Japanese speakers?

[Magenta]

So in the fall I'm going back to school for English literature but I'm planning on taking a minor in East Asia studies. Many of the courses offered are language courses. I definitely would love to take Japanese but it's a large language to tackle and while I'm fully prepared to start in September, I almost want to start trying to get some of the basics down prior to that. French class was always easy because it's my second language but this is starting from the ground up.

I have one Japanese friend who is hugely excited and said she'd help me with my homework and practice with me but I was wondering if anyone else (particularly native speakers) have any advice on where is really the best place to start just so I can go in knowing something. I'm slowly memorizing hiragana which I figured is something. Kanji is going to be intimidating although my school also offers Chinese courses (which I presume would probably be primarily Mandarin) but I'm not sure if I could handle both at the same time, even though the same characters are used.

Anyway, just wondering and all that.

[Capto]

Yo. Former Japanese grade-schooler here.

I think it's great that you're going to start learning Japanese, and I'd agree that if you get a head start you'll have a better time in the beginning of the class.

First off, Kanji:

As I'm sure you know, Japanese operates primarily off of two syllabaries and one character system, whereas the former two, the kana systems, are comprised of 46 syllable-based phonetic characters, and the latter is horrifyingly comprised of thousands of logographic characters.

While hiragana and katakana are important, kanji is impossible to get by without when it comes to Japanese text and writing. This is primarily due to its syllable-based structure as a language, whereas there are significantly limited combinations of syllables that realistically and practically form a word. As such, kanji is necessary to differentiate the meanings of syllable-groups that may sound exactly the same.

For example, take the random clump 'kasa.' This word can mean: bulk, umbrella, halo, or a few other definitions, represented by '嵩,' '傘,' and '暈,' respectively. I hope that illustrates the importance of kanji, because really, it's really really important.

Now as for the kanji themselves, fortunately, out of the thousands upon thousands of kanji that do exist, the Japanese Ministry of Education has compiled a list of 2,136 characters known as the '常用漢字,' or jōyō kanji [literally 'regular use kanji']. It's considered a baseline for the kanji that a Japanese person will have learned after completing their basic education, but also serves as a good guideline for foreign learners (note, it's by no means comprehensive, as it glaringly ignores the headache-inducingly wide variety of name-use kanji, but it's a very, very good list of necessary kanji).

Of the jōyō kanji, the subdivisions that are most pertinent to you as a new learner will be the kyōiku kanji, or 'education kanji.' These 1,006 kanji are divided by grade-level and are roughly organized on commonplaceness and simplicity of meaning. Unfortunately, this ignores simplicity of writing. For example, I learned the character '曜' in the second grade, but the character '欠' after I left Japan in the third grade. Regardless, the kyōiku kanji offer a good starting place to learn kanji. While I initially learned through rote memorization, right now I'm going through high school kanji by just writing them down once and reading a lot of literature and reciting what I jotted down, which is proving to be far more effective. Honestly, when it comes to learning methods, just go with what works for you. It doesn't really matter, whether it be notecards or reading through a dictionary or whatever [though on that note rote memorization isn't that great now that I think on it because each kanji has a variety of distinct readings and even different contextual meanings, so just memorizing kanji-meaning-reading is pretty inefficient in comparison to, say, notecards]. For kanji, if you want to learn grade 1 or grades 1 and 2 before class that would already get you really far ahead, but there's nothing wrong with staying at pace with how the class roles.

A little warning though. Learning Japanese and Mandarin at the same time isn't the greatest idea. They don't share grammar nor much of their vocabulary (though the Chinese languages have donated a large part of the Japanese language's lexicon to Japan). The biggest pitfall of learning the two languages goes somewhat hand in hand with the thing I wrote earlier about the jōyō kanji and governmental regulation of characters. Obviously China and Japan are two completely different countries and with completely different customs. China has its own list of commonly used characters, called the '現代漢語通用字表,' or 'List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese.' Why this matters is that actually, China has changed the characters. The government has prescribed simplifications to the script and characters to make them easier to remember, to write, etc.. As Japan has not gone these linguistic reforms, if you take both a Mandarin and Japanese course, you would be having to learn some of the same characters, but some different characters for the same concept and meaning.

I personally wouldn't recommend it.

Now for a bit of basic grammar:

Well, we know that English is very typically an SVO language [Subject-Verb-Object]. That's how our language works. Japanese is often presented as an SOV language, but that's not really true.

Truth is, Japanese is literally just a V language. You can have a completely grammatically correct sentence with just a verb.

Like '見ました.' 'Saw.'

The thing about Japanese as a language is that it is very context-heavy. The aforementioned sentence would have to be said in the context of a pre-existent conversation. There would have already been an implied subject and an implied object.

e.g.

"あの猫を見ましたか?" "見ました。"

"あのねこをみましたか?" "みました。"

"Did you see that cat?" "(I) saw (the cat)."

Whereas the subject and object are implied. In addition, even if you do add those things, for all intents and purposes the order does not matter so long as the verb is at the end. You can have a grammatically correct sentence by just mixing around everything else and it will all work out. For example:

"I the cat saw." "私は猫を見ました。" "わたしはねこをみました。"

and

"The cat, I saw." "猫を私は見ました。" "ねこをわたしはみました。"

are both perfectly valid sentences for expressing that yes, you indeed did see the cat, even if the latter may sound a bit weird to a native speaker.

So now that the sentence order mixup is fixed, just a few notes on basic grammar.

Japanese grammar is dominated by particles. Particles are short words that follow other words to determine their grammatical role. The most readily useful are the following:

は, が, を, に, へ, で, の, と, and も

First off, は. Note first of all, while it is written 'ha,' it's pronounced 'wa.' 'Wa' represents the subject marker, but it's a tad more nuanced than that. 'Wa' is used for setting the subject for the entire conversation or indicating context for future sentences. It's a little difficult to explain by words, but once you read more and study more you will get the gist of the 'wa' particle.

Then, が. 'Ga' is the identifier particle. It works to answer questions asked, but is also similar to the 'wa' particle in that it can add a subject to a sentence. The difference is that while the 'wa' particle is more general and context-setting, the 'ga' particle is specific to its sentence.

"私は魚が好きです。"

"わたしはさかながすきです。"

"I (wa) fish (ga) like."

In the sentence above, we see both the 'wa' and 'ga' particles at use. Here, I is set as the conversation topic. The sentence indicates that this and perhaps following sentences will be about the speaker. A good way of thinking about the 'wa' particle is something like "as for." Like, "as for me, fish is liked."

The 'ga' particle is specific to the sentence. Here, it likely answers the question, "what food do you like?" It is saying that the answer to the question, specific to this sentence, is fish.

Then, を. It's pretty simple. It just indicates the direct object of a sentence. Only thing is like 'wa,' it's pronounced differently from how it's read. Instead of 'wo,' it's pronounced 'o.'

"肉を食べました。"

"にくをたべました。"

"Meat (wo) ate."

Someone ate meat. This one is nice and easy.

に, へ, and で are all related in some way, in terms of location.

に is used for indicating location "I'm home," direction of travel "I'm going to school," indirect object "Give the pencil to me," and a couple more situations. These are the basics that are the most readily useful and most common.

へ is used only for direction of travel, so it's like a subset of ni. Like 'wa' and 'o,' it's pronounced differently. While it's written 'he,' it's pronounced like just 'e.'

で is used for means "I got home by bike" and for location. There aren't many more useful uses for 'de,' unlike 'ni.'

Then の. 'No' in terms of sentence structure is used for marking possessive. Direction is opposite of the word 'of' in English. Instead of 'object of owner,' it is 'owner no object.'

eg.

"私の車"

"わたしのくるま"

"I (no) car"

Summarily, it works like a Japanese reverse of.

Finally, と and も are nice little conjunctions. 'To' is 'and.' 'Mo' is 'also.' For all intents and purposes, it's as simple as that.

________________________________

These are just some of the basics. Of course, to learn any language will take a ridiculous amount of effort, but have fun doing so. I would suggest doing some light immersion learning on the side of your self-studies and later class-studies too, like watching Japanese TV shows geared towards kids or reading old kids' books and stuff like that. But yeah the road to learning Japanese is fun. We love when our language and culture is being appreciated so. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me or your friend. I, and I'm sure she as well, would be more than happy to help.

では、カルミーヤさん、頑張って下さい！一所懸命勉強して下さい！よろしくお願いします！

[Magenta]

Capto

That is the single most informative response ever given to me on this site and THANK YOU. I haven't read all of it 'cause it's relatively late but I am going to bookmark this for the future. My friend was actually telling me about particles but she didn't have much time to further explain them other than they're a bit weird for native English-speakers since we don't have an equivalent.

And thank you for the information about Japanese and Mandarin. While I figured the grammatical structure of the two would be very different, I was not aware there was actually such a difference in character usage. So they're the same but not the same. In that case, I'll stick to Japanese. Mandarin is interesting as well but sadly, I know no one who speaks it (I only know Cantonese speakers for some reason). So the lack of practice wouldn't be great.

Like, I know to some degree it sounds dumb, but I loved anime and manga and basically everything about Japanese history and culture as a kid. For some reason honourifics were my main interest, dunno why. Then it wore off a bit while I focused on other things but I've had so much time off that I got back into the media part quite a lot. And when I noticed my university had Japanese classes, my thought was... why not try to learn? If I'm already taking in a lot of media in that language, it would be kinda nice to at least be able to take in some (unlikely all given my prior knowledge of vocabulary is pretty low but not horrible) in its original format. Subtitles are a pain and translations are often horribly inaccurate. I know just enough to play Japanese video games with English subs and know that someone saying "yes" in Japanese does not actually translate to "this will be a piece of cake, dude, let's go". So yeah, it would be nice to one day potentially be able to experience it as it was meant, rather than the way it's made (and censored) for North Americans. I watch a lot of French films (subbed mostly) but because it's my second language, gotta admit it's nice when I can turn away for a few seconds and not become totally lost even if I only understand about 60% of it. I still watch French children's TV sometimes just to brush up on the basics. >_>

But that's just my silly reason (that sometimes people just laugh at honestly). Academically, I think it would be a fun challenge and would be a great path of study since I would love to go to Japan one day too.

[Capto]

Oh I totally understand that reason. It's also why I myself have decided to advance my own Japanese past the level of a grade-schooler. :p

And it seems I forgot to illustrate just how drastic the difference between Chinese simplified and traditional (the type used for Japanese kanji) can be. Or how similar.

From Japanese kanji to Chinese simplified hanzi:

'義' will become '义.'

Or, '魚' will become '鱼.'

So yeah, your mileage really will vary when it comes to kanji to hanzi or vice-versa. That's why I don't suggest it.

[Magenta]

Oh I totally understand that reason. It's also why I myself have decided to advance my own Japanese past the level of a grade-schooler. :p

And it seems I forgot to illustrate just how drastic the difference between Chinese simplified and traditional (the type used for Japanese kanji) can be. Or how similar.

From Japanese kanji to Chinese simplified hanzi:

'義' will become '义.'

Or, '魚' will become '鱼.'

So yeah, your mileage really will vary when it comes to kanji to hanzi or vice-versa. That's why I don't suggest it.

I dunno, I think it's been criticized because a lot of people do take Japanese culture as a fad (mostly when they're young) and people just like to complain. But I mean, NASA got a ton of astronauts thanks to Star Trek so I fail to see the difference if someone wants to learn a language because of popular media.

And yeah, okay, I can definitely see the difference (why must that first kanji character be so complicated) so I'll probably steer clear of learning another language on top of Japanese. Besides, it's hard enough on it's own so I figured it wouldn't be too practical an idea anyway.

It's writing and reading that's gonna get me. I actually have a decent-ish vocabulary if I'm listening to something or reading words in my own alphabet (I know it's... pinyin? in Chinese, not sure what it's referred to in Japanese) but the characters... so many characters. It's gonna be a definite learning curve considering my first two languages use the same alphabet, give or take a few vowels.

[Capto]

I dunno, I think it's been criticized because a lot of people do take Japanese culture as a fad (mostly when they're young) and people just like to complain. But I mean, NASA got a ton of astronauts thanks to Star Trek so I fail to see the difference if someone wants to learn a language because of popular media.

And yeah, okay, I can definitely see the difference (why must that first kanji character be so complicated) so I'll probably steer clear of learning another language on top of Japanese. Besides, it's hard enough on it's own so I figured it wouldn't be too practical an idea anyway.

It's writing and reading that's gonna get me. I actually have a decent-ish vocabulary if I'm listening to something or reading words in my own alphabet (I know it's... pinyin? in Chinese, not sure what it's referred to in Japanese) but the characters... so many characters. It's gonna be a definite learning curve considering my first two languages use the same alphabet, give or take a few vowels.

Heh. I live my otaku life quiet and proud.

The usage of the latin alphabet in Japanese is called 'ローマ字,' literally 'Roman letters.' While it may be useful at first, later on the usage of romaji is highly discouraged. It's good to get rid of the dependence on romaji before you start learning kanji, but if you already have some down it's fine. The reason romaji isn't great is that it creates an extra mental step in translation. You have to add it in between the kanji and the kana, and that extra step severely impedes speed and efficiency.

So yeah, I'd readily suggest learning hiragana and katakana [the former is arguably more immediately useful] as quickly and as best you can and dropping romaji like a hot potato. Overall, though, just take things at your own pace and have fun learning. Just keep that little thing in mind.

Oh yeah, and the 'r' sound in Japanese is notoriously hard for most foreigners. Given that you have prior knowledge of Japanese culture I'm sure you know how it sounds, but here's a little video describing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCbTj6a6S7E

Other than the 'r' sound there aren't too many odd sounds in Japanese, other than 'fu.' But I'd have to think on that to figure out how to describe it.