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A little japanese guidance

 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages Post Reply
fortheo
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4796 days ago

187 posts - 222 votes 
Studies: French

 
 Message 1 of 6
10 February 2011 at 1:21am | IP Logged 
Hi, I just started learning Japanese a little while ago. I’ve been doing lessons on livemocha, listening to Japanese podcasts, and Japanese music to keep my exposure up. I also just finished learning the hiragana symbols. I’m just wondering where I should go from here. Should I focus on learning katakana or kanji now? Also when I start Kanji I was going to use the “Remembering the kanji” by James Heisig, but now I’m not to sure. When I start to read kanji I want to be able to pronounce the words in my head, but "Remembering the kanji" says not to focus on the sounds but just the meaning of the kanji.
     So basically I’m just hoping someone can point me in the right direction, and give me some kind of guideline for how to approach learning Japanese.

1 person has voted this message useful



TixhiiDon
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 5224 days ago

772 posts - 1474 votes 
Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian
Studies: Georgian

 
 Message 2 of 6
10 February 2011 at 1:37am | IP Logged 
You should learn katakana after hiragana. A lot of people seem to neglect it, but it's
very important. At first you may be a little confused between hiragana and
katakana, but you will soon be able to tell the difference.

As for kanji, there are basically three groups of people: those who swear by Heisig,
those who hate his method, and those, like me, who somehow managed to study kanji for
years without once hearing his name. Try his method out to see if you like it. If you
don't there are plenty of other methods out there.

Definitely get comfortable with both hiragana and katakana first, though!

Edited by TixhiiDon on 10 February 2011 at 1:37am

2 persons have voted this message useful



ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5902 days ago

2150 posts - 3229 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 3 of 6
10 February 2011 at 1:45am | IP Logged 
I agree with TixhiiDon. All three scripts are very important because they're all used everywhere.

As for myself, I fall into the first category of kanji-learners that TixhiiDon mentioned. I loved working through RTK and found the method really worked for me (that is, if you can manage to keep up your momentum and continue to review the ones you've already learned). I don't think that the fact that the book doesn't teach the pronunciation is a huge problem, because I'm finding that learning the different readings of the kanji in the context of different words is working very nicely and painlessly, and I often surprise myself in being able to sometimes "sound out" a new word without even knowing that I would be able to do so!

頑張って!
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spirit splice
Newbie
United States
Joined 4794 days ago

9 posts - 9 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: German

 
 Message 4 of 6
12 February 2011 at 7:47pm | IP Logged 
Definitely start with hiragana, then do katakana, then kanji. I started with katakana because it looked
more "Japanese" to me, but doing so was a headache and made the hiragana more difficult. I took
blocks of 5 at a time (like all the k's or the n's) and it worked out well. Just keep practicing your writing
and testing yourself both ways (i.e. use the.symbol as the question to answer and use the romanization
as the.question to answer).
1 person has voted this message useful



vykis92
Groupie
LithuaniaRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5075 days ago

68 posts - 71 votes 
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 5 of 6
13 February 2011 at 11:01am | IP Logged 
Does anybody knows any good site for learning kanjis?
1 person has voted this message useful



Monox D. I-Fly
Senior Member
Indonesia
monoxdifly.iopc.us
Joined 4895 days ago

762 posts - 664 votes 
Speaks: Indonesian*

 
 Message 6 of 6
27 March 2018 at 4:26pm | IP Logged 
vykis92 wrote:
Does anybody knows any good site for learning kanjis?


www.tanoshiijapanese.com


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