
An introduction to Japanese - e-sushi
https://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/
======
helloworld
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.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=QcrXBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT...](https://books.google.com/books?id=QcrXBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT8#v=onepage&q&f=false)

[http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Read-Japanese-
Today/Le...](http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Read-Japanese-Today/Len-
Walsh/9784805309810)

~~~
TheRealPomax
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)

~~~
ionforce
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.

~~~
khedoros
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.

------
brokencup
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](http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar)

~~~
TheRealPomax
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.

~~~
xamuel
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.

~~~
TheRealPomax
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.

------
nlawalker
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.

------
redthrow
This doesn't seem to be a good resource to learn the language as a beginner.

For example Prof Victor Mair is against teaching Chinese characters to
beginners:

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554)

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580)

 _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_

~~~
TheRealPomax
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.

~~~
beevai142
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.

~~~
yborg
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.

~~~
stordoff
> 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.

~~~
ramparrt
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.

------
somenomadicguy
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?

~~~
showerst
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.

~~~
SerLava
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

~~~
tingol
Boring compared to what?

~~~
krapp
Possibly the "weird, perverted, hyper-futuristic" image of Japan that gets
conveyed through memes and anime.

------
melling
I'm collecting links for Japanese language resources, as well as other
languages on Github:

[https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning/tree/master/japa...](https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning/tree/master/japanese)

Other languages:

[https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning](https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning)

I'd love to find more great resources.

~~~
brokencup
The stickied posts at Koohii are a great resource for everything related to
learning Japanese. It's a pretty popular forum for Japanese learners:

[http://forum.koohii.com/index.php](http://forum.koohii.com/index.php)

------
Grue3
Oh, looks like it's time to plug my website:
[http://ichi.moe](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.

[1]
[https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744)

------
zylonbane
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.

~~~
new299
I'd probably disagree on most points here.

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.

~~~
cloverich
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](https://youtu.be/dBGD4guQdME?t=2m38s)

~~~
T-R
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

tl;dr: Don't let the Kanji intimidate you

------
solidsnack9000
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".

------
ljw1001
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:

Hippo Japan:
[https://www.lexhippo.gr.jp/english/](https://www.lexhippo.gr.jp/english/) The
US branch's online store:
[https://audio.lexlrf.org/](https://audio.lexlrf.org/)

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](https://audio.lexlrf.org/#!Customize)

(They are a non-profit and I have done some volunteer programming for them)

------
glandium
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.

------
garfieldnate
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.

------
SomeHacker44
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.

Thanks!

~~~
TheRealPomax
Please file that on the issue tracker for the project instead.
[https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar](https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar)

------
gcr
Is there a way to hide the table of contents on the right? It overlaps the
text pretty badly and makes the content unreadable on iPad.

~~~
TheRealPomax
Asking that on HN instead of on the actual repo doesn't make the most sense =)

Click the github icon on the grammar page, or just click here:
[https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues](https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues),
and let me know what you'd like to see improved.

~~~
gone35
Not everyone has a github account. Quick feedback on HN is perfectly OK.

~~~
TheRealPomax
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.

------
mahranch
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.

~~~
bajsejohannes
It does talk about that:
[https://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/#section-1-1-3-1-Not_prono...](https://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/#section-1-1-3-1-Not_pronouncing_Japanese)

------
twoquestions
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.

------
djent
The furigana in this is very light and small - not easy to see despite
beginners relying on them.

~~~
dexwiz
For some reason it's got a transparency set.

Removing bit of css should fix it. .nrGrammardata rt { color: rgba(0,0,0,0.4);
}

------
jotux
If you're looking for a book, this is what I used in my college Japanese
class: [https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-
Japanese-...](https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-
English/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471195877&sr=8-1&keywords=genki)

With the associated workbook: [https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-
Elementary-Japanese-...](https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-
Japanese-
Workbook/dp/4789010015/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1471195924&sr=8-6&keywords=genki)

~~~
TheRealPomax
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.

------
canjobear
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 :)

~~~
TheRealPomax
Protip: mention that over on
[https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues](https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues)
rather than in a comment thread (or, of course, do both!).

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.

------
partycoder
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.

------
ktRolster
Introductions are cool. My difficulty is figuring out how to advance from
'vaguely conversant' to 'highly competent.' There should be more research into
that.

~~~
TheRealPomax
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".

------
natch
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.

------
cloudjacker
I'm familiar with Japanese, but I had a question: do the phonetic building
blocks have individual names?

In western alphabets, the letters each have a name that is separate and
sometimes loosely related to their sounds.

In Japanese alphabets, I haven't noticed this yet, but I've never asked
specifically

Do they?

~~~
TheRealPomax
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")

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Bromskloss
I something like this available for other languages, say, for French and
Russian?

~~~
TheRealPomax
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?

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oDot
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.

I wish there was an app for that.

~~~
TheRealPomax
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.

~~~
oDot
Thanks! I will definitely look for the nearest culture center.

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coin
The author needs to test this page on an iPad.

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mrcactu5
this is so thorough! I lived in Tokyo for 3 months during the end of 2010 --
so this is a great review!

~~~
TheRealPomax
Thanks! and if you spot anything that's questionable or weird, let me know
through the issue tracker; there's always room for improvement.

