Beginning to learn Japanese

雨 = あめ sounds like Ame; rain
飴 = あめ; ame; candy
明日 = みょうにち; tomorrow

i met with my japanese tutor for coffee, and talked about ideas on how to make the sessions most useful. we have loads in common, not least of which is mixing cocktails.

we talked about the problem with hiragana, because sometimes you won’t know the meaning unless it is in context- because you won’t know how to pronounce it. for example:

rain is 雨. the hiragana is あめ. but you have to say it with a stress on the A.

if you say it with a stress on the ME, then you get candy instead!
candy is 飴 (あめ, ame)

明日は雨になるかな？
lit: tomorrow rain will be?
eng: will it rain tomorrow?

明日 = みょうにち (tomorrow)
i don’t know how to pronounce these kanji on their own at the moment, but i know from my meagre chinese that the first character means bright, and the second means sunshine or day.

so in this sentence with the word rain in it, she said you probably won’t be misunderstood if you pronounce it wrong. (no one is going to think you’re asking, “tomorrow will it candy?”)

context and stress is important with all these homophones!

this is a very generous fella, what a cool site. he’s bilingual and posts frequent phrases in his blog, to help people Speak Real Japanese, http://learning-jp.blogdrive.com/ he includes helpful pronunciation tips, and different ways to use words and phrases.

the author chooses to write in romaji, so my only wish is that it included the kanji and hiragana as well. i did try going to the Japanese dictionary, clicking ‘check if keyword is romanized Japanese’ and pasting in the phrase: Eiga wo mini ikanai from his post 14 Aug, which the author says it means “Do you wanna go to the movies?”

the search results in:

映画を見損なう 【えいがをみそこなう】 (exp) to fail to see a film [G][GI][S]

so the meaning doesn’t match up. and i’m confused on the hiragana, since it doesn’t match up with the romaji… i’m confused. i assume the romaji is for a different bunch of characters. and hence, why i wish it included the kanji.

alas, it’s a great resource otherwise!

this is great! i found stories to read in Japanese. a lovely lady has transcribed them. she made them for her husband. v sweet. this is her site: Do you want to learn japanese?

The stories are transcribed with hiragana and romaji. For example, this story “Natori” has:
- the kanji
- transcibed in hiragana
- transcribed in romaji
- translated in english!

… and helpful coloured phrases. now if i could just get a printer to work!

here is a quote from the site:

1. 笠島村　に　情けの深い　おじいさん　と　おばあさんが 住んで　いました。

1．かさじま　むら　に　なさけ　の　ふかい　おじいさん　と　おばあさん　が　すんで　いました。

1. Kasajima mura ni nasake no fukai oji-san to obaa-san ga sunde imashita.

1. A kind‐hearted old man and
women were living in Kasajima villedge.

英語 【えいご】 (n) the English language; (P); EP

英 【えい】 (n) England; Britain; SP
語 【ご】 (n,n-suf) language; word; (P); E

on saturday i took the greetings and hiragana quizzes at Genki: An integrated course on Japanese. it was so satisfying. i knew the greetings from listening to recordings. and i knew the hiragana from practicing with my handy-dandy flashcards, and the tools mentioned before.

i’d say about 60% of my answers were process of elimination. but mainly i got those by at least having to sound out the hiragana. very slowly, of course. results:
100% on greetings
hiragana 1 - one wrong
hiragana 2 - one wrong
hiragana 3 - 5 wrong!

i thought i knew the hiragana by now, alas. for basics, this page (promoting TileTag software) sums up the kana; including voiced sounds, long vowels and consonants, and the dipthongs.

but it’s a bit more confusing when they have some visual similarities. these are two very helpful articles highlighting confusing hiragana and katakana which look the same, and some notes on pronunciation. About Hiragana and About Katakana, (at Life on the other side of the ocean.)

i’m also going to practice writing the kana instead of just reading it. i prepared some pages to write them out. i think i need to look at them in a different ways too. i’ve also written them down by stroke number. and i need to find more chances to read the stuff. i noticed, really, that kana is not ulitmately useful, because there’s so much kanji in written japanese.

what i’d really like is some kids books with little furigana (little kana to show how to pronounce kanji).

i haven’t been writing what i’ve actually been doing. i’m going to catch up here, and from now on try and do more frequent note-taking on the steps i follow. then i can reflect on what i’d do differently.

for example, i wish i had started by simply reading these four articles, which help describe the gap between English and Japanese.

• Peter Payne’s Overview of the Japanese Language, as well as Japanese grammar guide. Entire Guide contains 8 different articles. Easy to digest!
• Particles vs. sentence patterns and also about Japanese sentences. These are also easy to digest, and cover differences in a little more detail.
• Japanese for the western brain; uses romaji at the moment. I found it helpful to transcribe as I was reading (using my handy dandy computer).
• http://www.guidetojapanese.org/ Very thourugh, uses Kanji, with inconsisent kana transcriptions. As a beginner I stopped when it got over my head.

i’d have started out with a better general understanding of Japanese. i had to look around alot to find out that these were, IMHO, the most useful articles available online.

(update: I just noticed that over at Mike Smeen at Learn Japanese was having the same thoughts about goals.)

when i began, my goal was to dabble in learning japanese, to aim low, and get some “survival japanese”. as i wrote in as i wrote in my profile, i was thinking of effective phrases i could say to get fed, watered and directed to proper locations.

today, i was looking at language schools for studying japanese, and saw a list of proficiency levels. here, half way down the pageis their list. i’d like to get elementary-level, this is how they describe this:

• has grasp of simple sentence structures
• has grasp of basic grammar
• has basic speaking and listening comprehension skill
• is able to recognize and produce approximately 100 Hiragana / Katakana / Kanji in context
• have a vocabulary of approximately 800 words

not sure if that’s possible in 6 months, but i feel very encouraged with the progress i’m making, and also the help i received on this journal. thanks people for visiting and helping!

i’ve opened a can of worms. i spent time thinking about the ‘right way’ to study. you can’t learn language by memorizing phrases, duh. you need to know how to make sentences all by yourself. and becoming familiar with hiragana is immensly satisfying. (i find myself collecting labels with japanese on them to try and trying to sound things out, like some kind of code-breaker; and guessing how to spell japanese loan words like origami, etc).

i have all the basic hiragana memorized now. next i’ll do the voiced sounds and katakana. just need to get some more index cards! i also desperately need a dictionary with furigana so i can figure out if my guessed spellings are correct.

i think i need to start making my own little vocabulary dictionary here so i can be sure what i’ve collected.

and i need to be clear about my goals, and my time commitment now that i have to get back to work tomorrow!

in a previous post, TelimTor suggested in the comments that i could write in japanese. seemed crazy to me at the time. but now that i’ve got a whopping 15 hiragana characters down, (the unvoiced, vowels, k’s and s’s) i can start taking notes in japanese. now that is fun.

(in mac, i clicked on the flag near the clock- and went to “international” i activated the japanese input methods available, and the kana palette. hey presto, i can type!)

あお- blue! (yay! i just typed that!)
えき- station (woo-hoo! to switch between hiragana or english input i just have to toggle by pressing apple + spacebar!)

あおえき= blue station. whoah. i don’t even know if i can say that in japanese yet, because i have no clue where adjectives go! how great!

あか - red!
いし- stone! (hey that’s cool, for し you can type both ’si’ and ’shi’ and it gives you the little hook you need)

i am so not going to get bored of this.

かさ- umbrella, how about あかかさ? a red umbrella!

oh goodie. i can’t wait until i can make sense.

wait a second! just one second… i’m so confused.

i went to check in the translation tool online at http://dictionary.com/ and red is 赤い … not あか … and blue is 青い not あお … what’s up with that? is this some kind of kanji bait-and-switch?

grr… i just hit a learning wall. *grimace*

i’m trying to learn the kana through writing. i’m using A Guide to Learning Hiragana and Katakana (Tuttle Language Library) and starting with hiragana. for review i’m either going to make my own flashcards, or i was thinking i could actually do it in flash, and make electronic ones with audio.

then it dawned on me, someone must have done this already. there’s many sites to learn the kana, many use javascript. but i want the sound as well. and often the sounds are separate sound files, and at least in my browser, you’re taken to another page. also, i’m looking for something i could use off-line. so the ideal kana programme would:

• be an all-in-one package to play offline
• have a chart with audio
• show or demonstrate stroke order
• show words using the kana you just learned
• have some kind of fun game or activity to challenge

best of the pack, i think is DoKana. i’ve only tried the demo, and i found it helpful. how it works: you click on and hear each kana sound, displayed in the standard grid. the ‘exercises’ are more like audible flashcards (not a game) which bring together the sounds you’ve just heard to make words. you get to see them try to say them outloud, then click to hear the native speaker and learn the meaning.

the demo only shows the vowels, k sounds, and s sounds (both hiragan and katakana). which is fine for me, because i only did the vowels yesterday, and i’m starting on K and S today. you can limit the exercises to words which begin wiith vowels or ones that begin with k or s.

on repeating these exercises i started knowing the meaning of the words, and being able to pronounce them! fancy that, i just learned how to say ’station’: eh-ki!

the same software engineer made a Kana Quiz using SVG. but i’m not ready for that yet.

other kana learning sites i found:
- http://www.kanachart.com/ is a very cute and fun site. has mnemonic devices for remmbering the kana, for example showing ‘ka’ turn into someone doing karate. but the audio is from linked .wav files which lead my browser to another page, just a little interference. and it gives examples of words with these kana in them.

- CosCom has linked mp3 files in another frame so it’s not as distracting. the drills also show stroke order which is very good. it also has double consonants. this is a close second, but it’s not all-in-one. they sell a CD-ROM for learning Japanese which you can demo.

as a refresher, i don’t think i can go wrong with good old flash cards. this site has flash cards to download and instructions to use them

I’ll keep adding more to http://del.icio.us/heather/kana”

i listened to dr. blair’s “japanese in no time” during my five hour flight from san francisco to boston. i made it through one run of the first CD and half of the second. i realized it was getting ahead of me, so i went back and started reviewing CD 1.

the programme has an interlinking story, which appeals to my corny sense of humour. the ‘activities’ and and ‘memory quizzes’ build up to interactions within the story. upon re-listening, i’d skipped the english story-set-up after the first time.

one funny thing, which i find disturbingly infectious are the mnemonics used to make words more digestible to english ears. i knew ‘dozo’ before, but now i fear it might be permanently linked in my mind to an image of me letting Bozo the clown pass ahead of me.

good news is, these seem to be employed decreasingly as the lessons progress. by the second CD, words are introduced on their own.

i know japanese is fast, and the syllables are short, but i’d love some syllable by syllable pronunciation. it’s hard to make out words which are made of four or more syllables. i’m sure that would be tedious on repeated listening. to stop that happening, i think audio CD makers should employ more track breaks so advanced users could skip boring bits, and novice users like me could repeat crucial practice bits.

this is not the first audio CD i have listened to. i also listened to Japanese for JETs, which i borrowed from my boyfriend. Eek, for a newbie like me, i found it impenetrable. right off the bat, long sentences in convoluted conversations. goofy background noise, etc. i’ll try and go back to it when i have some more practice under my belt.

but i’m enjoying dr. blair’s CD. it has a nice rhythm to it, with changes in activities, so i don’t feel bored. also, you get satisfaction right from the start because you are speaking, and learning how to make sentences, and using phrases in different contexts.

there are some bits that are challenging at this point, (especially where you hear the japanese first and have to say the english; and during the interactions where you have to respond to someone talking to you) but i think that’s a good sign that i could improve on repeated listening, and i’ll be able to tell i am improving.

i was surprised i had not heard of this programme in the many sites i had looked at. i only found it when i went to the bookstore and it was in the used section. i guess that alot of people who are writing online might be already advanced beyond this, but i give it a thumbs up!