Lasonax

Wow, I had never heard of such a phenomenon before: learning a language to earn money. I can't believe parents are teaching their kids chinease for that... Well, I would surely have been happy to have known Chinease from a young age no matter what reason my parents had for it, but that's just because I'm interested in asia today, kind of. Ugh, I can't believe people are thinking that it will make them earn more money... What the F***!? That's so cruel, taking up spots for people who want to learn just so that they can get an easy mark... I assume you don't have these "tests" in your country. Where I live, we can apply for a "test", where we basically don't go to class (you don't even have to go to that school or be part of the class regularely) and just take a huge exam, or a few smaller ones. I did that with English, and still got an A... So it's not hard to get an A through these tests, I wish you had the option to do those there. It's just... It does anger me that they also make it harder for you people who want to learn, but it's even more horrible that they're making other people unable to take the class just because they want easy marks

I'm a huge fan of Japanese music, but I suppose that doesn't really count for this, since I am studying japanese, and I do understand a bit of it... I used to listen to a lot of german music before and when i was studying german too, and I still find that german operas/chorales/music overall is quite amazing, even if I don't listen to it very often. I also find that many other types of asian music is quite awesome compared to european/american music, at least when it comes to pop-music. I tend to absolutely hate all kinds of pop music from europe and america, but for some reason Asia tends to produce some good pop songs every now and then. And well, I don't currently have any plans on learning any other Asian languages than japanese, but that might change in the future. So... What I mean with that is, I don't understand any other asian languages at all, and I don't think I will ever learn any other asian language, but their music is still great. There are some languages that I just can't stand to hear in songs though.

Only having one language across the entire world would never work. We would develop different accents, that would eventually lead to new languages. Having every person on the globe know english alongside from their native lagnuage however, is something that definately should happen. English is a huge language, and "most educated people know it", but I'm certain that there are still places out there in the world where english is not taught as a compulsory subject in school. If EVERYONE did know English, or some other language that everyone knew, the world would probably be a slightly better place. Or atleast have the potential to be a better place. I mean, even if we could all communicate perfectly with each other, we could mess things up anyway.

German was offered to me alongside with Spanish and French when I was in highschool. I really think that all those languages are pretty "worthless". I mean, forcing highschool students to learn a language just because they have to like that feels rather useless. I get that it's useful to learn English, and you're almost handicapped if you don't learn English: but there's not really much reason to learn German/French/Spanish. Surely if people chose to learn those languages from their own free will for whatever reason they have, but being forced like that "just because" feels so bullshit. The only option people had besides learning one of those languages in my school was to have extra-english, and that was rare: and only for peope who had problem with English.

They don't really start at the end, since they read in the other direction... So for them it's the beginning. In japanese you typically read up to down, and then right to left. (as in, you read an entire line downwards, and the next line to read is the one to the left of that...) They sometime write from right to left though, but in books/long texts they tend to do the "traditional" way.

As the title says, do you think there is a bad/stupid/... reason to learn a language? Learn a language as in, learning it "fully", and not just learning a few words. I mean surely, it's quite silly if someone decided to learn a whole language just because they wanted to watch porn in a certain language (I doubt anyone does this, I'm just making extreme cases up... but you never know) or something: but even if they did that, would that really be a bad reason to learning the language? I mean, no matter what reason you have for learning a language, isn't it great that someone is learning another language, even if it's just to watch porno? What's your viewpoint? Would you tell them to do something better with their time if someone told you "I'm learning this language to watch porn in this language" or would you help them out with their studies, or something like that?

I very rarely have to use a dictionary to look up words, but it happens. Maybe once every second day or something (note: I write a LOT of english every day, so this is really not much in contrast to how much english I'm writing/reading/Listening to). It's usually happens when I don't know the spelling of something, when there is a word I don't understand I can usually get the meaning of it from the context (or atleast, understand the overall meaning without knowing the individual word). But of course, I sometimes have to look up the definition of words too.

In high school I cared a lot for my marks, the english mark included. I did manage to get an A, aswell as a scholarship for extraordinary language skills... So I guess I was successful. It also seems like I will be getting a B or A in English now during senior high too, even if I just work on the knowledge i already have, and don't care much about the exams nor the assignments. I don't think it will make a differance to my future really, I'm thinking of becoming a librarian, and I don't think librarians need to have some super-duper english knowledge... I suppose it could be good, if I was working in some city where lots of people didn't know Swedish, but apart from that I don't think that my employer will check my english mark or anything... But I could be wrong, I guess.

Haha, why would this be a bad thing? I mean, is there really a good reason to want to learn japanese? I think wanting to learn japanese to read manga is a splendid reason, much better than "I may or may not move to Japan one day" or something shady like that. The problem would probably be that one would find it hard to motivate oneself just to read manga. I'm personally studying "only" to understand Anime, Manga, Light Novels, Visual Novels, and other forms of Japanese entertainment. (Note: A huge load of Visual novels and Light Novels are not, and never will be translated into English) I'm not learning to speak nor write, I'm focusing only on the passive understanding. Am I doing it wrong? lol OP: Even if this is an old thread... Whatever. I don't think it's very hard to learn by yourself, atleast not if you're not trying to learn how to speak the language. As others have mentioned, it is useful if you know how the words are pronounced though, so even if you won't be able to think in the language and make your own sentences and all, you should probably learn how to pronounce the kana properly either way. The hardest part about japanese is probably the amount of characters you need to learn, but that's really not as hard as some people make it to be, it just takes time. Good luck!

Well, it's hard for us to tell since we don't really know what resources you used in the past, nor on what level you are. (Even if you know very few Kanji, maybe you've studied particles and grammar to no end...) I don't think there has been any revolution for the past months as far as japanese learning goes, all the resources I am using and plan to use, are atleast a few years old. I suggest simply going through what you did when you started out, if you read a grammar book, go through it very quickly and see what you remember of it, and re-read the parts that you don't remember. Make sure to download Anki flashcards if you haven't already, and get the katakana/hiragana deck with voices, to make sure you know all of the kana. If you really need some grammar resource, as I've recommended in many other threads: I suggest reading Japanese The Manga Way (It's not some sloppy shit for people who are obsessed with Japan, it's just a "typical" grammar book that uses Manga in it's examples, which I really like myself. Around 300 pages or something. Basic level/for complete beginners) and Tae Kim's guide. As far as kanji goes... Just start all over again. If you remember any of them, awesome, but since you said you only remember a few, I wouldn't bet on it.

Well, I think most people won't be aware of what grammatical rules they are following, atleast eventually you will be "so good" at english/the language you are speaking that you'll just "know" right away how it should sound when it sounds correctly. Without having to think of these fancy grammatical words. I don't have much problem remembering some basic rules, but atleast for Japanese, I'm focusing only on understanding it passively (reading/listening) and not at all on speaking/writing. Therefore I focus mostly on being able to recognize grammatical things, and understand why they put that word there and why they put that particle there, and so on. With that beign said, I had no problem remembering all the weird grammatical words and things when I was learning German, and german sure has a very funny grammar system.

Honestly it's as simple as the fact that they don't use L in their own language. The same way we would have a hard time saying some sounds in some african language, or arabic language, they have a hard time saying sounds they are not used to. Surely we could argue that with every new language you are learning, there are new sounds and all, but atleast for me, I feel that japanese isn't actually that far away in terms of "raw-sounds", most of the sounds they use are already in use in english. (If you read Remembering the Kana, you would of course know this already). It does however sound a bit funny when they name an anime "Braku Burretu" or something like that, when it's named "Black Bullet", and "Braku Burretu" is simply their way of saying it. I may have spelled that romaji wrong, I don't quite remember how they spelt it... But yeah, if they change the sounds when they speak english, I wouldn't be surprised.

As far as I know the word still exists, accoring to Wikipedia Cheque is simply the british usage, and Check is the American one. Either way, cheques/checks are used so rarely nowadays that the word is almost never used... Because noone ever uses those things anymore, since there are almost always alternatives that are way better.

It really depends, but as far as Japanese goes (which I am currently studying: English is just there because I have english classes in school. I'm however so fluent in English that I don't go to the classes, I just take the exams and still get A's...) I'm really afraid of not understanding the grammar and listening to it. As I'm not focusing on writing or speaking it myself, I simply worry that I won't be able to understand it as quickly as they speak, which will definately be a problem at first. (when I've learned "enough" but my knowledge isn't "fast enough"). As far as reading goes, I will have all the time in the world to read a sentence in half an hour if that's what it takes, but with speech... You can't really do that, unless you fancy pausing the movie you're watching, or something like that. I'll learn eventually, but I'm really not looking forward to the day where I "know enough" but I don't know it "fast enough". Just a matter of practise though, as with everything. I think this applies to every language in general for me too, with speaking I don't actually mind having a bad accent, as long as they understand me. And when I'm speaking myself, I can speak slowly, and they will probably still understand what I'm saying (even if they would find it funny).

Being exposed to the language you are learnign is always great, and movies/TV-series is no exception. One could probably argue that there are far better ways of learning, but entertainment media is always a great way to learn more. It does of course require that you already know some, and/or that you are currently learning it, as it doesn't really work only to watch movies/tv-series... But yeah, it's a great tool to learn more.

Well, I partly regret all the energy I spent into learning German. I honestly have no use for it at all, but I suppose I couldn't choose anything else... So I pretty much had no choice either way. If I didn't study German, I would have studied french or spanish, because it was compulsory. (which is incredibly silly to be honest) If I could dream, it would of course have been awesome if I spent that time learning something more useful. But then again, I don't ever regret anything. What I did before shaped me into who I am today, and even changing something as simple as which language I took, could completely have changed who I am today. I always think about how little it would have taken for me to not get interested in anime. All that would have been needed would have been like, a little breeze in the flow of time, and i wouldn't have watched that episode that started it all... So, changing what language I took back then, could have changed everything!

I couldn't find a thread like this, even though there was one somewhat simlar ("When is the first sign of you nailing the language you are studying?" or something like that) so... Yeah. At what point in your studying do you think that you're good enough to stop studying it? I mean, we can always get better, even if it's our native language we can never know everything, so theoretically we could keep studying in languages forever. How about you? Will you continue book-studying "forever" to learn about new and extremely uncommon grammatical rules and words, or will you just drop all learning books after you've reached a certain point of fluency? Personally I feel that after over 7 years of studying english, I don't really need to study it much more than this. I have one more english class to go, and potentially one on top of that if I decide to pick an extra, advanced english class. I'm very fluent in english however, and I got straight A's in English, so I do feel like it's somewhat unneccesary for me to even study vocabulary, even if it could be useful. I don't really know where my limit goes, but I have been fluent in a way for a few years now, and I definately think that it's not enough to just be fluent. Where the line goes is hard to say, especially if it's something you're studying on your own, but yeah... Thoughts accepted!

As I've written in other threads, this is what I suggest: * Learn hiragana/katakana first, this will be a very easy step. Make sure to learn the diacritics aswell as the "combinations" (when you have one normal character and a smaller one). * Go through Japanese The Manga Way * Start learning the kanji * At the same time that you are learning a few kanji a day, go thorugh Tae Kim's guide (linked in the post above mine). It is true that some of those grammar rules have already been tought to you via the manga-way book, but it doesn't matter. Consider those parts repetition. You could skip "Japanese the manga way" book entirely if you want, but I highly suggest reading it through simply because it's a very enjoyable and easy-to-learn book, which takes a light approach to many basic grammar rules, structure, particles, and so on. When you're done with all that, you should probably be able to find more resources yourself to learn more grammar, but apart from that you should probably start working on your vocabulary by then. You can also do vocabulary + grammar + kanji at the same time, but it may or may not slow down your learning, depending on how hard of a time you have focusing on one thing at a time. Otherwise you should probably pick up a few words here and there simply through reading Tae Kim's guide, and being exposed to the language.

I think we all have accents, I don't think there is such a thing as "universal-english" or "national-swedish" or whatever. There are people who claim that they speak the "correct" one, and all other ones are accents to the accent they are speaking... But really, all ways of speaking are accents. When I speak swedish there is a clear accent, and if I would go to some other place in the country people would clearly hear where I am from. When I speak english however, I have a relatively british accent, sometimes it's quite extremely british, and sometimes it's less british. But for the most part, people very easily notice my british accent in english. The swedish accent that some people have when speaking english is just hideous, and it really just makes people sound uneducated. British english is the way to go, atleast if you're living in Europe.

I think the actual problem lies with both the person who is correcting, and the one who is being corrected. The person who is correcting the other person most likely corrects the other person due to feeling superior, wanting to teach this person something (may been seen as a negative thing from another persons perspective) or just be a jackass. The person who is being corrected is most likely getting mad because he/she feels inferor to the other person, even if the person correcting him/her didn't intend to declare that he/she was by any means smarter than the other person. Honestly, I think that we should be able to correct each other without worrying about who is actually smarter or not, but we humans don't really work that way sadly... I don't like being corrected either, or atleast not always. It depends a lot on how the other person is correcting you, even the slightest tone of "Are you stupid?" in the voice is like a slap in the face, but if it's a more laid back/nice tone as in "I think it should be X instead" it's a completely different thing. We don't want help, we don't want to feel inferior to another person, we can do good by ourselves, and we will ignore any help anyone else seems to give us: because we are strong ourselves and can manage on our own. We don't need your filthy corrections! I won't learn from those! (The paragraph above is some kind of parody of how I believe people think on the matter, maybe not actively think this but... That's how a lot of people act.)

I tend to be bad at speech, but good at the other parts. It generally breaks down to the fact that I write/read/listen WAY more than I speak myself, no matter what language it is. As far as japanese goes, I'm not even trying to learn how to speak nor write it, so... There's that. With german I was around A level (highest mark) when it came to writing/reading, but my speaking was lacking a lot, so I didn't get an A as a final mark in german class.

It's really crap when it comes to actually translating stuff in a good way, but for general translation, as for huge websites like amazon japan, it can be quite useful. I'm a real beginner at japanese, but I regularely order stuff from Amazon Japan, and Google Chrome automatically translates everything from Japanese, using google translate. The translations are horrible, of course, but atleast I can get a hum of what is being talked about, but it's not a very good idea to start reading the reviews that were translated from japanese to english... It's handy, but it's not a good tool for learning/translation where the details matter.

I feel confident enough to teach english on some levels, but I probably wouldn't be the best teacher around... My mother is an english teacher, and I get extremely good marks in english, so I could probably teach a bunch to beginners, but I might not have the patience to work with complete beginners. So yeah, I think my main problem would be patience, having to accept that people are probably really slow at learning, and that I would have to take things really slow... Ugh, I probably wouldn't fit very well as a teacher.

I tend to sing along to all anime openings/endings that I listen to, and I almost listen to every OP/ED of every anime I watch. After a few episodes I usually know the entire songs by heart, more or less... I'm not really sure if it helps my learning or not, I suppose it may help my pronounciation and vocab a bit, but I don't think it's anything that will make a big differance. Besides, my aim with my japanese learning is completely passive knowledge. (i.e I want to understand japanese perfectly, but I don't care for speaking it nor writing it myself. Although I will most likely be able to do the latter two aswell when I'm fluent in understanding, I will probably not be very good at it)

When you're starting out, I suggest to get the books (buy, download, whatever strikes your fancy): Remembering the Kana, aswell as Japanese: The Manga Way. First off you should go through the kana and learn every katakana and hiragana character, it might take a while and be quite boring, but you should be done pretty quickly if you put some time into it, they're fairly simple and shouldn't be too hard to learn. After you have learned that, go through the other book I just mentioned. It's a basic book about grammar and structure, and it's way of teaching you the very basic ropes is very fun (Uhm, it uses real manga as examples). When you're done with those two, you should probably already be interested in learning japanese enough to find more resources yourself, but if you still don't know what to use... Use anki flashcards for hiragana/katakana/kanji/vocab Use "Remembering the Kanji" for kanji Use Tae Kim's guide for grammar (Some of this will be already covered in JTMW, so see parts of this as repetition) Use Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and it's more advanced books for a reference list on grammar (for when you are good enough in japanese to understand enough to go by with a dictionary and referance list/learn as you are reading/listening/talking). "Tested" books as in those used in actual classes are not recommended for self-study, mostly because they are just that: used for CLASS studies. A lot of classes also use the old fashioned way of writing a character over and over again to learn it, which really isn't a good method for anyone who isn't a kid. Their progression is very slow, but you will most likely be more secure on the stuff you have learned that way, but personally I think that classes are not really needed unless you want to be able to SPEAK japanese well. If you want tested methods: take some japanese classes. If you're more into self-study, read above, and if this isn't enough for you, send me a PM.