The Road To Japanese

First off let me apologies, I haven't posted in a long time, you see I have recently started college so I've been busy! Don't worry I'm still here though and today I have some excellent Kanji learning videos to share with you! They are in development and their aren't many out yet, but i really enjoy doing them and I find Kanji EASY to remember after watching the video and writing it out just once ( and then the stroke order too) and writing the meanings and readings next to it ONCE, in other words i love them. The only bad thing is, as i said before, there are not many out so you can't use them to learn from purely, just as a supplement (at the moment to this date). Anyway here is the link, I also suggest subscribing to this guy and his multiple channels as they are great, giving you news about Japan and it's events as well as teaching some of the language. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM2rTzjAr2I&feature=feedbul Enjoy!

I saw someone post this on a website today "Hey im 16 and learning Japanese, i love it and im finding it fun but my friends just make fun of me for it and its making me want to stop, what do it do?" This angered me when I read this, not only at the people making fun of that person but also at him.

Since I've started learning Japanese, I've been called every name under the sun related to being obsessed with Japan, "Otaku", "Weabo", "Wapanese", "Wannabe Asian"; But did I let any of these get me down? No and I certainly didn't stop because of it. This one time, one of my particularly supportive friends said this to me; "Why bother learning Japanese you won't get far, I guarantee in a few weeks you will have given up", now actually this hit me hard because he's a good friend and he obviously wasn't very supportive but I carried on and its been a good few months since he said that (take that!) use their doubt as fuel for you to improve, prove them wrong.

Whatever they say, is it really going to do anything bad to you? Forget about it and move on, then laugh at them when you reach the title of bilingual, No one said it would be easy but giving up because of a few words is unthinkable!

This is something I have been doing a while now, as you probably know by now you should immerse yourself with Japanese things as much as possible, watch Japanese tv shows, listen to Japanese podcasts, read Japanese articles etc. Well when you are looking over these, I'm sure you will come over a whole bunch of vocabulary and phrases that you don't know (if you are a beginner then you will come across far to many to do this but I'll go into that later.

So what do you do? You write down all the phrases and vocab (even grammar points you have to look up) into your special vocabulary book! If your a beginner and you come across too many alien words or phrases then just pick out the most important and useful words and phrases. This can really help your Japanese and will extend your vocabulary, depending on what you are reading/watching/ listening to, you may even learn colloquial terms to help you sound more native. Give it a go, it will help you LOADS!

Ok so yeh, I borrowed the idea for this blog post of Textfugu so you should definitely read their article on it here, but hear me out. This is something that really made sense to me, if something is your passion, you want to do it all the time, am I right? If you really love learning Japanese then you really will stick to it, you really will learn, you really will become fluent!

Of course I'm not saying that you can learn Japanese with passion alone, hard work along with multiple other thing come into the equation, however with passion, that hard work, those spent pennies will all seem worth it, even fun to you, if you don't enjoy doing what your doing, it will be harder to accomplish. I know some people learn Japanese, or other languages for that matter, because they have to, for work, or because they have to move their, but even if you have to, find some way to make it your passion, relate it to things you love, incorporate those things you love into your studying!

Passion is the key to faster, easier success, so why not give it a try!

OK after youtube giving me way too much grief I have finally got the video up. Now you get to see the man behind the mask :o.

みなさん こんにちは！ So I recently got this comment : "hey! what is your studying method? you are in also on grammar? or stopped on hiragana e katakana? i need to know because i have to much things to study and i dont know what is better to do! STEVEN" and I thought a nice new thing to do was to start this new... section. Basically it's called Post Bag and if you have any questions, just post them as a comment and I will answer them, even if I don't know the answer, I will research them, then I will learn something also! So of course, let those questions roll on!.


As to the question above, this is my answer:
My studying method? I have lots, but for each part of learning Japanese, my study methods vary, allow me to go into more detail.


First I'll go a little into the order of which I have done/am doing things, if you have been following my blog, as you may already know I started off learning hiragana and katakana, this gives you a good foundation for learning Japanese, as some of the best kanji  resources give pronunciations in kana and some of the best grammar recources use kana in examples, in fact for learning grammar I'd say that knowing kana is vital, why? Well because all particles and grammatical points should be in kana, why change that? As well as this, the particle は in romaji is written as wa, but it is written with the hiragana for ha, which will only cause confusion when you convert! Now what I am doing is, at the same time, learning Kanji and Grammar, now my kanji studying method has changed a lot since my last post, as in the end Heisig's method wasn't for me, but that doesn't mean its bad. Once I have the grammar and kanji down, I will just work on my vocabulary and phrase knowledge, maybe learn some colloquial terms and of course practise what I have already learnt! I will watch Japanese television shows, this will help my listening and pronunciation as well as my vocabulary, I will read Japanese books and manga, to make sure my Kanji and kana skills don't dull, and another thing that I will do is translate books from English into Japanese and vice versa! I actually got this idea from PathogenProductions from Youtube, he mentions it in this video. Basically I will do lots to immerse myself, improve myself and to make sure my skills don't dull! Now onto my actual methods. 


For Kana I have made a few posts on that already, feel free to check them out: Kana E-Course, Learning Katakana, Hiragana Resources.


For kanji, again I have already made a post, but as I said above my method has changed since then, It's too much to go into in this post, as it's already long enough but expect this method tomorrow or the day after! You can check out my old method here, it's really good, it just didn't fit my learning style!


For Grammar I am mainly using Tae Kim's Guide To Learning Japanese this is an amazing recourse and I really can't fault it in any way. However let me warn you now, all the examples are in kana and kanji, although if you hover over the kanji it shows you it in kana. If you don't know kana you won't be able to use this effectively, of course you could translate it all into romaji using a chart, but that's time better spent actually learning kana. It also has exercises after each section to secure your knowledge on what you have previously learnt.


Also for Grammar I have a pocket grammar guide called BARRON's Japanese Grammar, this is a nice little book for reference and it's very affordable, my only complaint is that it is all in romaji, but its not meant to learn from only as a reference and such so I like it anyway.


As well as all of this I regularly watch, people on Youtube who blog in Japanese, I watch Japanese television shows, I listen to some Japanese music and try to read what Japanese I can. Also one of the most important things to me is that I practice everyday, stay in a habit of practicing, the one day you miss might turn into two days, three days, a week, a month and before you know it you've given up, don't let that be you! Study hard and don't give up, forget about the haters and embrace this chance to learn a wonderful language, at some point in your life you just won't have the drive or time to do it, so do it now!

I signed up to this while learning Katakana, it's a e-course that is supposed to teach you all the kana in two weeks and is made by http://nihongoup.com/, however it didn't prove much use to me because it sends you one lesson a day so I couldn't access the parts I needed to learn. However I do think it's a good course that can prove beneficial to anyone learning kana, so, in order to bypass the one lesson a day limit I have all the links to each lesson here in one place for you all!