Learning Japanese? Where to Start from!

I’ve always been Otaku, but it was in early high school years I became Omega otaku and refused to stop watching dubbed anime… My ears couldn’t take it any more after I learned what a nice sounding language Japanese is… (besides the fact Japanese Seiyuu are generally better than their American Counterparts.) I was in french class at the time; my school was so cheap they only had Spanish and French as second language classes. Studying french… a language that almost made me this crazy, I couldn’t help thinking how much I wished they taught Japanese instead. One day while I procrastinating an essay project by browsing the internets I decided to google up some information about the Japanese language Or “Nihongo” and decided at that point that I would just learn on my own.

Clearly I was delusional at the time because I would have to be a super genius to learn japanese on my ownXD

But in the two years I did study on my own I learned quite alot and thought I’d share some of the resources and advice I used in case anyone else wanted to learn japanese to deepen their… Love of Japanese culture=D

***First off… You need to make sure you computer can read the Japanese characters.***

Or you’re going to get some alien language appearing on your screen whenever you go to any of the sites with any japanese characters. Its pretty hard to learn the language if you can’t even see it.

Follow the directions here.

If you have Vista its a similar process that you should be able to figure out if I of all people did. You may also want to learn how to actually type in Japanese, which can be pretty fun, you might want to check here.

My host club welcomes you to Bluesnow’s Nihongo school for NoobsXD

1. Learn Hiragana and Katakana

Written Japanese is made of two types of writing… Kanji, which come from chinese Characters, each kanji represents a whole word or Idea. Generally you can tell its kanji if it has like a million strokes. For example Ai/Koi Is the kanji for love. Most people recognize that because its on Gaara’s forehead. But there’s like a Bajillion different Kanji… so as a begginer you first need to learn the Japanese Phonetic characters or your brain may blow up… Its Kind of like their version of the alphebet. They have two sets of Alphabets… Kind of Like how our letters have upper and lower case letters, but the same sounds. They are Hiragana and Katakana (Or when talking about them both In general its called just Kana.)

You’re thinking of the wrong Kana

Hiragana is their main alphabet; every single word in japanese can be written in it. Katakana has all the exact same sounds as Hiragana except this alphabet is used to spell foreign words… or for a different emphasis to stand out. You need to learn both… so its best to just cram them all at the same time. Some useful sites I found for this was:

The Kanji SITE

This site offers an extensive guide to teaching you pretty much everything you could want to learn as a beginner about Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji even. You should click start! and then Kana. The only flaw of this site is it doesn’t show Kana Stroke order that I know of, and the kanji compilation, despite going as far as to offer examples even is far from complete. It is also very hard to search for kanji on the site.

RealKana

A very simple site, but it allows you to test your reading ability in the beginning.

Hiragana Stroke order

Katakana Stroke Order

If you’re going to write them you better do it right. Or its going to be confusing as heck later when you learn Kanji. Follow stroke order is like part of Nihongo 10 Commandments… if you break the rules you go to hellXD

Enma Ai is waiting for any takersXP

My only advice for learning this is just write over and over and over and over till you’re seeing these letters in your sleep. Try to find one word for every letter so you learn some vocab in the process. In my case I spent about 80% of all of my math classes doodling this… that would probably explain why I almost failed Calculus. Even after you mastered writing, it will take a while for your brain to master reading them. I still mess up reading many of the Katakana (Especially Tsu, and Shi, and N and So), but practice makes perfect. Reading out loud is the best way to grind them into your brain.

Raito Practicing His Japanese=3

2. Grammer

If you can make it through Kana and still have the motivation to keep learning your next step is learning basic vocab and grammer rules like verb conjications and Adjective usage.

The Japanse Page

This is an amazing resource especially for the begginer.It gives decent grammer lessons. As well as some other fun information.

It takes a while to catch onto the basics… and you can get lost easily at first. I was very confused about Particles at first.

Tae Kim’s Japanse Guide

Probably the best site I’ve found for just plain information to reference. The lessons move very fast though, so you probably won’t get very far before you need to back track.

Learning to write and communicate in Japanse in general I’ve found is extremely difficult to do by yourself. Its hard to find enough written examples on the internet. At a certain point you may just hit a road block and feel you can’t learn any more; like you’re stuck at the begginers level.

3. Lessons

At this point you have a few options if you want to continue learning japanese.

First off… stop being lazy bum and trying to learn everything from the internetXD You have to go buy a book or you won’t be able to go further. I’ve been using Genki textbooks for myself.

Genki online

They go at a fair pace, is actually coherent and easy to understand, has funny little stories, An audio CD you can buy with it, and Incorparates Kanji and Vocabulary at an even pace.

If Great teacher Onizuka was my Japanese teacher I would get Straight A’s XD

Second off… enrole in a japanese class, or find a Japanese speaking person willing to help you. I’m in my second year of Japanese… and while I’m far ahead of some of the other students because I’ve been studying so long you learn ALOT more from a person who can actually speak it. They can answer all of your questions and correct your stupid mistakes. They show you how to properly speak it. They can tell you about japanese culture. Taking a class in necissary to truly learn the language. My Japanese teacher kind of reminds me of that old teacher guy in GTO with the expensive car that keeps getting beat up… But less perverted and more crazyXD

4. Kanji

Yeah… It will take you along time to readXD

Learn Kanji… Yes I posted this last. Unless you already know Chinese this is going to be the most difficult part of the language. The grammer itself is actually very merciful when compared to alot of languages out there, but the Kanji is not. You need to know about 2000+ Kanji in order to be even slightly fluent in reading normal sentences. Not only does it take a long time to memorize them all, but they can be very difficult to write, and some are easily confused with one another. Besides the links I’ve already posted the only advice I have is to make a story for every Kanji you encounter. That way, even if you can’t ready the pronunciation you’ll still know what it means.

Some Kanji are simple… Like “Ichi” or One is just a single horizontal line. Others take alot more effort to memorize. For example… The kanji for “Kaeru” Return. My made up story for this word is:

A business man had gotten off work and gotten a little bit drunk. He’s swerving while driving home and parks in the drive way outside of his house. (The bottom and left) He walks in the door to his house and see’s his wife and another man together… doing stuff… (Top right) And He Screams KAETE!!!! (The imperative form of Kaeru). Return my wife. They don’t all have to be that farfetch’d, but I’ve found that makes it more interestingXD

If you aren’t creative to make up your own stories you can buy a kanji Reference book such as this one That actually tells you either the real story behind each kanji or makes up something logical. (Its one of the books I have myself.)

While it might take a long time you might actually get to the point you can start reading and wrighting japanese. I’ve found this to be a good online reference for translations and other information, though it is very confusingXD Personally besides a text book I also have a Japanese Dictionary, a Kanji Reference book, and a Japanese idioms book. Between these 4 resources I can usually make out what something is trying to say.

For practice you might want to go to japanese websites, or watch Raw anime, or try to traslate raw manga scans. Every morning I start my day driving to school singing to Japanese music because its speaking practice right? Eventually you will really start understanding what they’re saying, it came as a shock to my system the first time I stopped looking at anime subtitles and realizing “OMG!!! OMG!!! I know what they’re saying!!!” Really I still consider myself a beginner so I don’t really have more advice to offer other than it takes alot of continued effort to improve. I just thought I’d post this in case there’s some poor Otaku out there that is in the same boat I was at one point, wanting to learn but having absolutlely no idea where to even start.

Ganbatte Kudasai=3

• Bio
• Latest Posts

bluesnow

Latest posts by bluesnow (see all)

• Hetalia- Almost time for Season 3 *Updated - Tue 09/03
• Hetalia Fandisk- Extra Episodes and Content - Thu 25/02
• Kaichou wa Maid-Sama! - Wed 24/02