I’m continuing to take Japanese lessons. It seems to be cheaper to import most textbooks from Japan than to buy them in this country (UK), so i’m trying to figure out which ones to get.
My teacher is recommending Minna no Nihongo and Basic Kanji Book. Having looked at pdfs online, i can’t say i’m especially enthused about either. Maybe because they seem to focus on practice rather than explanations?
If anyone has any opinions about the books they’ve used, i’d be grateful to hear them!
Pretty much all the elementary level books were of absolutely no help for me for anything but the most basic stuff. The Genki series of books are popular, you might try those.
Personally? Tae Kim’s A Guide to Japanese Grammar has been one of the most helpful things I’ve ever run into and you can just read it online on site.
My recommendation isn’t a book, but an app. If you have an android phone, Akebi is the best japanese dictionary app there is. It can do almost anything you’d want a futuristic, interactive dictionary to do. It can do conjugation, DEconjugation, example sentences, smart kanji flash cards, stroke order, on- and kun-yomi, the works.
I used Japanese The Manga Way for learning elementary Japanese grammar a long time ago and found it really fun and intuitive.
Minna no Nihongo is useless without a native Japanese speaker explaining all that garbage to you.
I always recommend Genki as the starting textbook. Take it from me the guy that has been visiting/living here for 12 years and wife is Japanese and still isnt near fluent.
heisig’s remembering the kanji series
shout out to broco for mentioning these tomes some years ago
make use of OJAD when the time comes to get your hatsuon correct too
heisig is one of those that either works for you or it doesn’t
it doesn’t work for me at all, so not a fan
I didn’t mean to write this much, but I was on the train without anything else to do. and I love buying textbooks. if only my japanese level matched my peerless textbook accumulation. alas, I remain piss-poor~
Another for Genki/Remembering the Kanji, here. I checked the prices on Amazon UK and was pretty shocked how expensive Genki is, so ordering it from Japan probably is much cheaper
Genki I was the first textbook I picked up when I came here and worked my way through it lackadaisicallly over a couple of years. I can barely remember it, to be honest, because of my terrible attitude to studying
When I eventually finished it, I wondered whether to continue on to Genki II or switch to Minna No Nihongo (they are always pitted as the two go-to beginner textbooks in the bookshops)
When I first took a look at Minna No Nihongo, I thought it seemed an admirably hardcore way of learning—it’s entirely in Japanese from page one—and must have been written in a special way to teach the language in the language itself. That is until I realised there is a supplemental grammar book of explanations you are supposed to buy alongside the main book
This does make sense as, as far as I know, its primary use is in language classes in japan which might have students from many countries—the supplemental grammar book comes in loads of languages, so each student has a separate explanation in their mother tongue—but the realisation that it is just a regular textbook, and one that comes at double the cost, was disappointing all the same
So I continued on with Genki II, which I’m still on with at the moment. The front two-thirds of the book forms a similar pattern: conversation (in kanji/kana, then English translation), a vocabulary list from the conversation, explanations of the numerous grammar points featured, then some practice tasks—usually for pairs, which I do alone ; (
The last third of the book is focused on kanji—here there are a couple of pages featuring ten or so kanji, then a reading comprehension task involving the new and previous kanji. I like the kanji sections a lot. I do them side-by-side with the grammar chapters from the front and they seem pretty much perfectly pitched all the way through, never too difficult, but they always feel satisfying and credible as pieces of writing
After Genki II, the third book in the series is An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, which is published by the same company but dispenses with the Genki stylings. It does seem a touch flat, though
Tobira is a pretty prominent late-beginner/intermediate-to-advanced textbook, and seems to be the last textbook you need before moving onto wholly native materials. It seems much more varied and interesting than AIATIJ, but no less rigorous. I think Tobira is the next book I will go through
Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji was an utter revelation to me
I read somewhere that its primary benefit is that it demystifies the kanji, and I kind of agree; before I tried it, kanji I had come across before, and thought I ‘knew’, would, if I saw them in a different context, completely unravel into unrecognisable patterns before my eyes. I can’t explain adequately just how effective the book was in teaching me to recognise the building blocks of kanji and then how to put them together and take them apart. This skill had been sorely lacking for me (and I fully admit to it being a personal failing)
Some criticisms of the book are that it doesn’t actually teach you any Japanese; even if you finish the book you won’t be able to speak or read kanji, and that the keywords Heisig uses don’t always match 1:1 with the actual meaning in Japanese. These are both valid criticisms, if a little unfair. While the book does not teach you to speak or read the kanji, it never claims to (that is wait the second volume aims to do). What it does teach you is how to write and recognise the kanji from memory. Although writing is not considered as being so important nowadays, for me learning to write them out by hand simply imprinted them on my memory much more vividly
The first few full words I noticed I could understand after studying with the book for a short while were 消火器 (in Heisig: ‘extinguish fire utensil’) and 高圧ガス (Heisig: ‘tall pressure gas’)—which are both words I see daily—and impressed upon me the efficacy of the system
For all this, it’s still not easy; you have to expend a lot of imaginative effort, and doing the same thing over and over again every day does get old at times, but it’s still constantly astonishing to me how well the system works
My basic plan of textbook attack:
Genki I
Genki II
Tobira
For kanji:
Remembering the Kanji I
Basic Kanji Books I & II
(Perhaps concurrently with Remembering the Kanji III)
Kanji in Context
Kanji in Context Workbooks I & II
Also worth checking out is Japanese Pod 101. I think it costs me about four quid a month for entire access to their full range of podcasts. The podcast itself can be pretty wearying at times—each podcast is part of a serialised story, and there are a couple of annoying voices/characters—but a conversation is played at full speed, then at half-speed, then with English translation. After this, the two hosts discuss the grammar points. It is pretty useful
i actually bothered to learn all the kanji radicals at one point
like ‘pressure’ up there is a cliff on earth, which you’d suppose exerts a lot of… pressure!
yay
Hobo vouches for you I will partner your j-convos any time!
I have a mixed relationship with my current Japanese school that I have now been talking about quitting for 2 months. We’re now doing speed N2 grammar but those classes are with 19 other students and almost entirely the teacher lecturing…grammar. Meanwhile we have a 22 word reading-writing-comprehension vocab test every day.
This class has been incredibly helpful but I am getting to the point that Japanese friends are absolutely the answer at this point and that means finding something social to do.
Read Shoujo furigana manga about a modern day shy girl trying to pick the nicest boy to be with to get some decent comprehension of how Japanese people actually talk. 10 years ago I read most of Beck but any modern day manga about a boring topic (ex Rock Music) is a good good thing.
i tried translating the first volume of bobobobo-bobobo for myself once lol
i did a year of j-lang at waseda and it was only useful insofar as it gave me year’s visa all things considered
if i ever formally learn again it’ll be with a private tutor only
i’m always surprised at how much writing i recognize from three years of mandarin in high school (like, i read all the way through what i was told was a japanese business card once, minus some proper nouns???) but no one’s actually explained the nature of the overlap to me? sorry if this is a Bad Post i probably have no idea what i’m talking about, i’ve just been curious
chinese writing arrived via various religious & historical texts and the japanese started using the chinese characters to write words they already had sounds for.
they also started reading the chinese characters with approximations of the chinese pronounciation. so it’s ended up with two readings - chinese (on-yomi) and japanese (kun-yomi).
sometimes there are more on-yomi because the chinese readings changed in different eras, and sometimes there are more kun-yomi becuse there were multiple japanese words for one concept. and sometimes there’s no kun-yomi because there wasn’t a japanese word, and sometimes there’s no on-yomi because the kanji was created in japan.
i think??
Maybe this thread should be not in the axe for when slackers like me totally someday for real this time try to learn a language
i have a bunch of Mnemosyne decks for kanji study that I’ve been using for awhile. six cards per kanji, 3 reading 3 writing, i physically write the answers out to a notebook.
there’s a few hundred pages of random kanji written into that notebook at this point, since I’ve been doing it almost daily since 2011. I think I’ve missed like seven or eight days total.
(actually extracted the cards from a DS game called Nazotte! because the software itself is pretty bad and i was in one of my more “ooh, reverse engineering” moods at the time.)
how has no one turned kanjilearn into a pokemon catch’emall game
Personally, I like the Adventures in Japanese series. But I’m not saying its the best. If you do not have a teacher, I recommend getting the additional workbooks for whatever book series you decide upon.
For anyone starting out fresh, I always recommend getting a Hiragana chart and Memorizing and learning to write all of the Hiragana, before you even look at your first vocab word or grammar note. If you go into your first lesson with at least 75% score on a Hiragana test, you’ll be way better off. You will mostly be able to focus on the vocab and grammar, rather than fumbling with every single “letter” you try to write. And by the time you finish the first handful of lessons, you’ll then be writing Hiragana pretty comfortably. Because you’ve been writing with it, since your very first vocabulary word.
In my opinion, the best dictionary is the Berlitz/Randomhouse (same exact book, different covers) dictionary. It is the largest physical dictionary I’ve come across in terms of total words. Has bothe Japanese/English and English/Japanese. And does a great job of trying to account for common situations/contexts, when offering Japanese words to translate English into Japanese. Its in that area, specifically, that it beats pretty much all other physical book dictionaries I have used. Hell, it beats most digital dictionaries, too. I have the Berlitz cover and it has been indispensable over the years, in getting me through situations I did not have the vocabulary for.
It also has a system for letting you know when a Japanese word was borrowed from another language and which language that is. Which I have never seen in another dictionary.
I do not doubt there are probably some great dictionary phone apps out there, but I have no experience with them. However, I’ve found virtually all online dictionaries to be nearly useless. And most digital pocket dictionaries to be frustratingly limited, compared to my Berlitz printed book dictionary.
hiragana is essential. i actually probably can’t write katakana from memory because i don’t practice it anywhere near as much, but hiragana is not something you can ever get away from in this language.