Japanese Language Thread

[Dudemanguy]

So you think you can learn Japanese? It's not impossible, but it takes some work and regular practice to get anywhere with it. I'm certainly not egotistical enough to claim anything close to fluency, but at least I can enjoy my cartoons so I'm not a total retard. Here's my personal recommendations.

Step 0: Learn the kana

This isn't up for debate. If you don't know the kana (hiragana and katakana), you can't do shit in Japanese. Do this first before anything else. It looks somewhat overwhelming at first, but there's actually not that much kana and you can just bruteforce it. A couple of handy sites for this are /djt/'s kana practice and realkana. Both let you select subsets of kana to study on. Just grind this every day until you know all of them like the back of your hand.

Step 1: Read through Tae Kim at least once

Tae Kim's guide isn't a holy bible or anything, but you want to have at least some kind of basic feel for Japanese grammer/sentence structure. You'll naturally pick up more of this kind of thing as you go along, but everyone needs a baseline to start from. It's not super long, but just quickly read through it at least once so you have some idea of what you are doing.

Step 2(a): Start learning vocabulary

Alright this part gets a little more contentious depending on who you ask. In my personal opinion, I think individual kanji study is useless. You learn kanji as you learn vocabulary. As you learn Japanese words, you will naturally start to associate certain kanji with certain meanings (which you are supposed to; that's how it works). Now of course, there is the question of how to learn vocabulary and/or where to get vocabulary from. I will cover that later.

Step 2(b): Start reading something you like

This is another one of my opinions leaking through. Some people may disagree, but I believe that you should start reading as soon as you can. Some people will say that you should study vocabulary for like a month or so at first before trying to really read something. However no matter what you pick up, you're not going to know the vast majority of the words (it's a foreign language after all). So if you have to grind through the dictionary (which you will), it might as well be on something that's directly relevant to you right now. I would recommend starting with manga since manga is fairly easy (most of the time) and can be actually interesting. If you want to bore yourself to death, you could read NHK easy news or some tweets instead.

Step 3: Just keep it going

This one isn't so much a step, but just more of a general observation. Basically you learn by doing. At first, constantly fighting your reading material and dictionary isn't fun. In fact it sucks. But if you keep it up, you'll start to actually understand things. Once you get to the point where you can read/watch content you enjoy without much trouble, you've basically made it. There's always more to learn, of course, but it stops being a chore and you can just enjoy expanding your knowledge. Gradually step it up from easier content (manga) to harder stuff (novels or something) and of course be sure to work in some listening oriented stuff (can be radio, anime, or whatever you like) as well.

Supplemental stuff:

Japanese-English Dictionary:
jisho (this is your friend)

Japanese-Japanese Dictionary:
Sanseido (there's more but I honestly don't use these too often; I mostly use the kojien EPWING dictionary and jisho)

Yomichan-import:
yomichan-import (this is for converting those pesky EPWING dictionaries to something yomichan can actually use)

/djt/ guide:
djt guide (has a lot of general resources and stuff; can be quite useful)

Personally I recommend using anki for vocabulary (if you're on GNU/Linux; this will be in your distro of course). Anki is basically like daily flashcards (yes, do your Anki reps every single day) but based around spaced repetition. The idea is that you look at a card, guess what its reading+meaning is, and then grade yourself on how well you did. If you keep doing well on a particular card, then the intervals will keep increasing to transition it into your long term memory. If you mess up a card a lot, enjoy seeing it again tomorrow. One thing to understand is that Anki is not a substitute for proper Japanese content. It is only a tool for memorization. To learn a language, you have to learn thousands of words. This is simply a way to "cheat" the system and give you a pretty easy way of memorizing a crapload of stuff (medical students often use Anki as well, for example).

I recommend that you don't use a premade deck (here is one if you insist though) but instead mine a deck based on whatever you are reading. In other words, if you read something and see a thing you don't know, then add it to your anki deck. If you are on a semi-modern browser, you can use Yomichan (firefox and chromium) which has anki integration to easily add words you see online in your browser to your anki deck. If you are on a legacy browser (Pale Moon for example), you can use Rikisama which accomplishes a similar thing (dictionary lookup and anki integration). Refer to those sites for details on setup.

Old OP (for historical purposes):

Well I figure we're well overdue for this thread aren't we?

Anyone else take the plunge and decide to start self-studying a bit on the language? Currently, I'm slowly making some progress with kanji through the kanji damage method with anki (sort of a flashcard software). Also, I'm going through this grammar book to hopefully get a better feel. I'm not terribly concerned with speaking or anything, but being able to read the damn moonrunes would be pretty nice. I don't want to let my brain rot, so I might as well spend my time on something useful.

So yeah any general Japanese language learning tips/tricks/discussion/etc. can all be talked about here.

Edit: I've switched to a core 2k/6k vocab deck for Anki now. It's very useful and comes with sounds so you can associate proper pronunciation with each word.

Also, here is a pretty handy general guide on learning Japanese with some resource links, recommendations, and all that good stuff.