Need advice for learning japanese

Online courses are good, but human interaction is far better. It took me five years of study plus some out-of-school-hours study and interaction with Japanese people (all the anime I used to watch didn't entirely hurt, but you're stupid if you think that's a decent substitute for formal education). Ideally you should be able to read and write Hiragana, Katakana and a couple hundred Kanji as well as have reasonable language comprehension before you start playing games.

For the record I prefer subbed animu and translated games though, it's a hassle to translate stuff in my head because it's still slow work and I don't entirely understand the language. I can get the gist of most of the lines by hearing, though. Specifics take time.

Uguu~

Korean friend of mine was far better at Japanese than I was.

nope.avi
Japanese incorporates elements of Chinese, but these are the hardest parts of the language because of the numerous interpretations. This is why you'll have people in Japan (you can see this in some shows and anime if you're a weeaboo) telling people how their names are written.

Kanji is Chinese-derived characters. I can type æ—¥ and someone from China will know what it means.

Depends on the game. Most (Pokemon, for example) use just Hiragana and Katakana. Some games like Visual Novels (i.e. Yume Miru Kusuri or Fate/Stay Night) will use Kanji as well.

 

Wrong! It's the other way around 3/4 of Japanese is Kanji as the written language, much like with Korean evolved from Chinese origins.

Kanji IS Chinese characters adopted in the Japanese written language.

It's actually Hiragana for the in dialogue text. Katakana is often used on Proper names of people & to denote words borrowed from English & other Languages.

Indeed, all you need to learn then is what each Chinese character's equivalent spoken counterpart in Japanese, as well as combining kana with them.

 

did you live in japan?

 

No, but I took up six units (that's two classes) of Japanese in College as my language elective courses & believe those two classes are not enough

To be able to read Japanese newspapers well enough you have to at least know of 3,000 kinds of Kanji as our Professor who did live in Japan for 20 or so years said. In those two short course, we only ever learned of about 200, so yeah not enough kanji knowledge there. Sadly, I've forgotten a lot of 'em over the years.

 

did anyone say buy people

 

How is it 3/4?
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Japanese will be easier for me since Kanji is basically Chinese characters, and I happen to be decently fluent in chinese.

 

Source -> http://www.hadamitzky.de/english/lp_kana.htm

And the rest Japanese uses in their written language as I said is Kanji or Chinese characters.

 

Sorry for posting incorrect info. I don't know much about Chinese or Kanji, but someone told me that the Japanese language, Kanji, has thousands of letters.

 

Indeed, Japanese uses thousands of Kanji & to be honest I'm so baffled as to how The Japanese manage to memorize them all. And what's even more bizarre is that the Japanese find it harder to learn English & using our Latin based Alphabet consisting of merely 26 letters & 10 numeral symbols. ???

 

Ouch, this would be so much better if video games originated from maybe England or North America. So, anyone here remember all symbols from katakana and hiragana? Or is that simply impossible even without counting kanji?

 

But then we wouldn't have awesome japanese games, why the "best" games will be games like call of duty...

I'm glad they are Japanese, best games are 99.9% from japan, anything else is another COD.

 

A better solution would be to stop using & teaching English altogether & promoting Japanese as the world's most recognized & used language that should be taught in schools as a second language. That or make writing systems that uses pictoglyphs such as Chinese characters obsolete & FORCE the use of the easier Latin Alphabet

 

The hiragana and katakana scrtips are the easier part of the written language. I haven't studied for a year but I can still read them fine.

 

Haha, best idea ever! Also, I don't think I could live without the rpgs that come from japan. So yeah, Hypnos, I guess you're right.

 

But then people as feel as kick a** for learning it.Yes I put stars for the A word.

 

There are over 80000 chinese characters that ever existed. Japanese uses less than a quarter.

 

It's different syntax and word construction in English, we don't use a pictograph system and our letters represent letters, not sounds.

 

Another question, for the kana, should I be able to know all of them by heart, or just recognize it when I see it?

 

Learn the everyday and other simple words first, usually games don't require that much of a vocabulary. Then learn how to spell with the symbols. Helluva a lot easier than to do it the other way around for me.

 

Knowing all of them by heart is definitely advisable. Helps to be doing official study so you're constantly asking yourself "what's this one again?"