>>34845
Maybe a more multi-sensory approach would be helpful. I almost entirely ignore the audio component of the language since i'm not really interested in it, but maybe focusing more on that would be helpful to you. I hope you keep at it if it's what you want to do.

I do spaced repition like this. If I can't remember the word, I write it for two lines of paper and just move on. At the end of the week, I see which ones I remember and which ones I don't, I then limit what I practive in the set next week to what I didn't remeber. The number I have to go through in a set shrinks like this. I try to reward myself for what I know more than punish what I don't. Also, do you use the vocab you do know for anything? Are you working through a textbook?

Post edited on 30th Apr 2020, 6:04am

>>34846
I mostly do Anki with sound. I worked with textbooks before (minna no nihongo and others), but not really my thing.
What I try to do is kinda the opposite. I forget about what gives me a headache to learn and keep going. I know I will be confusing 開 and 閉 (or anything similar) forever so I don't think I should focus on that but just keep going. The idea is to be able to read and have a general idea of the meaning of things, even by using context. Problem is the wholes in your knowledge can be really demoralizing.

What bothers me more about japanese is their phonetic simplicity; I see the syllabes as a really limited number of puzzle pieces that are just slightly different from each other and are used to make an absurd amount of combinations so it's really hard to remember anything, you're studying 15 new words everyday that are too similar if not identical to the 15 words you studied yesterday.
And Kanji can be pretty much the same.

>>34847
>it's really hard to remember anything, you're studying 15 new words everyday that are too similar if not identical to the 15 words you studied yesterday.
And Kanji can be pretty much the same.
This may be true, but I prefer to look at it by ignoring similarities a bit and focusing more on the differences, what makes a word unique. These differences may be minute, but when everything is really different from each other and unique in many ways, the total amount of information you have to learn is larger. In hs I took German classes and it was a far less pleasant learning experience for me personally. They conjugate everything and there's tons of exceptions to rules.

>>34848
For the phono-semantic ones you can sort of take advantage of their similarity by knowing that they will sound similar. Although this only really helps if you learned vocab (in e.g. hiragana) before the kanji, since then you can associate the sound to the kanji (and thereby derive the meaning from its association with vocab) rather than trying to remember the meaning directly.

>>34844
Yeah those are tricky. I remember seeing "~ka mo shiranai" and being confused trying to make sense of that literally.

>>34849
>Although this only really helps if you learned vocab (in e.g. hiragana) before the kanji
I learn everything at the same time: how it's written with kanji, how it's sounded with hiragana, and the meaning. I forgot to mention that. In the two lines that I write a vocab word, I write those three in order over and over again. I shorten the english meaning to four letters to conserve paper space and say it in my head.

Post edited on 30th Apr 2020, 11:08am

>>34850
This is what an average piece of practice paper looks like for me(not my neatest handwriting).

So, how do you guys read the "fake furigana" thing? Like they have a a word written just normally, but above the Kanji they have a "joke" reading in kana. Like the reading says puri-zun or chiruden or something, but the Kanji says kangoku or kodomo. I've seen this in scenarios that are not limited by english-japanese word play, like the reading gives omocha but it should be dorei.

>>34937
I think the furigana in those cases might provide additional context, either in the sense of a clarification, word-play, or doublespeak. Sort of the equivalent of doing something like "plaything (read: slave)" or "plaything slave"

Post edited on 8th May 2020, 2:26pm

What's been really annoying me for the longest time is 月, or rather many of the words that use it. I keep getting gatsu and getsu mixed and getting the word wrong and this has been going for a while now... I feel so stupid.

>>34940
Gatsu getsu no difference.
Just don't call madotsuki madogatsu and you're fine.
t. 窓月

>>35074
There's definetly cases where がつ is preferred over げつ and vice versa, like ６月（ろくがつ） and 月曜日（げつようび）. Also, Madotsuki's name is 窓付き, not 窓月.

>>35075
new years eve is お正月 - おしょうがつ - oh shyo ga tsu. the biggest pain in the ass for me is the vowel extension う. If you forget one, the ime wont know what you want.

The fact that からだ can be written as 体, 身体 or 躰 is confusing me.

Lately, I've been seeing the expression　につき　fairly often. More precisely a particular instance of につき: 凶暴につき. I searched around:
につき is defined as:
because of, on account of
regarding
per, apiece
The regarding sense I'm already used to, but the other ones don't seem to fit in the context. There is also a very famous japanese movie その男、凶暴につき I never watched it, but maybe it comes from there? When I saw the expression in anime, it got translated as is cruel, but that doesn't explain anything.

>>37006
What's the context? A quick survey of Yahoo!知恵袋 seems to suggest that most people interpret 「～につき」 in 「その〇〇、～につき」 as synonymous with 「～だから」「～なので」「～のため」.

>>37015
It's from initial d second stage. The 8th episode is called そのクルマ 凶暴につき .

Does anyone know a site that list jap onomatopoeia?

I spent a long time going through anki core 2k deck and reading through tae kim grammar guide and expected that I would at least understand the basics of the language by now.

So I started reading ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石,
and needless to say I have no idea wtf I'm reading. I can recognize many individual vocab words but cannot put a sentence together. Is reading through novels without understanding anything really the key to getting good? That's what AJATTers say on youtube. I can't understand shit

>>37738
Reading something shorter like news articles would probably be better. NHK Easy News should definitely be possible

I've been studying japanese by listening to songs and trying to make out the lyrics and then reading the lyrics afterwards, to fully understand everything. However I've come across a bump in the road. I've watched this anime Genma Taisen Shinwa Zen'ya no Shou, and listened to its OP and ED songs. I've found some lyrics to the OP but I can't find the lyrics to the ED, and there are some words I can't make out, especially the first word she says in the song, in both the ED and the Full version. The song name is 月のシズク by 桂亜沙美. The full version of the song and in the link is all the episodes of the anime on MEGA. Can someone give this song a listen and tell me the first word she says?
Link to the episodes: https://mega.nz/folder/BoQXEK4C#k3MRIk2m0rVGjaiuNeU5QQ/folder/QsIBiaTK
Link to the full version song: https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=GJ9F35AQoZk

>>38460
I'm not exactly sure but I think it's ぎこちない.

>ぎこちない.
Ah, that makes sense, I kept hearing it as きこちない, thanks.

>>38460
Does this work? Are the lyrics not hard to parse nonsense?

>>38464
Yes, it works. I find it much more useful than using books or anime. These kind of works are very narrative drive, which requires an extra effort to keep up with, also if you miss something a lot of the fun is gone, and it piles up so in the end you can't keep up anymore. Music on the other hand, can be enjoyed without even having the slightest idea of what the singer is saying. It also works on a subconscious level, whereupon sometimes you will be doing another thing completely unrelated and remember a song, and it plays in your head pleasantly, even then you're listening to it and learning. The only setbacks of doing this is that sometimes you can't make out the sounds, but even then there's lyrics online. Music without easily searchable lyrics like this one is very hard to come by. But I'm still a beginner, so take this with a grain of salt.

>>38466
Thanks. I had considered doing the same but came up with excuses. I'll go ahead an try.

>>38466
I concur that this works well. The most important part of learning a language is practice, and songs naturally get stuck in your head so you're basically practicing it throughout the day. What I do is pick an OP/ED I really like (strong emotional connection makes this more effective), read through the lyrics once in kana (or romaji) form so you can actually lex the individual words, try to interpret as much as I can based on existing knowledge, read the English lyrics, listen again, and repeat the last two steps over the course of a few weeks.

If you come across a song without English translation, that's also an opportunity for you to practice translation skills and contribute back to the community. Song translations are a great stress test of your JP skills since they will often use more obscure (sometimes archaic) grammatical patterns, word play, and will leave a lot of stuff up to interpretation.

>>38474
>If you come across a song without English translation, that's also an opportunity for you to practice translation skills and contribute back to the community.
I've been thinking about this. Is there any database of japanese songs/anime songs? Where would be the best place to upload it? Ideally it would have the original lyrics and the translation in one page for each song. I've found a few songs that don't have easily searchable lyrics and that I would like to translate but I'm still thinking were to send it to.
Also, in the aforementioned case of 月のシズク there wasn't even the transcription of the song on the internet. The only option to get an "official" transcription would be to buy the out of print CD from Yahoo Auctions or something, but I'd say that's a lot of effort and money and logistics. Probably would need a middleman to ship it back to me as well. The reason I'm bringing this up is because although we had a similar discussion on the "State of Fansubbing" thread, the specific topic of what I've come to call "Linguistic Architecture" - I'm sure there's already a word for this but I can't find it - never came up. To explain what I mean by this let me tell how I've came across this idea. I was watching Speed Grapher and there was an episode - the translation of the episode was something on the lines of "A disgrace of a mother" - whose title contained the word ハハ. Not 母, but ハハ. The katakana version did not convey the usual familiar and caring tones of the kanji version, because of this it was used. Now, if I am to transcribe a song without the original lyrics I may used kanji instead of kana, or kana instead of kanji. The fact is, this is an actual concern I have if I am to submit a song's lyrics. It would not be present in other languages, but in japanese this is a thing.

>>38621
Yeah often times I've used even things such as whitespace to get an idea for how to interpret lyrics.

As for places to upload, I've been lucky enough to find wikia pages for the songs I TL'd, so I just posted it there. There is "animelyrics.com" which I've run across a lot when searching for song translations, which despite the name seems to be general enough to include doujin, j-pop, etc. so you could try there (they also appear to be a legitimate community, as opposed to the various fly-by-night copy paste jobs); and they have full support for original kanji/romaji transliteration/english translation pages.

Although amusingly despite the fact that they require you to pass a JP language test before uploading translations, some of the English translations there have been less than stellar (which I guess is because crafting good translations is itself an art, especially so for song lyrics).

Post edited on 13th Aug 2021, 9:03pm

Op here. It sure has been a long time since I made this thread. Don't exactly have great or inspiring news, but might as well go over what's happened.

I "got through" roughly a third of Tobira. Didn't engage with it much. I also bought the "A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" series and read about half of the beginner volume.

Took a beginner class in Japanese which I breezed through, and then I pretty much stopped my studying except the occasional half-hearted flashcard session that barely scratched my built up pile.

Recently, I had to reinstall windows and I forgot to back up my card data. So I started from scratch and have kept up with it for the past few weeks.

Big difference is while before I had English on the front, Japanese on the back, the cards I'm using now are the other way around. This has made using them a lot less painful. Considering my primary goal is reading and not producing, it also makes more sense.

I've always used Mochi as my flashcard program. It has less features than Anki, but I strongly prefer its ui, and it can import Anki decks. Here is my progress for February(I've been using the Core 2k/6k Tae Kim Vocabulary deck). I'll post a screenshot like this every month now.

I'm gonna try reading now on a regular basis. I can still at least mostly understand the N5 stuff here https://yomujp.com/n5/
I think I'm done with textbooks if I can help it. I'm not trying to pass a test.

>>33794
>I wanna read something like Saya no Uta smoothly and with crystal clear understanding, really enjoy myself. How difficult would that be?
The garbled speech in the opening scene of Saya no Uta seems to pose some difficulty even to native speakers, judging from the few gameplay commentary videos I've watched. While they could pick up the gist of what was being said at least some of the time, none seemed to have crystal clear understanding.
If you pay attention to the context and listen closely to the audio while trying to read along, you can just barely make out what's being said in some cases. For example:
>「ダカラ、屋内ジャ愧Tテサ、屋苞ｧ+けーと。凍ッタ塘1Dpデ滑レルトコロ」
>「だから、屋内じゃなくてさ、屋外スケート。凍った湖の上で滑れるところ」
I believe being familiar with standard pitch accent can also help with making out the words.
By the way, this line is a lot more intelligible than its English version counterpart, which is literally just:
>"TYK#^t3m4T34,Rg4534j&lg45uje@@@"

March 2022 report. The rules I follow are, I only add up to 20 new cards in a day, I only add cards if the number due that day is less than 100.

Post edited on 15th Mar 2022, 11:54am

The japanese use "=" for "-".

It's been months since I first commented here about using music lyrics to learn japanese. All these months passed by and I only feel more despondent. I changed my mind completely on the music learning thing. In the end, lyrics don't really have a concise logic tying the words together, so they are actually not even close to being the ideal medium for learning japanese. I tried to read untranslated manga, on a website called sukima.me. I am absolutely frustrated. Many times I understand every word on a phrase but can't make sense of what's being said, even the conjunctions and the particles, but the overall idea goes over my head. This is the most infuriating thing ever. It just goes on and on in a never-ending cycle of being disappointed towards myself. I try reading a new manga series, using a dictionary. Until just a few pages in, I reach a page where I understand every word being said, but can't make sense of it. I started learning japanese in 2015-2016 it's been 7-6 years, and fucking nothing. I can't fucking read a single chapter of a manga without getting stuck at a fucking simple sentence. I try another manga, the cycle repeats itself, sometimes while using a dictionary every single page, I made it to chapter 3 or 4, then it happens again. Not to mention the fucking exhaustion of doing this. I read 20 pages of manga, and it feels like I read 100 pages of a normal book. I sincerely don't know where to go from this. Will it be 8, 9 years, and I will still be failing at the same things? A child born when I first started learning is already 6 or 7 years old, and I still can't speak japanese for fuck's sake.

>>39451
I could read manga just fine 5 years in, but what matters is how many hours you're putting into it everyday. If you're studying just an hour a day or so, then even if you're doing it for many years it doesn't amount to much. I was putting at least 6+ hours to it everyday religiously until fairly recently and I had many months I would do absolutely nothing else with my day but take a shower and read manga. Even with all that effort, it's a very slow and difficult process indeed.

Reading A LOT really is all it takes to be able to read well though, you can rest assured about that. If you can't deal with frustration very well, then I suggest you pick a manga that has a translation available and put them side by side. That way you can quickly verify the general meaning of the sentence, understand it and move on. I do that for novels sometimes. It helps a lot. I never mind getting stuck though but I'm particularly pacient.

Just to give you an idea of the amount of stuff I had to read before I could read manga well (I kept a log) here are the titles I read every single volume of at least once, many of these I read twice:
Nangoku Shounen Papuwa-kun (7vol), Hanamote Katare (13vol), Blame! (10vol), Saikyou Densetsu Kurosawa (11vol), Capricorn (5vol), SentoMan (3vol), Doraemon (45vol), Jigoku Shoujo (9vol), Itazura na Kiss (23vol), Hoshi no Kirby (25vol), Kuragehime (17vol), Cardcaptor Sakura (12vol), Gugure! Kokkuri-san (12vol), Gakuen Alice (31vol), Rurouni Kenshin (28vol), Read or Die (4vol), Rozen Maiden (8vol), Kingyo Chuuihou (8vol), Mizuiro Jidai (7vol), Chobits (8vol), Super Mario (43vol), Fruit Basket (23vol), Chii’s Sweet Home (12vol), Takamare! Takamaru (17vol), Urusei Yatsura (34vol), Sumire 17sai (2vol), Dragonball (42vol), Angel Densetsu (15vol).
Those are the ones I managed to finish but I read a good amount of volumes from several other titles I either didn't like or it was too hard for me at the time that's not on the list.

By the things you described I think you're on the right path, all you need to do is to understand your frustration is only going to work against you. There's no need to be frustrated, it's not a race, you're not losing anything by getting stuck or not understanding something, as long as you're reading Japanese you're on the right path towards your goal, that's all it matters.

>>39451
>A child born when I first started learning is already 6 or 7 years old, and I still can't speak japanese for fuck's sake.
A child is in "learning" mode 24/7: in complete immersion. The only advantage you have as an adult is that you have already learnt the embedding/abstractions for concepts and so can skip that phase, but that probably doesn't buy you much.

>I changed my mind completely on the music learning thing.
I think song lyrics can work, but you shouldn't only rely on song lyrics. The benefit of lyrics is that they will stay in your mind easier, and you'll get exposure to more diverse/varied style than you would reading prose.

>>39454
>Super Mario (43vol)
Where were you able to find scans for all 43 volumes? The upload I found is missing Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World #7, and Super Mario 64 #5. There also appears to be several chapters that aren't included in the volumes. Were you able to find those too?
>as long as you're reading Japanese you're on the right path towards your goal, that's all it matters.
What about listening comprehension? I would think that most learners here also want to understand the lines spoken in anime without having to rely on translations, and Japanese subtitles can be difficult to obtain. From my experience, listening feels like a separate skill that needs to be honed in addition to reading, especially in cases where the speech is not clearly enunciated.

>>39459
You got it from the same place I did apparently, because vol12 and vol40 are indeed missing and they're the ones you mentioned. Do you care about Mario or the artist? You can read many of Mr. Motoyama's work for free on https://www.mangaz.com/authors/detail/1731. He's a history buff, much of his output is about old Japan. I vaguely remember reading him saying his family comes from petty nobility or something and he even owns a real samurai sword handed down to him through generations. I wish I could find that info again but I can't find it now.

And yes, listening is more or less a separate skill. The anon I responded to was complaining about not being able to read manga, and for that reading more manga is the best way to improve. If anime is the thing you care about the most, then of course watching tons of it is the path to improve. I would begin with watching the entire animelon's catalogue several times. In fact I've watched probably over 1k hours of anime there and I don't even like anime that much. I lost count of the times I watched Kuragehime and Rozen Maiden in there, those are my favorites.

>>39460
Thanks for the tips.

Added another rule that I'd add one new card every day no matter what.

Post edited on 15th Apr 2022, 5:35pm

To any anon who successfully learned Japanese enough to comfortably play VN’s, read light novels, and understand raw anime, was it worth it in the end and how long (in 1000s of hours) did it take to get good?

>>39482
I have a hard time with listening some of the more complex stuff because I don't care at all for anime (I just care for literature and manga really) but as far as reading goes I'm pretty much fluent I guess. Yes it was worth it. Took me about 7 years, at least 3 hours a day every day, missing virtually no days, so I would say about 7k to 8k hours.

I broke the thousand threshold. Remembering is easier after learning even basic grammar since many of the "words" are derivations produced from simple rules.

Does anybody have any experience with the attached pdf? Or can at least somebody who is capable of moonrunes tell me if it is any good?

>>39816
Did you memorize the kana yet? That's the first step. The booklet is fine. It takes a very long time to learn Japanese. Looking in retrospect, the most important aspect of the material you use when first starting out is its ability to keep you going. I guarantee if you study long enough, as the years go by you'll end up using pretty much every method out there. I've used these types of books, too. And Anki and all the Genko books. I memorized Kanji by themselves, in words not writing them down, then writing them down, then writing whole sentences down. I've used pretty much every method under the sun, from books to apps. As long as you keep pushing every single day, you'll get there. Took me about about 7 or 8 years to be really proficient at Japanese.

I see a lot of people getting obsessed with the 'right method' to use, please don't fall for this trap. Don't take hours tweaking your Anki cards or trying to find the perfect grammar book, I see lots of people making this mistake, they get lost and never learn a thing. Don't worry about that, the important thing is to keep learning Japanese. Try that one, work really hard with it, try to reach the end of it, take it seriously. If you burnout or the material is not working out for you, try using Anki, try other books for a while and then come back to it. The most important thing is not to give up. Sounds cheesy but it's the truth. As soon as you memorize the kana, pick up native material. Yotsuba is a good start for that.

That's my advice. The first year is the hardest because you won't understand anything and it can get incredibly frustrating, so don't give up and don't blame on the material you're using, it's not the book's or the software's fault, learning Japanese is just that hard. Develop a schedule and grind grind grind grind, at some point it will be fun and then it doesn't feel like studying anymore. Feels really rewarding. So yeah, do this book, it's fine. Memorize the kana as quickly as possible along with it and as a dessert, struggle through a chapter or two of Yotsuba. Then the next day you do the same thing, same with the day after that. As months and years go by you'll get better.

>>39818
This is a good post. Also note that on learning grammar, there's two approaches you can take: one is to study grammar in depth, the other is to learn by pattern matching via exposure to sentences and text. I think usually people will use a mix of both: if you do only the former, you won't get enough exposure to recognizing things "in real use", and if you do only the latter, you may not have enough exposure to rarer/odder usages of things.

For the former, it's best if you find resources that are closer to linguistic resources than "learn japanese" books, since the latter are often incomplete. Take the infamous "wa vs. ga" thing (which IMO is a bit overrated for beginners anyway, you'll get the meaning all the same, the only difference is nuance). There have been multiple research papers written on this (in English) that you can read through, and this will be much better than any forum post or textbook explanation you come up with. This by itself can help "bootstrap" knowledge, but of course you don't want to be sitting there trying to manually "parse" sentences, you want it to become instinctual, and the only way to do that is through exposure so you can internalize things subconsciously.

>>39818
I didn't, I haven't done anything yet.
Can you recommend something for the kana? I assume first the kana, then the pdf, afterwards the kanji? Anyway thank you for your post, this gave me a few ideas regarding that matter, also thank you to >>39819

>>39820
Hey anon, memorizing the kana is pretty straightforward. You do it exactly like you did with the abc all those years ago. Since you're going with that NHK book, here's their syllabary to go along with it.
https://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/syllabary/hiragana_english.pdf
https://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/syllabary/katakana_english.pdf
You can also find cute looking hiragana and katakana charts to have on your wallpaper or to print it out so you can look at it periodically, which is nice. I really liked the ones like pic related, with words starting with each syllable at the bottom and pictures to go along with it.
Go for the hiragana first, then the katakana. Write them down over and over again. That's how the Japanese do it and that's how I did it, too. Let that muscle memory help you out. Pay attention to the stroke order, this is important because kanji also has a stroke order and that helps you memorize them a lot faster. Put as much time to it as you possibly can. It takes a week or two to go through them all but it takes a month or more to be able to read more comfortably. You can already start with your book if you want, and take a look at Yotsuba as well, but your primary goal should be to memorize the kana, that's the most important thing att.

>>39823
Thank you for your kindness, anon.

>>39816
I can recommend these 3 sites:
>https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/learn/kana.html
>https://www.imabi.net/
>https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

>>39820
Don't worry about being stuck with a few kana(probably katakana) in the first week(s) when instead you can learn the first simple kanji in the meantime. As your studies progress, you may find relief in the discovery that kana descend from kanji, like に from 仁 or せ from 世. But there will be some dozens more of phonetical elements in writing, コ　for some kanji containing 古, ユ　for some kanji containing 俞.