Looking to start learning Japanese!! (Need a Japanese Dictionary?)

First off, here, have a dictionary! :) We won't tell anyone what words you look up...>.>

http://www.nihongomaster.com

So I'm interested in learning Japanese. How did you guys start? What made you want to learn?

I started last month. I'm doing a night class once a week for the year. I wanted to do do it because one day I hope to watch anime in Japanese without subtitles. Also because I plan to go to Japan in a few yrs. I'm really enjoying it and would encourage anyone to give it a go!

Wow! Thanks for the encouragement!

I've been looking at some study materials. What recommendations would you give regarding which materials work and which ones don't?

Well my family is of Japanese ethnicity so I was always exposed to the Japanese language but I was raised in a different country so I never grew up speaking Japanese. As I grew up of course I became interested in Japan's culture and language...so like most of us here anime, jpop and what not became one of my biggest interests and at first I learned perhaps the foundation by just listening and watching things in Japanese that were subtitled. After years of doing so I began understanding more and more, but I wanted to know more and so I began taking classes and so now I can understand 40%~50% of conversations that are not too complicated. I also wanted to learn because its part of my family's culture.

This guy has some interesting tips http://www.japanesethroughanime.com/

For my course we use a text book called 'Japanese for busy people' or if you can afford it, Rosetta Stone is apparently very good.

Oh I forgot to say~ The textbook that I use in my class is called Genki (2nd edition). It comes with a textbook, workbook and a audio cd. It's not that expensive and it really does a good job at explaining things...lol the only complaint I have is the absurd things they have their characters do...but other than that it's a pretty descent book. Also by the way if you have an iPod/iPhone you might want to download Kotoba! it's quite of an app and its free. It's a dictionary from Japanese to English and English to Japanese, although it might be good to have a basic idea of the word your searching for because the app will show even outdated words that aren't used anymore. It also has a kanji function that teaches you the strokes, meanings and etc. Quite useful app ^^v

thx a good tool

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Originally Posted by Yuuchun

Oh I forgot to say~ The textbook that I use in my class is called Genki (2nd edition). It comes with a textbook, workbook and a audio cd. It's not that expensive and it really does a good job at explaining things...lol the only complaint I have is the absurd things they have their characters do...but other than that it's a pretty descent book. Also by the way if you have an iPod/iPhone you might want to download Kotoba! it's quite of an app and its free. It's a dictionary from Japanese to English and English to Japanese, although it might be good to have a basic idea of the word your searching for because the app will show even outdated words that aren't used anymore. It also has a kanji function that teaches you the strokes, meanings and etc. Quite useful app ^^v

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Thanks so much for the recommendations! Yeah, I've heard so much about Genki that it's definitely my first stop when it comes to a study book! I'll check this Kotoba thing out! Thanks so much!

Also, I'm a little jealous that it's part of your family's culture. It's much easier to learn if your environment is immersive. Not to mention, it's probably awesome to be part of a culture that has so many fans!

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Originally Posted by egosha1381

thx a good tool

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Super glad you like it! I personally think it's fun just because of the sample sentences. Being able to see how a word is used in the context of a sentence helps with getting a "feel" for the meanings of a word. Also, not having the romaji so handy forces me to learn things quickly XD

Ahahaha the only thing that will help you is getting accustomed to Japanese manners such as bowing and etc. But for the language itself...unless its spoken in the household you don't have that much of an advantage over other students. But thank you ^^v

Btw I found this site a long time ago when I use to do little translations here and there. It basically romanizes Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters...although because Japanese kanji has multiple readings you'd have to know which reading your looking for. But none of the less a useful tool when you don't know the character LOL...quite handy when studying kanji.

http://www.kawa.net/works/perl/roman...an-demo-e.html

I know it has been a while since the last post, but I thought you might be interested in this site:

http://www.jisho.org

It allows you to look up words in either English or Japanese, search for kanji by entering them if you have it (for meanings) or by entering a reading or dictionary code if you know those (such as SKIP), searching by radicals as well as a section filled with example sentences. I hope it helps out with your learning!

wow. sounds like ima try that. XD

I started a while ago but language learning has never been a strong point of mine. I have about a dozen books and have loads of audio tracks from Pimsleur and Japanesepod101 which help alot, but i'm still quite slow.
I just want to be able to watch anime in japanese without subs and to be able to have a conversation in japanese when i go there in a couple of years.

I really really love japanese and would definetely like to learn it, I know some words and stuff from animes as I assume everybody who watches it knows but I'm starting to take it more seriously.
Besides beinng trying to understand and memorize kanji I just remembered that I have some CDs teaching japanese for some years ago (got them free in a portuguese newspaper, how lucky, hum? :p), and they're great! They're from eurotalk.com (the one I'm taking is called "Talk Now! Beginners"), and in the cover of the CD says this is the CD-ROM language learning most selled in the world.
It's really awesome, it has voice recording for you to compared your speak with actual japanese, vocabulary with images and kanji, software for iTunes/MP3, some tests for helping you to memorize things and some more stuff, I'm really motivated with it! :D

There are so many great places to study. I use several sites online all the time. I also have a You Tube channel where I try and share different study resources and do some lessons with the help of native or fluent Japanese speakers. Please swing by and say hello and I will link you to as many online resources as you want.
http://www.youtube.com/user/GengoNoTabi?feature=mhee

One of the things I do as far as learning Japanese is to just study my Japanese by the book and then try to see how much I can understand when listening to Japanese in anime. Bcuz with listening, there is a big difference between knowing how it is said and then being able to actually recognize it when it is said by someone.

Also, always texting my Japanese friend in Japanese also helps too.

Oh, look what i found, a japanese language forum. Anyway, Japanese is my first language and if anyone wants to learn the language they really should do it. Moving to japan really helps, but of course not everyone can do that.

it was easy i had japanese class back in 3rd grade then she left to have a baby then we had stupid spanish class stupid ugly teacher

Everything started with the original movie of Ah! My Goddess... That is how I started out.:)

Had a small Japanese unit-type thing in first grade, then it sorta slowly festered under the surface until I discovered Spice and Wolf. After watching so many inspiring stories afterwards I decided to start studying Japanese to see what sort of stuff influences the Japanese contemporary media I've enjoyed so that I may apply it to my own works.
Example: the concept of raising a child to be a perfect wife (I have heard of games and such with such a premise, yes?) dates back to the Tale of Genji. Oh Genji, you so silly.

I learned through Anime and Video Games,

Gameboy games for hiragana/katakana moving upto n64/ps1 for kanji.
I learned Hiragana/katakana pretty much completely while spending a week playing Zelda:Link's Awakening (ゼルダの伝説：夢を見る島). I feel it's all about sticking with it for long enough for it to have an impact. Short term memory is easy (see flash-cards) but long-term memory is what's hard and where it matters. 4 hours a day for a week > 30min a day for a month in my opinion and experience.

I saterted learning it because my school demanded 2 languages at GCSE and I couldn't stand french, now I mostly use it to play games a year before they are released here and for Anime (which is funny because I started Anime to help learn Japanese...).

I have an app on my ipod touch called "Japanese" which has a kinda red background that is very good as a dictionary / memopad.
There is also another app called 漢字忍者 (Kanji Ninja) you can get on android and apple which is used by japanese children to learn the kanji. (just choose japanese keyboard and type it into the app store with kana and choose the auto-complete kanji).

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Originally Posted by NihongoMaster

First off, here, have a dictionary! :) We won't tell anyone what words you look up...>.>

http://www.nihongomaster.com

So I'm interested in learning Japanese. How did you guys start? What made you want to learn?

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Well, I started by watching Anime, believe it or not. That was my key to learning from then on. I was a huge fan of the Japanese culture, and I loved the food, language, etc.

Hi all,
This is a site that I've just started putting together for exactly this purpose.

www.japaneseanimelanguageclass.com

I hope that anyone with an interest in Learning Japanese from Anime will check it out and get involved.

I have been studying Japanese for a long time (my sensei says there is no end to learning, haha). But I also teach basic Japanese part time.
The reason why I studied was because I wanted to watch Jdorama in the original language. Yep, Jdorama not films, not anime. I know, I'm weird that way. :)

This is also another good dictionary site - http://wwwjdic.com/

It's a dictionary that's partnered up with a freeware Japanese Word Processing program called JWPce (which can be found here), and is a very good starting point for an electronic dictionary.

As far as texts go, get one you feel comfortable with. I personally liked the Learn Japanese series (4 volumes) published by the University of Hawaii. It's presented fairly simply, grammar lessions are clear, and it addresses some of the cultural and contextual issues of Japanese, and spends a great deal of time in the fourth book on Keigo - the Japanese variations of language based on social stature and situation.

The key to a good Japanese text, to me, is how fast it weans you off of Romaji, and starts you on Kana and Kanji with much of the lesson material being presented in Japanese rather than Romanized Japanese. I don't believe that one can effectively learn to speak Japanese without understanding the written language as well. Perhaps it's possible, but I think it's probably much harder, and you'd still only know a portion of the whole language.

Don't short change yourself. If you're going to learn Japanese, learn all parts of it - spoken and written, including Kanji. It all works together and will be much easier to understand if all parts are available for use.

My 2 yen,

Akiosama

A lot of smartphone dictionary apps now use the WWWJDIC. So if you wish to study on the move and you don't have any internet connection, an offline dictionary app will be handy. i currently use imiwa (I think it used to be called Kotoba). ^_^

Maybe someone posted this already but this website is in Japanese and it's pretty good~
http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/
Underneath the text bar, if you click 英和 (英和) you get translations from English to Japanese while 和英 (わえい) goes from Japanese to English~ (^^) 辞書のすべて(じょしょのすべて）searches all of the dictionaries areas~
Beside the search bar you want to click 辞書検索(じしょけんさく) which searches your word for you~ The other button searches the web~
I hope you find it useful!! (^^)ノシ

If you're looking for a grammar dictionary there is a really good one called "A Dictionary for Basic Japanese". Check it out it's really good I have the one for intermediate, and advanced also.

http://www.learnjapanesethroughanime.com