Learning Japanese

October 2009

Learning Japanese I think I'm learning Japanese I really think so

For everyone else, your goal is to probably be able to watch anime, read manga, play games fairly fluently. Learning Japanese can pose a great challenge, especially when the tools and resources are hard to come by where you live. Guys, don't feel too disappointed if your local community colleges or universities do not offer Japanese classes. Heck, the guy who did the Sakura Taisen walkthroughs for the Sega Saturn (Lando/Kayama) was self-taught, and he'd never even been to Japan. It _is_ possible to learn Japanese by yourself, but if you don't have the right pronunciation, you will be defeating yourself. Watching tons of anime and other Japanese stuff helps at least with familiarity of pronunciation, and with practice you can pronounce places like Asakusa like a native (Asa'ksa instead of "asa koosa" like noobies do, and as I did when I first went to Tokyo ten years ago). With technology and the Net, it is possible to progress fairly far with Japanese as long as you are motivated and can stick to it. Many language programs for your computer have the ability to critique your pronunciation when you use a microphone. I did that 12 years ago, and I'm sure the software today is even better.

I started out with simple DOS-based Japanese language programs about 15 years ago, which was fairly fun. I soon took the only Japanese class available to me at a community college (I had to drive downtown since the school I was attending didn't offer it), and after the second class kept getting cancelled due to low attendance, I suggested that we do the second class at somebody's home after it got cancelled twice. The class went through the book "Japanese for Busy People," which is pretty boring unless you get excited with conversations like, "please accept my business card." The first Japanese for Busy people has a kana version to give you the option of starting out reading the kana. This is very, very important. If you get caught up reading Japanese in Romaji (Roman alphabet characters), you'll only delay your progress. It's like training wheels that will impede your ability to actually learn to ride a bicycle.

It was self-teaching from me after that. I taught myself hiragana and katakana and about 600 kanji, then later took Japanese 101 at the university and ended up dropping it because I'd already mastered 90% of the material and after realizing that the class only covers the first half of the book. It was a Monday-Friday class and I had to take the shuttle bus between ASU campuses to get all the way across town to take the class. So much of my day was taken up by just the commute alone. Plus, I was already close to graduating, and getting stuck in a class with immature freshman really tried my patience. For self-teaching, I'd recommend the book Japanese for Everyone. Japanese for Busy People is geared towards businessmen, but it is also a good way to learn. Just do not bother with a book that has everything written out in romaji. As I said above, however, if you are serious about learning Japanese, make sure it is at least in hiragana/katakana, and preferably starts in with kanji right away. If not, you'll regret it. The first book is pretty basic and stuffy, but the second and third Busy People books loosen up and have more interesting conversations. I learned a lot from these books. One book that I think is mandatory to pick up is the book "Read Japanese Today" by Len Walsh. Easy find at any bookstore, and you'll master 600 widely-used kanji easily with this book. It shows the ancient Chinese heiroglyphs and how they evolved into ancient kanji that you may see at Chinese temples and such, and how they became the kanji they are today. You will learn the meanings of the radicals and piece them together to form specific concepts. Once you learn the basic elements of kanji, it becomes easier to take a kanji apart in your mind and use the parts as a mnemonic for remembering. Take for example "hare" or clear skies　(晴れ), which makes sense because it is sun 日and blue 青 together, which describes a clear blue cloudless sky. When you can see how radicals associate with one another, you can quickly learn the kanji. For example, it is easy to see how　mouth 口 and ground　土　together makes puke 吐く (haku). Neat, huh?

The next step would be to get a book like Kodansha's Pocket Kanji Guide. This book is a way to identify kanji you cannot read. The two main ways is to either identify the kanji by its radical or by counting the brush strokes.

The best way to learn Japanese, of course, is to live in Japan. I taught English for two years, and took two classes at the local shiminkaikan (or civic center as I would translate it). I've certainly gotten rusty after moving back to the States, even though my wife is a J-girl. I try studying, and right now I'm trying to plug away through an intermediate-level Japanese book.

If you have access to a Japanese bookstore, like maybe taking a trip to Los Angeles or someplace that has a Japanese market, I recommend getting the kanji drills for Japanese children. They show you the stroke order and such, and show the onyomi and kunyomi for each kanji.

One more good kanji resource is the book "A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters" by Kenneth G. Henshall. He goes through grade by grade of kanji and provides mnemonics for memorizing. Also, I like to type the word "mnemonics" whenever I get the chance because it looks funny. Words are funny 'n stuff.

Learning Japanese, the nerdy way

Get yourself a Nintendo DS!

Here is a tool I have found to be very useful. You need to get yourself a DS if you don't already have one. One mandatory DS software for tackling neat Japanese crap is the Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten dictionary (gotta love these long software titles). Assuming you can get by at least with a bit of reading ability (it is intended for a Japanese audience afterall), this is an essential tool for plugging your way through import video games and manga. For only about $30, this software can transform your DS into an expensive electronic dictionary. (It also features plenty of hidden Game & Watch games, but enough about that.) You can write a kanji with the stylus pen or spell it out phonetically and it will translate it into English for you. The software can be a bit unforgiving sometimes when you attempt to draw a rather complicated kanji only for it to give you the raspberries and make the screen blank. Sometimes I know I'm drawing the kanji perfectly and it still won't recognize my handwriting. But at least for the times when you draw a kanji and it comes up as something different, you can click on the kanji and it will give you similar ones to choose from. Often the kanji you want is selectable from the list.

I'm trying to plug along through the childrens kanji drill books and test myself with the Kanji Kanken DS program. This is by far the most popular kanji learning software for the DS, and it focuses on passing the Japanese language proficiency tests. It looks like there are newer versions than the one I have, but I like it. It really focuses on stroke order, which at times can be the most challenging for me to remember. Right now I'm only on 9-kyu (2nd grade elementary). My wife got me Kanji Kanken along with Rakubiki Jiten for my DS in the summer of 2007 when we went to Gameland in Torrance, CA. Recently my dear friend Galen gave me Kanji Kanken 2, which I have yet to even start to look at. Kanji Kanken is not a dictionary, so both this and Rakubiki Jiten are essential. The software I have is a bit different than what is shown in the video above, but you get the idea.

Video games:

Start out easy. I picked up the Ai Yori Aoshi game for super cheap at a local game shop that specialized in import games. I bought this for about $15 on a whim. When I started playing it, I was amazed at how much I could understand, and I was proud of that. The game consists of two scenarios: a vacation to a southern island, and a vacation to a winter vila for a ski trip. Every line of text is spoken by the voice actors from the anime, making it easy to follow along the text. It's impossible to play this game and not learn new kanji to words you know, but didn't know the kanji to. The dialogue is very conversational Japanese, making it easy to understand. The only difficulty I have is with understanding Tina's dialect, because I'm just not familiar with it. In all, it's a very cute game. Have your dictionary and DS next to you, take notes, and learn! There are many games like this. They range from graphical text adventures to dating sims. Thankfully for DVD disc storage space, with newer games, most, if not all, dialogue is fortunately spoken. Not so with the Playstation and Saturn days. Another similar game I bought is DearS for the PS2. I also bought Fate/Stay Night: Realta Nua, thinking it was more of the same. I didn't know much about the game before I bought it, other than that the anime was based off of this game and that the PS2 version doesn't have hentai themes like the computer version did. It turns out that it is a graphical novel, and it features tons of written text with little spoken dialogue. It will be a long time before I can tackle this game. I am currently starting on Shining Tears for the PS2. I've read that in the English version, they removed all of the voice acting. All they did was overdub the battle cries and grunts during the fighting gameplay, as if that was even necessary. It is this sort of crap that needs to stop. It would have been cheaper to just leave the Japanese voices intact, and it defies logic as to why they didn't, especially if they didn't bother dubbing English voices. Anyhow, it's a pretty cool Gauntlet-style hack and slash game. Very different than the tactical Shining Force games, but it's a cute and fun adventure game.

Manga:

Kimagure Orange Road is one of my favorite anime. I prefer 70's and 80's anime by far. The KOR anime is eloquently artistic, and you just don't see this sort of anime anymore these days. If you don't know, KOR is a high school romance comedy drama with ESP powers. Conversation is on a high school level, so it is fairly easy to understand. I usually prefer science fiction, but that would require a level of Japanese I'm just not ready to tackle yet. For now, I'm going to stick to something easy. And since I've already seen the KOR anime TV show over and over again, I'm already familiar with the story, so it helps me to understand the meaning of the dialogue better. Manga helps the reader out a lot because most manga has furigana, the phonetic readings to most kanji. So, either a decent dictionary or the DS electronic dictionary will be the only companion you need to read! Not all manga has furigana, however. To my dismay, the Super Robot Taisen manga that has been published in Dengeki Hobby magazine has no furigana. I would be up to the challenge of tackling this manga if it weren't for this. Without the furigana, translating this will be quite cumbersome.

So, I hope this should be a good introduction on how to unleash your super nerd powers upon the Japanese language learning field of your life. It's hard, and sometimes the language doesn't make sense. It helps if you have more motivation to learn the language than just video games and manga, and I truly hope those of you reading this are not the type who think they know so much about Japanese culture from watching anime and such. If so, please feel free to go bite yourself because your kind really makes me sick---especially if you're the type who thinks that Japan is some sort of utopia! If you're into this stuff but also have a well-balanced view on the country, then congratulations and you may just yet learn enough Japanese to help you learn to enjoy Japan's pop-culture on your own without relying on translations. I've read people on forums such as Anime Nation wanting to learn the language, so I decided to put this page together as somewhat of a guide. This also gives everyone a backstory of how I've come to the point I am now. I am nowhere near fluent, and I cannot watch Japanese movies and such and understand everything perfectly without a translation, but I have been able to see Sen To Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) and Neko no Ongaeshi (The Cat Returns) while I lived in Japan and get the gist of the movies with no subtitles.

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