This is a thread for people to help me find resources necessary for learning Japanese (and for people to point and laugh at my failures of which there will probably be many).
For starters, could someone explain what all the written forms of Japanese are? I've heard there are several.
For starters, there is , basically sets of syllables to write/read stuff.are the shitload of more complicated symbols that you'd be having most trouble with.Nightmare!
are hiragana/katakana over/next to kanji explaining how to read them for noobs like us.idkfa
Last edited by Enhance; December 31st, 2012 at 10:21 AM.
There's Hiragana, which is used for Japanese words, Katakana for Foreign words, and Kanji for also Japanese words so they don't take as long to write out.
Fuck Kanji.
Learn Katakana and Hiragana Learn Kanji. Simple...I mean... not but its not impossible
No, Kanji is the only thing that gives Japanese any discernible form. Take it away, you have no context and everything is just a phonetic sound.Originally Posted by KENTA
Also, there's romaji, when you spell out a Japanese word with the English ("Roman") lettering system. But don't bother much with it, because it's a crutch you don't want when learning Japanese.
Localizationing stuff
Kanji and Hiragana was easy enough... Part I hate most about Japanese is Katakana, useless bullcrap. Japanese has to be one of the most (if not most) inefficient languages in the world
It's more for the foreign guys, after all, to understand how to read those squiggles.
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Learning katakana should make learning kanji easier. Discerning kata flows into discerning kanji.
As for the inefficiency part, I could argue there, but I don't feel like it. I don't know Korean either so I can't put you in the box with roman script languages.
Last edited by Enhance; December 31st, 2012 at 10:28 AM.
They have unique symbols for individual words? That is going to be a pain to memorise.
Yeah, they adopted it from the Chinese.
I know katakana but really never really understood why they had to add such an inefficient language system into their already broken language structure. If not for Japanese language Japan wouldn't have ended up becoming an international recluse like they are right now
It's the main part that makes Japanese harder than most languages.
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I don't think it bothers them that much
I'm going to want a list of what each Kanji means for the more obscure ones, aren't I?
Anyway, I could share some experience with you that I got after learning 6 or so languages (excluding programming/markup ones), but my conclusions might as well be personal to me (they're actually not but it takes a lot to understand them), you can bump me in pm or whatever messaging system you can think of.
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I don't think you want a list.
I'm learning kanji first before katakana and hiragana; does that make me weird?
Not so Mega Sig, now properly spoilered
Spoiler:
Beast's Lair's own Dwarf Fortress succession game is now recruiting mighty able dwarves, sign up if you have what it takes!
memorize 2000+ kanji be acquainted with them enough to use them in your everyday life and you'll have no trouble striding through the streets of Akihabara like your resident Otaku... Took me nearly two years to do half that and I still can't write them perfectly
^in fact by my experience that's not a very bad Idea at all.
Yes
It's also helpful in sentence structure. If you have a bunch of hiragana, which is mostly used for structure and grammatical technicalities rather than proper words, kanji and katakana are what separates out the terms used in a sentence. Katakana especially helps because there's no capitalization or things like italics in Japanese, so on top of it being used for loan words, it is usually the form they have for proper words that need a kind of emphasis or focus.
You see it that way in manga, btw, if you need an example. Katakana is usually what they use for onomatopoeia sound effects in panels, or sometimes a character will shout another character's name in it rather than the hiragana or kanji the name actually uses for emphasis or exclamation.
Localizationing stuff
It makes you Chinese.
What with like 33,000* or so symbols?
*someone correct me on this if its wrong.
But I'm Filipino my life is a freaking lie! D:
Last edited by Gaterjhonz; December 31st, 2012 at 10:40 AM.
Not so Mega Sig, now properly spoilered
Spoiler:
Beast's Lair's own Dwarf Fortress succession game is now recruiting mighty able dwarves, sign up if you have what it takes!
you need learn only 2000 Kanji combinations for academic purpose. 1000 for your everyday life...the actual figure however is much higher than that. There's not a single japanese that knows the entire kanji combinations available out there
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