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.