How did you learn Japanese?

[Just4fun]

What website can i learn japanese?? i want to do translations..

[Mystes]

What website can i learn japanese?? i want to do translations..

Start learning kanas, you can simply google the charts and practice.

[Just4fun]

What website can i learn japanese?? i want to do translations..

Start learning kanas, you can simply google the charts and practice.

Ohh kanas first before kanji?? ok thanks!

[rpapo]

Ohh kanas first before kanji?? ok thanks!

Seriously though, the kanas are simply a pair of parallel alphabets that function much like roman letters do for european languages . . . except they're systematic and simpler. Furthermore, in a normal light novel, more than half of the text is in hiragana or katakana. Once you know the kanas, then you can also read the furigana attached to the rarer kanji . . . and in some cases (early reader's books), to every kanji character.

But you will still have to learn vocabulary, grammar, and, sooner or later, the kanji.

[Mystes]

Grammar...are the rules complex?

[rpapo]

Grammar...are the rules complex?

The rules for the grammar are not particularly complex, but are very different from european languages. It ought to be easy, but the language goes with a way of thinking, and it takes a while to internalize it and adapt.

The next major problem is the vocabulary. Moving back and forth between latin-based languages, this is not too hard, because (1) the words somewhat resemble each other, and (2) their meanings, for the most part, have a great deal of correspondence. That is, if one language has a word for one color, the other language also has a single word meaning that same color. This is much less true in going between occidental (western) and oriental (eastern) languages. Any single word in English, say, may have a dozen or more approximations in Japanese or Chinese, and the same is true going the other direction. Japanese is said to be a "precise" language. That may be true to a person raised speaking Japanese in the Japanese culture, but converting the concepts to something a westerner might understand as precise, let alone natural sounding, is not always an easy task.

On problem #1 above, English speakers have a huge advantage at this point in history, because Japanese have borrowed huge numbers of English words into their daily speech. But you have to be careful about that: they pronounce them their own way, and you have to get used to the rules of that transformation, and often their understanding of the word's meaning is not the same as ours.

Apart from those borrowed words, however, true Japanese words have virtually no resemblance to English, or even latin-based words. You have to memorize them one by one. Case in point: "to memorize". In Spanish, a somewhat related language based on Latin and influenced by Arabic, the verb is "memorizar". Almost the same. In Japanese this is 覚える (oboeru), which has no similarity in sound nor spelling whatsoever. And the meaning bleeds over to "learn" and "remember".

[Just4fun]

Grammar...are the rules complex?

The rules for the grammar are not particularly complex, but are very different from european languages. It ought to be easy, but the language goes with a way of thinking, and it takes a while to internalize it and adapt.

The next major problem is the vocabulary. Moving back and forth between latin-based languages, this is not too hard, because (1) the words somewhat resemble each other, and (2) their meanings, for the most part, have a great deal of correspondence. That is, if one language has a word for one color, the other language also has a single word meaning that same color. This is much less true in going between occidental (western) and oriental (eastern) languages. Any single word in English, say, may have a dozen or more approximations in Japanese or Chinese, and the same is true going the other direction. Japanese is said to be a "precise" language. That may be true to a person raised speaking Japanese in the Japanese culture, but converting the concepts to something a westerner might understand as precise, let alone natural sounding, is not always an easy task.

On problem #1 above, English speakers have a huge advantage at this point in history, because Japanese have borrowed huge numbers of English words into their daily speech. But you have to be careful about that: they pronounce them their own way, and you have to get used to the rules of that transformation, and often their understanding of the word's meaning is not the same as ours.

Apart from those borrowed words, however, true Japanese words have virtually no resemblance to English, or even latin-based words. You have to memorize them one by one. Case in point: "to memorize". In Spanish, a somewhat related language based on Latin and influenced by Arabic, the verb is "memorizar". Almost the same. In Japanese this is 覚える (oboeru), which has no similarity in sound nor spelling whatsoever. And the meaning bleeds over to "learn" and "remember".

in short learning japanese takes time...

[Mystes]

Speaking of which, anyone tried to write the arabic language?

[ainsoph9]

Nope. For at least this reason.

[Sh4d0wStrider]

Home schooling japanese ^^ self tuition when I think about it here in my country only in two universities you could actually get tuition from a teacher which knows the language haha

[Mystes]

I need to start self-teaching...

[ainsoph9]

That is what I keep telling myself when it comes to my kanji.

[Mystes]

That is what I keep telling myself when it comes to my kanji.

Why not learn with Light Novels? There are furigaganas.

[ainsoph9]

I have other ways. I am actually trying to see if I can become a translator for Digital Manga.

[rpapo]

That is what I keep telling myself when it comes to my kanji.

Why not learn with Light Novels? There are furigaganas.

Furigana are not used for the most common kanji (they assume you know such things already). The only text I've ever seen where every single kanji was marked with furigana was the Bible.