The Language-Learning Thread

I have a copy of 正しい漢字かきとりくん (tadashii kanji kakitori kun.)

It teaches all the kanji that Japanese children are required to know by the end of elementary school (1006 according to the back of the box.)

It's very good, but entirely in Japanese. There is also no dictionary support. I bought mine in a store, but they stock it on the Japanese amazon.

Sadly, I don't think you can buy stuff off of Amazon Japan without a Japanese bank account.

Ah, fair enough.

Last edited by Anonymous on Wed Aug 25, 2010 12:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think I'd be bankrupt by now if you could.

Thanks for the advice guys. Slow work day, so I'm browsing Amazon for learning materials now.

Chris, you must obviously find yourself conversing with natives daily. Do you still have to translate in your head what people are saying into English on the fly in order to respond?

Erm, I've never really thought about it to be honest. I don't think so. When you can understand what someone is saying in Japanese, it's pretty easy to respond. I guess it's all subconscious.

EDIT: Okay, I'm listening to a Japanese song at the moment, and conscious of what you have just said, I'm not translating it into English in-order to understand. That ought to be the same for conversation.

I still have to painstakingly translate everything from Japanese to romaji and then to the English meaning, so there's usually a slight delay in everything I do. Hopefully with enough practice, it'll will become natural.

Saying that, I dreamt in Japanese last night. I was starting at a Japanese secondary school (which, coincedently, looked like my old secondary school, but with more humidity) and actually said おはようございます when introducing myself.

After that though, everyone started speaking English so I was alright. I even made a joke.

Maybe I accidently fell asleep with my headphones on, like in thay Dexter's Lab episode. Or revisiting Ouendan rubbed off on me (I still couldn't make out any words in the songs, mind, besides the fact that they say "San, Ni, ICHI!" at the start).

Fluency is just round the corner, people.

I've had some really, really weird dreams in Japanese, it's really bloody annoying because you wake up knowing you somewhere in your brain, you know you can use all that stuff, but no matter how hard you try you can't remember it unless you're dreaming it.

I'm starting to get more dreams like that as I'm trying to learn more and more, I think it's just a general reaction in your brain that's just filing everything you know into your subconcious, but some of the dreams I've had I probably couldn't explain here as you'd think I was clinically insane. I explained one from a few months ago (one of my first) in the Dreams thread I think. :lol:

It doesn't help that my "learning hours" as about 11pm-3am, as I always work better at that time (it's always when my Uni essays were done, usually with submission at 9am that morning).

This means that I go to bed crammed full of half-learnt Japanese tucked deep away somewhere. I often can't remember it before I go to sleep, but it's clearer in the morning. However, learning it all this late means my brain is so active I can't actually sleep - I've been up since 6am the past few mornings, muttering Japanese to myself whilst trying to doze off.

I think I'm becoming mentally unstable.

Actually, didn't they prove the best time to study is either directly after you wake up, or just before you go to bed? It's got something to do with the way your brain processes information or something. I usually study from 10-11:30/12 then I'm always watching anime between 1-2:30 every day, also obviously with all the other bits inbetween during the day to flesh it all out.

StayDead wrote:Sadly, I don't think you can buy stuff off of Amazon Japan without a Japanese bank account.

Err, yes you can. I've bought a DVD from there before. Enjoy your bankruptcy!

edit: Unless you mean Marketplace, in which case you can't

Herr Dark Wolf wrote:
StayDead wrote:Sadly, I don't think you can buy stuff off of Amazon Japan without a Japanese bank account.

Err, yes you can. I've bought a DVD from there before. Enjoy your bankruptcy!

edit: Unless you mean Marketplace, in which case you can't

Holy sweet jesus. Goodbye money!

Ever seen that comedian whose thing is to count normally then randomly shout the next number (Ichi, Ni, SAN! Yon, Go, ROKKU! etc)? I once had a dream where no matter where I went there he was shouting numbers and the only person who noticed was me. I think he got up to Juichi (11 right?) before I woke up.

Actually that reads more like a nightmare

Igor wrote:Can we talk about more than just Japanese in here? I'm looking at learning Russian at least to a decent conversational level and massively improving my French. I'll be in Russia for a couple of months next summer, and hopefully I'll be spending a year in France in the next few years. My French used to be at a high A Level standard but has waned recently, and I know absolutely no Russian.

Thoughts? I should begin with Russian, right? I can see similar problems that Parksey is having with the written language - anyone know how difficult is Cyrillic to get to grips with?

I really want to pick up Russian, but not "properly" as such. My gf is Russian so speaks fluently with her mum in Russian (like I should be with Spanish :shifty:

) so I wanted to pick it up as a little something for her. Once you get your tongue around the sounds, it doesn't seem too difficult. It's similar in a sense to Japanese actually as AFAIK, they don't use the verb "to be" and other things like that. Like, there are genders; masculine, feminine and neuter nouns, but no articles; "a/an" "the" etc.

With regards to Cyrillic, I have my gf's pocket Collins Russian dictionary. It has a chart of all the Cyrillic characters and their sounds in Russian and the most similar sound in English. Just one page, but by using that and just reading randomly picked words in the dictionary, I've managed to learn how to read Cyrillic. I have no idea what the words mean, but I can read Russian, essentially.

As I said, it's not something I'm doing like StayDead is with Japanese. But more just asking for phrases, and then picking up on grammatical similarities and making sense of the sentence structure. Gf's mum says my accent is perfect though. Like, no regional accent tendencies or anything. 8-)

I could be a Russian newscaster, yet.
It's also funny, cos she re-married to an English man, who knows how to say yes and no in Russian, while living with two Russians who always talk in Russian, and I've picked up loads of little things just from listening to her talking on the phone. :lol:

I really like the way it sounds actually. I like the sounds the language has. Except for that weird one, that you use in "we" which is pronounced something like "muhhy".

Also, for the record StayDead, your blog has way too many anime videos and references in it. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were a massive ******.

G-Ratasaurus Rex wrote:Also, for the record StayDead, your blog has way too many anime videos and references in it. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were a massive ******.

I wouldn't have so many references, but honestly my life is so dull I have no idea what I could possibly write about. :fp:

Question though, would you say I'm generally making sense with my sentance structure, or am I strawberry floating it all up completely?

I skim-read so much, so honestly I couldn't say. From the sentences I wrote, they seemed fine.

I have a few queries from last night' "lesson". I'll romanised as it's much easier for me to type at the moment.

Firstly, it introduced the question: "Kore wa Sumisu-san no keitai desu ka". Would it still make sense if I removed the question particle and have it read: "Kore wa Sumisu-san no hon desu"? Would that still mean "this is Mr Smith's mobile"?

Does removing the question particle "ka" simply make it a straight sentence (in other words, are the two grammatically identical in meaning apart from the particle)?

Also, it introduced how to say that it wasn't someone's phone/book/watch et al and how to ask whose it was, but it didn't combine the two.

Does "Kore wa Sumisu san no hon dewa arimasen ka" make sense? I've not learn how to ask questions using different tenses or verb forms yet, so I'm just hazarding a guess that this ask "This isn't Mr Smith's book?"

And, would the sentence "Kore wa watashi no tokei desu" mean "this is my watch"? And can you just cut the "kore wa" bit?

And, finally, the difference between Kore/Kochira - is the former "this" for an objection and the latter "this person" for an introduction?

Oh, one more thing.

Which is correct for "please say it one more time":

"Mou ichido itte kudasai"

or

"Mo ichi-do onegaishimasu" (the "mo" has a hyphen over it, by the way)

I gather the top one actually includes the verb for "speak" - I presume that's "itte" - so that says "please say it one more time", whereas the bottom one just says "one more time, please".

It doesn't matter which "mo/mou" is used does it? The hypen basically means to elongate the "o" sound anyway, right?

1/2. If you remove the question particle, you're just stating what it is, but I'm not sure what you mean as hon is book, so it'd read this is smith's book, but yes. If you remove the question particle of the first setance, you're just staying that this is Smith's mobile.

4. Yup, you can take out Kore wa, quite alot of the time you can as Japanese is very conversational based, so for example if I'm saying you're cute, I wouldn't say anata wa kawaii desu ne. I'd just look at you and say kawaii desu ne as you can generally presume if you're the only person I'm talking to, I'm talking about you.

5. Both of them can be used for this person, I don't think it matters which you use, but kore is more humble than kochira.

I can't even read romanji properly anymore, I had to type it half of it in kana to even remember what it meant, It's like if I see words in Kanji I know written in Kana I keep forgetting what the words are, I have such a bad memory. :lol:

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