How I Master Japanese

• 2011-11-27

  New cut surely gives lots of ways to play w/ hair style ^_^

• 2010-12-23

  Started Again

  It’s been a wile :) Well… it seems that I dropped my mastering about a year ago (or even a bit more than that). I learned kana and moved on to kanji and.. got really, REALLY frustrated over it. It’s not that I was that naive to think kanji’ll be as easy as kana (god, no! one should be out of their mind to even assume that), but I just did not expect I’d get so overwhelmed. I’ll do a separate post about this frustration and what I think I took wrong.

  The important thing is that I started again! (^__^)V Thanks to my recent obsession with visual kei band called the GazettE. So far, I’ve learned: 私、僕、俺、見、良、皆、食、素、事。I think I should stop here now ‘cause I have to do my job, I’ll do a separate post on HOW I’m doing it later on as well (but I still do it for pleasure and do not force myself a tiniest bit).

• 2009-09-09

  Idea for Learning Grammar + Hiragana Practice

  Yesterday evening I felt like reading about Japanese grammar. I’m not sure if anybody knows what the feeling this is, but that’s what I experience sometimes and missed much since the university time. I’ll cut sweet memories now; so, I felt like learning grammar.

  I picked up one of the grammar books I have and started reading. Wait a minute, it’s romanized! Oh shit, I was hoping to practice reading Hiragana from examples as well! What a misfortune.—I thought for the first second.

  And during the second I was kinda inspired that I better practice writing Hiragana, right here! And that’s what I did: added the 2nd line to all examples and wrote them in hiragana. Kana is better remembered if through writing, that’s true.

• 2009-08-23

  Articles are commentable

  Now all articles in this blog can be commented, thanks to Disqus. Viewing comments and adding your own are available at an article page.

• →

  How I Learn Hiragana. Initial Drilling

  There are several approaches to learning Hiragana, from old traditional drilling to innovative ones that assume you associate a kana (syllabogram) with an image of something, and remember it so. And traditional way is very simple (AFAIK): I’ve read that  Japanese kids at school just write every kana many times until they remember all of its elements and flow, and start writing it automatically.

  I’m more on the traditional side here. I believe kana must be drilled so that when you read, you recognize it immediately without any thinking, just in the way you do when you read text written in Latin (or your native) characters. If you call to your associated memories for each character, it will take you ages to read a simple phrase! And that’s really not my goal.

  So, at the first stage of studying a kana, I learn how it is written: what its strokes are and in what order they are written. Then, I review variations of writing the kana as it appears in different writing/printing styles to gain better understanding of how the kana’s elements relate to each other and how it–as a whole–is balance. It’s not a secret that each kana character is well-balanced, say, if one makes up a construction in the form of a kana, most probably it won’t fall because its center of gravity is at the right place. I’m sorry I don’t know how to better describe it. I’m sure there is some special term for this, but I don’t know it and try to describe it just the way I feel. Anyway, let’s sum it up: The first stage is to learn and understand the kana.

  The second stage is to drill how to write the kana, implementing all that you understood about the character on the first stage. Drilling is simple: I write it down many times. It is better to start with a squared paper because writing kana within square helps you make it more balanced. It is very important to write kana correctly from the very beginning, because once got used to incorrect writing, it is much more harder to get retrained afterwards.

  That will be all for today. This article came out more general than specific, it mostly explains the concepts rather than answers a question What do I do exactly? So be it. The next will be more specific.

  I guess I’ll write several wordy articles like this where I’ll explain everything, and then an article that sums it all up and gives exact directions on what to do.

• 2009-08-18

  The Start: Focus on Hiragana, Why

  Ok, here’s a short post, just to begin with something.

  I decided to put the first focus on learning Hiragana: knowing Hiragana is a base thing that allows you read and write Japanese on the beginning level. Learning a language gives the best results if it is comprehensive, meaning that it includes reading, writing, listening and speaking. Of course, you can pick up only one or two things from the list, but that’s good for specific purposes only and does not count for mastering a language.

  In addition to this quite an obvious statement from teaching-foreign-languages field, knowing Hiragana is a must to find out the meanings of Japanese words. Google Translate, for example, translates words input in Hiragana (even if they’re supposed to be written in kanji), but it does not do it for words input in Romaji. (So, if you’re learning with a romanized textbook, you should be aware of that, and also of that you’ll be only able to listen and speak).

  Next post will explain How I learn Hiragana.