Learning Japanese

Language Learning Chinese
1

I can’t put it off any longer; I need to start learning how to read Japanese (and want to learn how to speak it). The textbooks – both Taiwanese and Western – seem pretty bad (and vaguely allude to pronunciation – that in which I am most interested). I’d like to get into the details of spoken Japanese from day one; that is, things such as:
(1) How are the initial consonants in ら、り、る、れ、ろ really pronounced?
(2) How are long vowels pronounced?
(3) How does pitch (tone) and stress work in the language?

How should I start? Is there a textbook made for people like me?

:bow:

2

I’ve done a bit of thinking, resulting in:

Find some simple language (children’s book) and a Japanese dictionary that indicates pitch accent and go from there. I’ll get a text book for the grammar (recommendations?). After I have the basics down and a nice list of questions, I’ll find a tutor. (If I’m lucky maybe some kind of language exchange.)

This has some info on dictionaries with pitch accent markings: jref.com/forum/archive/index … 32671.html

The marks work like this:

[quote]To explain a bit on the key, 0 represents the word is pronounced in monotone, without pitch accent.
1 means the pitch rises on the first syllable (or kana character). Similarly, 2 means pitch rise on the second, 3 on third, etc.

あめ [1] 【天】
あめ [1] 【雨】
あめ [0] 【飴】

Note: The pitch accent is based on standard Japanese (based on Tokyo Yamanote-kotoba) and does not apply to dialects.
[/quote]
Here’s a link to an on-line dictionary that has the marks – dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?p=%E9%AD … &dname=0ss

I’ll deal with the ら series and long vowels with internet resources. (I have a CD, too.)

Any thoughts ?

3

Learn to speak it first. The homonyms will drive you nuts if you try to learn the readings first.

4
  1. Tap with your curled tongue on your palatine once - that’s it. You may need some practice, though.
  2. What do you mean with らぃ ? There is nothing like that :wink: Neither is there ぬぅ. Long vowels are basically just ū and ō and ei (of course, ā and ī and also there, but nowhere near as often as ū and ō. I would guess, ā and ī are under 10 words, each), and they are (mostly) written as e.g. ちゅう (e.g. 中 chū) or しょう (e.g. 小 shō) or けい (e.g. 軽 kei – This sound is not a long vowel sometimes, though). And they are just long vowels. Basically, these long vowels are the ordinary vowels in English. You rather have to practice how to pronounce the short vowels, because they are short. Small Hiragana are only ゃ、ょ、ゅ、っ, because they are changing the -i row (e.g. ち、き、し) to get something with -y- (Tōkyō). The small っ is something different. But there are no small Hiragana ぃ or ぅ as you have written (ok, they are available, but no :smiley:). They are only used for Katakana, so not that’s not that important at the beginning.
  3. This is not that important. Of course, it’s important, but in no way as important as in Chinese. Everybody will still understand you. Also, the pitch accent differs according to region. Stuff like ame or hashi is quite limited, and usually you don’t confuse chopsticks with bridges, so context will save you.

I would not go into detail with these pronounciation stuff. You will learn it as you learn the language. Japanese pronounciation is really easy, except for some few consonants (r the most famous). Another “difficult” thing is the っ. (One example:
四日 (yokka) vs. 八日 (yōka).) Also, g is sometimes pronounced closely to n (very nasal).

Do you want to learn the language, or just the pronounciation? Why not take a language course? Shouldn’t be hard to fine one in Taiwan. Grammar is quite different to English or Chinese. It helps if you have learned Korean or maybe Turkish before, but if not, the structure will be completely foreign to you (even more than Chinese).

For recommendations of grammar books: amazon.co.jp/Dictionary-Basi … 156&sr=8-1
This is not a textbook, though. It is a dictionary. There are also intermediate and advanced available. I checked several grammar books, and trust me, this is the best. You will not need anything else, if you are looking for grammar.
(ok, if you can read Japanese, you may also try this one: 日本語文型辞典. There is also a Chinese translation available).

Btw, 魚翅 is Chinese :wink: You must not select 「で始まる」 (starts with), but 「に一致する」 (one to one match). If you then enter 魚, you can select the pronounciation at the right side. 魚 is originally pronounced うお, but nowadays さかな is far more common (I think, the reading さかな came from some drinking bar or so… quite funny. Ah, it actually explains the reading: 「酒菜(さかな)」で酒のおかずの意」: It comes from the meaning of a side dish to alcohol called sakana ). You also get いお, but I don’t know when that is used. You also have うを in brackets, which is the same as うお, but is old orthography. There are other readings, as well. You have to select them according to use (well, that’s the same as in Chinese). E.g. you save 魚市場 （うおいちば） for fishmarket, not ぎょしじょう (what it would be in ON reading) nor さかないちば.
Different readings are the most horrible thing in Japanese, but also the funniest.

5

ありがと Hellstorm-san! Great post.

[quote=“Hellstorm”]Btw, 魚翅 is Chinese :wink: You must not select 「で始まる」 (starts with), but 「に一致する」 (one to one match). If you then enter 魚, you can select the pronounciation at the right side. 魚 is originally pronounced うお, but nowadays さかな is far more common (I think, the reading さかな came from some drinking bar or so… quite funny. Ah, it actually explains the reading: 「酒菜(さかな)」で酒のおかずの意」: It comes from the meaning of a side dish to alcohol called sakana ). You also get いお, but I don』t know when that is used. You also have うを in brackets, which is the same as うお, but is old orthography. There are other readings, as well. You have to select them according to use (well, that』s the same as in Chinese). E.g. you save 魚市場 （うおいちば） for fishmarket, not ぎょしじょう (what it would be in ON reading) nor さかないちば.
Different readings are the most horrible thing in Japanese, but also the funniest.[/quote]

Interesting. :bow:

Is there a way to gauge which reading is most common?

About motivation; if I’m to continue into a PhD program back home, I’ll need to be able to read Japanese at least as well as students who have finished three years of course work. (I’m not saying I’ll go into a PhD program, but I want the option for three/four years down the road.) Since I’ll be studying it, I might as well learn how to speak it, too.

About pronunciation; I like learning about pronunciation systems. Paying attention to distinctions in pitch, vowel length, and segmental stuff will keep me interested.

About courses; I don’t trust Taiwanese language teachers and I don’t like language courses. Self study is more effective for me. Having a teacher is important, though (otherwise how would I know 魚翅 is Chinese and らぃ doesn’t exist :slight_smile: ) I’m going to find a tutor once I get in the thick of it.

About grammar; verb/adj inflection will be a bit tricky and I’ve heard there are a lot of particles, but I should be able to figure it out and whatever else I encounter with the help of a tutor.

Thanks for the book recommendations :thumbsup:

6

Learn it yourself. I’m a self-taught JLPT Level 1. A few friends have asked for help with their studies, and if I had to use their textbooks I would have gone mental and never learnt the language. To me, they go the wrong way about it (not sure what the right way is, but starting with ‘masu’ forms seem to make the language as a whole harder to learn).

Pronunciation:

The Japanese ‘r’… If you’re a native speaker, this trick should work like a charm.

Say an ‘l’
Say an ‘r’

Notice how you move your tongue but not your lips for the ‘l’, and your lips but not your tongue for the ‘r’??

Now try and move them both at the same time. Ta-da! You have a Japanese ‘r’.

Hellstorm is right, you don’t need to worry about pitch accents!! If you learn to speak the language well, you’ll naturally pick them up. Also, if you focus too much on them you’ll find it harder to understand dialects (I speak a southern dialect, and the pitching is completely different to Tokyo (standard)).

Personal tips:

Grab the Oxford Mini Japanese Dictionary. At the back there’s a verb form table, and that’s really the most key part of the language.

I learnt from song lyrics and manga, initially… possibly not what you’re after XD But the anime/manga craze means there is a huge online market for learning Japanese for free… through not-always-othordox ways. i.e. animeworld.com/japanese/

Slightly more orthodox website: studyjapanese.org/

Since you need to know how to read it well, you’ll need kanji. Try song lyrics (you can listen and nut out the reading) or manga (has furigana).

7

That’s a good start…! :wink:

No textbook. But you can handle IPA, i see. That, coupled with audio materials, should get you into the pronunciation stuff. And as others have already suggested, don’t worry about pitch - in fact, i’d say try to avoid it altogether (keep intonation “flat”), and in most cases you’ll be “less wrong” than trying to follow some rule that you have in your head but not in your ears. BTW, my pronunciation is “southern”, as well (including the straight [g] in “ga”, no nazalization like the Tokyo people), and yet, when i meet with people from any other part of the country there doesn’t seem to be much of a communication problem either way.

I’d say get used to the language by listening (even without understanding at first). Good listening material? NHK TV is a good and varied source and available in Taiwan via subscription. And if you live somewhere where the level of electric pollution is not too high, you may want to get yourself a good radio receiver to pick up AM broadcasts from Okinawa at night.

Gotta run, will be back. :wink:

8

@ tsukinodeynatsu and yuli:

Thanks for the info!

I’m convinced; I won’t worry about pitch accents. And I’ll tune into some streaming radio tonight :slight_smile:

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what manga was, so I walked over to a manga shop (blog.xuite.net/n770808/acgblog/36621849) to see for myself…interesting experience…So manga are comic books (漫畫), right? The shop didn’t have anything, besides picture books, magazines, and “other stuff”, in Japanese. I did buy a Chinese translation of a comic book, though. I’ll see what I can find online.

9

tsk tsk. don’t PAY for manga.

www.onemanga.com ← English ‘scans’ … Not always 100% accurate, but generally OK.

You’ll need to find a series you like and then do a search for raws (original Japanese versions). I think Mangahelpers.com has a decent selection in the forums (you need to look though) and they also have a small ‘learning Japanese’ section.

I’ve been out of the community for a while, so I’m not too sure… sorry! I can do some hunting for you if you’d like :slight_smile:

What’s your Japanese level like at the moment?

Yuli~~~ Okinawaben, or Kyuushuuben?

10

quote=“archylgp” How are the initial consonants in ら、り、る、れ、ろ really pronounced?
[/quote]
Are you American? If so, it’s like the “tt” in “butter” when pronounced fast. A quick tap.

It’s also like the single “r” in Spanish, as in “para” (but not the “rr”).

11

[quote=“archylgp”]
To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what manga was, so I walked over to a manga shop (blog.xuite.net/n770808/acgblog/36621849) to see for myself…interesting experience…So manga are comic books (漫畫), right? The shop didn’t have anything, besides picture books, magazines, and “other stuff”, in Japanese. I did buy a Chinese translation of a comic book, though. I’ll see what I can find online.[/quote]

Yes, 漫畫 and Manga (漫画) is the same.
But I would not recommend learning by them: The language there is really difficult. Lot’s of spoken Japanese, which sometimes is not really natural. Also, it has lots of contractions, which makes it quite difficult to understand. Personally, I don’t like them, because they have no colour :smiley:

You could maybe start by reading some folk tales (like もも太郎、かぐや姫 and lots of other stuff which names I have forgotten). You could also get some Nintendo DS games.

12

Okinawaben :slight_smile:

13

Of course, i forgot that “radio” is now on the internet, too… :bow:

漫画… yes… hm… i have heard it more than once that people can learn Japanese from manga, but i’ve never met anybody who’s actually done that (such people probably don’t live here but only come to visit and spend their time mostly at manga conventions and otaku fairs). :wink:

Of course, manga can help you broaden your understanding of casual speech, slang, and various subcultures, once you know enough Japanese to do all the “regular” stuff, but if you have a busy life and want to learn Japanese to be able to manage when you come here, i’d suggest to leave the manga for later…

14

I agree. I went through the websites and looked at some English translations and raws. Two things: (1) too hard at this point; (2) not really my thing.

On-line databases are great – aozora.gr.jp/cards/000329/fi … 12100.html :slight_smile: I’ll start today and see how it goes.

By the way, has anyone read manhua (Chinese comics)? I read a good chunk of the comic I bought yesterday. The story is disappointing and the language seems dumbed down. (Perhaps I made a bad choice.) This is coming from someone who normally only reads academic articles/books, so maybe I’m just not used to seeing more colloquial language written. There is some educational value in manhua, I think, but there is more in reading things like this – dangdaizazhi.com/dangdaizazh … cleID=7905

Anyways, thanks for the advice tsukinodeynatsu, hellstorm and yuli – :slight_smile: :thumbsup: :bow: :notworthy:

15

[quote=“yuli”]

漫画… yes… hm… I have heard it more than once that people can learn Japanese from manga, but I’ve never met anybody who’s actually done that (such people probably don’t live here but only come to visit and spend their time mostly at manga conventions and otaku fairs). :wink: .[/quote]

I learnt primarily from Inuyasha… It was pretty funny when I got to Japan, actually, because everyone kept saying ‘Huh, you speak like a manga character!’

archy, if you primarily need Japanese for academic stuff, avoid the manga. It’s VERY colloquial and perfect if you want to live there and make friends (because of all the contractions and stuff; you learn them and then copy your friends in how to actually use them), but not quite so good if you want to be doing academic stuff XD

Try newspapers?? Is there a newspaper with furigana for learners, like a Japanese Guoyu Ribao??

16

Well I’ve been trying to learn from that folk tale and the first problem is I don’t know where the word breaks are; for example:

むかし、むかし、あるところに、おじいさんとおばあさんがありました。

I see that “むかし” means something like “in the past”, but I have no idea what あるところに is.

I think I’ll need to start with a textbook :s until I get enough down to go out on my own.

Chapter one: わたしは學生です。

17

あるところ

ある = to have, to be (an inanimate object)
ところ = a place

ある ところ (together): in a place (that there is); somewhere

Yeah, the word breaks are the hard bits. I avoided that by learning with all the kanji straight off… generally the kanji breaks it up (you get kanji(word)-particle-kana(word)-particle-kanji(word)-particle-verb(kanji+ending) sentence patterns a lot).

Don’t know much about textbooks~~~ except that you’ll save yourself a lot of hassle by trying to learn the grammar patterns from manga/songs/newspapers/similar… because the textbooks make it complicated. Or you could just ask on here and you’ll get a few Japanese-starved people answering you :smiley:

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[quote=“archylgp”]Well I’ve been trying to learn from that folk tale and the first problem is I don’t know where the word breaks are; for example:

むかし、むかし、あるところに、おじいさんとおばあさんがありました。

I see that “むかし” means something like “in the past”, but I have no idea what あるところに is.

I think I’ll need to start with a textbook :s until I get enough down to go out on my own.

Chapter one: わたしは學生です。[/quote]

If you write it in Kanji (this sentence now has too many Kanji, so it is not natural, but will illustrate you the sentence):

昔、昔、有る所に、お爺さんとおばあさんがありました。

あるところに (有る所に) is actually copied from Chinese, e.g. in the construction 有人… So it just means “there was a place where…”

The word breaks seem quite hard, but if you get a little bit understanding of the grammar, it is quite easy.
に is a location particle, と is “and”, が is subject particle. ありました is the same as ある, just different verb form.

You got a version which is only in Hiragana and has no word spacing. Texts completely in Hiragana for school children usually have word spacing. If there are enough Kanji in the text, you don’t need spaces anymore, though.
Try to get a version in Hiragana with spacing, or the normal version with Kanji (may actually be suited better for you, but don’t fall into the trap that you think you know the word because you know the character from Chinese. I have the opposite problem when reading Chinese).

19

I knew a guy who lived in Japan for 7 years and studied Japanese even longer. He even translated some government websites for free(JP to English). He said they didn’t even bother to so much as say thank you(much less pay him). He said he invested a ton of his life to learn the language of a people who don’t want to speak to anyone who is not one of them. He’s in TW, now. I met another guy who spent 15 years in Japan before he woke up to reality. “Funny Business” is book about a superstar(compared to your average person) from the U.S. but when he arrives in Japan his talent doesn’t change the fact that he’s not Japanese. On the other hand, there are exceptions to any general rule.

20

[quote=“shuiping”]I knew a guy who lived in Japan for 7 years and studied Japanese even longer. He even translated some government websites for free(JP to English). He said they didn’t even bother to so much as say thank you(much less pay him). He said he invested a ton of his life to learn the language of a people who don’t want to speak to anyone who is not one of them.

He’s in TW, now. I met another guy who spent 15 years in Japan before he woke up to reality. “Funny Business” is book about a superstar(compared to your average person) from the U.S. but when he arrives in Japan his talent doesn’t change the fact that he’s not Japanese. On the other hand, there are exceptions to any general rule. [/quote]

I have never encountered anyone who absolutely didn’t want to speak to me. Of course, there are some people who try to avoid speaking to me because they think my Japanese is too bad to understand their reply, and thus talking to me is too tiring. But I met those exact people in Taiwan, and you will likely meet them everywhere.

If you want to learn a language to communicate with people who are on the same wave length with you, you should stick with European languages. Be it Japanese, Chinese, Korean, they are all not “easy” to communicate with. But, luckily there are other reasons to learn a language.

I wouldn’t like to live in Japan or Taiwan for a long time, though. The culture is just too different, imho.