Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

[Andy C]

I've never been especially good at learning languages. However, the necessity now bites hard: I'm making a trip to Hokkaido in June to meet my wife's family and I really want to be able to function at some level above that of the completely isolated outsider idiot.

I've made a couple of stabs at it over the last few years but haven't made much progress - mostly through my ineptitude but partly because my wife's English is so good that there hasn't been the necessity or incentive. She'll help me as much as she can, I'm sure, but do any of you linguistic types have any hints for surmounting the problems of getting comfortable with a language that doesn't map in a straightforward way onto the structures of my own? The frequency of loan words in Japanese is a help, certainly, but I find I miss having an etymological understanding of Japanese words - where I can subconsciously get the sense of unfamiliar words in English from their Romance or Anglo-Saxon roots, I've no equivalent process to fall back on in Japanese. And the whole business of sentence structure and signifyer particles is downright flummixing.

Any tips or strategies?

[JtS]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

To learn Japanese, you must become one with the Japanese.

[Ek weet nie]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

I've been trying to learn Mandarin for the last 18 months for similar reasons to yourself. I have no tips because I'm still useless but best of luck with it!

[anton pulisov]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

And the whole business of sentence structure and signifyer particles is downright flummixing.

Nah, that bit is easy, in fact it's much easier than European languages in that respect. Once you know "wa", "no", "ni" and "ka" you're flying.

The killer is learning the vocab and the fucking Kanji.

[Guest]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

Konnichi wa!

I love how they have different number systems depending on the shape of things that are being counted.

[Guest]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

But I would recommend evening classes for learning languages - just to hear someone speaking properly is really so helpful. And it imposes discipline. When i went to learn Norwegian the class was full of people whose partners were from Norway; most of them said that their partners weren't good as teachers - which makes sense really.

[Gerontophile]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

read Shogun. Worked for me.

[Ek weet nie]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

Partners are terrible at teaching their own language.

[Andy C]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

The killer is learning ... the fucking Kanji.

Yeah, part of my difficulty in learning is my inablity to put to one side an incredulity that anyone would think it's a good idea to have four writing systems (kanji, hiragana, katakana and romaji) going on at the same time, even possibly in the same sentence. I'm resigned to remaining illiterate for quite some time yet.

[Ginger Yellow]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

I don't think there are any cunning tips for vocab. It's just memory and practice, really. As for the grammar, I've always found that the easiest part of learning a language, so I'm not going to be much help. I'll just say there are a lot of free podcasts aimed at people learning Japanese.

[Moonlight Shadow]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

My normal recommendation is to read comics/graphic novels, the perfect associative tool to learn a language but I think in your case you mainly want to have a modicum of conversation possible rather than being able to read a manga. Spoken japanese is. of what I gather, rather simple in term of structure. I would concentrat on that rather than try to get your head around written japanese which is very different from English, notonly in term of characters but ideograms are an entirely different mindset.

Ceremonial can be very important to Japanese people, particularly older one, work on that, what to do and what to say if you are having tea, say and your in-laws will be impressed.

[anton pulisov]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

Andy C wrote:

The killer is learning ... the fucking Kanji.

Yeah, part of my difficulty in learning is my inablity to put to one side an incredulity that anyone would think it's a good idea to have four writing systems (kanji, hiragana, katakana and romaji) going on at the same time, even possibly in the same sentence. I'm resigned to remaining illiterate for quite some time yet.

The mad thing is that every Kanji can be spelt out using hiragana. So there is really no need for Kanji. They just have it to be annoying. All of Japanese can be written, without any problems at all, using the 60 or so Hiragana letters. I reckon at least half of my Japanese lessons were wasted on learning Kanji when they could have been spent on learning the actual language.

And there's no need for Katakana either. All it is is Hiragana written using a more blocky style. But of course they can't be polluting Hiragana with foreign words, there has to be a whole seperate alphabet for that.

[Pants]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

I've been learning Cantonese for about six years, for similar reasons Andy. I'd agree with Nil that partners are pants at teaching their own language. One thing I've found really useful, that might help you, is that we conference call her family together. That way, I can practice my bits of conversation, but my missus is always there as a safety net if I get out of my depth.

Also, don't be scraed of the trip. I find that every time I spend a couple of weeks with my in-laws, my Cantonese comes on massively. They don't speak English and my wife gets bored of translating everything, so I'm forced to find a way to communicate.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

My mate's brother does a learn Japanese podcast. I should take this opportunity to plug his site.

http://japanese.libsyn.com/

[Andy C]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

Yes you should. That looks ace.

[Furtho]

Learning Japanese, I think I'm learning Japanese

My Japanese is absolutely rubbish, Andy C, and I feel your pain.

However the key thing in terms of my communicative ability is that I can actually use the little that I do know. The reasons for this are, I think, threefold:

1. because my pronunication is pretty good (the only time I ever hear Japanese is from native speakers rather than gaijin at classes, etc., and I'm a decent enough mimic), which means that people can generally understand me;

2. because I understand and can use katakana and a reasonable number of loan words; and

3. because I understand and can use lots of set expressions, which, (a) are easy enough, but also, (b) make my in-laws (who can speak literally no English) think I'm some kind of linguistic genius.

Given that you have a limited amount of time before your trip, if you are starting from scratch I think there is a limit to what you can realistically achieve.

My suggestion would be that you concentrate on improving your pronunciation and learning katakana (two things that are easy enough to do in conjunction with each other). Yes, katakana. In my opinion it is the best way into learning spoken and written Japanese, because it is a halfway house in terms of the vocabulary whilst at the same time enabling you to clarify in your mind what the building blocks of the language are in terms of sound. Ganbatte kudasai!