Len Walsh's "Read Japanese Today" is a gem. By exploring the history behind the symbols -- using what the author calls a "pictorial mnemonic method" -- it's easy to learn many kanji in an enjoyable way.
Before a few-month stay in Japan, I sampled a variety of books and audio programs. Now, looking back many years later, Walsh's simple introduction is the one I remember best.
No question, his text is quite lovely, although also a part of the language my book (intentionally) stays away from. There are many, many ways to teach kanji, depending on how courses are taught (even learning it at home from books/internet on your own). Another good source for mnemonic-based kanji is Heisig's work, although I've found the best approach so far to still be "learning the kanji in the words we're using that week", with plenty of repetition and practice. It's tedious, but for a large number of people, effective! (but of course, not effective for all)
One thing that texts seem to ignore (in my never learned Japanese opinion) is that not all letters are equally important, if we equate importance with frequency. For example, the letter E is much more fundamental and useful to learn than the letter X. Thus, any alphabet shouldn't be looked upon as a sequence of equivalent letters. There are contours and characters and color... Things that are more obvious when learning with actual words/phrases.
Japanese has 3 forms of writing (not counting use of the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals). 2 of them are used to write phonetically, and each has about 50 characters. They aren't too hard to learn, and are the closest equivalent to "letters" in written Japanese. One is used for phonetically writing Japanese words and for grammatical particles, and the other is mostly used for foreign words, sound effects, or things that you want to bring special attention to for some reason (I've been told to consider it similar to writing something in italics, maybe). The shapes of these have a somewhat-distant etymology to Chinese characters.
Beyond that, there are 10s of thousands of characters with a much closer correspondence to the Chinese ones (although perhaps a number in the low thousands are commonly used in everyday life). About the first thousand are taught to grade schoolers. I don't think that the correspondence is perfect, but these are supposed to be the more common characters, in general (and are taught earlier for that reason). Roughly the next 1000 are taught during middle and high school.
As a Japanese learner, we tended to have example sentences that introduced new grammar constructs, new words, and new characters for those words (if they're commonly written non-phonetically). I think by the 4th semester of class, the goal was to have mastery of the ~100 phonetic characters (the hiragana and the katakana), along with perhaps 500 of the non-phonetic characters (the kanji), along with different ways that various characters would be pronounced when used in different words.
In general, I feel like we did cover legitimately useful words and characters, but that if the text (literally) left out the less-used "letters", it'd be a premature optimization that wouldn't gain you much. If you mean that more commonly-used words should be given priority, then I agree, in principle.
That is not how Japanese works in the slightest. Kanji represent full words, often multiple ones (due to use in compound nouns) not individual letters without inherent meaning on their own.
I quote:
"Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis. We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice."
For instance:
Psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Barry Beyerstein, and colleagues listed as one of the "50 great myths of popular psychology" the idea that "students learn best when teaching styles are matched to their learning styles", and they summarized some relevant reasons not to believe this "myth".
Incentive matters. I'm ADHD, which turns the effect of the 'this isn't that interesting' dial up to 11. I could do repitition if I was going to Japan, but I probably would prefer the other one otherwise.
There are degrees of how difficult it is for people to manage boring. In college I failed English I, Public Speaking, Ethics and a 1-credit seminar course. Multiple times. I also had solid recommendations from several computer science professors where I was top of the class and worked doing research for some time. Mornings are also pretty hard, but that's another thing entirely.
Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese is a resource that has been around for a while that has helped a lot of beginners with the language. I'd recommend checking it out if you are interested in learning the language: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar
Yeah, we've both been around for a long time now. Tae Kim's book is great to have too, but we wrote our material with different audiences in mind. His work takes a slightly more gentle approach, my work started with being for people who want the same material as university students of Japanese get, without being able to afford $100 text books (my print copy's $30 max) or even without being able to afford classes (not every country has affordable education for those who would do well).
I'd echo the link to his Guide to Japanese, and if you want a grammar reference as well, adding my book to the mix can carry you through your first year university pretty decently.
In my experience, those $100 university textbooks aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Tae Kim's guide is infinitely better, if you're an autodidact. Use Tae Kim for grammar, use Heisig Volume 1 for kanji, and use real Japanese for everything else.
That's why I wrote mine - my fellow students needed lecture notes in "not Dutch", which mine were, so this books started as a website with my lecture notes in html form, which slowly grew into the material for this book. It's $25 on paper, free online (donate whatever you feel it's worth), and generally covers what actually made sense to cover given the classes we were in.
Decades ago, the single most useful Japanese learning resource for me was Mangajin, which explained Japanese comics and concepts in excruciating detail:
Cool! I'm traveling to Japan for the first time later this year. When I started making a few flash cards here and there for common phrases, I realized that learning a new language might be a good use of spare brain cycles, and Japanese seemed pretty cool, so I kind of fell into it.
From a beginner's perspective, this seems like a good overview of the "mechanics" - good to read at the beginning in order to get a basic understanding of the concepts, and a good reference, but not a good way to actually start learning the language.
My local library has the full beginner/intermediate/advanced set of Pimsleur Japanese, which has been great to use during my commute - I say "use" rather than "listen to" because the point of the Pimsleur method is that it's interactive - you're supposed to respond to the prompts out loud so you get used to physically forming the words and so you can hear yourself in comparison to the reference speaker. The Human Japanese "app textbook" is pretty good as well. Anki is a good flashcard app but making the cards yourself is painful and time consuming, I need to go find a few more premade decks.
pay little or no attention to memorizing characters (I would have been content with actively mastering 25 or so very high frequency characters and passively recognizing at most a hundred or so high frequency characters during the first year)
focus on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, particles, morphology, syntax, idioms, patterns, constructions, sentence structure, rhythm, prosody, and so forth — real language, not the script
> pay little or no attention to memorizing characters
I'm not usually one to speak bluntly, but, at least for Japanese, speaking from a lot of experience, this is flat out the wrong approach.
Older books like the romanzied "Japanese for Busy People" took this approach. I started with this book, it felt easy at the time, but it was immensely impractical - you don't build up enough of a base to learn from any other material. It's completely useless. After over a year, in a formal setting, I ultimately decided to just completely start over.
Currently Japanese courses mostly just focus on Hiragana and Katakana, since material for children usually has pronunciation guides over the kanji anyway. This is workable, but it just gives you no leverage where you could have some - you end up memorizing a thousand indiviaul words, some of which maybe kind of sound similar in parts, when you could instead learn a dozen charcters, and know that they share root words. Phoenetic approaches work for children who are in a situation where they can memorize from immersion with native speakers, and have additional clues like context and intonation to emphasize root words, to pick up new vocabulary.
When I started studying Chinese, we instead went with a "radicals-first" approach, and after just a short time of that, my Japanese vocabulary exploded - I could suddenly pick out all the seafood on a menu, and I started asking people mid-conversation "oh, does that use these characters?", and I could understand what it meant without them having to struggle to translate to English: Heart+Electric+Map - it's probably an electrocardiogram, especially if we're talking about hospitals. If you haven't learned the kanji, you don't even know if you can make that association from the sounds, much less how to ask that question.
That's how you get to fluency, by building up a foundation that lets you learn without active study. You can't get there by avoiding the basis of word composition in the language. Apologies if my frustration with characters-last approaches came through a little strong - they wasted a lot of my time.
Mair's point is that "building up a foundation" means learning the language not the script.
> characters-last approaches
I think it's more accurate to call what Mair's advocating a "language-first-characters-later-if-necessary" approach.
Here's what Mair said about Chinese classes:
It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25. If the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarin—strictly romanized, mind you. But there are exceedingly few teachers who are enlightened enough to teach it that way.
They're not reasonably separable. Memorizing romaji, or even strings of hiragana, removes the associations between root-words that are related, like those radicals that let you identify menu items, and removes the visual aid for identifying root words in context. Memorizing associations between arbitrary groups of sounds without the radicals is actually harder, it just sounds easier to those intimidated by the idea of learning characters.
Given, much to Mair's displeasure, that actual native media is written with kanji, they're immediately necessary, and not studying kanji effectively bars students from any learning outside the classroom until they have - which is completely counter to giving students either the context necessary for immersion or the reinforcement for traditional study to work.
Maybe it's merited for Chinese classes, with its larger character set, but Mair's approach just sacrifices students' ability to learn on their own in favor of lowering attrition rates of intro-level classes. It's actively harmful to students aiming for fluency to build up the characters as this insurmountable mountain in the distance before they can actually use their knowledge, rather than the useful compositional blocks and visual aids that they are.
(Notice the native narrator has no trouble reading the kana-only writing.)
It's true that much of current native media still uses kanji, but they aren't "immediately necessary". There are books/manga with furigana and software tools like Rikaichan/kun for online articles.
People should be able to learn whatever they want outside of the classroom, including kanji (being able to recognise commonly used characters certainly helps in understanding native media). It's just that grammar, vocabulary, etc (real language) are much more important than kanji for beginners.
Sure, Korean is phonetic, and so learning it phonetically makes sense, since you won't be forced to re-learn it again to be able to use your knowledge. Speaking from experience studying Korean, though, attaining a useable vocabulary through rote memorization is dramatically harder than if you're familiar with the 한자/漢字 words are derived from, for exactly that reason - even though hanja's not used directly so much in korean, we started studying it in the third semester of Korean class, and it was helpful, though I'd agree maybe a bit excessive there.
Games that use a strict hiragana character set are readable by natives because they're already fluent in speaking; they're unnecessarily difficult for non-native speakers, particularly since they tend to only have the bare minimum of separators between words. After living in 4 prefectures, working for a small Japanese company, and dating a native speaker for roughly a decade, I still find those games hard to read - it's just hard to identify the shapes of words, like reading English with no spaces; you have no choice but to guess where the boundaries are and sound everything out syllable by syllable, because everything's written differently from how you'd see it anywhere else.
If some people want to put off kanji or memorize phrases from a travel guide, that's their prerogative, but not teaching the compositional aspects of kanji, and leaving students to fend for themselves after selling the idea that it's all rote memorization (and seemingly to push this implausible ethnocentric dream of the language one day being exclusively romanized) is just a disservice to the students, as it was to me.
> strict hiragana character set are readable by natives because they're already fluent in speaking
This is an argument for spending more time trying to become fluent in speaking (by learning vocab/grammar/etc) than spending time learning how to draw a bunch of characters.
The use of spaces would be necessary if Japan were to switch to kana, and that's one of the 3 things Kanamoji-kai recommends as well:
Without spaces kana-only writing would be hard to read for most native speakers.
I honestly don't see any issue in not teaching kanji in Japanese classes, any more than not teaching cursive writing or Latin in English classes. They are just not essential. (Please do not start a lecture on how Latin helps you understand English.)
> ethnocentric dream of the languge one day being romanized
I'm not saying Japan should switch to romaji. I think in Japan's case kana would be much more realistic.
Also, I'm not advocating abolishing kanji either (people should be able to write kanji all day everyday if that's what they want to do).
I just want the government to (a) stop teaching kanji in public schools, and (b) mandate the use of kana (or some other phonetic writing system) in government documents.
I don't see how it's "ethnocentric". For most non-native speakers it's much easier to learn this way. Only non-native Japanese learners I've met who found it "easier to read" kana-kanji writing were people who already knew kanji e.g. Chinese people who were learning Japanese & were not fluent in speaking. The true of the matter is they were just familiar with the characters and they often didn't even know how to pronounce the words.
I have to agree with T-R. Japanese is much easier to read with Kanji. If you run into a kanji you don't know, that's too bad, but I run into words I don't know in English, too. You just look it up. English spelling is just as complicated, in my opinion.
Also, "stop teaching kanji in public schools" is pretty much the same as abolishing kanji.
You read my conversation with T-R and your takeaway is I think teaching kanji to beginners is a bad idea because "I run into a kanji I don't know"? Please.
> English spelling is just as complicated, in my opinion
That's a separate issue, but I agree with you to some extent. Here's a Feynman quote (which I agree with 100%):
If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.
> "stop teaching kanji in public schools" is pretty much the same as abolishing kanji
I don't think so. There are many things that aren't taught in public schools but taught in private classes (calligraphy/ikebana/yoga/etc).
It's good that people who care about these cultures enjoy them in their own time and other people are left alone and not being forced to learn something they think has a low ROI.
If kanji is such a good idea as you claim, it will survive and thrive without government coercion, don't you think?
This book is not for people who want to stay a beginner for a year, this is for people who want to learn the language at the same pace as a typical university student: you get a few weeks to learn hiragana and katakana, then the romaji is taken away. After a year, you'll already know anywhere between 1000 common kanji and the full jouyou set.
I wrote this book based on that need. So step 1: learn hiragana, because after the introductory chapter you're not getting romanised Japanese anymore. However, because it's not a writing course, all kanji have furigana so that you can read every sentence. This book is not going to calmly and gently lead you through the Japanese grammar, it's meant as a proper "you need this book for a year at most, after that you should already know everything that we cover". Perhaps not to the degree that you can duplicate the book, or in a way that makes you remember all the technical terms, but all the constructions and how they use them: this is the pace you run through learning Japanese at first year university level.
Mair's argument is that it is a waste of effort to spend time on learning the characters, in the first stages of learning the language. They are more easily learnt systematically somewhat later on, when you know the corresponding words to which you can anchor them. Note that the people advocating for this are university language professors and teachers, who are claiming they have data backing up the claim.
As an adult student of the language, my experience is that I was glad to start without the crutch of romaji, for a simple practical reason - Japanese quickly becomes tedious to read Romanized. Kanji + kana are much more compact, and things like the conjugation of a verb and doubled letters which are common in the language are immediately obvious - because the writing system is designed to accommodate them.
Learning 2500 kanji from the beginning is a major cognitive task that shouldn't be a primary focus, nor is it in native Japanese language pedagogy. But learning the kana is simple, again I learned them as an adult and had them down cold in a few weeks of active classwork. My kanji retention is terrible, but learning materials almost always give the reading of kanji using furigana, and there are useful tools for annotating web pages, etc. with furi readings.
> Kanji + kana are much more compact, and things like the conjugation of a verb and doubled letters which are common in the language are immediately obvious - because the writing system is designed to accommodate them.
My grasp of Japanese is virtually non-existent, but I noticed this as well. Taking an example from the post, I find something like しっけ easier to parse than the romaji shikke. The latter form just feels clumsy for reasons I can't really articulate.
It also makes the pronunciation a little easier at times. If I read "desu", I read it with a fairly pronounced "u" sound. Reading です, on the other hand, I know without really thinking about it that the う sound is typically very short.
I think it's because most hiragana/katakana is in the form "consonant-vowel" meaning that almost all words are made up of collections of 2 letter sounds/syllables. This gives words a certain cadence which is easily repeated. When you convert that to romaji you begin to parse the words as though they were english and the discrete "consonant-vowel" sounds get broken down and become harder to see/read.
Really though, you can learn hiragana in a single sitting using mnemonic trickery and you can commit it to memory using a spaced repetition or flashcard system in a few days. Not learning hiragana and katakana seems much more of a hindrance than "wasting time" by learning it.
Right, my counter to that is that's great if you want to leisurely learn Japanese, but also not very relevant for the type of course this book supports. These typically start you on kanji pretty much in week 3, in conjunction with the word lists that support the kanji you're learning every week (and constantly use throughout that week and subsequent ones), specifically because of the argument raised: learning kanji without the words they're in, and even if that, without using those words, is ridiculous.
The argument above applies specifically to university courses, and was made by someone who is familiar with teaching such courses. So I don't think you can just discount it with handwaving, especially as there are claims about better success rates.
I'm not discounting anything, but different people want, or need, different courses.
My book is geared specifically towards people who are to enthusiastically committed to learning Japanese, and want more information about the language they're paying money for to learn, with some assumptions about what that means: they, like me, and like many of my fellow students at the time, but not like everyone, want to learn Japanese properly, without hand holding because some grammar or some orthography is deemed too hard. We'll see whether that's the case as we learn, not as an assumption baked into the course.
Of course that method doesn't work for everyone, but for me, and for many others, but again not for everyone, getting kanji early was exciting, motivating, and awesome. I would have been angry at a promise of a better approach without kanji for half a year as a paying student.
So that's the book you get here, too: I am not making assumptions on how slowly you want material, this is a grammar for supplementing your course work, or deep diving if that's what you want to do. And if the Japanese used in the book is too much, too soon: it's a free book, find one you feel fits you better. But we're better off with a spectrum of works: rather than every book following the best methodology, we need all those methodologies, and then people who go hard, fast, can pick the hard, fast books, and people who don't can pick the slower, "better success rate" approaches and do well with those instead.
Pomax, I met you in an IRC channel years ago (2005 I believe), used a very early rendition of your book to teach myself Japanese (it was just a Japanese grammar dictionary at the time, written in DocBook), and promptly ended up become one of the many teenage anime fansubbers of the era. I made so many good memories fansubbing anime and made so many friends who I still cherish today, that I thank you for the amazing introduction to this language that I still relish to this day.
I'm sorry but I think the book is getting priorities wrong when the learner's goal is to learn practical Japanese.
Also I think some example sentences in the book would sound awkward to native speakers. (e.g. "今日自転車で帰り中で転んでしまいました", "もっと安いのありましょうか", "お箸の使い方に慣れてない人に難しいです" (this may be a typo), "きれいじゃないで、明るい部屋です", etc.)
I think this girl gives better advice on how to learn Japanese:
Then it should please you to know that is not the goal of the book. This is a grammar (a type of educational book), not a "Learn Japanese" course book, and is to supplement courses (institutional or personal) in Japanese, to act as reference and deep-dive material =)
As for odd sounding sentences: nice! let me know about them on the github repo. Link's in the side nav as the github icon, but the direct link is https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues
Even if research has shown advantages to waiting to teach the writing system, this approach has become extremely unpopular, to say the least. There are only one or two places still using the textbook "Japanese: The Spoken Language," and all other modern textbooks teach the writing system from the beginning.
Even textbooks that used to use romanized Japanese for fairly logical pragmatic reasons, like "Japanese for Busy People," which is aimed specifically at busy adults who are trying to learn the spoken language in the least amount of time/effort, have been rewritten to eliminate romanized Japanese! Many people studying Japanese go so far as to consider the presence of romanized Japanese, even in combination with normal written Japanese, a black mark against a book, a viewpoint which I think is a bit extreme.
Additionally, even if there is a benefit to early spoken fluency, it's going to really annoy students when after two years they suddenly have to start learning the writing system from the very beginning. With this approach, students wouldn't be able to use any modern instructional or reference materials for 2-3 years. Basically, they wouldn't be able to study on their own at all.
Also, from the standpoint of practical language instruction, since many students drop out of Japanese classes the second they're asked to learn hiragana (much less katakana and kanji), it is much more efficient for all parties involved to have this occur earlier in the process.
Many people studying Japanese as a foreign language actually also 1) find it very discouraging to discover that they can't read words they know because they haven't been taught the characters, and 2) find it very difficult to parse romanized Japanese since it is harder to tell where words end and distinguish particles/verb endings from nouns and verb stems.
> The problem was that all of my language teachers insisted that I memorize hundreds of characters right from the very start.
For every person who is mad that that they were made to learn kanji from the beginning, there is another who thinks their Japanese ability was permanently impaired by not being taught kanji early enough (I have met plenty of the latter). Regardless of the method, there are people who are going to object to it.
You will never remember, or "passively recognize" any characters, (especially low-frequency ones) unless you specifically focus on remembering them. Also, at least 75% of words meanings become trivial once you learn what their corresponding characters mean. Or you can spend all your time getting all those similarly-sounding kanji compounds mixed up in your head because you can only write them in hiragana.
He's mostly talking about Kanji from what I can tell. Learning Hiragana is probably a big different. It takes about a weekend and helps with pronunciation. Everybody is different, but I found it useful to at least know about...
I agree, I'd recommend learners to learn kana because you can learn it in a few weeks (as opposed to many years for kanji, and even after that many years, people - including natives - don't remember them very well).
Orthogonally, I've always wondered, why are geeks so into Japan? Slashdot and all of it's children, like HN, are always full of posts by Westerners about Japanese culture, language, etc, but pretty much lacking in any interest for any other foreign lands. Is it solely an anime thing?
The real answer is of course "it's complicated", but i'll take a shot:
Since the 80s, Japan has been seen as very 'futuristic' in the west. Some combo of extreme density and a high percent of the economy being manufacturing makes people more comfortable with technology, and that's reflected in their pop art and music, on top of the normal exoticism of a non-western language and culture.
Aside from this, their (extra future-y) nerd culture is more accessible to westerners through manga, anime, and video games than countries like China or India.
They also have fewer taboos about mixing sex and digital entertainment, so things like dating sims and porn games probably draw a segment of the particularly digitally comfortable into Japanese culture.
Since i visited Japan (and some other asian countries) i will try to explain my own fascination of the coutry: It's the fascinating mix of high-tech and tradition.
Japan is very high tech, but remained relatively closed to other countries for a long time. They have their own religion (Shinto). Their own alphabet. Compared to other asian countries (like indonesia) people have a different mindset.
All in all, it fits the right amount of familiar-but-different for me. For comparison: Singapore is just familiar-with-an-asian-touch to a westerner.
I'll add to this. Every place has its ups and downs, and the cultural distance allows Westerners to completely miss the negatives. Normally this is canceled out because the majority of nonwestern nations are visibly poor.
That means it can just seem incredibly cool and fun, while it's actually a relatively boring country in the scheme of things
The answer to why geeks love Japan is probably going to vary by geek. Japanese culture is broad and full of deep practice. It offers many obsessive exports, any one of which could fully consume someone with the geek mindset, from ikebana and origami to J-RPGs and painting Gundam figurines. It only takes one of those hooks to grab a Westerner and steer his/her interest toward the rest of Japan. Anime is just one possibility on a long list.
It's worth keeping in mind that Japan was ascendant during the formative years of many of the geeks here. We all rode to school in Japanese cars, played games on Japanese consoles, took pictures with Japanese cameras, studied Japanese in school so we could be future masters of the universe, and so on. Many geeks on the academic fast-track got a lot of exposure to Japan from a young age, and it still holds our interest.
Japan is a modern country with a modern economy, so I'd bet you'll find a lot of folks on these tech forums who've lived and/or worked there. I worked over there myself.
Finally, interest in Japan is not limited to Westerners. Some of my best friends when I lived in Tokyo were from places like Ghana, Bangladesh, Brazil, etc. Everyone is intrigued by that weird country, not just white people.
Many are going to say something like "Japan is a hyper-modern country set against ancient traditions, which is so neat" or "Japan is historically X so Y happened after Z and therefore we've been interested since year NNNN". That's all fine and probably indirectly, abstractly correct. But I don't think it captures the more visceral and immediate reasons that so many geeks personally take interest.
Well, consider that Japan has been the nr 2 economy for many decades, having been overtaken only as recently as 2010 by China. That's not nr 2 of Asian countries, nr 2 of all countries.
All the more special is that it's also the nr 1 non-western economy, i.e. not the US or Canada or Australia or Europe, which will feel familiar to anyone living in those countries. Even irrespective of it being an economic powerhouse, it feels culturally more differentiated from the west, than say South-America is from North-America, or Eastern-Europe is from Western-Europe.
Combine that with a long history of civilisation, and you've got THE major (economic) superpower with its own distinct culture. There's no such story in the rest of Asia, Africa or South America. All other countries are either economically struggling, or are culturally/historically insignificant, or are simply too small like Singapore.
I don't think we even have to fully explore the interesting relationship Japan has with technology as part of its post-war economic and cultural story and many other such facets like it, to answer the question. None of the interest in Japan feels at all illogical to me.
Japan has been captivating to Westerners since at least the days of Commodore Perry. But in this era, the "hook" was probably some form of anime, video game, or manga. In the 1980s, most television animation was utter crap, churned out by studios like Hanna-Barbera and intended to sell toys and keep the kiddos busy on weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings. Very little thought was given to story or characterization, and episodes were always self-vontained half hours (if that).
To a kid growing up in this time, Robotech (with its long-form structure, complex characters, and real death of major, beloved characters) was fucking Game of Thrones.
This same generation would grow up with Nintendo and Sega, and all the Japanese-originated games on those platforms. So it's not surprising that as young adults we would becone attached to the culture which produced all this stuff.
You are looking at 110 episodes, each 25 minutes long, covering what is effectively a naval war in the stars. But with it you have intrigues of all stripes, and no real good guys.
It's interesting to hear Robotech mentioned on a site where intellectual property law is often discussed, without mention of the controversy surrounding its IP. When Harmony Gold USA created Robotech, it did so using exclusively licensed footage from a Japanese multimedia franchise called Macross. In the 30 years since, many new Macross works, including anime representing some of the most innovative uses of music-in-film-as-a-critical-plot-point (of great interest to a musical theater listener like myself!), have been produced in Japan to great critical acclaim, but their legal import and streaming into the US has been consistently suppressed by Harmony Gold, which maintains that it has the exclusive rights to the Macross trademark in the US [2]. From one perspective, Harmony Gold USA played a pivotal role in bringing anime to the US, and it's only rational that they be allowed to harvest from their Robotech brand without diluting it with Macross competitors. But it's a frustrating situation for Macross fans.
the pull for me to japanese culture is their culture of design. people like sou fujimoto and fumito ueda are very inspirational in their wholly unique approach to design in their respective fields. i feel design in japan is such because of their tendency to be fascinated by futuristic ideas but at the same time have a wealth of history and mythology to draw from.
i am not into anime or other such things but have recently picked up my first manga: all you need is kill, solanin, and pink. but i would say i am interested in other cultures just as much. it typically revolves around design though. haha. and i a not even a designer in occupation.
Anime is a big part of it but I think if you look deeper there is a sense of respect for a culture which can produce something like that—a place where dedicating oneself to something is respected in a way that isn't just about getting rich. Anime is a manifestation of that culture but there is much more to it.
If so, more likely to me a cultural thing as it's most certainly not limited to animation/comics. Among the popular things there's also at least video games, music and, to some extent, cinematography ("live action" movies) and literature. Some may also start to get interested through history, mythology or games (Go, Shogi, Mahjong, Hanafuda, etc.). Or martial arts.
Source: initially I got hooked on Japanese music (then anime and the rest followed)
Japan was the first Asian country to "westernize", having done so in the Meiji period (~1870s). Particularly after WWII, Japan tried very hard at catch-up growth, to the point that by the late 80s, there was consternation about the US being eclipsed by Japan (in 1991, Japan's economic bubble burst, and it hasn't recovered as of 25 years later).
Part of the appeal of Japan is that it has a very visible cultural export market (anime/manga/video games), and that is driven in part by the fact that Japan is a very populous country: it's the second largest "rich" country (loosely defined here as OECD sans Turkey and Mexico).
Japan's history also helps in this regard. Its relative isolation kept its history from being the more-or-less samey nature that, say, European history. The samurai, while being almost a carbon copy of the western knight, is just different enough (the vastly different roots helps obfuscate the similarities) that you can pretend that samurais aren't knights, and it's not hard to make media that focuses on them in this light. This makes it easy to sell Japanese history as "cool."
A lot of valuable points have already been made, but I think it is as much a chance of timing.
I think the main factor is economics: post-war Japan was well placed to export its culture. Around the 70s/80s Japan, in being the most economically developed of the East Asian countries, was trading the most with the West. At the time, China was still on lock down for example, and Korea's growth curve was later and smaller than Japan's.
This period coincided with TVs becoming more common in the household, and later came VHS and consoles, and Japan was able to cement a position of exotic appeal in pop/alt culture as access to and variety of media increased.
In the mainstream you had things like Karate Kid, Ninja Turtles and Mario. Slightly less mainstream you had things like DBZ, Sailor Moon and Akira.
It probably also helps that Japan feels more "familiar" to the west: Japan has democracy and homosexuality is not illegal, for example. I would hazard that factors like this make Japanese culture somewhat less foreign to follow than say Chinese culture which may be smeared by anti-communist sentiment.
There are general trends, but I think you'll find as many reasons as there are Japanophiles.
On my end, what fascinates me with Japan is how they developed in relative isolation for such a long time. My ultimate dream would be to explore and learn about alien cultures and languages; in the meantime, I feel that the closest I can get to that is Japan.
Oh, looks like it's time to plug my website: http://ichi.moe
It's very helpful if you're trying to learn Japanese, or read some Japanese. Just copy-paste any sentence in Japanese and it will show how to read it, and what do the words mean. Read up on grammar, and you're ready to go.
Also I generated an Anki deck for learning kanji and all the words [1]. It's really big, and I'm almost halfway through it myself (about 1.5 years of study). Good luck if you try to attempt this challenge.
From what little I know and from reading this, Japanese seems exactly like what Microsoft would design if it needed to make its own language. Complicated, full of ambiguity, still trying to keep compatibility with an older system (but breaks it anyway), pointlessly redesigned every once in a while. Reading seems even worse because very visually dense kanji just do not survive compression as much as a couple of sticks (like letters in an English or Cyrillic alphabet).
Granted, the language may have a beautiful side which you only learn about by actually learning the language, but still, spending an eternity to do so doesn't seem like a nice way to spend time.
The spoken grammar of Japanese isn't too bad. I'd say it's more logical than English overall.
Written Japanese in Hiragana and Katakana is unambiguous in spelling/pronunciation. It's not like English where you need to learn a bunch of spelling (and sometimes multiple spellings). So it's massively easier.
There's Hiragana and Katakana which have a similar purpose, but then English has upper and lowercase letters for seemly no very useful reason.
Kanji is a significant additional workload and there where efforts to get rid of it in the past. The problem is I'd guess it does have utility, cramming more data in per unit area is useful, as is being able know it mean "on" or "off" or "of passable quality". And now with computers you can type in Hiragana and it prompts for the Kanji. That makes things significantly easier.
The other thing that's interesting about Kanji is the meaning is divorced from the sound. With English your forcing a discretized serialization on sounds. With Kanji the idiographic communication feels closer to a visual representation of a concept.
I've been studying Japanese for a little under a year now. Outside of Kanji, I've found the language at least as easy to pick-up and learn as Spanish. Additionally being an English speaker seems to actually be an advantage, as there are numerous "loan words" that are basically English. This (elementary learning) song is illustrative of that: https://youtu.be/dBGD4guQdME?t=2m38s
Kanji isn't so bad - most of the more complex characters are built up out of smallers ones, and even the smaller ones, as the article breifly hints at, have a primary radical that roughly categorizes it - learn the radical for "water", and you can identify all the seafood on a menu, even if you can't read a single character. They're actually really helpful for both comprehension and reading speed, like learning latin root words would be for English, but a lot more consistently applicable, so it gives you a lot of leverage.
The stroke order seems annoying at first, but it's pretty consistent, and actually really helpful for memorizing. The different pronounciations also seem intimidating at first, but for the most part:
- One's for composing with other characters
- Others are mostly variations on that one for fluidity, where people will still understand you if you get it wrong
- There may be one for when it's used on its own, that gets used so often you quicly think of it as basic
- Anything else is probably an edge case that you'll never see
Kana pronunciation is not completely unambiguous. は and へ have different pronunciation when they're being used as particles. Additionally, there is pitch accent, where small differences in pitch can change meaning. (Although pitch accent varies between regional dialects and you can almost always guess the meaning from context so it's not critical for understanding.)
Every language was designed organically and is full of exceptions and flaws. I don't think most people realize this of their native language. As a native English speaker with a minor in Japanese, I found Japanese to be quite systematic compared to English. I also believe Japanese is more expressive, which is probably true for many languages. The kanji writing system can be difficult, it is true, but there are nice parts about it too if you care to think about them. On the whole I prefer Japanese as a spoken language to English and wish I was better at it. Writing could be argued either way.
A Chinese reader could wonder why we use multiple glyphs to expose a single concept. "How inefficient," they might think, "each character has so few bits of information! Are speakers of this language just memorizing entire blocks of characters at a time so they can read fast?"
One advantage of Latin characters (shared by Cyrillic, Greek, and even Arabic) is that the featural elements of glyphs are few enough that you can make each individual glyph small. You can clearly read Latin text even at 6-8pt font sizes, whereas the need to distinguish multiple parallel lines in Chinese characters makes it barely legible at a standard 12pt font.
"standard 12pt font" is biased for latin characters, though - at the larger font size, the Chinese characters are still getting much better information compression than the latin characters, which need to expand horizontally by using several characters per unit of meaning, plus separators (spacing and hyphens) to even be readable. In practice, even adjusting for font size, paragraphs of Chinese and Japanese are almost always shorter than latin-language equivalents.
Of course, the real winner of this argument is probably Korean.
Actually, I think Korean is not a winner. Its block-shape dictates that a character like 이 take the same amount of space as 핥, so there's a limit on how small a character goes. (There are fonts that try to break out of the standard square shape, but I don't think any found wide use.)
I think proportional fonts have a better space utilization by their nature. Anyways, I don't think that's an important metric. It's not like we live in an age where paper is scarce.
This may be true in general, but extensive use of diacritics, e.g. as in ancient Greek or Vietnamese, could make reading small type extremely difficult.
Japanese is surprisingly easy to get into, and hard to master. You don't need to know all the grammar in this book to make your way around Japan, you can get a basic amount of grammar down in a few weeks and simply working on "knowing more words" is then all you need.
But, much like English, if you want to know all the subtleties and intricacies: strap yourself in, we're in for a rough ride. There are lots of finer details you can get lost in, just like any established language.
It's much easier than language like Finnish or Russian in some respects (lots of things like needing to match genders, modes, plurality, etc. simply don't exist in Japanese), but then there are also things that are much harder (like knowing which level of politeness to use when talking to someone).
It's all about what you consider "knowing Japanese". Microsoft could never hope to come up with something as convoluted as Japanese, or even modern English. They're both waaaay more nuts if looked at in their entirety =P
Kanji is tough indeed, but that's why hiragana is awesome. You can learn it quickly and since it covers the entire spectrum of pronunciation - you can use it to write/type any word, even if said word uses Kanji. This is how most Japanese type it anyway, since digital text input auto-convert hiragana to Kanji as you put together sentences.
There are some dubious examples of English usage in the section on verbs. I understood what was intended but only because I am already well familiar with the topics the author intended to illustrate.
> However, there is something funny about transitivity: some verbs, like "walk", you can only use intransitively (we don't say that we "walked the street", for instance), but many verbs can be used either intransitively or transitively, like "eat".
One can "walk the streets of Bakersfield".
> For instance, traversal verbs (such as 'walk', 'run', 'fly', 'sail', etc.) are intransitive in English, but ... while in English one does not "fly the sky" or "swim the ocean" (at the very least you'd need a preposition such as "through" or "in" to make those correct English), in Japanese this is exactly what you're doing.
Although we don't often say that someone swam the ocean, Columbus "sailed the ocean blue".
FWIW, what may be the largest language program in Japan (called Hippo in Japan and Lex in the US) focuses to an enormous degree on spoken language and does no grammatical training at all. Instead, they try to emulate, as much as possible, learning the way children do. More info:
On the store, you can pick a language you speak, and the languages you want to learn, and it generates a download, with playlists (iPhone) that mix the audio segments in a variety of ways: https://audio.lexlrf.org/#!Customize
(They are a non-profit and I have done some volunteer programming for them)
Only skimmed through the beginning of the grammar section, and it looks more technical than most of what I've seen so far online.
I must say that after I had studied Japanese for some time, reading Reiko Shimamori's systematic japanese grammar (Grammaire Japonaise Systématique, actually, I don't think there's an english edition of this french book) was an eye opener. Japanese grammar made so much more sense to me once I heard about 連体形, 未然形, etc. And I'm glad you talk about those. As I said, though, I only skimmed, but a quick search doesn't reveal any mention of 助動詞, sadly.
PS: the menu on the right overlaps with the text if the window is narrow, and that makes it impossible to read.
As long as we're mentioning Japanese resources, here are my favs (all paper):
* A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar, Makino and Tsutsui. These have 99% of all of the grammar you will ever need, and they are packed with lots of helpful example sentences.
* Remembering the Kanji, Volumes I and II (III is extra credit), James W. Heisig. Keep in mind you need about a month of dedicated brain time for volume I (great for ALT jobs!), and volume II can then be repeatedly skimmed afterwards while engaging with real texts.
* Making Sense of Japanese, Jay Rubin. He has a way of explaining concepts that seem weird to English speakers.
* Colloquial Kansai Japanese, D.C. Palter. It is not very fun to get to Japan and realize they don't talk like the text books. If you get the basics of Kansai you'll be less lost in all of western Japan, which shares a lot of features, plus you'll be more aware of the types of variation that are possible.
* Polite Fictions, Nancy Sakamoto. This book is getting old, but as long as you remember that times change and culture is a continuum this is a fantastic introduction to group culture.
Actually, the first book I learned Japanese from was "Speak Japanese Today," by Taeko Kamiya. It's meant for business travelers and gets you set up with the basics without using the native orthography. I read it when I was 13. Good memories.
Thank you for this. I would like to have read this, especially since I'm on vacation in Hokkaido now, but unfortunately your "clever" right-side table of contents overlaps the actual content on my iPad Pro running the current iOS. So, it's impossible to read the last 10-15% of each line, especially once the TOC expands to most of the height of the screen.
Please give a less "clever" and more traditional UI.
As the author: no it's not. I am in no way notified of comments on my works when someone-not-me submits a link to hackernews. I only discovered this HN thread because people pointed it out to me almost a day after the fact, so if you leave a comment on an HN thread in the expectation that the right person will magically find it: that is not how things work. If you want something improved, tell the people who need to be told, not a random person who posted an interesting link to reddit or hackernews. Your comment just gets lost and there was no value in posting it.
The article is better than I thought it would be (I typically don't have my hopes high) but it does skip over something in the pronunciation section: silent letters. When reading Japanese, sometimes the "u" is, or can be, silent in the word. Most common times (but not the only) you'll see this is for words like "desu" and "masu". The "u" is usually not spoken or sounded out. So spoken, it would sound like "Des" or "Mas". But you can see it silent in other words, like daigaku or eikoku. Now I'm not a linguistic or Japanese expert so they may not use "silent" to describe not voicing the letter/vowel, but my point is that the article doesn't mention this. And given how often "desu" and "masu" are used by beginners, I'd include that in beginning for an introduction to Japanese.
I'm not a trained linguist, but I do have an amature interest in the subject, and have studied Japanese from both a second language, and a linguistic perspective.
The basic building block of English phonetics is the syllable. In Japanese, it is the mora. If you are fammilar with the Japanese writing system, to a first approximation, each phonetic character maps to a single mora [0]. A mora comes in three forms:
1) (C)V - A vowel, optionally preceeded by a consonant (almost all phonetic characters, and compounds like しゃ)
2) The first part of a long consonant. (little っ).
3) Syllable-final nassal /n/ (ん).
Although moras map closely to the writing system, their classification is based on an analysis of spoken japanese (including word games and common mistakes by native speakers).
The relevent piece of this is that there is no way to express "des" in terms of moras/. Instead, we view is as "de-su" with a devoiced vowel. Devoicing is not common in all dialects of Japanese. In the dialects where it is common, a native speaker would recognize the voiced and de-voiced variations as being different ways of pronouncing the same thing.
In dialects where devoicing occurs, there are well understood rules for predicting when it will occur. The particular rule prediciting desu and masu is that high vowels (い/i as in igloo, う/u as in goose) are devoiced when they are word ending and follow a voiceless consonant [1].
[0] Compounds like しゃ are still a single mora, but little っ is its own mora.
[1] A voiceless consonant is one that is made without vibrating the vocal chords. This is the difference between, for example, ka/か and ga/が.
feel free to file an issue about that. This material is the basis for the print copy, in which the furigana ends up looking fine, so if the CSS can be tweaked for better screen presentation, let me know and let's tweak the CSS.
Although I should point out those are a different kind of book: these books, with associated workbooks, are for guiding you through learning Japanese at a slow and steady pace. That's super useful, but not what a grammar is about.
my book is more an encyclopeadia of the grammatical constructions used in Japan, organized by broad category, which you can cherry pick parts of to supplement whatever topics you're covering in your regular course work, or leaf through when you want to refresh your understanding of the grammar.
Books like Nakama, Genki, Japanese: the spoken language, etc. are great (although I don't like how many of these books don't use hiragana after the first few weeks), and then having a cheap grammar (this one's free, or $30 at most if you want a copy you can leaf through) alongside it only helps you get a deeper insight into the learning you're doing in your school or university course, or even your spare time.
This book looks really cool to learn literal meanings of words and how to speak them in Japanese, I'll have to keep it bookmarked for later if I ever go there!
However, the big difficulty for me when I studied Japanese in school was how indirect you have to be when speaking. Even once I could follow along simple conversations and translate the literal meaning of everything, it turns out Japanese people generally only imply what they really mean, rather than state it directly. I have similar problems with American Southerners.
I wonder if that's a cause of someone becoming a hikikomori (basically a shut-in), as they may be unable to keep up with the huge number of unspoken social rules.
The content of this grammar seems good and I like it! But I have a pedantic nitpick: Seeing the kana and kanji sections listed under "syntax" is a huge red flag for anyone trained in linguistics. The writing system is not usually considered part of the syntax (or even the grammar) of a language, rather it is just a means to express the spoken language on paper. These should be in an "orthography" section; they are certainly not syntax in the modern linguistics sense of the word. Just some advice to make this impressive work more palatable to linguists :)
I stuck it in syntax mostly for chapter convenience at the time (it's been almost ten years O_O), but splitting it out into its own orthography section sounds fine to me.
If you want to learn kana, you can drill it in this website:
realkana.com . You select the kanas you want to learn, then you drill them until you learn them.
Writing each one repeteadly also helps. Note that they have a stroke order that you are expected to respect.
Kanji is really hard, you will need to spend some good time learning them. A chrome plugin called rikaikun, or rikaichan for firefox might help you get familiar with kanji by annotating them when you hover over them as you encounter them on websites.
Introductions are cool. My difficulty is figuring out how to advance from 'vaguely conversant' to 'highly competent.' There should be more research into that.
There is, and it's literally "use Japanese daily". How you do that is entirely up to you, but start speaking Japanese every day to people around you. Easy to do in a university or school setting, because everyone else is doing that too, harder to do from home, but that's where the internet and local classes come in. Use something like italkie, pay someone for home-tutor style conversation classes, find a Japanese cultural center near where you live and get chatting, hang out in Japanese chatrooms, just get yourself in there.
The simple truth is that you don't get to "highly competent" without "high frequency use".
Wow, this is impressive. If I ever need a Japanese grammar, this looks really good. The author has said it's not intended as a tutorial, so let's get that out of the way, and just say good job on creating a resource that students of other languages can envy.
Probably? Give amazon or google a search for a "grammar" (which is a style of book in the educational space) on those languages, rather than a textbook and see what comes back?
For me, the hardest thing with learning a new language is immersion. I can study grammar, read books and use Duolingo all day long, but in the end it comes down to "living" it.
pretty sure many airlines have apps that let you book a flight! Joking aside, though, there are sometimes alternatives. The most obvious is "study it at a college, not at home", but that can be prohibitively expensive, so an alternative is "volunteer at your local Japanese cultural center". And for at least the writing part, 2ch (not to be confused with 4chan) is still a very popular IRC network: find some channels, hang out in them, and start contributing to conversations. It's a great way to get your brain to exercise its Japanese modalities, even if you don't improve your pronunciations that way.
As an inherent phoneme, the kana don't really "need" separate names, their pronunciation already works in sentences, although the columns (based on consonant) and rows (based on vowel sound) do have their own designation, being 行(ぎょう) and 段(だん) respectively.
For example, if you wanted to "precisely" talk about し, you could refer to it as さ行のい段 ("the i-dan entry in sa-gyou"), or even さ行のい段の「し」 ("the 'shi' that is the i-dan entry in sa-gyou")
I'm far from an expert or even intermediate in Japanese, but I think not. The names of the kana are just their sounds.
A sketch in Azumanga Daioh comes to mind, where one girl is talking about the character じ ("ji"), and another girl thinks she's talking about hemhorroids, 痔 ("ji").
Before a few-month stay in Japan, I sampled a variety of books and audio programs. Now, looking back many years later, Walsh's simple introduction is the one I remember best.
https://books.google.com/books?id=QcrXBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT...
http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Read-Japanese-Today/Le...