Tag Archives: reading

Note: I originally intended this all to be one post, but it was becoming far, far too long. So, I’m splitting this up into a series. This is the first article in the “Japanese Writing System” series. To the untrained eye, Japanese writing looks like chaos. A friend of mine (who speaks fluent Japanese ^^) once told me her father refers to written Japanese as “chicken feet”, or the marks they’d make on a page if dipped in ink and turned loose. All of these symbols are mixed up all over the place in a seemingly random fashion (to the untrained eye, anyway). To top it off, there are no spaces between words! How is anyone ever supposed to learn that? I answer that question with another question: How did anyone learn English? It’s complex, too! Sure, there are only […]

Part of immersion is listening to audio, such as podcasts. However, most Japanese podcasts do not come with written transcripts. This represents an issue when studying because it can be difficult to correctly understand what you hear. This is where Podcastle comes in. Podcastle is a project funded by the Japanese government for foreign Japanese language learners. It provides a speech recognition system to automagically convert the audio into text. While you play the audio, it tries to keep up but can sometimes become “desynchronized”. It helps if you know enough Japanese to be able to tell when it’s messed up, as it can sometimes be off by a few words. Knowing kana at a minimum may be enough to be able to tell this. While its speech recognition is not all that accurate (let’s face it, though – none […]

Alright, so I’ve had some time to look into these MCDs posts on AJATT to see what they are all about. It seems each MCD is meant to focus on a single kanji, rather than a whole word. This makes a lot of sense, but also can (and likely will) mean that you can have multiple cards for the same sentence. However, it also seems that this might be better once you have more kanji/readings under your belt, since they are so context dependent. To that end, I’m going to use a combination of both going forward. I’m going to continue adding sentences to my original deck primarily, until I can go monolingual. From there, I think it would be best to ease into MCDs a little at a time until I’ve got a solid enough grasp on things to […]

It’s a simple question, really. The answer? For some it will be just as simple, whereas other folks may find trouble coming up with an answer. I didn’t initially intend for this article to be very long, but alas it became so. So sit back, crack your knuckles (or whatever it is that you do when reading) and get comfortable. Because I’m going to give you my… Top ten reasons for learning Japanese (or any foreign language). Before I begin, please bear in mind that this list outlines my top 10 reasons. However, it’s likely that yours will be different. Perhaps they will be the same ones, albeit in a different order. That’s okay, as this isn’t meant to be an ‘end-all-be-all’. So, without further ado… #10. You live once for each language you learn. Essentially, the concept here is […]

Almost daily, I run into people asking me “How do you say [insert random phrase] in Japanese?”. Anyone that knows I’m studying Japanese seems to think I can immediately speak it, and seem disappointed when I cannot (yet). This is because of the way I’m learning sentences. You see, right now, I am focused on input vs. output. Before I get into my reasons why, let me first define each. Input is taking anything Japanese in. It’s listening, reading, seeing. Output is speaking and writing.   Why Input Should Come First The reasons behind this are simple. Let’s get an example situation to work from. Say you’re lost, and need directions. You find a local, and ask something along the lines of “渋谷はどこですか。” (Where is Shibuya?). Great! He understood your question, and is now giving a response. Problem is, you […]

As of yesterday, I’m at a little over  1,300 kanji. I’m at the part that sucks, the part where there’s still hundreds left, and it seems like it’s taking forever. It’s taking a bit longer than I initially planned because of recent time constraints. No matter, I press on. 1,800 is my current goal, and once I reach that I feel it will be finished sooner than even I think possible. Currently I’m hitting about 200 reviews a day, with between 20 and 30 new kanji a day (unless time is really short – then it’s like 5). Cool thing is I’m at the point where I can look at a web page in Japanese and recognize most of the symbols, or at least parts of them. I still can’t always make out words or sentences, but I can sometimes […]

Updated 7/12/2011. Immersion. From everything I’ve seen/read/heard, immersion is quintessential to learning not just Japanese, but anything, really. If you think about it, it’s how you learned English in the first place – assuming, of course, that it’s your first language. Or, perhaps it isn’t; in which case you would still need to learn via immersion if you really want to get good at it. Let’s back up a few paces and glance at what immersion is from afar. Immersion is basically surrounding yourself with what (language, in this case) you are trying to learn. Full immersion is completely cutting all ties (within reason, of course) to your primary language and converting/changing all those things around you to be in the language you are striving to learn. This includes a lot more than you might consider at first. Obviously one […]