Interested in learning Japanese

[mmksworld]

Dear all,

My name is Murali. I am from India. I have been working in Japan since 10months. I learnt a little bit of Japanese by attending Japanese classes in our ward office. But, now I would like to talk Japanese fluently by watching some videos. I tried downloading some videos in Youtube and few other sites.The were bit useful. I came to know about akiba-online while browsing and felt happy by seeing Japanese movie torrents here .

I would like to do friendship with any Japanese girls/boys if they are interested.Dont take me wrong, its just a matter of me learnig japanese and you learnig English. If you feel ok, then contact me at murali.marmekala@gmail.com or my skype id is murali.marimekala.

Also suggest me some good japanese movies. I forgot to tel you I am in Kawasaki

Waiting for your reply.

Cheers,

 

[fuwavsgodzilla]

i think the best way to improve the level of japanese is the sepcial class for the man speaking English.

the japanese is not like the others language,u can hold it by watch video or book

 

[Heavens_Cloud]

Everyone learns in different ways. When you can't practice real conversation (and hopefully the person you're speaking with is kind enough to correct your mistakes), then watching Japanese TV/movies is the next best thing you can do to help learn. When you can't do that, listen to Japanese music.

Once you reach a certain point in understanding of the language, you begin to notice patterns that make it easier to learn and remember new things as they come.

 

[aquamarine]

Sorry, but how does listening to Japanese music help you learn? I listen to East-Indian music and still don't have a sniff of an idea as to what they're saying. Even if you listen to groups like Bennie K that have about 40% English, 60% Japanese lyrics, the English still doesn't equat whatsoever to the Japanese wording.

My suggestion (on this three month old thread, thanks Heavens_Cloud) is to download podcasts via iTunes that give free Japanese lessons as well as study Japanese-language text books. That's the best way. If you're a kid, enroll in a high-school Japanese class, that's how I got started many hundreds of moons ago.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

If you're a kid, enroll in a high-school Japanese class, that's how I got started many hundreds of moons ago.

I totally first read this and thought:

• "Aquamarine took classes with Japanese high schoolers just to improve his language skills?"
• "Oh no, wait! He said 'if you're a kid'! Does this mean ... he was already in Japan when he was still a little kid?"

A few more seconds of confusion followed before I figured out that you probably meant for him to take Japanese language classes in his own country if he's still a kid in high school.

I knew a few kids who had Japanese language programs in their high schools, but every last one of them was really unimpressive. :\ Most students had taken 2-3 years of the language in high school but still didn't test out of a single college semester of Japanese. A few students would test out of 101 and 102 but no farther than that. Maybe it was just my state, but I think it could be something where unless you get a good teacher with a strong program that's challenging and not afraid to flunk students (as is true in college), you're going to have a lot of kids proudly naming colors and animals with next to no ability to properly write sentences outside of present-tense -ます form. My point? This suggestion may work for people who come from where you went to high school, but from my own personal experience it won't. We didn't -- and still don't -- have any foreign-language offerings at my high school besides French, Spanish, and German. And German only got added back around 1998 or 1999 (feels recent to me ... goddamn I'm getting old ;_; , can't believe that was 10 years ago). I think maybe I heard something about a Japanese or Arabic program being added, but then again, my high school is one of the preppy upper-echelon ones. :\ I know no other school in the tricounty area would have a Japanese program.

lol, French, the epitome of a program where teachers with no other job skills are so in fear of losing their jobs that they'll do whatever it takes to convince the schoolboard that French is more important for a worldly person's education than Arabic, Russian, or Chinese. And that would be the program I hail from, lol, and c'est une langue que j'adore, mais ... I haven't spoken it or formally studied it 6 or 7 years. T_T So I'm rusty as hell when it comes to trying to produce it myself.

 

[techie]

Learning Japanese from listening to music is not sounding like the most optimal idea.

Tell meListen to a few jpop tunes and then tell me the phonetic difference between

　Edit: dang the IME is tough enough to get it to stay with hiragana... sorry all if I said somethng really wacky

Example... suki vs/ skii

in songs (Japanese ome than any other language imho) they pronounce sylables clearly whereas in spoken language not.

go for TV shows, rosetta stone, a few pimsleur tapes and some other alternatives, converse with people, look at news, daily contents in natural spoken language and so on... I believe NHK had a video series for teaching Japanese too.

That is more practice than any music will ever be.

Or you can always jump in to the mad wordgames of Globe if you still go the music route. I hear they are fairly advanced on that side.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I just realized something that completely throws the music-based learning out the window: tones. Well, not "tones" per se, but morae (音字, onji). As an example, there is only one "right" way to say the word takaramono 宝物 with regards to Kantou intonation according to an old sensei of mine (who hails from Nagoya, actually), and that's LHHHH: where 'L' means lo-pitch and 'H' means hi-pitch. "ta-KA-RA-MO-NO." Not LHHHL. Not LHHLL. Just LHHHH. (And by proxy the particle following the -no is also going to receive a hi-pitch rather than a lo-pitch mora.)

Native Japanese can play with this, just as we English-speakers do, when they are expressing emotions that alter tone or when they are speaking in ways that alter tone -- like singing. So you see the problem? Japanese music will probably give you a poor grasp of appreciating morae. For the words to fit the notes, regular tones may be thrown out the window rather than forcing their retention and requiring the melody to accommodate.

This is more of an intermediate or expert-level concern than a beginner's, but there's no point in encouraging bad speaking habits early on only to have to have them corrected later.

And people who are actually in Japan may disagree with what I've said here. I've never been to Japan. I don't pretend to speak anywhere near fluent Japanese. I've always been pretty clear on that point. But I'll defend my claim by saying that this is what I was taught by a Japanese Ph.D in his 50s who was born, raised, and educated in Japan -- and who always shared with us some of the fun differences between Nagoya dialect and Kantou dialect, e.g. velar ん ('ng') vs nasal ん ('nn').

 

[aquamarine]

I totally first read this and thought:

• "Aquamarine took classes with Japanese high schoolers just to improve his language skills?"
• "Oh no, wait! He said 'if you're a kid'! Does this mean ... he was already in Japan when he was still a little kid?"

OK, you found me out. I'm actually 15 years old...

 

[Sakunyuusha]

longer but easier to understand, I hope

I just realized that what I wrote above may be very confusing even for those who are fluent in English but have no linguistics background, so I'm going to try to explain it by example in a language you are intimately familiar with -- ENGLISH! -- and that should help anybody who reads this thread in the future.

In English, (over-simplified argument but bear with me) we have three tones or morae instead of the two the Japanese have. If Japanese is a lo-hi mora system, then English is a lo-middle-hi system. We will denote this by writing L for lo, M for middle, and H for high. Some examples:

• "apple" has a hi-lo, or HL, pattern
• "watermelon" is HLLL
• "Madagascar" is MMHL (not LLHL -- you can prove this to yourself by giving the -car the same tone you gave the Ma- and the -da- syllables, which would be an MMHM pattern.)

Got it? Okay. Here's what I want you to do now: tell me how you'd say these words?

• experiment
• experimentation

The word "experiment" is LHLL but the word "experimentation" is LMMMHL. Notice that you go up from ex- to -per- but you go up another level from -men- to -ta-, and then you drop two whole tonal levels back down when you finish it all up with the -tion. You should (if you speak American English; and I don't think other Englishes will differ much for these two words.) (If you notice that "experimentation" has more than 3 tones or that either word appears to have something like a half-tone, good for you! Just remember, I said English isn't really a 3-tone language, we're just applying the model as best we can for now to avoid needless complications. ^^; )

So what's the point of all this? These tones, these L's and H's, are what I'm talking about in Japanese when I use the word "mora" (singular) or "morae" (plural). So here's what I want you to try out now:

• try saying "experiment" with only one tone -- let's pick a lo-tone like a robot, which would be LLLL.
• try saying "experimentation" with this tonal pattern: HHLLLL (This should sound very funny to you! If it doesn't ... )

If somebody said the words like this to you on the street, and said all of their words with similarly funny tones, would you believe they could speak native English? No, of course not. You would either think they were fooling around, psycho, or a foreigner.

SAME THING FOR ALL LANGUAGES WITH TONES.

If a Japanese guy heard me say 宝物 with the following tone pattern -- LHLHL -- first of all it'd probably make him think of the game Simon™ (you know, the music game with 4 colored light pads?), but second of all he'd know I wasn't a native speaker. Nobody in Japan says 宝物 like that. Nobody. It's not an acceptable intonation in normal speech. And if you said all your words just as badly? It'd be borderline unintelligible.

For Americans, think about Apu from the Simpsons. This stereotype about Indian English holds just as true for American Japanese or for any 2ary language speaker. When we say that foreigners are talking incorrectly, most of the time it's the tone! Even the newbs pronounce the syllablic sounds correctly!

Why did I choose the words "experiment" and "experimentation"? Why not just show you one word? Because: I want you to recognize that it's human nature for second-language acquirers to assume tonal inheritance for word families. In plain English? People assume that the "e x p e r i m e n t" portion of the words "experiment," "experimentation," "experimented," "experimental," etc. should be identical. So they learn how to say "experiment" correctly (tones and all) but then they misapply "experiment"'s tones to the words "experimentation" and wind up sounding like a foreigner. Which is exactly what they are, of course. ^_^;

So the moral of the story is, if all your Japanese comes from textbooks, YOU'RE SCREWED. Because you'll zero appreciation for spoken tones, and NO textbook includes mora diacritical marks over words. (I mean no textbook outside of advanced/expert linguistics texts.) And if all your Japanese comes from music? YOU'RE STILL SCREWED. Not too screwed. And not at all for a beginner's level. But screwed enough and screwed too much if you're going for mastery of the language. If mastery's the goal, then you won't want to fuck around. Learn how to say the words correctly right from the beginning. Because once you get them into your heard incorrectly, it's a haaaaard habit to break.

P.S. Did you check out that Simon link? I'll say this then: think of the blue color as L, the red color as M, and the green color as H. (Ignore the Yellow, which is a musical flat.)

 

[techie]

This is indeed a very useful thread... Great work on the explanation there Sakunyuusha.

One thing most will state as well, and I see it all the time, is to lay off the Romaji as soon as possible. For the very same reason as the above given I would say.

There is a slight exception to the rule, which may only hold true for a few native speakers of languages other than English.

In fact English is only my third language in comparison, and by use, but has become more or less my first language recently. My native language on the other hand, though written with the usual alphabet, has nearly exactly the same enunciations as Japanese syllables and Romaji in that sense has not been as confusing to me as I assume they would be to a native English speaker.

Still, the preference to bail Romaji to learn the Kana/Kanji would be quite understandable and the benefits clear to anyone wishing to understand more than Hentai/Anime magazines and the occassional instructional signs.

When it comes to the dictionaries though, cold you recommend one that has the morae indicators included?

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I cannot. I am in the market myself for a good paper dictionary for onomatopoeia -- and have been for the last 2½ years. It's hard to find a good dictionary.

There are several excellent 日本語-->English electronic dictionaries available for Japanese natives. All of the Japanese graduate students I knew had them. They're about the size of those hard cases you're supposed to put your glasses in but nobody ever does. Each of them costs (iirc) $100 to $250 (maybe aquamarine knows more about current pricing??) and they came with the entire contents of Japan's equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. The better ones come with both pre- and post-war kanji and detailed explanations about certain words or kanji. Hell! I even knew one guy who had the Nihonshoki and the Kojiki on his! Or maybe that was a separate device? Oh well.

Unfortunately, the best I've ever seen available for the non-fluent white man hoping to speak better Japanese are Nintendo DS kanji games that anime fans keep recommending. Don't get me wrong: I love anime and I love my DS. But I don't have fucking time to turn on the DS and try to scribble-scrabble stuff in. I want a keypad! And what's more, I don't want a kanji practice game! I want the 50,000+ word dictionary and kanji extravaganza! I want grammar! I want loan words! I want it all. Not 2000-odd Joyo kanji. -_-;

And so to this day, sadly, I have never seen a good digital nor a good paper 日本語<-->English dictionary for advanced speakers. If I had? I'd own one and recommend it to you heartily.

For beginners, I would recommend http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C as a quick and easy-access site that is excellent even for advanced users but requires Internet access and (to be useful to you) a computer with Asian fonts installed. Which does not include most public consoles, sadly. -.- For people like me who get too distracted by the magic of the World Wide Web and prefer old-fashioned books, I do suggest Jack Halpern's kanji dictionary. I have purchased it twice (first copy was destroyed, don't ask) and it has on occasion had kanji that even WWWJDIC didn't seem to have. I also own this dictionary but I would say that I very rarely used it in my first year of study because I was such a baby speaker and then by the time I could have used it I was using WWWJDIC or my textbooks instead, and now the book's kinda worthless to me because most of my questions these days are for technical terms, sexual terms, onomatopoeia, or kanji, rendering the book useless. Neither paper dictionary has mora indicators, nor does WWWJDIC. I didn't see those until I first took Japanese linguistics as a 3rd-year student of the language and even then we didn't have an official textbook. I may consider e-mailing the teacher if you think you'd want such a book in the near future, but I haven't spoken with him in a few years, so you'll have to be pretty serious about wanting the book!!

 

[techie]

I agree completely with your monash jdic reference, see link above.

I donwloaded the whole version a long time ago before I got into mysql development and dumped it into a MS Access db file.

I added the hiragana/katakana list for beginners on it too.
I have yet to include the 3100 std. kanji's and to find a good list of all name kanjis but if someone wants this. all credit goes to monash.

Here is my ref. list though you'll need acceess or a viewer capable to read ms access 2000.


I made this simply because the lack of an interface back then and I could never understand why you would have to have a computer degreee before being able to learn how enter a search in a simple GUI to look up a language reference. This is not much of a GUI but at least you dont need to trix around installation to do a simple lookupm and its for all, from beginner till you get up there.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Here is an excellent audio sample providing another example of Japanese morae: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

Step 1. Click on the audio link at the very top.
Step 2. She first says 箸, hashi with a HL pattern.
Step 3. Then she says 橋, hashi with a LH pattern.
Step 4. Then she says 端, hashi with a LL (or baseline, or no) pattern.

The words are very different, as you can tell by the very different kanji! ^_^;

It's easy for people to get intimidated by this but I would encourage them to recognize that all languages with tones or stresses have examples like these, and English is no exception. For example?
- desert vs. dessert (same sounds, only difference is HL vs. LH intonation)
- perfect (the adjective, with HL sound) vs. perfect (the verb, with LH sound)

If someone spoke to you and you heard them say, "He was lost in the dessert for 2 weeks," would it make you laugh? Yes. Think of this comic? Maybe. Confuse you beyond the ability to know what they meant. No, of course not. Same thing generally holds true in reverse. If you say "meet me at the chopsticks at 5 o'clock," I think most Japanese will know what you meant. ;p

 

[techie]

after pondering the last examples, I wonder if even the Japanese would understand a sentence like...

"chasing someone down with a pitchfork for two bottles of Japanese beer"

especially after having a few already. (^^)

 

[aquamarine]

When all else fails, just say "gomimasen"
*big grin*

 

[techie]

or when youve already had a few, and stumbled on the tounge twister above a few times, try "okawari" (^^)

 

[Kanaris]

Aside from learning Japanese don't you need to learn English too?

 

[aquamarine]

'the hell is it talking about?

 

[wotakaskus]

When all else fails, just say "gomimasen"
*big grin*

i'm sorry but,what's "gomimasen" mean ?

i always hear the word that close enough to that word,"sumimasen" .it's that was a same word and same meaning ?

 

[aquamarine]

Gomimasen is 'Aquagolish'.

Along with that, you can also try sumimasorry. Hisashiburi and 'gyuu' with pouty lips when something goes wrong.