Comments on: Japanese is easy

By: Read Japanese

Read Japanese — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:18:04 +0000

I agree. Japanese isn’t as hard as it is made out to be. Japanese can be easy if you learn about cultural and social conditioning. This greatly helped me – I lived in Japan for 10 years. To speak the language well you need to become Japanese to a degree.

By: 2nihon

2nihon — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:23:31 +0000

Just the inspiration I needed tonight. Kanji as a cheat sheet…absolutely brilliant statement there. It’s true!

By: Japanese Words

Japanese Words — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:29:53 +0000

Alex, great article. While I won’t say that learning Japanese is easy (since people generally tend to confuse that with spending very little time learning), it most certainly can be fun and is very rewarding. I think it is also important to be careful with sounds. While they are very limited, many of them require different movements than the English language.

By: Alex Lee

Alex Lee — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:09:02 +0000

mysoju.com has a bunch of Taiwanese dramas, but you might end up with a Taiwanese dialect of Mandarin as a result. I don’t know where to get mainland Mandarin stuff except if you buy it from sites like yesasia.com. A lot of times Chinese movies come with both Mandarin and Cantonese audio tracks.

By: doviende

doviende — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:14:58 +0000

You mention chinese and korean materials….do you have any awesome chinese material recommendations? it seems like there’s tons of video available in *cantonese*, but not mandarin and i’m looking for mandarin. thanks for the tips

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:58:24 +0000

Thanks Nomadic. I’m glad you’re finding Japanese a smooth ride. Keep on top of it and you’ll be proficient in no time. (Just don’t underestimate it and take a long break from it, or you’ll find you’ve regressed a little bit!)

Hope to see you back around again soon!

By: Nomadic Tian

Nomadic Tian — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:15:50 +0000

I totally agree that Japanese is easy to learn, even though I’m still a beginner. As a matter of fact, I’m learning it quicker than I’m learning Spanish, which is quite unbelievable only because Spanish is considered to the “easiest” language to learn for an English speaker. So my brother and I are learning Japanese like crazy.

This is my first time visiting this blog and I like what I see. I add you on my list.

By: mswashu

mswashu — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:18:23 +0000

Thanks for the quick reply, Alex (my son’s middle name is Alex). I saw the Genki mentioned elsewhere but wasn’t sure; I’ll definitely give it a go. It’s difficult to fall for something you can’t grasp as quickly as you would like. I check my feeds daily, so I hope to read you again soon, and as for your location….I’m SO jealous, having two kids, Japan is only a dream for me. Keep writing; I’ll check in again soon. Oyasuminasai!

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:25:57 +0000

Hey mswashu, thanks for stopping by. I hope this reply will help alleviate your conundrum.

You can start off wherever you feel most comfortable. Even if you’re studying inefficiently in the beginning, you’ll soon find your groove and make corrections.

I recommend starting off with the Genki 1 textbook. Although I’m not a fan of the textbook format myself, I do see a certain utility in the textbook structure. The way I suggest studying it is to “mine” the sentences. Just worry about recognition at first, to get the ball rolling. Don’t focus on interpreting grammar, just try to pick out some of the rules yourself as you go through full, complete sentences. Don’t study the terms in isolation.

While you’re at it, pick up the Genki 1 CDs too. Shadow the Japanese conversations on the CDs, and adjust your pitch and accent to the audio. Work on shadowing for 30 minutes at a time. You can shadow several times a day. When you’re not shadowing, work on reading and internalizing the sentences. Practice writing out the sentences in the book by hand while you say aloud each word you write. Skip almost all of the repetitive exercises and just focus on the complete sentences (conversations, reading passages, and grammar examples).

That will give you a great foundation. You can probably finish off the book pretty fast (a couple of months). If Heisig doesn’t work for you, don’t force it on yourself. You might be able to come back to it a little later when Japanese looks a little bit more familiar to you.

P.S. I’m originally from San Diego, but I haven’t been back to the States for a while. This is my 4th year in Japan, and I also lived in Korea for a couple of years. I’m moving back to Korea next year.

By: mswashu

mswashu — Fri, 22 May 2009 01:37:07 +0000

I’ve subscribed to your feed and read a number of your posts but the one thing that gets me is where exactly to begin. AJATT suggests beginning with the kanji, somewhere else says the hiragana since there are so few of them; I’ve listened to a little Pimsleur (before I was told to avoid it) and picked up a few phrases, but with all the suggestions and warnings I feel more than itimidated. I took french in high school and hated it but that was eons ago (I’m in my 30’s now) and I only became really interested in learning Japanese around this time last year. I feel lost, really. The Heisig method doesn’t really work for me. I can’t imagine the character/story link. I did find one place that works like a SRS, manythings.org/japanese, and I have to say the few kanji I’ve studied there have pretty much stuck in my head (surprise). But I this a good thing? Will I really be able to recognize more complicated kanji as I progress? Some of those characters have crazy stroke counts. I’m trying to do this everyday but have to admit I can be lazy about studying, especially after being on the phone for 8 hours at work. I do the immersion trick to an extent whereas I love japanese dramas (featuring Arashi members) as well as the variety shows. Am I starting in the right place? HELP! BTW, where are you located? Stateside?