do you wake up every day do your work or school or what ever. come home and studdy Japanese or is it just a "when i have the time" kinda thing.... for my New years rez im goin to work on it every weekend for a month becaus i dont know what my time is going to be like with school home work. once i got that down im bumping it up to 15 min. every night.

ARE YOU DEDICATED??

Here is a current collection of my books

Yookoso Volume 2 (Plus CDs)
Yookoso Volume 2 Lab Manual (Plus CDs)
My JPN313 text book (Plus CDs)
Nelson Kanji Dictionary
Japanese-English Grammar Dictionary
Making Sense of Japanese
Making Out in Japanese
13 Secrets to Fluentley Speak Japanese
Expressing Emotions in Japanese
And lots of dictionaries

Agatsuma wrote:

do you wake up every day do your work or school or what ever. come home and studdy Japanese or is it just a "when i have the time" kinda thing.... for my New years rez im goin to work on it every weekend for a month becaus i dont know what my time is going to be like with school home work. once i got that down im bumping it up to 15 min. every night. ARE YOU DEDICATED??

If you really want to learn Japanese, at my college we learned about 20-30 words per day (M-W-F) and each time we met the next day we were tested on it. Then of course we would have the quiz and you would have to know these words. In the beginning, she would say a sentence...you fill in the blanks with those words. Later on after you learned hiragana and katakana, you need to write out the sentence in Japanese. Try to commit yourself to learning 20-30 words a day, learn hiragana within a week or two and the same for katakana. It's actually not that hard if you keep writing it over and over and some people used flash cards. Then once you're past that, you will need to learn kanji. Try to learn 10-15 a week starting with the basics.

The books that we used at our university are the Japanese for Busy People volumes 1-2. Actually, of all the books I have purchased on my own, I really like those volumes a lot. You can find these in Amazon or eBay really cheap. If you are going at it on your own, I highly recommend getting a good Japanese dictionary (one for English->Japanese and Japanese->English). You can find how-to-do kana and kanji books easily. If you do get the books I mentioned (JFBP), then you may want to get the CD because it's good to know how to pronounce the words.

But the dedication on your part will have to come in memorization and needing to use those words and apply it. Know the words, know how to write it in kana and if you are ready, go to the next step which is kanji. Some people need flash cards to learn (they do help), I pretty much kept reading it over and over and took the quiz that's in the book and applied it.

I recommend going to school over learning it on your own. The reason is because you can use your language to converse with others who are learning the same time as you. If you have a large Japanese student population in school (moreso, those attending an English Institute than those who have been in college for many years) and make friends with them, a lot of them are willing to make you learn and most who know that will only speak Japanese to you. Most of all, you do not want to fail thus you are forced to learn so many words and kana. Where if you learn on your own, you go at your own leisurely pace and there is no pressure.

My only advice is to be careful with some books (yes, when I was a newbie, I used that "Making out in Japanese books" and sure enough...people knew I was using Japanese from that book). Be careful with learning from anime because you can come off very childish or really weird. As for dorama, also be careful. It's important to know the politeness level and not use everything you hear. If you see KimuTaku say Ja na for "see you later". you definitely don't want to say that to someone in a business or formal setting. Most of all...if there is anything that bugs me the most...people who don't know how to pronounce the words... learn how to pronounce the words. You won't believe how many people pronounce "anime" as (a-neem) or "Manga" as (mei-n-ga).

Also, there are Japan chatrooms where people who are learning type in Japanese ala romanized. If you don't have Japanese or people to converse in Japanese, go online to practice your conversation skills.

Good luck!

kndy

Books are good but there's nothing like proper tuition I find. I was learning from books until I finally saw classes being advertised. Now I go once a week for an hour and a half to learn Japanese with a small group. My teacher also offers home tuition at her house for about ?10 an hour so I think I will do that soon.
I am totally dedicated to learning the language and I will be going back to Japan later in the year to see the autumn season and so I really want to speak a higher level of japanese than I did last year.
Anyone going to Japan has that insentive to study harder I think
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I stop my Japanese studies during my exam periods now (before I wasn't and messed up hrhr) however since I have many Japanese learning / speaking friends (internet, MSN etc) Also tried p2p calling to Japan last days, works fine =) (since all my Japanese freinds moved to another cities or back to Japan ...)
Besides that, after finishing my previus study books, I'm studying with the 'Minna no Nihongo' books now.

Quote:

Anyone going to Japan has that incentive to study harder I think

so True

On the contrary, watching drama can be a GOOD way of learning Japanese as you become more used to it--this is the same for any language. You see 1) Which situation the vocabulary is used in (for example, how to say goodbye to your superiors vs. your same level and/or people 'below' your level), 2) How these words should be placed in a sentence for speech and 3) Intonation and proper pronounciation.

I took a few years of Japanese courses in college and this is my 2nd time in Japan, but I noticed an immediate difference when I actually watched more programs in Japanese for only 2 months.

Studying any language by yourself can always get off onto a rocky start. I too tried before having official classes, it was useful to get down the basics. However, I still think a person can learn a lot from dedicated studying! I study Japanese 24-7 (well, mainly because I am living in Japan now and it's impossible not to hear or speak Japanese, hahaha. But also if I find a word I don't know on TV, I look it up immediately! Sure, it make be some obscure law-term word, but everything helps!)

I wish you the best of luck! Also, check out some websites on the web with dictionaries and basic phrases! They're great for getting idioms, proverbs, etc! Culture is language, and language is culture!

i just started studying japanese and i guess it's not that hard. considering the grammar is basically the same as korean..i'm so dedicated..that even though i should be studying other subjects ...my mind keeps on focusing on japanese. so since japanese is the only subject i want to study, i'm having a hard time focusing on my school work..T-T i mean im in china right now trying to learn mandarin...but im so interested in japanese i don't want to focus on anything else

Not dedicated enough, I'm afraid. Need a girlfriend who speaks and reads the language...

bmwracer wrote:

Not dedicated enough, I'm afraid. Need a girlfriend who speaks and reads the language...

exactly!!! I think that's the best way to learn japanese
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arnel98 wrote:

exactly!!! I think that's the best way to learn japanese

Heh. Arnel, now you're talkin' my language!

I have to agree...

though I'm scared rather shitless when I look at the kanjis... oi, grammar, vocabulary, I can handle that, but the kanji system....oi *hides from it*

Two people who goes to my Japanese class are married to Japanese women and they say it's actually very hard learning Japanese from their wives, they say they need to take classes
.

Kanji is something we're just starting at class. Last lesson we painted the characters for "heart", "mountain" and "friend". Once you try it yourself you gain so much more respect for it because it's not as easy as it looks to paint.
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bmwracer wrote:

Not dedicated enough, I'm afraid. Need a girlfriend who speaks and reads the language...

Thought you had a "wife" who already does though....???????

ahochaude wrote:

Thought you had a "wife" who already does though....???????

Touche. Only if it were true, Aho...

I forgot to mentino that I am a Japanese major, and have a Japanese girlfriend

ParaParaJMo wrote:

I forgot to mentino that I am a Japanese major, and have a Japanese girlfriend

Ouch, that really hurts.

I pretty much took Japanese from my freshman to my junior year of high school. Not enough kids signed up for Japanese 4, so I couldn't take it my senior year. So I had to take a yaer off until I started college

idk how dedicated i am, im taking beginner japanese courses during night class, i have numerious books, that i could fill in for my knowledge, but still reading in kanji is the hardest, anime and j-dramas really helped but i need to keep on going with my courses im having fun though.
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a japanese girlfriend wow hahah that sounds fun i have an asian girlfriend but shes not Japanese she is Indonesian i love her

Not very, I had great intentions to study for 1-kyuu last year but it never happened. I studied Japanese in Uni which traumatised me (lecturers were MEAN!) and did not study when I lived in Japan though. Have a lovely Japanese boyf though who I speak in Japanese too when I'm drunk / on the train and want to talk privately