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Comments
So, the first thing this program has me do is answer 2 questions. "Why do I want to learn Japanese?" and "What's holding me back?"
1. To have access to more Japanese media that is not localized.
2. My lack of a strong work ethic, and things that have only recently been added to my life, like college and a job.
I stick them both right on the bulletin board over my computer.
The next thing it talks about is how the "social reality" in our minds plays tricks on us. When we tell people out goals, and they acknowledge them, we fill closer to having achieved them, and we don't work as hard. And it shows some evidence, like TED Talks and things.
Since I already told you guys, the way it says to go about this is to only talk about it in a way that does not bring my satisfaction. Like, every time I mention a new thing I've learned, mention five more things I still need to learn.
Also, to try and stay away from congratulations until I myself personally feel like I deserve them for the work I've done.
Ｒｉｋａｉｃｈａｎ is handy.
I also like Rikaichan. Shit got me through my Japanese translation class.
My only "issue" with it is that sometimes I lazily mouse over through a text, read key words (e.g. "yesterday", "fish", "eat") and figure it out through from there (Yesterday I ate fish), rather than take my time to understand the language behind the sentence and presumably learning nothing from it.
Nine hundred million people can't be wrong!
I don't really care about Chinese at all.
My high school had it, but didn't have Japanese though.
I can help out
I need somebody to practice with... :<
How much experience do you have, Ica-samasempaikunchaneesaaaaan?
But Japanese is just Chinese with more stuff!
That "stuff" presumably includes "games he wants to be able to read written in it".
Fuck games!
Read shitty kung-fu magazines and seriously old Chinese erotic, fantasy, and historical novels!
But if he learns Japanese, he can watch Kamen Rider for us and tell us how accurate the translations are.
u so cray
...fine.
Continue.
I'd learn Chinese after I'd learn Japanese, not so much because of the rewards—Chinese literature is pretty cool—but because Cardinal Mezzofanti found it the most difficult language he'd ever learned, which is saying something. (Granted, he learned it in less than four months...)
Then again, I'm not sure that he ever tried learning Japanese, so make of that what you will.
Korean is interesting, too.
Saturn: Not much (rusty as fuck, and even with the amount I know, it's from a single semester)
Then we shall learn together!
So, the guide advises making a neat little log each chapter, answering a few questions. So that is what I shall do, dating each one.
December 16, 2012
There are four Japanese "alphabets". Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Romaji. I'll be learning three of these, since I pretty much already know the last, and it won't be of much use to me. Hiragana and Katakana contain the same sounds, but use different syllables. The difference is that Katakana is used for foreign loan words. Kanji is used to write the “vocabulary words" and it comes from China.
So far, so good. Simple bits here.
Now I'm gonna learn Hiragana first. Apparently, that'll make learning everything else that much easier.
I have successful learned the main hiragana. Now onto Dakuten and the Combo ones.
Fortunately, that will take all of five minutes.
Yeah, it was pretty easy. A few of them are tough to remember though.
So, I learned that, I learned the combo-hirigana, and I also learned around the small っ. Which really isn't very complicated at all.
So far I feel pretty good about this.
よくできました～
ありがとう!
ひらがなを覚えるのはそんなに難しくないけど、大切なのは練習だ。練習をしなければ書くと読むのスピードが遅い。そしてこれからはカタカナだ。カタカナはひらがなと同じように簡単に覚えられるけど、書く時はよく忘れる事がある。たくさんの漢字がもう書けるようになった時まで時々カタカナの書き方を忘れてしまった。
頑張ってね。
My "learning" of the Japanese language has so far consisted almost entirely of random words and phrases that I've learned just by coming across them in Wikipedia, anime, hentai, whatever. I just happened to know, for example, that "おかま団！" means...
...well, it either means "teapot group" or "fag brigade". I would usually assume the former, but with Blackmoon I just don't think I can be too sure.
Anyway, yeah, given the amount of extra time I have on my hands now, I feel more than ever that I want to start actually learning this language properly. I just don't know where the best place is for me to start...
I have a similarly infantile grasp of German, so I'm with you there (but with a different language). Like, I know enough to extract essential sense from basic and common phrases, but I wouldn't exactly say that I speak it. Without a caveat of the kind I just posted.
Probably doesn't help that most of my exposure to German is through Middle High German, too.
I really need to polish my German too. I mean I had it for about 5 years from 7th grade to second year of gymnasium (5 years) and it is similar enough to Danish that I can actually understand a lot of German (probably between 50-80 percent of any given movie), despite the frankly pitiful level of command I hold over it. If only I could go back in time and tell my younger self to study it more seriously...
Oh well, it's one of those things I'm going to look at when I have the time, right now I'm too busy with my actual studies and after that I'd properly rather get better at Japanese, which I by now speak a hell of a lot better than German (actually whenever I try to think of something in German, Japanese just comes into my head), but which I also find way more fun since it's so different from the other languages I know, whether as German has the same grammatical structures.