being the three alphabets though and Chinese characters, then again most people complain about that.

The first place to start with Japanese should definitely be Hiragana and basic sentence structure combined with basic vocabulary. You should also practice all the time speaking it and pronouncing it. The best way to make a language stick is speaking it, speak it all the time. Parrot lines from anime.

I would be better with the language than I am now but I just had so much going on I had to put my language studies on hold.

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Postby tailz » 10 years ago

I'll give writing sentences in Japanese a try w/ google translator. (Though, many people say that the sentences are wrong most of the time. )

これは幸福である&
マインド委員会の平和

This is supposed to be a title of a song. It's long enough to be sentence as you can see. :p ! Anyways the title is:"This is The Happiness & Peace of Mind Committee". I'm not sure if Google translate got this right, but it seems half accurate. (looks like some characters are incorrect though.) So, google translate is trying it's best! :D !
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tailz
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Postby tailz » 10 years ago

みくみくにしてあげる♪
(してやんよ ;)
(This is how the title really looks like.)

初音ミクNIシテあげる♪
(Shiteyanyo)
(I wrote this one in romanj.Google translate made it look like this.)

私はあなたがミクミクを行う作ってあげる
(あなたはそれをするつもりだ)
(I got this one simply because I wrote it out in english.)
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Fuzzy Pickles!
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Postby Fuzzy Pickles! » 10 years ago

"Earthshine" wrote:I took Japanese for 5 years so I got pretty efficient (no where near fluent or translation worthy though, but enough to get the main point). I found the language to be pretty simple actually, the hardest part being the three alphabets though and Chinese characters, then again most people complain about that.

The first place to start with Japanese should definitely be Hiragana and basic sentence structure combined with basic vocabulary. You should also practice all the time speaking it and pronouncing it. The best way to make a language stick is speaking it, speak it all the time. Parrot lines from anime.

I would be better with the language than I am now but I just had so much going on I had to put my language studies on hold.
I have to agree with the 漢字 being the most difficult aspect of learning 日本語。What makes learning 漢字 so difficult is because of several reasons. One is because of the shear volume of 漢字 that must be learned. Elementary and secondary students have to learn over 2,100 常用漢字 in order to read a newspaper. That means that learning the 常用漢字 is going to take a long time, especially if you were to learn them like a native Japanese would (which is not very effective for an adult since these meanings should not be difficult for them). Another thing is that with a 漢字, you really have to understand the 漢字。You have to know the English meanings, you have to understand the 訓読み and 音読み, you have to know which 日本語 name to use and you also need to understand the radicals of a 漢字 and the parts of it (because who wants to have to memorize 15+ strokes of a 漢字 when you can simplify these steps by memorizing radicals instead?). Variants of a 漢字 helps as well.

Though to be fair, this is coming from someone who just started to tackle 漢字。 Oh boy will that be difficult. Luckily, once I get to where I understand 漢字 much better, everything else should start to fall in place. 日本語 is a language that gets easier over time rather than more difficult (like English ironically enough).

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Earthshine
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Postby Earthshine » 10 years ago

The actual language itself is rather easy but the Chinese characters (I can't write kanji on my computer now, it's being dumb) is most definitely the most difficult. I got the hang of it though in my studies.

Since I've put Japanese on the back burner I've lost a lot of knowledge of kanji, but I still have retained most everything else. For those characters that I don't remember I purchased myself a thick book that is a kanji dictionary, it has well over 7,000 characters, their usages and radicals and even the dreaded name pronunciations.

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Postby tailz » 10 years ago

I need to get my hands on one of those books. I'm totally lost on kanji. :lol:
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Postby Sporkia » 10 years ago

As somebody who's studied Chinese for 3 years, I have pretty much the exact opposite problem. I can read a fair amount of Kanji (with my only real obstacle being that they're more often traditional Chinese characters and I'm learning the simplified ones), but the rest (say for a bit of Katakana) is just too much for me to get behind.

But the thing about Kanji that really frustrates me is that pronunciations in Japanese usually have multiple syllables, whereas the characters read in Chinese all have one. So when I take a look at something in Japanese, I sort of end up reading it in my head like "Japanese Japanese Japanese CHINESE WORD Japanese Japanese Japanese"

I think it would be cool to learn Japanese, but it's stuff like this that makes me realize I'm too far into Chinese mode to get into it as much as I'd like. ^^;
It's a magical day!

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Earthshine
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Postby Earthshine » 10 years ago

今日は。私の名前はアンジェラです。

Computer finally stopped freaking out. But yeah I see what you mean with how it might look to someone who knows more Chinese than Japanese... and the usage of the two alphabets that aren't pictograph based, it makes the language look very unique.

The kanji dictionary I bought I found at Barnes and Nobel in their language section. They have many great resources there.

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Postby Fuzzy Pickles! » 10 years ago

For a free resource, jisho.org is a great place to help accommodate 日本語 speaker hopeful. When it comes to kanji, it has a lot a person could hope for, 訓読み、音読み、名乗り, the radicals, all the 英語 meanings, and the parts. Surprisingly, I find the parts to be much more helpful than the radicals as they help place the 漢字 together better. Best of all, it's free. It's why I haven't checked out a 漢字 book yet since I haven't seen a need for it.

Speaking of which, how far is everyone getting in studying 日本語? I have read over the state-of-being section on Tae Kim's guide, but I should start practicing it soon. Hoping to learn ten new 漢字 for each section.

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Postby Tetsuwan Penguin » 9 years ago

I found a site that tries to teach Japanese via Anime.
http://japanesethroughanime.com

He's posted some video lessons on line. Actually rather funny videos, which try to teach common phrases. Doesn't touch the written language at all. The author got hooked on learning Japanese so he could understand Japanese language anime and soon realized that most of the instructional aids were too 'formal', he needed to learn the 'street language'.

While I would certainly like to be able to read the manga in its original language, I think I'd be more interested in being able to understand the spoken language.

From my experience with learning the Morse Code many years ago, it was easier to SEND Morse than to Receive it (I can probably do a good 25 WPM banging on a telegraph key, but I'm lucky to be able to COPY above 10-15 WPM in my head hearing it.) I wonder if the same thing applies to learning a foreign language?

BTW Morse is not a code, it's a Cypher. (Letter/symbol substitution), although once you start copying entire words as single sounds (which high speed code operators do), Morse no longer operates as a true cypher and almost becomes its own language!
Last edited by Tetsuwan Penguin on Sun Jun 08, 2014 11:32 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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