I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Step-Innovative-Approach-Spea... as another excellent resource. Written by an engineer for engineers, with detailed flow charts for the various conjugation rules and other aspects of the grammar.
The book lists the various common sentence structures then teaches you how to expand the various fragments to construct more complex sentences. Somewhat similar to learning via a CFG and deriving a parse tree. if you want to absolutely nail your Japanese grammar, this is a solid logical way to go about it.
Book's biggest drawback is that it is rather dry. You will need to complement it with a book that focuses on vocabulary, idioms, and colloquialisms so that you don't sound like a robot.
If it weren't for that book I would have never understood why there are so many exceptions with verbs regarding the whole intransitive and transitive thing.
I once got some way through writing a program which turned OCaml variants into Japanese sentences. So you'd write something along the lines of:
`IsIn (`Noun "neko", `Noun "uchi")
(except usually far more complex) and it would generate the Japanese sentence, working out is "neko" is animate or not and so how to translate `IsIn correctly.
This is the reference I wish I had when I was learning Japanese. I tend to learn natural languages a lot like I learn programming languages: I get a lot faster at learning once someone explains the underlying rules and how they combine and interact.
Reminds me of Japanese: The Spoken Language, which is what I used to learn Japanese. It's quite challenging at first but I can't think of a better way for an adult to learn the language well.
Sorry, I gotta disagree with you. Learning Japanese using an antiquated romaji system (si vs shi, etc.) and not learning any kana or kanji won't get you very far. What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?
I saw Eleanor Jorden (writer of JSL) talk at Cornell, and a kid in the audience asked, "I opened a book and saw a bunch of squiggly lines!" To throw out a language's native written system is folly.
We used the Genki bookset in school, and it worked pretty well.
See my other comment. I would be willing to bet that more top performers under the JSL system compared with top performers under a reading / writing focused system will end up being much more successful in careers / life in Japanese society.
Japanese people take for granted that Kanji is hard and are forgiving when Westerners aren't that great at it, but it's painfully hard to listen to someone speak with non-native intonation and poor grammar.
Actually Japanese know it is hard, and focus on it like madmen. A top Nintendo DS game for adults in Japan is a Kanji re-training game.
In any case, Kanji is so visual - until I learned it many words didn't make sense to me. Knowing how to say it, but not understanding the real-underlying meaning is not fun.
As far as intonation, Japanese is one of the easiest languages with regards to that. Once you get the basics it is simple, but still you must talk with others (Japanese club, co-workers, neighbors, skype, etc) and listen to real Japanese (anime, news, etc.)
I don't meet many Westerners that think Japanese intonation is easy. :-) It's probably the most critical aspect of sounding natural when stacked up against all other factors and can make or break the tone of the conversation.
I think Japanese intonation is very hard for native english speakers but it's not hard at all for someone speaking romance languages (the sonorities are rather similar to spanish I find...)
the sonorities are rather similar to spanish I find...
This is very true. I grew up in an area where lots of Spanish is spoken, and I learned a tiny bit myself. For me, Japanese pronunciation was trivial. My teachers were praising me right off the bat. The only difficulty I have is with my current tutor, who is bent on teaching me to pronounce the Japanese r/l the way a Japanese would. (AFAIK it's not necessary at all for understandability, just a pet peeve of hers.) I had a very different experience with French and German, so I know I'm not especially gifted at phonetics. I think the early exposure to Spanish was the key.
> What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?
Anyone have an idea of how difficult it would be to do an augmented reality iPhone app that would translate these signs, etc., on the fly for you? If I were traveling, I would probably buy an iPhone just for that app.
A quick Google search turned up this NYT article [1] from 2002 about the idea. Does this exist in a retail app already?
I am going to knock this because I used it. Problem: the written part of Japanese. You read this book and learn how to talk a bit, take a plane to Japan, then bam - surrounded by the visually amazing, but daunting Kanji. The Jorden school of thought totally disregards the written and focuses on the spoken. That is fine, but the wrong path to real Japanese fluency. The best way to start learning Japanese is to get into the writing system (hiragana), Kanji (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji), grammar and start reading real Japanese. がんばって！
I do agree that people who use this approach are behind others in reading / writing performance. Indeed, it took me awhile to catch up. But fortunately this is something you can pick up on your own fairly well.
On the flip side, to be brutally honest, 99% of the people (that I've met anyway) who come through programs that focus on reading / writing sound horrible when they speak. They tend to suck at grammar, their intonation is all wrong and have a very hard time creating complex sentences. It could just be the sampling that I've interacted with but I can always tell the difference immediately between a JSL student and someone who focused on reading / writing.
Why is this important? It depends on your job / life but I personally spend my most important moments interacting with people via speech, not text. I'd much rather create a strong impression in person up front. It makes all the difference.
I also swear by JSL, and I'm practically the prototype for somebody who came through it: my Japanese ability is horrifically lopsided in that I speak like a college-educated engineer (important when you are one!) and, when forced to write without a computer, struggle like a not-too-bright 6th grader.
That said, there are vanishingly few times in life when an engineer is required to handwrite anything other than their name and address, but I have to speak to people constantly. When I do, I'm consistently reminded how fortunate I am that I learned contextually appropriate Japanese, a strong foundation in grammar, and proper polite Japanese (something many American Japanese programs just abandon on the excuse "bah, that's hard and you don't really need it" -- which sounds great until we're being introduced to the mayor and you say "Yo gramps where's the crapper?").
That is not an exaggeration, by the way. I spent the next hour apologizing for her. (For students of the language: ジジ、トイレはどこ？ vs. standard Japanese トイレはどこですか？ vs. in consideration of the fact that the mayor vastly outranks both of us すみませんが、お手洗いはどちらにあるかご存知ですか？)
Agreed and yes, you must focus on the language as a spoken form and written form. So I am not advocating reading only, but Kanji must be overcome and the best time to do it is NOW.
I studied Japanese for many years and always had the Kanji wall. It was daunting and hindered my progress. In the end, it made Japanese seem mysterious and not really possible for western-minds to grasp.
I used RTK and got through Kanji in four months, now I focus on sentences and reading wherein I speak out loud while reading. I also speak with my family in Japanese as much as possible (this is my primary reason for studying).
In the end, you must treat the language as a living language and understand all forms it is presented in. But, you already get this point, just saying it for others. :)
I took ~3 years of Japanese (using Japanese for Busy People I - III) but I'm definitely not as far along as I'd like to be.
This is the best replacement for a ~$300 electronic dictionary on the iPhone I've found so far: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa... (iTunes link). As it's been said, learning to speak vs. learning to read is a whole different story.
This reminds me of my Japanese classes in high school, my/our teacher had made his own litterature for the class and we constantly played our scenarios/theater/sketches. Trained Japanese "thinking", grammar, writing, talking, interacting.. all at the same time. Landed me at "little of everything".. I wish I paid more attention now!
The problem becomes tractable, and maybe even a little friendly.
Fwiw, the explosion isn't really combinatorial. It'd better if it was, because at least that would be predictable. No, it's best though of as entirely irregular combinations of a medium-sized number of components. But the aforementioned resources help you deal with it.
I can't upvote this enough. I went from 200-300 Kanji characters that I acquired painfully to now 2053 Kanji characters using RTK in about four months. I use Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) to do reviews, but the Kanji koohii site is awesome for stories and has a nice active forum. I keep track of my progress here: http://kd7yhr.blogspot.com/
Are you learning just the meanings, or the meanings, kunyomi, and onyomi?
I ask, because I'm somewhere in between ２級 and １級 with the JLPT, and since I've only spent a collective six months in Japan, it's a bit of a struggle sometimes to retain vocabulary.
I'm finding that I have a very easy time with the meanings, and so I can figure out new compounds pretty easily. For example, in the novel I'm reading last night, 脱皮 came up, and although I figured out the meaning (a snake shedding its skin, a crab moulting, etc.), I still had to look at the dictionary because I couldn't remember the onyomi for the first character, even though it's very common.
Reading out loud has helped a lot, and I'm going to start blogging in Japanese about starting a company, but I'm always looking for tips on improving. :)
Newspapers still send me running for the dictionary, but I think that's because I read a lot of articles about politics and business, which are very kanji-heavy.
at first, I focused on production of kanji from a keyword, e.g., discuss -> 談, at this point there is no Japanese and I spent four months getting through all the kanji. I still test daily and have gone through 21k kanji tests.
Currently, I am reading みんなの日本語 wherein I am focusing on sentence mining and grammar. My current deck of sentences is around 800 sentences that I review as well, wherein I review recognition and speak out loud. My level is currently in between basic to low-intermediate. In the sentence mining I learn the readings of the kanji in context and could care less about kunyomi/onyomi, e.g.,幼稚園 -> ようちえん (or infancy-immature-park in RTK keywords).
I studied Japanese for 12 years half-assed never getting anywhere. For the first time I am making progress and I have a plan (which is the part that I lacked before).
BTW, to retain vocabulary, I would recommend Anki http://ichi2.net/anki/ it is open and regularly updated.
This always seems to come up whenever Japanese is mentioned. Just to balance this, RTK is not for everyone, personally I am having more luck with repeating kanji while seeing them in context in written material.
Of course, do what works for you. It's different for everybody It's just that those of us who like RTK really like it, and we want to talk about it and tell everybody we know. It's a Kathy Sierra kind of thing.
I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Step-Innovative-Approach-Spea... as another excellent resource. Written by an engineer for engineers, with detailed flow charts for the various conjugation rules and other aspects of the grammar.
The book lists the various common sentence structures then teaches you how to expand the various fragments to construct more complex sentences. Somewhat similar to learning via a CFG and deriving a parse tree. if you want to absolutely nail your Japanese grammar, this is a solid logical way to go about it.
Book's biggest drawback is that it is rather dry. You will need to complement it with a book that focuses on vocabulary, idioms, and colloquialisms so that you don't sound like a robot.