The Road To Japanese

On the bus, in the car, on a plane or anywhere else, JapanesePod101 is great for studying Japanese! It has many audio lessons and resources to help you learn Japanese for all levels of skill. Each lesson comes with a pdf that covers what has gone on in the audio lesson, in great detail and it also has other stuff too like a kanji sheet. It also has a paid option where you get a whole bunch of new useful resources but in my opinion the free version is good enough and will serve you as an excellent tool in your journey to learning Japanese!

http://www.japanesepod101.com

Watching anime is a very popular pass time but it is not the way forward to mastering Japanese. I don't know how many times I see people say this and yet people still insist on doing it! Yesterday I was talking to my friend on skype, he explained to me how he had starting learning Japanese too. Of course, I got excited, finally I'd have a friend that I knew in real life to practise Japanese with (all the others take on the ignorant attitude of "I'm English, other countries will learn my language, why bother becoming bilingual?"). So, I asked that all important question; "So how have you been learning it?" to which he replied "I've been watching one piece (a popular anime) with subtitles and copying what they say". I decided to hear what he could say, for a laugh and what came out was awful. He called me an idiot every 5 seconds, referred to himself as sama and sounded like a frog on helium. Obviously this is not the way to go!

Watching anime is fine but for the most part don't copy what they say, a lot of it is unacceptable to come out with, calling yourself sama for example and whatever you do, don't copy how they say things, it's extremely over exaggerated and if you actually talk like that, you will look like a total moron!

Learning to write Japanese is one of the hardest aspects of the language, with Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji making up their writing system, all with more characters that the Roman alphabet, it is a very daunting task!

Once you have got the basics down of all three (or just Hiragana) you can start practising writing properly. Lang-8 is fantastic for this, basically you write journal entries in the language you are learning and then natives (or people fluent in the language) correct what you have done wrong! It's a fantastic tool and you should definitely use it! You can also correct other peoples journal entries that are in a language you know, to help them out and be a good person and all.

You can visit lang 8 here: http://lang-8.com/

So I'm still learning hiragana, I practise for maybe 30 mins every two days. Now I personally dont feel that's enough but I have other things to do too and I do use Rosetta stone for one hour+ everyday, so it can't really be helped. But then I stumbled upon my new best friend (inanimate friend of course), Hiragana and stroke order charts, I have them next to me on my desk when I'm on my computer surfing the net, I have it next to me at the breakfast bar when I'm eating my morning bowl of cereal, hell I even take it with me on the toilet! That way I can constantly test myself and go over Hiragana and trust me, I can really see improvements in not only my hiragana recognising skills but also in my ability to write them! They are very useful in my opinion, you can get some from this website. I love this website, I found it recently and I've been finding it really helpful, the guy that runs it is pretty amazing to have all of this set up and readily available! You should really visit it and browse around I am sure you will find lots of useful tools for learning Japanese!

Japanese is going well, with all the extra help of a Japanese friend to talk to its been allot easier to understand some of the concepts and rules in he Japanese language! Although I keep making the odd embarrassing mistake! For example the other day I was talking about food to my Japanese friend and I wanted to say I like eggs but some how I managed to come out with I am an egg! Oh dear, another example is instead of saying I have to pee I  said I need to pee on you, now that was embarrassing! Well, at least I won't make those mistakes again!

Ok so today this post isn't about language learning. However today I saw something that really surprised me, basically a man illegally walked into a school, wielding a kitchen knife. The school teachers "surrounded the man and held him in place using the weapon", the weapon being a sasumata. Now that's some pretty courageous behaviour, I can tell you that this wouldn't have happened in the UK, no way. Our teachers would probably hit the deck and do as the man said and as this guy was obviously a psychopath he would of stabbed them anyway. I applaud these teachers!


You can read the full story here.

Recently I sought out to find a Japanese friend to talk to, guess what? I found one! Apart from him being a really nice guy and fun to talk to, he has cleared up all of the questions I had about Japanese (and Japan) so far, I really recommend finding a friend from the country of the language you are learning as it can really accelerate your language learning progress!

For example he helped me understand counters, in Japanese when you want to say 2 dogs you have to put what I can only describe as an extension on the end of the number depending on what the thing the number is representing, so for two dogs it would be ni-hiki no ino.

To find Japanese people to talk to you can go here: http://www.japan-guide.com

Konnichiwa! So today I thought it would be a good idea to start learning (properly) hiragana. I'm not going to lie, it's a hard task for me, it's not like anything I've done before and it's just not what I'm used to looking at but I soldiered on and have at least learnt a i u e and o (I've started learning others but got interrupted, so I don't know them well yet).

Despite it being hard it's also been fun, it's a whole new aspect of the language and I've enjoyed it. To learn hiragana I have been using two websites, first I used this website to learn to write them, it shows you what it is in romaji and hiragana, an example of it in a word, how to say it and (what I liked the most) the stroke order and how to draw the character. The other website I used was this one, this I used to teach my self to quickly recognise the characters so that I can read them fast. Simply select the group of hiragana you are learning (also if you aren't learning katakana at the same time go onto the katakana tab and turn them off) and then simply go onto practise and practise away! You can also go onto options and select which fonts you want it to display, I recommend selecting them all so you can recognise the characters in their different forms!

And remember if you want to follow my journey in learning Japanese, as well as helpful info and advice on how to learn the language (or others) please, follow this blog and subscribe to my RSS feed (the link can be found at the bottom of the page). Arigato!

To learn Japanese I have been using Rosetta Stone, I have found this software to be very useful! It teaches you the language via immersion, which basically means you are surrounded by it, there is no English presented to you whilst learning with this software, it links pictures to the words, just how you learnt your first language!