Learning Japanese

[Protoman]

I know some of you here live in Japan, and maybe you know some Japanese. Even you who don't live there may know Japanese. I want to learn Japanese (going to Tokyo late October this year, but I want to learn it regardless). Anyone feel like helping me and others learn some japanese?

[L___E___T]

I've been learning slowly for about a year, it's definitely a long-term goal, so wishing you well and good luck, keep up the motivation to learn and you'll make good progress

[P]

OK here's my mini guide to the fastest way of learning Japanese:

1.
Learn kana as soon as possible and after that avoid using romaji at all cost.
5 minutes a day with this homepage http://www.realkana.com/ is enough to recognize all hiragana decently in a week (of course you can learn it much faster if you have the will). You can also learn from a textbook.

2.
While practicing kana, get a noteblock and practice writing kana every day. Be careful and get the stroke order right for each character from the beginning. It will help you remember them as well. A noteblock with no lines at all or one with a square grid is best. You don't have any use for lines.

3.
You also need to know grammar, words and standard phrases. Get a textbook that doesn't use romaji other than the first few lessons. All books have pros and cons and I don't know what to recommend. I think Genki is ok and it only uses romaji up to chapter 3.

4.
Memorize the glossary, do the exercises and read and translate the texts in every chapter of your book. This is the most important part in learning the language. When memorizing the glossary, write them down in your noteblock (using only kana is enough when starting out). This will further help you writing kana as well.

5.
If you are serious about learning Japanese, you'll eventually need to get yourself a kanji book. Basic Kanji Book vol 1 is a good start. Genki teaches some kanji but it's a far too small amount to really be useful. It's a good start before you buy a real kanji book though (even if the order you learn them in is a bit weird in that particular book).

6.
When studying kanji, write them in your noteblock like you did with kana and be extra careful that you get the stroke order right from the beginning (shouldn't take long to learn the general rules, and you've already come a long way just by learning kana). You'll also need to know about radicals if you want to be able to look up kanji that you've never seen before. If the book doesn't tell you what radical the kanji has, then look it up in a dictionary or on the internet and write the radical in your book beside the kanji or somewhere in your noteblock. This is not to memorize what radical every kanji has but to get a good grasp of the most common radicals. It doesn't take up much extra time and you will be grateful later that you did this. Don't think "I can learn radicals later", because you won't.

7.
When writing kanji in your noteblock, you might as well write kanji compositions (words with at least two kanji) that you find beside each kanji in your kanji book. These compositions will now be part of your glossary memorizing so you'll need to memorize the pronunciation as well.

8.
You might need a dictionary as well. I got away with using online dictionaries (http://jisho.org/) for a long time until I was ready to buy an expensive denshi jisho but I sometimes regret that I didn't get a cheap paper dictionary early to bring with me.

9.
And finally you need lots and lots of patience (especially if you teach yourself) and get used to the fact that you won't understand most Japanese texts for a good while. But if you use this method (possibly modified to suit your preferences) a little bit everyday you should eventually learn Japanese!



Edit:
Practice speaking
The above steps are enough to learn reading and writing Japanese but, in order to understand spoken Japanese and to be able to speak, you need to listen to the CD that comes with your book, read every text out loud many times (be careful and try to pronounce like they do on the CD), and do all the listening and speaking exercises. Talking to yourself like that may feel incredibly dumb, but it's totally necessary to get your tongue to get used to the language. You can do all this while you are studying the book normally.

Listening
You need to listen a lot to Japanese. It's not enough with just the CD that comes with your book or watching anime or movies and such. Listen to Japanese radio/TV (you can download KeyholeTV), you can just let it be on constantly while doing other stuff in your home every day. It doesn't matter that you don't understand anything, the idea is to expose your ears to tons and tons of spoken Japanese and this will amazingly make you a better speaker/listener. I know this from experience.