Best way to learn Japanese?

[Xantan the Foul]

I'm working on learning Japanese... I don't really have the time to do college yet (though I plan to do online classes if they're offered , once I get my GED).

I'm mostly interested in learning to read it (for obvious reasons) and picking up speech and stuff later, you never know when it might come in handy.

What books, or programs would you guys recommend to get a working knowledge of Japanese enough to play imports well?

Plus, I imagine that once I know enough, playing the games and understanding them would probably help me learn alot.

[delafro]

- Befriend a Japanese speaker.

- Go to Japan.

- If you're at all serious about it, get a Canon WordTank or Casio Exword.

-For Kanji, I would highly recommend a book called 250 Essential Kanji. (The actual title may be slightly different, I don't have it on me right now).

- Classes of any type never hurt, but I can't imagine online classes being of too much use. Maybe I'm wrong on this one though.

- For some tips, you can read the entries at jlist.com (or jbox.com), just scroll down. There's also peterpayne.net, the guy does a good job explaining basic concepts of the Japanese language.

- I really don't know how much Japanese you could learn by yourself, if you can't take classes, do whatever you can to at least work with one other person.


That's all I can think of right now. If you're desperate, you could always try the Japan board at Gamefaqs. And GaijinPunch's message boards would be a good place to ask as well.

[davidbrit2]

I highly recommend taking one or two semesters of Japanese with a professor that's a native Japanese speaker. That's helped me so much more than I would have been able to do with simple book learning.

And if you want a really good portable dictionary, search for the free "Dokusha" for Palm OS. It should run fine on even a very low end Palm, though 8 MB will get nearly or completely filled if you load all the dictionary files.

[Azazel]

The only kind of program I can kind of recommend is Edict which is great dictionary type program.

I'd start out with learning Katakana and Hiragana. katakana you can self teach your self in a few hours but takes some practice till you can start to translates words.

I'll second the motion to learn the essential Kanjis that you see the most often. Also learning Radical lookup will be a good idea up till you have a good knowledge of about 300 to 500 Kanjis.

Learn as much as you can about sentence structure, grammar, verb ending, particles etc. that you can on your own. If you take classes down the road it will be much easier if you already have some knowledge of this stuff.

I learned on my own but it's definity not the path I recommend for learning the language properly.

As for playing imports. I strongly recommend on not playing any all Kana games. Unless your a native speaker these are very hard to read and understand. Generally games, anime, and songs are very hard to translate and understand and it's not something you want to start out with. It's better if you start out with something easier like maybe translating a website or article about a game. Translating a guide/faqs is another good way to learn as generally the Japanese guides are pretty straight forward and the sentece structure is pretty easy. It will take a while before you can start to really understand the storylines in import games. When you start out you should at least be able to translates menus, items, magic weapons, armor and that kind of stuff.

[vulcanjedi]

Speaking of learning Japanese.

About 5 years back I sold four TI Speak and Spells on eBay for over $100 each all to people in Japan. Never knew if they were using them for the speech synth or to learn English :)

Is there any web pages or software or older (by older I mean simpler) electronic games like this in Japanese? I would love to learn a little bit myself. At least to play some Phantasy Star Adventure :)

VJ

[Lord Contaminous]

I actually recommend playing any 8-bit Famicom RPG's. Most of the time, the because of the size of the Famicom cartridge, there's not enough memory room for kanji.

Interesting fact though, according to the book 1-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life, most of the text in the game "Mother", is mostly haiku, which is strictly in hiragana.

[NE146]

Yknow for all the times I have gone to Japan every year since I was a child.. and even was there on an extended stay on a student exchange program, all the japanese friends I have, and even growing up w/ jap tv... I still have yet to even have a single clue about the language.

I guess the most important thing to have to "learn japanese" is the desire to do so LOL I certainly had none :P

[vulcanjedi]

I actually recommend playing any 8-bit Famicom RPG's. Most of the time, the because of the size of the Famicom cartridge, there's not enough memory room for kanji.

Interesting fact though, according to the book 1-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life, most of the text in the game "Mother", is mostly haiku, which is strictly in hiragana.

I have actually played the Japanese version of Sega's Dragon Crystal a number of times. Since I have the english version I know what all the menu options are supposed to say but not the menu items. I used to have a list of the 30 most common words in video games in Japanese. can't remember what I did with it though. Must be with that memory improvement cassette I can't find...

VJ

[EnemyZero]

Ive also been self teaching myself for a while now, i started with basics like sentence structure, gramma, stuff like that, and i have a handy dictionary to help....im not tackling reading or writing yet, but ive come a long way..check this site out ...http://www.japaneselearning.com/