any advice for a new guy trying to learn this complex language? - Feed Post by jackrosetti
any advice for a new guy trying to learn this complex language?
posted by jackrosetti
Comments 13
Learn hiragana, then katakana, and drop romaji like it was the plague. Seriously, romaji is pure evil and will dog your learning.
haha thank you man!
i shall do the same :D
I did katakana first then hiragana and got it down quickly.
i really don't think it matters on the order.
agree with the romaji part..- the best thing to do though is to keep studding like its a bad habit. otherwise it will take forever... trust me.
- The order doesn't matter, but hiragana has fewer characters that are super close, so it's somewhat easier. If you dig getting the more difficult one out of the way first, kudos to you.
- the kana really isn't difficult... and i thought they were the same difficulty.
anyway kanji on the other hand... there is just so many of them its agonizing to master.... not so much the similarities but that you have to keep on them or it takes forever..
Don't give up and devote at least half an hour to japanese each day.- It's not in the same league as kanji, ninja, but hiragana doesn't have six pairs of characters that can be confused at a glance. Katakana does.
Don't worry about the time it will take you to learn it, enjoy the process.- arachkid your right on that, but if you pay close attention to detail its a little easier. i still get confused by katakana ソ and ン every so often but thats about it the others are not as close. just need to remember which way the small line goes for which one.
making up mnemonics for them helps a lot, and that goes for all of them. - ソandン
シandツ
クandケ
(on a computer, it's not so hard, but I'm talking "real world" encounters where fonts can be stylized, etc. If your only experience with Japanese is going to be on the Internet, much fewer problems)
And so on... add to that that reading katakana words (new ones, after you find out the "usual" ones) means trying to butcher the language you already know to figure out what word it means. Those words have a habit of being "new" and "trendy" and as such not being in online dictionaries yet. :P And then sometimes you figure on it being from English, and it's not. :P With hiragana, you know it's Japanese, and the word is going to be in a dictionary. - Thank you everyone who took time out of your day to help me out! Really means a lot to me. :D
