Melya68 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 4301 days ago 109 posts - 126 votes Speaks: French*, English
| Message 1 of 13 19 February 2014 at 2:30pm | IP Logged |
I have absolutely no idea how long this 日本語 adventure will last.
I've decided to just enjoy it. :)
I started studying three days ago. By now, I know most of the hiragana, though reading them in words is still difficult. I've also learned many basic words and expressions such as water, wind, why, "where is?", hello, goodbye, ticket, splendid, Japanese, English, mosquito, to see, to buy, book...
I watched Mirumo de Pon! in Japanese and was able to understand a few words.
I want to avoid studying grammar and boring stuff for as long as possible. I'm going to focus on hiragana for now. I might learn katakana in a few weeks, but I don't want to get confused.
Kanji is next on my list, especially since I know some basic kanji already as I studied Chinese for a couple of weeks last year.
I still haven't learned basic greetings such as "good morning". I know it's something like "ohayo" and if I hear it I can recognize it, but writing it is another story!
I'm looking for fun resources, possibly even stuff for young Japanese children. I really want to avoid more formal courses for now.
Edited by Melya68 on 19 February 2014 at 7:57pm
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Melya68 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 4301 days ago 109 posts - 126 votes Speaks: French*, English
| Message 2 of 13 19 February 2014 at 11:40pm | IP Logged |
I'm almost done learning hiragana, but I need a lot more practice recognizing the characters. Sounding them out is not too difficult though, so that's good news.
I wanted to use Fairy Tail raw volume 1 for some dictation practice, but sadly, most of the manga is in kanji!
I'll definitely need to look for manga targeted at a younger audience. I'll give Yotsubato! a chance. It was recommended by some nice forum members here.
Edited by Melya68 on 19 February 2014 at 11:40pm
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kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4857 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 3 of 13 20 February 2014 at 1:41am | IP Logged |
Good luck!
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Melya68 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 4301 days ago 109 posts - 126 votes Speaks: French*, English
| Message 4 of 13 20 February 2014 at 3:02am | IP Logged |
Thank you! I got a bit discouraged by Yotsubato!, so I've decided to work on hiragana some more.
It seems like there are two main fonts for hiragana, and I have trouble reading one of them because the characters change slightly. For example, "ki" seems to gain a stroke (or lose its round-looking part, whatever.) This is also true for "sa", and "ko" loses its bounciness somewhat.
I was lucky enough to find writing practice PDFs, and a couple of hiragana charts which use both fonts.
After much thought and consideration, I decided to print the PDFs. Now, this is a big deal for me. I rarely ever print anything. It's not even a cost issue, since my cartridges are cheap. However, it seems that the minute I print something, I lose interest in the content of what I printed. We will see how much hiragana practice I get in!
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Melya68 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 4301 days ago 109 posts - 126 votes Speaks: French*, English
| Message 5 of 13 20 February 2014 at 11:47am | IP Logged |
Hm, sleep can be a funny thing. It seems like a good chunk of the hiragana I've learned has decided to escape overnight. Maybe my brain wasn't warm enough?
In all seriousness, I'm currently dealing with some issues, and I suspect that stress is the culprit.
Any advice on how to deal with this is welcome.
I've been up for an hour, and all I've done so far is reviewing the hiragana. I think I should stop reviewing for now, because "forcing" things isn't a good way to learn a language. I'm probably a bit of a slow learner when it comes to Japanese, but hopefully I'll get better at learning hiragana soon.
I got told that studying when you're stressed out is not very useful at all, so I might have to take a break.
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Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6126 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese
| Message 6 of 13 20 February 2014 at 12:31pm | IP Logged |
if you are having trouble with hiragana you might also want to look into Heisig's hiragana/katakana book. It helped me a lot when I was starting out. Other then that, how do you review? With Anki?
Something you could also try is reading something because the more you see the characters the easier it will be to remember them. :)
Best of luck with your studies, try not to stress out too much you are just starting out so it's normal and ok to feel a bit overwhelmed at first.
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Melya68 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 4301 days ago 109 posts - 126 votes Speaks: French*, English
| Message 7 of 13 20 February 2014 at 2:23pm | IP Logged |
Thank you for your advice! :) I need to check out his book.
I review with Memrise. I try to associate one image or funny little story to each hiragana.
I think I tried to learn too many hiragana too fast. The course I chose was probably too advanced for a beginner, because it also contained ばぱぼぽきょきゃしゅちゅ, in other words, the hiragana + the ten-ten and what the course calls the "mini-kana".
I started another course, which contains only the basic 46 hiragana. It's much easier, and now I realize that I know over half of them very well already.
I'll restart the other course when I feel more confident with the basics.
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Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6126 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese
| Message 8 of 13 20 February 2014 at 2:43pm | IP Logged |
I think once you have the basic ones down it will be easier to study the remaining ones. :)
Another thing that helped me that I recommend if you don't do it already is writing out the hiragana will you study them. Being able to write them also makes it easier to remember them while reading.
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