I started learning a few weeks ago. I've been translating Girls und Panzer 4 comas on Gelbooru(because nobody else had) and I've been using WaniKani. I'm still not good enough to start reading manga, it takes a while to translate even 4 comas and often I am not happy with my translations.

>>33796
Op here, I'd suggest you learn the radicals(with the original meaning) and learn how to write them correctly. I don't think little things like the kanji for left and right starting with a different strokes are important, but learning the general patterns was helpful to me. I don't think counting strokes is important either. Just get the motion down. The way you draw a box for example is totally different from what you might do intuitively. The way the thread kanji is written works very well while what you'll try by looking at it without knowing anything looks like shit.

Do Kanji straight from the start(right after kana). When learning vocab, learn them with their kanji. Going back and learning the kanji which goes with old vocab is a waste of time. It's too early for you to be doing translation. It's just too early.

Post edited on 7th Dec 2019, 8:23pm

>>33799
>Do Kanji straight from the start(right after kana). When learning vocab, learn them with their kanji. Going back and learning the kanji which goes with old vocab is a waste of time. It's too early for you to be doing translation. It's just too early.

Yes, that's what I have been using WaniKani for, my plan is to learn Kanji through that(plus it teaches some vocabulary) and vocabulary through 4 comas, these 4 comas have furigana so it's not 100% necessary to actually now Kanji to read them.

>>33800
>4 comas
It's 4 koma (in romaji こ is written as ko not co)

>>33799
>learn the radicals(with the original meaning)
This is good advice. If you're serious about doing kanji and don't already have exposure to it from Chinese, then focusing on kanji alongside or before vocabulary is helpful so that your brain can recognizes the symbols as something other than amorphous squiggles. Breaking it down by radical is helpful in giving them structure. It should be noted that wanikani makes up their own meanings for radicals, and obscures the structure of some kanji (many kanji are made up of phono-semantic components such as 仲 made up of a "person" radical 亻and the kanji 中 which gives it the reading).

I've been doing kanji for some time and probably the most annoying part is all the different readings. At least in Chinese it's supposedly consistent, but with kanji you have *multiple* different ON/KN readings. Given that the grammar is relatively straightforward so the spoken aspects can be acquired relatively easy (barring accent issues), it's irksome that it's paired with what's probably among the jankiest writing systems. Given that koreans were able to reform via Hangul, I do wonder why Japan has decided to stick to this.

>>33801
>the most annoying part is all the different readings.
I've been completely ignoring the readings when learning them. My thinking is, if I know the word and how it's pronounced, I know the word; if I don't know that word, I don't know it. Learning how actual words are written and pronounced at the same time seems way less torturous than learning every possible reading of kanji, and more efficient. If there are clear patterns, like with 学, i'll pick up on them.

I don't like how they change the meaning of radicals. It makes learning the meaning of kanji a bit more difficult and maybe removes some interesting cultural context. The village radical and one of the fire radical coming together to form the black kanji sort of makes sense. It doesn't if you learned the village radical means computer because it looks a little bit like one.

>Given that koreans were able to reform via Hangul, I do wonder why Japan has decided to stick to this.
Once you know them, kanji makes reading a hell of a lot faster. There's also the matter of cultural preservation and accessibility. The average Korean can't read a 1970s newspaper from their own country. Imagine them trying to read a book from that era. Their language also has the same problem with homophones(maybe a bit less), which has caused confusion and even pretty bad infrastructure damage.

Korea has always had a struggle with literacy rates, yet despite having a more complex written language now, Japan's literacy rate is one of the highest in the world. Plus Kanji is good for the brain.

Post edited on 7th Dec 2019, 10:06pm

More info on Hangul only vs mixed script.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190401182600/https://kuiwon.wordpress.com/articles/

Post edited on 7th Dec 2019, 10:11pm

>>33801
>own meanings for radicals, and obscures the structure of some kanji

True, their mnemonics are often not helpful either but I try to ignore them anyway.

I find the different readings to be quite interesting etymologically, but yes they are annoying.

I've been learning for about 1-2 years now, I forget when I started but I haven't had to use translations or subtitles for some time now.
>AJATT
AJATT is weird and culty, which is why Matt (the american guy in the video) made MIA, which is what I've been following to very high success as of now.
One of the things you should know about MIA is that he's not just outlining it so you can be "fluent". The end goal of MIA is to be native level, i.e. you're not just speaking in a way people can 'understand' you but also in the way they'd speak themselves. Also, the point of it isn't to not have an accent, but precisely TO have an accent: an accent natives would have, that doesn't sound awkward. To this extent, studying pitch accent (which isn't that hard actually), and copying native speakers to correct any mistakes in your pronunciation is paramount.
The guy's aware total mastery isn't for everyone, or you don't have 10 hours of your life to dedicate to this daily, which is precisely why MIA was made to be extremely flexible to people's needs and schedules. As far as I'm aware he also wants it to avoid "cult status" as much as possible. I'd recommend checking out the website, even if you're not interested in really precise speech corrections there's tools for making Anki better and methods to improve listening comprehension.
>JLPT
I took a sample quiz a few days ago. It's literally just a reading quiz with added listening parts. Don't bother 'studying' for it.
>Kanji
The first big goal in reading comprehension is learning to see kanji as characters rather than little squiggly lines that mean jack shit. I admit I'm not 100% sure what the best way to do this is, or even how I got past this barrier, perhaps grinding a deck in Anki could help. Other than that:
1. Don't bother "learning readings". Just learn how words are pronounced and eventually the readings of kanji will come naturally to you.
2. It's very possible to be able to fluently read a passage of Japanese and be unable to properly write any of the kanji from it from memory. In the same way, you can learn to write a kanji but be unable to read the word its in. Reading it and writing it are two different things.
3. Don't worry about "how much kanji you know".

Also, don't bother with any language learning community. You'll just try and compare yourself to your "peers" when you should only be focusing on your goals. I don't even bother with MIA's "community" despite following parts of the system.

>>33805
>It's very possible to be able to fluently read a passage of Japanese and be unable to properly write any of the kanji from it from memory
Even natives experience this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

>>33805
>lso, the point of it isn't to not have an accent, but precisely TO have an accent: an accent natives would have, that doesn't sound awkward. To this extent, studying pitch accent (which isn't that hard actually), and copying native speakers to correct any mistakes in your pronunciation is paramount.
Why is this something which people want to obtain? If your pronounciation is horrible and incomprehensible, then yeah, the problem is obvious, but if you're talking to somebody on the phone, why is trying to make sure they can't tell you're a foreigner important? If you listen to audio regularly, you'll probably unconciously start to imitate what you hear, so while not as effective as active study, your pitch accent will still improve. Again, basically nobody approaches English like this. I guess if you want to live there I can get it.

>>33808
One must aim for the best.
I'm lucky with japanese because my native language means I can pronounce perfect japanese almost without any effort. Sadly I can't remember kanji for shit.

>>33808
>Why is this something which people want to obtain? If your pronounciation is horrible and incomprehensible, then yeah, the problem is obvious, but if you're talking to somebody on the phone, why is trying to make sure they can't tell you're a foreigner important?
It's partially a perfectionist thing. The big difference between "native level" and "fluency" is sounding like a native. People who strive for native level want to be as damn well good at speaking Japanese as they can possibly be.
>If you listen to audio regularly, you'll probably unconciously start to imitate what you hear, so while not as effective as active study, your pitch accent will still improve.
That's partially true. Listening a lot will help you naturally pick up on the pronunciation of words, how sentences are formed, and builds up listening comprehension in general. The specific problem with pitch accent is that it requires a bit more training to properly hear, since most languages don't have that sort of accent. With the use of an Anki addon this becomes really trivial and easy to do. Once you really do start hearing pitch accent, you'll realize 99% of everything you hear is said with the proper pitch, so deviations from that would definitely sound weird to a native.
>Again, basically nobody approaches English like this. I guess if you want to live there I can get it.
Most people don't approach language like this in general. Going out of your way to have natives correct the very small issues in your speech that couldn't be corrected through listening, correcting your own speech through copying a native, and whatever study you did on speech is something that's done by people who want to eliminate as many mistakes in their pronunciation as possible. It's basically already done by people who are near-perfect and probably wouldn't "need" it to be understood.
Also, English is a pretty widespread language that's spoken by several different countries, so the "proper" pronunciation can change depending on where you live.

Although if you're just out for fluent literacy then there's obviously not much point in worrying about your pronunciation and you can decide whether or not to even bother with it later.

>>33810
What language is that?

>>33813
Catalan.

>>33794
You'll achieve your goal if you just have the persistence to stick to it. The most important thing is that your study plan is reasonable enough for you to commit to it on a daily basis. Patient effort is what will pay off, impatient people are forever stuck in the loop of overdoing it and giving up (or doing nothing at all while daydreaming about studying 10 hours a day).

>>33819
For example: if you memorize 2 kanji every day (and do regular reviews), you're finished with jouyou kanji in 3 years. It may sound like a long time but some of us have spent 10-15 years wanting to learn Japanese but never making any real progress. I'd even advise starting at 1 kanji per day pace and raising the amount only when you're 100% sure that you'll stick to it.

>>33820
I haven't practiced kanji specifically in a while, but "at my peak" I knew up to grade 4, which is around 600. Just the meaning and how to write them though, not the pronounciation. It helps me a bit with learning vocab. I'm not sure if learning kanji on their own is worth the effort or not though. I learned them in sets of ten. I would write each one for three lines of paper, then go through them and see which ones I still remembered. I'd write the ones I forgot for another three lines. Then I'd move on to the next ten and then review all of them back from the start and so on. I learned about 20 to 50 a day that way. Some spaced repition was involved too week by week. Tedious, very tedious.

Post edited on 12th Dec 2019, 11:16am

>>33820
>if you memorize 2 kanji every day
That's what I've been doing. However since my focus is more towards spoken Japanese rather than written (with the intent of translating hitherto obscure/untranslated OP/ED and accompanying B-Side tracks), in addition to the 2 kanji per day I'm also going through ~20 vocab words a day (learning in hiragana). I'm using an Anki deck based on the Wanikani vocab, which is nice because it breaks down the words by its component kanji, and even though learning in this way (doing most of vocab before kanji) seems backwards at first, I think it's been working nicely because when it's time to learn a new kanji I've usually seen it in vocab words before so I can make the connection and have something to remember it by.

The one downside is that this doesn't build up the visual link between string of kanji -> vocab word, so I will have to go through the entire vocab deck in kanji when I'm done learning the individual kanji. I consider this an acceptable tradeoff though since reading isn't my main focus and I think the second pass through will be much quicker since I will know both the pronunciation and meaning already.

>>33821
>I'm not sure if learning kanji on their own is worth the effort or not though.
I'm not interested in being able to produce kanji on paper from memory, so I hardly spend any time writing down kanji - recently I haven't bothered at all. That removes much of the time and effort and it's still really helpful in improving kanji recognition. This page is great for reviewing: https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/horon/kanji/ichiranhyou.html

>>33823
>>33822
I'm too busy at the moment and lacking energy to focus on kanji study. So I just generalize it.
My daily dose of an NHK and/or Anibu article, as well as the YT channel スーツ 交通 and the live morning news and weather forecast https://aqstream.com/jp present a fun and diversified, less cramming way of learning new vocab and a few kanji. Some stick at first try. Others stick once you've seen them twice or thrice. It's also a great way to expose yourself to more japanese and feel more comfortable with the language.

>>33806
Yeah, this is definitely my problem.

Can't write kanji for the life of me, but once I see it, I know the character meaning.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that Japanese mainly use technology (mobile keyboards, word processing software) instead of actually writing.

>>33801
>Given that koreans were able to reform via Hangul, I do wonder why Japan has decided to stick to this.

I have a theory that it's largely based on how similar many Japanese words are to each other, yes English has this to some extend but it does not seem to have it to the same degree so having a hieroglyph represent a word could give it meaning where it would otherwise be confused with something else. I think that is also why the Japanese language is so context based in general.

>>33863
>it's largely based on how similar many Japanese words are to each other
Not sure if you know this, but that's roughly what a homophone is.

>>33864
Yes and Japanese seems to have more of them and they are also spelt the same(or would be without Kanji), they don't just sound the same or very similar.

>>33801
>in romaji こ is written as ko not co
Wrong, you can write it in whatever way you want, so long as it makes sense phonetically and looks good. See also ニコ動/Nicovideo, 大君/Tycoon, 谷川ニコ/Nico Tanigawa, and of course 遠野/Tohno (instead of Toono or Tōno). There are different schemes for the systematic transliteration of Japanese into English, but they should not be used by learners of Japanese for anything but typing Japanese on a keyboard. Anyone who is serious about learning the language should study the kana and go from there.

>it's irksome that it's paired with what's probably among the jankiest writing systems.
Japanese has the best writing system in the world. It has both phonetic spelling thanks to the Kana, and a offers high reading speeds thanks to Kanji's compact representation of complex meanings. English has neither.
>Given that koreans were able to reform via Hangul, I do wonder why Japan has decided to stick to this.
If you ever get around to learning enough Japanese to actually read books, it'll be obvious why they don't want to dump the Kanji, despite some Europhiles in the Meiji era advocating for it and (((America))) trying to coerce them into it after WW2. Written Japanese without Kanji is ok for playing Pokemon, but anything more complex than that is going to be nearly impossible to read due to all the homophones.

>>33868
>and a offers high reading speeds thanks to Kanji's compact representation of complex meanings
It's certainly more dense, but that might not necessarily translate to quicker reading if the gap which you focus on at any given instant differs in width between the two (with the limiting factor being the brain's processing rate, not the optical field of view).

There haven't been many cross-comparisons between reading speed in languages, but the two I've found [1, 2] do seem to place Chinese slightly above English in terms of reading speed (separated by 1 SD = ~1/5 of the given reading text). I could only find one comparing Japanese and English [2], but interestingly that has JP 1SD lower than English (and about 2SD lower than Chinese). I'm not sure why there's this difference between CN and JP.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19388079909558298?journalCode=ulri19#preview
[2]https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2166061

>>33870
>Reading time (aloud) was measured by stopwatch.
That study is completely irrelevant to my point. The big advantage of Kanji is that you can easily glean a word's its meaning without having to sound it out in your head first.
What's more, spoken Japanese is not a very dense language; it makes up for its low number of phonemes by being more verbose, i.e. it tends to use more syllables than English to express the same concept. Of course saying オオカミのたましい out loud takes a long time, but that doesn't change the fact that the meaning of 狼の魂 can be understood very quickly.

>>33870
Japanese would take a lot longer to read without Kanji. How fast it is compared to other languages isn't so relevant.

Op update: I've finished Genki 1. How is everyone else doing?

>>34051
I couldn't even learn the basic alien letter things so I gave up.

>>34051
Fairly well, much of what I read is starting to fall into place much sooner.

>>34052
That's one of the biggest hurdles. You have to write them a lot over and over again, daily. It takes around a week to get them down solidly. This step is the only time romaji will be useful. Write the kana, then its romaji, over and over again for a few lines of paper.

I'm currently using anki for vocabulary and various guides (Tae Kim, Imabi, Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, Visualizing Japanese Grammar, and Yuko Sensei) for grammar. I feel like I'm doing pretty good so far. Does anybody believe that my course of study is effective? I hear that I should just study kanji alone, however I also hear that that may be a bad idea and to just study vocabulary. What do you guys reccommend?

Yeah, they really did need Kanji. The amount of things that are read as こう is getting ridiculous.

>>34066
I think what really helped me understand the necessity of kanji was seeing an RPG write out an uncommon word with hiragana and scratching my head over what the fuck they meant.

Ive been studying for quite some time now. There has always been much ado about "this method" or "that method", but in reality you should use whatever works best for you, regardless of what the "community" is using. After all it's unreasonable to expect the same method to work for everyone else. I lost too much time with Anki and the "Antimoon" stuff, because at the time every guide said "Do your reps", "Grind Anki", but it never worked for me. This whole AJATT thing doesn't interest me either. What I do is I learn Kanji by grade, as they do in Japan, by writing via an app and then on paper, and write it on a 10x11 sheet with a pencil, then I redo the strokes of the same kanji over the original, but with a color pencil, using 6 different colours for stroke ordering. This leaves me with a sheet containing 110 learned characters and I can see the stroke order just by glancing at it.

I agree partially with you OP. Actually in my country I've seen many people treating even English that way, to the point of want to speaking with the accent of a determinate news broadcast network accent because it's international and others are wrong or just the local accent as well, all with the intention of "going unnoticed that he is not an native speaker"
>If somebody ever sees their face, they'll still know they're not Japanese.
These are my exact thoughts on the situation.
>Is this just a goal anybody has because of how ethnically homogenous Japan is?
I know people who try to do with English, so I don't think it has anything to do with ethnicity, at least it's more likely that you could pull it off in more diverse countries such as Canada.

>>34064
>I feel like I'm doing pretty good so far
Seems to me that it is effective for you.

>>34073
>I learn Kanji by grade, as they do in Japan
I don't know about that. I don't know what methods they actually use(colored pencils?) or if those kanji lists are intended as study material they learn in class, or as bench marks, like "if you're in grade 6, you should at least know this already". I've read somewhere, kanji is "learned" in Japan purely through context, vocab words and such. Japanese people look at how kanji is learned by westerners and are bewildered. Don't know how credible this is though.

I used to learn them on their own in a similar, but less rigorous way to what you do up to grade 4, but I stopped because even if prior kanji knowledge is helpful every once in a while, it seems like many common words have their own kanji which is rare anywhere else. I just learn words now and accept whatever kanji comes with them, passively noticing patterns. There's other things that could be done in that time.

OP update: I've finished genki 2. I'm doing tobira next. How's everybody else doing?

>>34835
Good job OP. I haven't been doing well and I hate myself for it. I need to motivate myself more. I only know like 50< vocab.

>>34835
Good job OP. I haven't been doing well and I hate myself for it. I need to motivate myself more. I only know like 50< vocab.

>>34836
Thanks. Routine is God.

>>34835
I'm slowly going through vocab and kanji. Interestingly I haven't really found a need to focus on grammar explicitly since I feel that I learn better by looking up new grammar in the context where it's used.

I'm suffering a lot with not even three months of anki. Truth is I started to study japanese in college like ten years ago, did it for two years, never made any progress. I still struggle with the most basic shit. Still, I will keep with it or I will die trying. Sometimes I wonder if my brain is suited to learn japanese, maybe it's one of those things you can't do no matter how much you try.

>>34839
How do you deal with idioms and expressions? If I've never seen it before it, I wouldn't know if it's vocabulary or what.
>>34841
Examining your methods and trying something else might be worth a try. I always write the vocab as i'm going through my flashcard. If I can't recall a word, I write it over and over. Maybe some muscle memory is what you're missing.

Post edited on 30th Apr 2020, 4:11am

>>34844
>If I can't recall a word, I write it over and over.

I tried that the other day. I couldn't remember a meaning even while I've been looking at the same word for the last 15 days. I wrote the word and the meaning like 100 times. And 30 seconds later I looked at the word again. I completely forgot the meaning and I confused it with another one. It was incredibly frustrating.

The other day I confused 日 with 月. Basically the first kanjis you learn and I have learned like a decade ago. I confuse き, さ and ち in a daily basis. I mean, it's a mistake you can do while learning hiragana, not something to keep doing ten years later.
Right now I can only trust in my autist willpower and hope someday I will be able to understand things because I assume being just functional it's impossible.

>>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.

Can someone confirm whether this is an appropriate, if not awkward, reading?
「までも魔術の修行をろく付けてくれないいいかげんな師に痺れを切らしたメリアは」 -> Meria, who became impatient with her careless master going so far as to not give her any decent magical practice.
I'm assuming ろく is being used as an adverb, that までも is there for expressing the extent, and 付けてくれ, putting aside the negation, means giving assignments.
Reading is both a fun and frustrating puzzle.

Sorry, it should be「いつまでも魔術の修行をろく付けてくれないいいかげんな師に痺れを切らしたメリアは」 -> Meria, who became impatient with her careless master never giving her any decent magical practice.

>>40079
That sounds ok to me. I'm not any good, but this is how I parsed it

((itsu made mo) ((majutsu no shugyō wo ro ku tsuketekurenai) (īkagen na shi))) ni (shibire wo kirashita) meria wa

Maybe if you want to make it sound poetic: Maria, who had grown impatient of her master's negligence in providing magical training

After a 3 month "break" I've gotten back into flashcards and have added about 100 more cards.