http://www.japanesepod101.com/

I'll check it out, altho I'm not really looking for commercial ways, but I'll sure use those 7 days of free trial ^^

Dood, it's completely free. What you're referring to is the 7 day free trial of the premium service. It's genuine as well, you can check by the RSS feeds, they have pages of podcasts.

Great source right there for you.

Ok, maybe a dumb questions, but how the hell do you type japanese in Windows XP?

I've set the keyboard and language in windows to japanese, but my keyboard still acts the same as what it did before. No japanese symbols anywhere -_-.

I'm Prolly missing something, but what?

google

Found out why I couldn\t type japanese. I had keyboard layout set to japanese but it has to be set to IME keyboard layout.

my kid is learning Japanese at college, why i have no idea

yeah It´s super dumb to learn any languages except your native one.

i doubt he will use his japanese knowledge in the UK if he plans to stay there :p

Well japan is a very modern country and leading in robotic technology and prolly on other fields aswell. Haven't digged all that deep yet in their culture.

Sure has to be something that makes learning japanese usefull in the UK, even if you plan to stay in the UK :p

almost everything is translated in to english in the UK, if you don't wanna work as a translator i highy doubt you will have any use for it except for entertainment :/

i can see why you would study it for the fun and if you watch alot of anime or read manga or whatever you could also have use for it in that way :).

yeah, its sometimes a pain to find the right subs for anima or movies xD

Well subs are one thing, but there are so many japaneese games that wont be published outside country, not to mention most of games is dubbed instead of subbing (there was certain rpg with same 3 main heros voice actors that play in Naruto anime, and they made a lot of subtle inside jokes regarding it, all lost with english dub).

learning japanese so you can watch hentai undubbed? hell yea!

Learning a new language, even if you would never use it to more than reading´, opens up a whole new world.

I don´t really measure the "worth" of skills/things like that :)

we all have our own oppinions!

french, spanish, german i could understand but not japanese

let the kid learn japanese! :P i think its cool

ofc im letting him , its what he wants to do :)

japanese is spoken by more ppl...

ye i guess it is... in Japan :) lets hope he can visit there one day and be able to use it

how did it happen of you getting kid?!?

Never payed attention to biology class huh ?

I don't think it is.

Sure there are more japanese people than either French, German or Spanish. But those three languages are spoken in many more countries (especially French and Spanish)

I don't think so, especially french and spanish because of the many (ex-)colonies of France and Spain.

"ok"

I think it's super dumb not to learn at least 1 more language.

nemesis... ganbate

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sarcasm

:)

Wasn't there a study where they found out that people who are multilingual (know 2 languages or more) live longer then someone who just knows 1 language.

I'll see if I can find it somewhere.

Found it: Learning a Foreign Language Can Help You Live Longer (not really a research, but oh well :)

They also say that people who are smarter and do many different things in their life live longer.
And those are exactly the people who would try to learn more languages, so I think it's just a coincidence.

Basically it comes down to keeping that brain active. Just like you would train ur body to keep fit you should train the brain aswell to keep fit, i guess.

besides americans there arent really that many people in the modern world who only speaks one language anyway afaik

He wants to be Wapanese!

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Wapanese

Hehe, http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/1/14/Shoujo.jpg made me laugh =)

uhh.. because it's interesting/because he wants to? geez.

captain obvious

apparently not to you.

yellow fever! XD

So he doesn't have to wait for games and anime to get translated ofc :D

oOo think you might have it :D

watch it, you might not want him to end up like this tho

Maybe he plans on getting some japaneese chicks? :P

They have some good animes in Japan (currently watchin Death Note right now, only two episodes left though :( ), best to watch them raw (AKA w/o subtitles) and, if they're currently running, sooner than those who need to use subtitles like myself.

light dies :>

saw that coming, the series has catharsis written all over it.

that's why you stop at ep 26 :)

and watch "code geass" rather similar to death note, and yet different.

There is someone within driving distance of you teaching Japanese. If you had the willpower to learn Japanese on your own, I doubt you would be posting on ESR for suggestions.
yea so... find a class don't trying to teach yourself. If you absolutely MUST teach yourself then try genki　げんき。

I live in a very small village, doubt there is such a teacher nearby :p.

I just like to understand the basics of the language, don't need to fully master it (yet). I learned to read and understand swedish aswell by just learning it myself. Altho swedish is offcourse alot easier to learn then japanese I reckon :).

watch lots of anime then :D

what exactly is your reasoning for this? learning on your own is just as effective as teaching, and usually a lot moreso, in my experience and opinion. I don't understand why there's a mentality of 'must be taught by someone else.' who taught them and then who taught them, ad infinitum?

I, for one, did not even go to middle school, and I'm doing quite well so far.

i can't comment on japanese, but chinese is impossible to learn to speak (or understand) with any coherency unless you live amongst native speakers, or are taught by those that speak on a comparable level. in fact, try simply looking up a chinese character in a dictionary without first being given an in depth tutorial into the way chinese characters work and then being taught how to accomplish this task...HA, you'll get nowhere fast.

it's true that chinese is further complicated due to its tonal nature, but i don't imagine japanese being much easier. e.g., off the top of my head i can think of over a dozen specific mandarin words to express "brother" depending upon generation, birth order, and what part of the country one resides. or take the example of the thunderfish. "yu" being fish, "lei" being thunder. without a helpful nudge, surmising the modern translation for "yulei" to be "torpedo" would be quite a stretch. or how about "chao youyu" - word for word meaning "fried ink fish" (squid). without being taught the nature of such a common phrase, one would probably never infer the meaning "to be fired from a job". a great number of modern chinese words, especially colloquiallisms, require these sort of etymological gymnastics, perhaps even moreso in formal settings.

i hope for this guy's sake that japanese is a bit more structured.

Japanese is much easier to learn. Mandarin is a bit of a challenge but it's worth the trouble if you are working for a company with chinese connections :-)

Every language has phrases like that, they're called idioms. They're quite easy to work out once you're given them in context, which would most certainly be the case given he plans to use the language in a real setting.

Also, why would you use colloquialisms in a formal setting?

the fact is that colloquiallisms in a formal setting are simply a reality of the language. and yes, those examples would normally be considered idioms in western languages, but that doesn't apply in chinese as those words are simply parts of "everyday" speech.

So are idioms. So are euphemisms. They're all a part of everyday language.

All the colloquialisms are part of everyday speech, in a regional sense, people still manage to teach themselves.

i suppose i wasn't clear enough as the meaning doesn't seem to be getting across. oh well. perhaps that even better exemplifies the need to be taught the language and culture in order to understand the nuances of learning the former.

oh, I'm sure it isn't easy, but neither is a lot of other things people do by spending a few months' time alone -- Isaac Newton inventing calculus on a whim, kids becoming Go professionals, someone learning to solve a Rubik's cube in 10 seconds, or making a new discovery in physics (historically).

advanced mathematics can be learned without teaching, and so can physics, astronomy, chemistry, computer science, and so on. I really don't see why language cannot.

i agree that most things can be self-instructed by a motivated individual. but due to the nature of the chinese language being so deeply rooted in a 5000 year-old culture, i would deem it nigh impossible for even most above average thinkers to develop fluent skills on their own without any exposure to native speakers and the explanations of structural and cultural concepts.

Yeah, a friend of mine is chinese and she tried to teach me some, but speaking chinese is very hard with all the different tonals that you can produce. Like the word "Ma", that can have like 4 different meanings allready depening on the tone you speak it (horse, mother, linen, and something more, can't remember). This alone makes it allready very complicated imo ^^.

Japanese seems so far much easier and quicker to learn.

imagine the horror of learning 14 different characters and even more meanings for the simple syllable "shi" during my first semester alone; that's not including conjunctions :)

Imagine that in Japanese there are about 80 characters that you can read as 'shou' ;) (though they are used only in compounds but with so many homophones floating around...)

i'm not at all attempting "one-upsmanship", so i won't mention how many different homophones "shi" has in total. but i'll point to the fact that the "14" i pointed out were just the 14 different characters for the same sound i learned in my first semester :o

that doesn't include the different contextual/compounded meanings for those. or all of those that i learned later, and the ones i'm still discovering!

but it isn't surprising that japanese readers suffer a similar problem as japanese borrows many, i would even dare say a majority, of it's characters from chinese. even the characters for "japanese language" found in DVD audio/subtitle options and on restaurant menus are written using chinese characters.

So you're saying that there's more than 14 characters read as 'shi'? (not talking about compound homophones but please mention how many :D) Sorry if I misunderstood but I was just replying for fun, didn't want to 'win' or whatever.

I don't quite understand your last paragraph (are you mocking me? ;)) but here's my 2 cents (I just love to talk about these things):

Japanese borrowed the characters from Chinese but in return the Chinese have borrowed many compounds constructed by the Japanese from existing characters. (There's at least one compound I'm not sure about as in Japanese it means 'letter' and in Chinese 'toilet paper' ;))

The Japanese also made some new characters but their number is relatively small. (for example character meaning 'to work' was made by adding the 'human' radical to the character standing for 'to move') There's quite a lot of characters that have been simplified and in many cases they don't resemble the simplified chinese at all - which imo sucks btw) It's hard to improve on something that has been evolving for thousands of years ;)

i consulted the basic dictionary i use for quick lookups just now - 58 unique characters for "shi". there's definitely going to be more than that. plus very many of those have multiple/flexible meanings, particularly when compounded or used in idiomatic structures.

no, i wasn't mocking you. i was taking interest in a noted similarity between the two languages.

concerning "toilet paper", that isn't accurate, as the chinese for toilet paper is "wei sheng zhi" - weisheng is a common compound loosely meaning "hygiene". e.g., weisheng + jian (room) would be a restroom/bathroom/WC what-have-you. zhi is commonly used in different contexts to mean a strip of paper; combining the two is pretty obvious. though i doubt the japanese use the characters for "hygiene" in their compound for "letter".

i'm not being skeptical, but i'm curious to hear more about these compounds that the chinese borrowed from the japanese - i'm not an asian language etymology expert, but i've never heard of such a thing.

concerning the "to work" example you cited - i tried a few variations of "work" in a few online dictionaries. almost all of the characters i discovered were chinese in origin. i don't disagree that japan came up with some of their own and also simplified several chinese characters, but that particular example was a bad one, if we're thinking of the same character.

ok, just now out of curiosity i google-language'd "letter" from english to japanese. the first return was 2 characters - the chinese for "shou zhi" - hand paper. this compound lends itself to hand towels or paper towels one might use in the kitchen after washing dishes.

It sounded a bit like you were mocking me so sorry if I misunderstood you.

I'm not versed in Chinese and the Japanese equivalents may differ in meaning but I hope everything will be understandable.

Concerning 'to work': why is that a bad example? It was made up of existing radicals (human 'ren'? + move 'dong'?) but it is unique to Japanese. Off top of my head I remember the character meaning 'crossroads' (character 'ten' on top of radical for 'advance') or 'move inward' (radical for 'enter' on top of radical for 'advance'). As you can see from those examples the Japanese made some new characters but they used elements that were already in existance.

Concerning the borrowed compounds, it's just what my teacher told me (and I have no reason to not believe him). He also told me about some characters made in Japan and adopted by Chinese (but those could be made from existing elements as well, I'm not sure). I didn't delve deeper into these matters so I can't help you much. Google is your friend though.

On a side note I once watched some anime subbed in Mandarin and I saw a lot of compounds corresponding to the spoken Japanese. Which might also suggest that the Japanese borrowed those from Chinese ;) But knowing that the two 'countries' came first into contact ~2000 years ago there's bound to be some language exchange.

The Japanese have adopted the chinese characters along with buddhism and depending on the curent reigning dynasty in the region the readings the monks brought with them were different. Even today each character can be read in two ways: first one is called on'yomi ('chinese'* readings) and another kun'yomi (native readings). Most characters have more than 1 on and kun readings (one example is character meaning 'up' ['shang'?] that has over 10 different readings depending if it's used alone or in compounds). Several have only an on reading and some only kun. Chinese is a bit better in this department since one character = one sound (right?). The on readings are used mostly in compounds while kun is used when the character is standing 'alone'.

Sorry for wandering off-topic, it's just that I like babbling ;)

Concerning the 'toilet paper' vs 'letter': it's possible I remembered it wrong but the fact that the meanings are different remains. To be sure the compound I'm talking about is formed from 'hand' (shou?) and 'paper' (zhi?).

* nowadays mostly unrecognizable to Chinese people but still bearing some similarities (at least on paper: hand = 'shu' vs 'shou', paper = 'shi' vs 'zhi' but it's 'tegami' vs 'shou zhi'), it's understandable as many of the current on readings were borrowed a long time ago

i would go with Rosetta Stone.
here's the demo: http://www.rosettastone.com/en/individuals/full-online-demo

also, Japanese is as hard as Arabic and Chinese. So you must be willing to pretty much give an hour a day for a couple of years of learning to become OK at it. and this should help you with the phonology. GL, you'll need it.

I always thought japanese was easier to learn then lets say chinese. Because chinese is a tonal language (meaning the tone you pronounce something allready makes the meaning of a word different), whereas with japanese the word still means the same regardless of the tone.

Correct me if im wrong tho, cos im not sure. Just heard something like that.

i have no clue, but use rosetta stone :)

don't know about japanese, but it's definitely correct for chinese

Japanese is somewhat easy IF you have understood how it works. The fastest way is a normal course, though.

Arabic Wasn't that Hard for me, of course it was part of our Curriculum .. each year from grades 7 to 12 !

PS : maybe it's because it has a lot of common parts with ours.

Salām 'aleykom. Well, it's a lot harder for English speakers to learn Arabic.

Sigh .. Does not accept unicode.

anyway .. yes you are write .. I think it's pretty "Strange" if not "Hard" for people to face2 "H"s - 3 "S" s and etc which are pronounced differently.

qaf, `ayn, and ghayn are pretty strange for english speakers too. btw, can you download unicode characters for use in microsoft word?

this man speaks the truth

I hope it's not because you watch a lot of anime.

No, I've haven't really seen many anime to be honest and not planning either.

Find the culture very interesting. Alot different then our western country but it still has many similarities. Learning a bit about the language is kinda a logical step in order to learn more about some country's culture. And shud be fun aswell ^^.

It's just that I know a guy that lived in Japan and seems to hold the same interest as you in the culture and stuff. He hated the anime tards, the Icelandic anime tards that is.

same with my friend that is learning Japanese! what an amazing coincidence! :p

Don't be ridiculous... of course that's why he wants to learn it.

weeaboo in denial.

download some e-books (sound-books). i have three books on my pc.. about 100 chapters, and every chapter is 30min long... haven't listened on them too much though.

only problem is that you don't learn to write it, but you get good at speaking it.

i could perhaps send it to you if you can't find it off the net ;-)

pack your bags and of to japan. live there for a while and you'll learn japanese quickly. and ofc you'll get to know the culture :)

LEARNING JAPANESE
I THINK YOU'RE LEARNING JAPANESE
I REALLY THINK SO

there's no easy way you lazy bitch. Study it at university or you'll suck whatever you try. Good luck

the robot has spoken

This should help you out.

haruhi <3

mikuri <3

ps i hate 'em both. viral marketing ~.~

suprised runcratz aint pissed all over this thread yet

LIKE OMG I WATCH A LOT OF ANIME I'M SO TOTALLY JAPANESE NOW!

Wapanese!

i think i'm turning japanese i think im turning japanese i think i'm turning japanese i really think so

its been done but ok. here's a fun fact: kurt cobain used lyrics from that song in 'nameless, endless', the bonus track from nevermind. lol

yeah i noticed that :)

Try the rosetta stone. It's an expensive language program but you might be able to find a torrent for it. It's cool because it can teach you a little bit of hiragana and katakana (two of the alphabets).

Although you might find the words and phrases you learn with that program you might think is weird but it teaches you plurals and grammar. It's actually one of the best language programs in the world. I've used it for japanese before too.

To get around in japan I recommend that you do learn hiragana and katakana so you can at least read a bit of what you're buying. Also another tip is that it's like the states, they don't add taxes onto their prices (but sales tax there is 10% iirc)

I found this document that explained the kanji in pretty to understand words. Like explaining the origin of the character first to show that it reflects its meaning.

Like the picture of a tree with roots that then gets simplified in a character that, with some imagination, looks like a tree with roots (本) and that also means roots or origin.
The same with the sun becomming eventually a square with a line in the middle (日). Put both those characters together and you get 日本, sun, origin...aka...japan.

Hiragana is an addition to kanji for the grammer and katakana is there to translate foreign words into japanese when there is no kanji character for it? I believe my e-book said something like that. But im only on page 42 so don't know much yet. Haven't gotten to the kana part yet.

Ah great, ESR doesn't allow japanese characters -_-

Yeah that's basically right. But some kanji is so complex that in the newspaper they have the meaning in hirigana in brackets. Hiragana also really helps with getting to know how words in japanese are pronounced. They're basically all pronounced how they're written. Also (IIRC) all the subway signs are written in hiragana.

Katakana isn't that difficult to pick up once you get the jist of hiragana.

If you're just a beginner I wouldn't even try to start with kanji. It is sooo complex! There are specific stroke orders and everything (there are for hirigana and katakana too but it's not that hard). To really learn kanji you will have to either do a real course or live in Japan.

I have a friend in Japan who had been living there for 15 years and she still only knows the basic "everyday" kanji. I think you're aiming too high with kanji if you're only looking to converse in the japanese language. They will be really greatful for your efforts. Japanese people are some of the friendliest, hospitable people in the world. Even if you only know the basic things they are so happy about it.

Ok I'm downloading that program. Curious.

get all the language packs off of oink, hundreads of the fucking things

Yeah, I noticed kanji becomes more and more difficult now I read much further in the e-book I got. Can't recognize tree's or suns anymore in the kanji symbols :P.

Hiragana and Katakana both have around 50 characters consisting of only a few strokes. Will be much quicker to learn then kanji indeed. Will check that out instead then. Thanks for the tip, didn't know they used it quite alot in japan.

Downloading rosetta aswell now, 2.67GB O_o

It seems like you're getting a version of rosetta with many language packs. Basically you just need the rosetta installer (shouldnt be more than 500mb) and then the japanese language pack :x

Hello LIEFJE-eee

sex time... Nice one!

Yeah, It has loads of languages, chinese, french, spanish, japanese, arabic, german, swedish, and many more.

Can be handy when I want to learn another language again ^^.

Definitly much quicker since not many (if any:P) japaneese people know all the kanji. They basicaly got a lot of small thematic dictionaries for everyday use :P

It'd be hard for anyone to know ~50k kanji ;P

This Rosetta stone is a weird program if you ask me :>. Been playing with if for 15 minutes now, but I still don't get it -_-.

I do the exersices. I see a picture, I hear a voice say something japanese, but I don't get to hear or see what that something they are saying means. Offcourse I can guess it from the picture, but the pictures get more complex along the way.

I checked the same exercise in english and then you got the same pictures with spoken lines as "one girl riding a horse". And this is exersise 1 from the first level. Offcourse you can guess it pretty good from the picture, but here is the catch. Later on you get different sentences with the same pictures -_-. Like "A boy under a ball" and "A ball on a boy". And you don't get the translations to those sentences at all when ur doing it in japanese.

Kinda irritating to guess everything, or im missing an option in the program -_-.

You can change in the options to have either the roomaji (english letters) or hiragana for the picture show up too.

I think bascially with the program you learn from repitition.

Yeah thats what I got. Only downside is that you can't get the exact meaning of what either is being spoken or written in japanese.

But yeah, hopefully I get most of it by just repeating it loads of time ^^

I'm not sure i can help you out, but I'm Japanese :)

How do you type japanese in Windows XP? I've set keyboard and language settings to japanese, but it just works the same as when I put everything on english.

guess this site's gonna be a big help
http://www.nihongo-ok.com/

Better Learn Korean .. I Heard it helps a lot on Starcraft !!! :D

I've been doing a japanese evening course at my uni for a year now and im going to Japan next week for a 2 month intensive study at a institute there (and ofc to check out the country + woman) but yea.. i recommend "Japanese for Busy People 1 - (Rev. 3)" If you need to practice some convo sometime, im on quakenet #landed channel most of the time! - Fenda

Well japaneese is rather easy (from polish point of view:P), the only hard part is memorizing kanji :P

I cant give you any links nor aplications, but keep focus on spoken language, and romaji. Romaji is great thing, since its directly the way to pronounce things, and most of japaneese people can use it (they learn it in elementary I belive). If you will buy dictionary, check if it additionaly use romaji (when I was in uk I saw many priced that didnt), also there should be available some learning matterials like textbooks for foreigners with it (you can always ask ambassady, they should have department for that).
Further you can try educational program used in japaneese schools to step by step teach their own kids kanji. Its actualy highly recommended by many people who already know, or teach japaneese.

Ah and if you never heard someone speaking japaneese live (not in tv or something) then be ready to bite your tongue really hard. I heard a lot of japaneese in tv, music, and anime, but when I heard it live at my school's opening ceremony, it was really hard not to laugh :P

ps. learning japaneese from subbed anime is actualy not so dumb idea as most people thinks :P

you just have to 'learn' it not pick up random words :>

Well I learned english by picking up random words from games, and movies. Its not the fastest way, but for me its most natural and easiest one since I dont like any kind of classes.

all you need to know is "kutabare" :)

watch some old godzilla movies.

japanese is mandarin isnt it? at my uni they teach mandarin as its a popular language used in business over there

No japanese ain't mandarin. Mandarin is one of the dialects in chinese. Japanese is just japanese ^^. Altho written characters in japanese are mostly taken from chinese characters.

languages keep your brain working
plus you dont have to look at the subtitles in hentai,thus making all the japanese babble during sex more intresting

I know it's late but I happened to see this topic and since I wanna learn Japanese too I thought it might be useful for you too. also if you're using t0rrent stuff you can search and the result will come for itself.

also check this out, USEFUL!
http://maktos.jimmyseal.net/jip.html

Thanks, looks pretty good. Bookmarked it! ^^

what a waste of time when you could just purchase this

purchase? lolz

What geek doesn't go through a wanting to learn Japanese phase?

This is probably just a fad and will pass. Looking at the parent post date,you've perhaps given up the idea already...

However, respect if you actually stick it out and obtain a working knowledge of the language (or any foreign language, for that matter).