Has anyone learnt/is anyone learning Japanese? (tradition, America, experience)

[James the Persian]

Hi all,

It's been a while since I learnt a new language and I'm seriously considering learning another. I've studied Germanic, Romance and Slav languages in the past, so I'm not really interested in another European one. I've also studied one native American language and one Indian to a degree and I know enough about the tonal Asian languages to know that I'm not going there!

I was wondering if anyone here has experience of learning Japanese. I have an abiding love of their culture and have had since i was small and I've looked into the language enough to see that it looks interesting, is very different from European languages, and isn't tonal. It'd also be fun to learn another (three actually) writing system.

If anyone has any advice, whether it be along the lines of start here or this worked best for me, or any suggestions as to useful resources (online, books, I don't mind) then I'd be very grateful to hear from you. Thanks.

James

[Engyo]

No matter what method you choose, for Japanese you need a group of people to actually speak it with. As a member of a Japanese Buddhist school, several friends and acquaintences (including my wife) have studied Japanese at various times. Without a speaking partner(s) that you can continually polish your skills with, you will find it a tough go..........

[FatMan]

Originally Posted by Engyo

No matter what method you choose, for Japanese you need a group of people to actually speak it with. As a member of a Japanese Buddhist school, several friends and acquaintences (including my wife) have studied Japanese at various times. Without a speaking partner(s) that you can continually polish your skills with, you will find it a tough go..........

I'd completely agree with that. Furthermore, if you find it difficult to have speaking partners or if you do not have time to take part in traditional style classes, your next best bet is to get a training program that is interactive and uses speakers and microphones on the computer. But it will be a challenge.

good luck.

[James the Persian]

Originally Posted by FatMan

I'd completely agree with that. Furthermore, if you find it difficult to have speaking partners or if you do not have time to take part in traditional style classes, your next best bet is to get a training program that is interactive and uses speakers and microphones on the computer. But it will be a challenge.

good luck.

As is my penchant, when learning languages, I generally start with the written aspect, and particularly grammar. There's never any substitute, when learning to speak, for actually speaking to people, no matter what the language, but I generally leave that until I have a reasonable grasp of the written language. I know this is the exact reverse of what many do, but I'm generally afraid to open my mouth until I know that what's coming out has a reasonable chance of being understood, if that makes sense. When I do finally come around to wanting to speak, I don't think it should be hard to find people to do it with. Leeds is a pretty cosmopolitan city.

James

[FatMan]

Originally Posted by JamesThePersian

As is my penchant, when learning languages, I generally start with the written aspect, and particularly grammar. There's never any substitute, when learning to speak, for actually speaking to people, no matter what the language, but I generally leave that until I have a reasonable grasp of the written language. I know this is the exact reverse of what many do, but I'm generally afraid to open my mouth until I know that what's coming out has a reasonable chance of being understood, if that makes sense. When I do finally come around to wanting to speak, I don't think it should be hard to find people to do it with. Leeds is a pretty cosmopolitan city.

James

I'm not trying to dissuade you, but the the Far East languages lend themselves more to speaking first simply because you are not dealing with letters, but rather symbols that represent words or phrases. In comparison to Western languages, grammar is not stressed much in the Far East.

I took the path of learning the written word first when learning german, but found it was much easier and almost necessary to learn the spoken word of Mandarin. To be fair, I know little to nothing about Japanese, so you may ultimately disregard this entire post

[James the Persian]

Originally Posted by FatMan

I'm not trying to dissuade you, but the the Far East languages lend themselves more to speaking first simply because you are not dealing with letters, but rather symbols that represent words or phrases. In comparison to Western languages, grammar is not stressed much in the Far East.

I took the path of learning the written word first when learning german, but found it was much easier and almost necessary to learn the spoken word of Mandarin. To be fair, I know little to nothing about Japanese, so you may ultimately disregard this entire post

No, I won't disregard it. You might be right as I have no experience with any far eastern language. I must say that it would be a first for me to find a language that i couldn't get a decent handle on with written grammar before I started speaking, but that doesn't mean you're wrong. Japanese is, however, certainly different from the Chinese languages because although it does have the Kanji pictograms it also has two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) which seem to work much like the devanagari script used for Sanskrit and Hindi (which I am already familiar with), though both seem considerably simpler than the latter.

James

[Engyo]

James -

One of the problems with starting on the written side is that Japanese actually uses three alphabets; two (hiragana and katakana) are somewhat phonetic, and the third (kanji) is actually chinese inorigin and is the symbols that Fatman spoke of. My wife's kanji dictionary is a couple of thousand pages long. Hiragana is used to write words in Japanese, and katakana is used to write loaner words like restaurant and hotel and television. So as you can see, it is a bit complex.

[James the Persian]

Originally Posted by Engyo

James -

One of the problems with starting on the written side is that Japanese actually uses three alphabets; two (hiragana and katakana) are somewhat phonetic, and the third (kanji) is actually chinese inorigin and is the symbols that Fatman spoke of. My wife's kanji dictionary is a couple of thousand pages long. Hiragana is used to write words in Japanese, and katakana is used to write loaner words like restaurant and hotel and television. So as you can see, it is a bit complex.

I'm aware of the three writing systems. I would have thought, though, that for the purposes of learning grammar and the general structure of the language, just learning hiragana and katakana would suffice? I mean, unless I'm actually trying to read real written Japanese is here any need to understand the Kanji? If not, I can't see that being much more difficult than learning devanagari, especially considering how complicated some of syllable combinations can be in that script.

James