Japan
Japanese Page
This page was last updated on 01/09/06
Because I Had Far Too Much Free Time and Too Little Frustration
After my last trip to Japan, I decided to learn Japanese. This is an odd decision for several reasons. First, I am terrible at learning foreign languages. I have a terrible memory and I nearly failed my second year of German back in high school. Second, Japanese is one of the hardest languages for a native English speaker to learn (I think I read that only Arabic is harder than the Asian family of languages.) Finally, I was 34 when I started, and languages are far easier for the young than for us elderly. In spite of all this I am still beating my head against this wall two years after starting.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about starting Japanese study is figuring what resources to use. Any bookstore will have a dozen books promising to teach you Japanese in 10 EZ lessons. There are a number of on-line resources that claim to have college-level instruction. Faced with all of this, I had trouble deciding what direction to take.
The one thing the Internet does not have is a decent discussion of these resources aimed at the beginner. And after this page is complete, it still won’t. What it will have is one more page that is part advice and part review from one beginner to another. Maybe when I am finally fluent, around 2032 or so, I will rewrite this page into my perfect vision.
The One and Only Thing I Know For Sure
As I said, I am still a beginner to the Japanese language. Take that into consideration with everything you read on this page: Ultimately, I don’t yet know what I’m talking about. I do, however, have one piece of advice, often repeated, that I am sure is good:
As soon as possible, memorize hiragana and katakana. For those of you completely new to Japanese, hiragana and katakana are two of the three Japanese alphabets, the third being kanji. Hiragana and katakana are essentially phonetic alphabets. There is one hiragana and one katakana symbol for each basic sound. Kanji is the alphabet that contains all the really complex symbols that stand for words, or parts of words, that will continue to befuddle me for the rest of my life.
Many Japanese resources will try to ease you into the language using romanji, a method of spelling Japanese words using English letters. While this may be less intimidating, it will ultimately hinder your progress, I believe.
There are several benefits to memorizing hiragana and katakana early. Because they are phonetic alphabets, knowing them will help your pronunciation. If you memorize Japanese words using romanji, you may be tempted to pronounce the words as they would be pronounced in English, which is sometimes incorrect. Conjugating verbs (and some adjectives, sigh) is an important part of Japanese. Memorizing words using hiragana and katakana makes the conjugation rules easier to understand. Romanji makes them seem more arbitrary. On a more discouraging note, I also think that if you can not memorize these two alphabets, you may have a significant amount of trouble memorizing vocabulary and kanji. So this task is an early acid test. Finally, if you can write a few words in hiragana and katakana, you can more easily impress people, the most important part of learning any foreign language.
Following this advice, the first thing I did when I began studying was to make flash cards for hiragana and katakana and spent about two months memorizing them. When I began taking Japanese at a local community college, I was well ahead of my fellow students struggling with romanji.
Along these lines, I also received advice to begin memorizing kanji as soon as possible. This seems like good advice because you can not read any real Japanese text without it. At the same time, I had all I could handle with memorizing beginning vocabulary and did not seriously begin kanji until my second year of study.
Finding a Sensei
In my opinion, a live class with a native Japanese speaker is the best method for learning Japanese. I find that the immediate feedback, pressure from deadlines, and camaraderie of fellow students all push me to study more diligently that I would on my own.
In the summer of 2004, I took an adult education Japanese 101 course. This class was not particularly valuable. Because there were no tests or quizzes, there was little feedback and too little homework. Also, the other students were not particularly diligent. Thus, the class moved slowly and I did not get much out of it.
After that adult education class, I enrolled in the standard college-level Japanese 101 at my community college. Our teacher is pretty tough and there are quizzes or tests every class. By Japanese 103, the drills were brutal and the sentences were really challenging. I finished Japanese 202 in May of last year and, while the pressure was discouraging, I believe I am further along than I would have been on my own.
Not everyone has the luxury of a local Japanese class, however. If you have a reliable Internet connection, there is a "next best thing:" http://www.yesjapan.com. YesJapan is an impressive on-line Japanese course. It covers slightly more material than my 101 through 103 classes covered. It has good explanations and examples, a sound instructional design methodology, and complete sound files so you can hear all of the Japanese as well as read it. You can also ask questions which are promptly answered by the teachers. I used this site regularly before my first live class and it helped me immensely. I fully intend to go back and complete the rest of the material after I complete the two years of courses my local community college offers.
If you have a fast Internet connection, you can download YesJapan's many video shows. The teacher discusses various topics about Japan and Japanese with native speakers. While the shows may not be the most slickly produced, they are informative, well annotated, and quite entertaining. They provide great motivation to continue studying.
Learn Japanese in 10 EZ Steps
There are a multitude of books on Japanese and I have read just a small percentage of them. This section contains my opinions of each of the books with which I have worked. Keep this in mind, however, when reading reviews of any Japanese books: No Japanese book is perfect. Even the best have problems. If you intend to learn Japanese solely via textbooks, you will probably require several so they can make up for the shortcomings of each other.
For lack of a better order, I will review these books in the order that I worked with them. Some of these books are easier to find than others. I recommend using Google to find stores that sell them.
Japanese for Dummies
You will not learn Japanese from this book. Besides the fact that it uses the dreaded romanji, it covers too much too fast and the included CD is not worth much. Still, this book is a pretty good introduction to basic concepts in Japanese. I first read it when I was deciding whether or not I could manage to learn this language and it was valuable as a general overview.
Japanese for Busy People 1-3 Kana Version and Workbooks
The Japanese for Busy People books are probably my favorite Japanese text books. I find the lessons to be fairly logical and the explanations to be pretty complete. They also have my favorite workbooks. I am a big fan of workbooks because they give you a chance to actually use the language you are learning. The biggest problem with these texts is that the accompanying CDs are very difficult to obtain (at the time of this writing.) I have read others complain that these books focus on formal, business Japanese which will put students at a disadvantage when they try to communicate with Japanese people via casual Japanese. I am not yet experienced enough to talk to this issue. (Note that at least the first book is available in both kana and romanji versions. Obviously, I recommend the kana version.)
Japanese for Busy People Kana Workbook
This short workbook is a nice but inessential study aid for learning hiragana and katakana. I think it is worth while if you can afford it, but it is not necessary.
Learn Japanese New College Text and Workbook
This was my text for Japanese 101 and I really found it lacking. It uses romanji, which does not help, but it also contains bizarre diagrams that confusingly illustrate pronunciation. Its explanatory text is dry. The workbook is cheaply produced and sometimes confusing. I simply can not recommend this text.
Genki 1-2 and Workbooks
These text books are published by the Japan Times and are intended for English speaking students learning Japanese in Japan. I would say that they are fair books. For the most part the explanations and descriptions are clear. They sometimes make strange choices for vocabulary lists. They have very little in the way of explanation of kanji. Instead, they seem to create random lists for each chapter. The workbooks are clear and useful. I have neither major complaints nor compliments for these books.
Nakama 2 and Workbook
This is the second textbook in the Nakama series, which I used in Japanese 201 and 202. I did not read the first, which is probably good because I hate the second. I do not feel that there was enough attention to detail in the making of this book. The glossary contains only a fraction of all the new words introduced. The instructions for the drills and for the workbook are often very confusing and contain errors. The discussion of Kanji is a bit more robust than other books, although the lists still seem randomly generated. The book frequently uses kanji that it will not introduce until several chapters later. The listening exercises are supremely frustrating as they include many words I do not know spoken at a very fast rate. If I have to say something nice about the book, I do like the detail of the grammar explanations. The example sentences seem exhaustive to me. I feel like I am seeing a wider variety of types of sentences than I do in other books. Still, I recommend avoiding this text, I had a terrible time with it.
Let's Learn Kanji
An early piece of advice I received concerning Japanese study was that I should begin studying kanji as soon as possible. Unfortunately, every resource I have read on Japanese treats kanji as a set of characters I must simply memorize. Let’s Learn Kanji tries to use a more systematic instructional design. There is a logic behind the order of the Kanji and the authors attempt to build upon past characters in a progressive manner. Unfortunately, I have not devoted the time necessary to really utilize this book and I am sure that is to my detriment. I hope to get back to this text after my 200-level classes because Kanji continues to be a serious problem for me.
Barron’s Japanese Grammar
I really like this little reference book, even though it uses romanji. Essentially it is a list of various grammar rules organized by types of words; nouns, particles, verbs, etc. Although I never read the book straight through, I often referred to it when I encountered a conjugation I did not know. It is pretty handy and inexpensive.
Mangajin's Basic Japanese through Comics 1-2
Mangajin was a magazine about the Japanese language illustrated by many pages of Japanese comics. I have some of the issues of the magazine but have found them to be mostly too advanced for me. (The magazine is out of print, but you can still find issues for sale on the Internet.) They produced two books of articles from the magazine and I heartily recommend them. They are not Japanese lessons, but rather detailed studies about individual subjects. The books pick individual phrases or topics and explore them through various comics. They cover these topics in much more depth than any text book or classroom session could. (Quickly, I also want to mention another magazine, Nihongo Journal. Every issue comes with a CD and it also covers topics too advanced for me. Still, the articles cover current topics and there is quite a bit of support for the Japanese Langauage Proficiency Test. ALC stopped publishing this magazine in 2005, but started doing monthly issues again in 2006.
Crawling Into the 20th Century
Here’s the thing; when I began studying Japanese, I figured that the best way to do so, outside of classroom, would be computer-based training off of a CD. After all, in the years I spent as a professional instructional designer, I watched the increasing power of computer based training and multimedia computer classes. Language teaching seemed like a natural fit with its requirements for sound and pictures.
No such luck. After a fairly thorough search, and far too much money, I have found that CD-based Japanese lessons are mostly disappointing.
The Rosetta Stone Language Library CDs
When I first began, I planned on these CDs being the basis of my study. After all, they were expensive and apparently NASA used them to teach their employees. I was under-whelmed. The instructional design seems to mimic immersion, but really it just amounts to a guessing game. The CDs display four pictures and give you words or phrases, both aural and textual, and you have to click the pictures that go with the text. Somehow, over a very long time, this is supposed to lead to fluent Japanese. I am not sure I see how.
The CDs are not totally devoid of value. As a supplement to a live class they can be a productive diversion. However they are a very expensive diversion, so they are not for everyone.
Instant Immersion Japanese CDs
These CDs are similar to the Rosetta Stone CDs in that they are guessing game. The lessons are grouped by subject, however, so you can play the games to learn food vocabulary, or colors, etc. These CDs are much less expensive and, again, are a nice supplement and diversion.
Learn Japanese Now CD
I think I looked at these CDs for about ten minutes; ten very baffled and confused minutes. I saw a screen full of Japanese text and a voice began reading and there were a ton of menus and buttons and what-not. If this is good Japanese instruction, it was way too advanced for me. I have not revisited these since that first try.
Mangajin CD
Similar to the Mangajin books and magazines I discussed above, this CD contains a number of Japanese comics. A voice reads the comics and they are fully annotated. I have not yet spent enough quality time with this resource, but it seems like fun.
Click Here For Fluency
There are pages and pages of Japanese instructional material on the World Wide Web, and I have only scratched the surface of them. Here are few links that I have found useful, but I am a long way away from cataloging all of the valuable stuff.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C is an on-line Japanese dictionary I use frequently. This link takes you directly to the search page. The dictionary is pretty robust. You can look up kanji, see conjugations, and see example sentences in Japanese that are way too advanced for me. The only downside is that the server is often painfully slow. Thanks to Jim Breen.
http://linear.mv.com/cgi-bin/j-e/dict is the online dictionary I use when the one above is unavailable. For some reason I can not get this one to display kanji.
And because I do more than just study, here are a couple of sites with some fun, Japanese-related material. The first is a set of hysterical essays by an English teacher in Japan: http://www.gaijinsmash.net/. The second is a page of generally weird and funny stuff about Japan: http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/.