Hello, I'm a new member on these forums and I just wanted to drop by and say hello

But anyway I've already finished "Remembering the Kana" and am up to 276ish frames on "Remembering the Kanji"... I've been doing a bunch of reading about various way to learn the Japanese language, however one of those things that I've noticed is there's a ton of emphasis on total immersion environment with music, movies, audio/etc all going on so that you can "hear" and slowly over time get used to the language and starting to pick up on the language.

However this won't work because for me to be able to go into the total immersion environment I would have to be *able* to actually read the language and I won't be able to watch movies or so forth with subtitles until I can read it fast enough to keep up....

So I was wondering if anyone had any specific idea or advice here? I've been studying the Kanji's for the last half of a month and was hoping to keep up the pace of adding an chapter or so every two days or so...

I guess its a mixed bag, because I don't have to bother with learning how to actually speak or hear the language, but on the other hand, I'm missing out on that whole immersion aspect where you can have something playing in the background and you are able to go around cleaning and doing what so ever.

Thanks!

Welcome to the forums


I was just going to ask you what is your reasoning for learning Japanese? Do you plan to go there? Or do you just want to watch anime with subs or manga or websites etc.

I think you're going about it the right way just by starting with RTK and moving from there with whatever.

Realistically the 'immersion' thing (insofar as you describe it, a lot of passive listening and such) is just to multitask and get used to the sound and cadence of the spoken language. As this doesn't really apply in your case, you're not actually missing out on something too pivotal. By no means is it necessary to engage in that sort of immersion to achieve reading literacy -- it's mostly for listening and reproduction.

My personal motivations for learning are almost entirely literature-related -- the speaking/listening is just kind of part and parcel and a bonus prize, in a sense, but not my absolute goal. My accent will probably always suffer due to this...

Anyway, back on track, the immersion isn't necessary to learn reading fluency, it's considered beneficial for 'total fluency'. Your path will get you to reading fine. It'll be a bit harder because you won't recognize words that you've heard verbally when you finally encounter them in kanji/kana, but again, that is not really required by any means.

spleenlol Wrote:Welcome to the forums
I was just going to ask you what is your reasoning for learning Japanese? Do you plan to go there? Or do you just want to watch anime with subs or manga or websites etc.

There's a wide variety of reasons actually, some that are probably quite silly Just out of the blue one day, I decided that I was rather tired of only knowing one language and would love to learn another language. That language was Japanese/Chinese, I've always looked at the script and found them to always have filled me of wonder and aware that they were able to write/read such a pretty script.

Now another funny fact is, my mother got to travel around the world, not only once, but twice, and got to touch dozens of country, and the second time she got to go with my grandmother. Anyway, this is kind of funny because I come from a farm in the Midwest and am primary an Germanic heritage. Yet looking back on my life growing up I did notice that there was quite a bit of Asian influence on parts of my childhood. My mother and grandmother had a ton of Japanese and/or Chinese artworks around their houses. And my parent house is full of futon, every single member of my family sleeps on futons on the floor, and the only "traditional swing" door in the house is the two exterior doors, all of the rest are sliding doors. My mother also had quite a few Buddha stature around the house also.

I never was really that interested in Anime or Manga at all growing up, and then latter on about a couple year ago, some friends introduced me to the material and I've been on and off reading and watching it. I also love to read books and personally have quite a large library of books at home... I figured that Anime/Manga would be another good "resource" for me to use to be able to use in learning the language so its not an negative thing to me, but I'm not really obsessed over them at all, its an pretty neat medium, reminds me of the comics that I could never read when I was a kid.

Thus my goal with learning Japanese would be to get to a point where I am able to read their books, I would just LOVE to gobble up some more books and the language looks like quite an amazing language and I just would love to be able to read it.

Also I was going to head to Japan for about a week this summer but due to money issue and time issue with another friend we both agreed to delay it until the summer of 2011 where we will be able to spend a full three weeks and tour as much of the island/Japan as we can.

I am kind of hoping that I will be able to *at-least* have good enough literacy to be able to have a good time in Japan and be able to read the signs, magazines, and so forth.

ninetimes Wrote:My personal motivations for learning are almost entirely literature-related -- the speaking/listening is just kind of part and parcel and a bonus prize, in a sense, but not my absolute goal. My accent will probably always suffer due to this...

Anyway, back on track, the immersion isn't necessary to learn reading fluency, it's considered beneficial for 'total fluency'. Your path will get you to reading fine. It'll be a bit harder because you won't recognize words that you've heard verbally when you finally encounter them in kanji/kana, but again, that is not really required by any means.

I can't even speak anyway I did learn some basic English phrases in high school but that was about it. I have over, the last I remembered, over 90 dB of hearing loss in both ears anyway and hearing aids are of no aid.

Anyway I agree, I would love to be able to read, read and read some more books

Yeah my primary concern is that I won't be able to pick up the language as smoothly or quickly as some of my hearing peers would be able to because my only source would be reading and honestly I probably won't be able to read very well for a long while. RTK I figured would be the first step forward for me

[edit: gaah grammar and spelling (engrish) issues! Corrected!]

Many people take the 'listening immersion' notion too far, thinking it's some sort of panacea. But as ninetimes said and I think spleenol implied, it depends on your goals, and in my opinion, and I think it's the right one, that kind of audio immersion develops superficial skills in general listening to a point, but from there, it's a matter of doing focused listening for specific listening skills.

However, if you do want to be able to lip-read Japanese, I think that films and dramas with subtitles--studied in Anki using decks of video clips made from subs2srs, could be beneficial. Take your time associating the kana/text with what the actors are saying. You could focus purely on expressions, body language, the speed they seem to speak at, recognizing the natural pauses and boundaries between words.

Which brings us to grammar--I don't know about other texts, but Japanese the Manga Way and Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, which are great beginners' books (and on to Dictionary of Intermediate/Advanced) place spaces between the words, which would help getting a feel for the aforementioned word differentiations. (Japanese the Manga Way also explains contractions, which would also be helpful.)

Luckily, Japanese is a very visual/spatial written language, and much of the spoken communication occurs nonverbally, with more emphasis on tacit situational context than English. ^_^

I am also a fan of the aural element in SRSing as an extra mental 'hook' for memorization. However, just as non-deaf Japanese users make use of 空書 (writing the kanji in the air/or their palms to summon the muscle memory of strokes), from what I've read users of JSL (Japanese Sign Language) also use '指文字' (See here for an example picture of つ), finger-spelling, which might help replace the audio with something spatial/physical. Edit: In addition to writing during reps/reviews, I mean. (Or at least when first learning something, and if during the SRS reps you're feeling fuzzy on things.)

Also, from what that Wikipedia article says, there's a 'subgenre' of programs with JSL in them, so perhaps it might be useful to look into those. Since I doubt those have many English subtitles, that might be something to look into later, though.

At any rate, this is something I've thought about a little bit in a different context (my thread 'how the brain processes kanji' wherein I stress that written Japanese is less phonocentric than alphabet-based languages), so I hope I was able to spin those speculations into something that addressed some of your concerns.

Edit: Another thing to keep in mind is that many folks studying written Japanese are focusing more on meaning/grammar than knowing the pronunciation of kanji. The book 'Reading Japan Cool' talks about the prevalence of 'visually decoding' as young Japanese develop their literacy, recognizing those iconic kanji and skimming from word to word like that. I used to be against this for second-language learners, but since then my perspective has changed and I think it's great to embrace that less phonocentric aspect of a written language.

nest0r Wrote:Many people take the 'listening immersion' notion too far, thinking it's some sort of panacea. But as ninetimes said and I think spleenol implied, it depends on your goals, and in my opinion, and I think it's the right one, that kind of audio immersion develops superficial skills in general listening to a point, but from there, it's a matter of doing focused listening for specific listening skills.

However, if you do want to be able to lip-read Japanese, I think that films and dramas with subtitles--studied in Anki using decks of video clips made from subs2srs, could be beneficial. Take your time associating the kana/text with what the actors are saying. You could focus purely on expressions, body language, the speed they seem to speak at, recognizing the natural pauses and boundaries between words.

I don't know about Japanese, but one little known fact is, only 20-30% of the spoken English language is even lip-readable! The rest of it is gotten from context or knowledge of the subject spoken, then you can fill in the blank, but its an pretty inefficient way of doing things. I never did learn how to lipread because I never had a need to growing up (small rural community)... So I honestly don't know how lip-readable Japanese would be That sounds like an good question I would need to ask some of the deaf kids over there in Japan!

But yeah I agree, I think that flims, drama, anime, whatever with the subs2srt would service as a valuable source of sentence mining for me to learn the language better.

nest0r Wrote:Which brings us to grammar--I don't know about other texts, but Japanese the Manga Way and Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, which are great beginners' books (and on to Dictionary of Intermediate/Advanced) place spaces between the words, which would help getting a feel for the aforementioned word differentiations. (Japanese the Manga Way also explains contractions, which would also be helpful.)

So far I have these books:
1) Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary
2) Kanji Learner's Dictionary
3) Schaum's Outline - Japanese Grammar
4) Remembering the Kana
5) Remembering the Kanji (Book 1 & 2)
6) Baron's Japanese Grammar
7) A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters - Kenneth Henshall
8) Japanese the Manga Way
9) Read Real Japanese (Kind of a goal post, to be able to read this!)

nest0r Wrote:Luckily, Japanese is a very visual/spatial written language, and much of the spoken communication occurs nonverbally, with more emphasis on tacit situational context than English. ^_^

I am also a fan of the aural element in SRSing as an extra mental 'hook' for memorization. However, just as non-deaf Japanese users make use of 空書 (writing the kanji in the air/or their palms to summon the muscle memory of strokes), from what I've read users of JSL (Japanese Sign Language) also use '指文字' (See here for an example picture of つ), finger-spelling, which might help replace the audio with something spatial/physical. Edit: In addition to writing during reps/reviews, I mean. (Or at least when first learning something, and if during the SRS reps you're feeling fuzzy on things.)

I noticed, and so far I seem to be able to pick up the Kanji pretty quickly, honestly what I've been doing is reading one "Unit/Chapter", writing it out a few time, go do something else, come back, work on recall and reconization(Spell?) in Anki with it, then go to bed. In the morning I then notice that they seem more cemented into my memory. And I noticed that the stories seems to fade rather quickly which I'm not sure if that is a normal thing or not which has me concerned because I'm only at the "275/6" Kanji fence post so far... But what I've been able to remember so far I can almost recall without needing to use the story, but there are still some "tough" ones such as "Cape" Aka Cape Strange, that I still need to use a story to recall.

But anyway I would LOVE to learn how to sign JSL, however my primary concern would be access to raw materials, and having someone to actually communicate with, so honest thoughts on *this* would be that it would be the most beneficial for me to get to the point where I can Write and Read basic/average level of Japanese before I embark onto learning the JSL. Otherwise I'm concerned that I could get it tangled up with my own "SEE (Sign Exact English) & ASL (American Sign Language)" so I think it might be wiser to beef up on the Japanese first so I can have a more solid foundation to base the JSL off top of.

nest0r Wrote:Also, from what that Wikipedia article says, there's a 'subgenre' of programs with JSL in them, so perhaps it might be useful to look into those. Since I doubt those have many English subtitles, that might be something to look into later, though.

At any rate, this is something I've thought about a little bit in a different context (my thread 'how the brain processes kanji' wherein I stress that written Japanese is less phonocentric than alphabet-based languages), so I hope I was able to spin those speculations into something that addressed some of your concerns.

Thanks One thing I honestly love so far is the "lack" of weird rules, I've always struggled with "Phonocenteric" part of the English language, for example a ton of words that hearing people would have trouble spelling, (to, two, too) I would not have any issue, however I would have to put up with stubborn teachers who still tried to force me to deal with Phonocenteric stuff, which was just absurd to me.

nest0r Wrote:Edit: Another thing to keep in mind is that many folks studying written Japanese are focusing more on meaning/grammar than knowing the pronunciation of kanji. The book 'Reading Japan Cool' talks about the prevalence of 'visually decoding' as young Japanese develop their literacy, recognizing those iconic kanji and skimming from word to word like that. I used to be against this for second-language learners, but since then my perspective has changed and I think it's great to embrace that less phonocentric aspect of a written language.

I mean honestly I can understanding needing to be able to speak and hear the language, but its honestly not a factor with me so I think I can focus purely on the meaning/grammar of the language itself I'm already an rather fast reader of English, and I learned more about the English language from the books that I've read growing up than from the crappy English courses offered at my school. The last time I've counted, I had over 600+ Novels and my parents, brother, sister, and myself put together probably have over 3,000 books in my parent's house.

[Edit:] Sorry about the sheer volume of my text, but I'm just kind of excited that I've been getting a generally positive response so far, I was really concerned that people would scoff at the fact that I was deaf and tell me that I shouldn't bother learning Japanese or something. So I was kind of nervous about reaching out. The last time I tried to reach out to some other people at my University, they more or less scoffed and discouraged my studying of Japanese, and didn't really help, even though one of them were deaf and knew "some (aka took 2-3 classes)" of Japanese... And this is my second attempt at starting to pick up on the language since that "last" attempt

I think that the Chinese written language learned alone might actually be easier, as you would not have to learn the phonetic script that corresponded to the characters. However, you WOULD have to learn more characters...

There are some good books in Japanese, though, so I think you'll like it. That's what really matters. The language that you enjoy more is always easier.

Maybe you could learn 'em both and be some kind of awesome polyglot.

nest0r Wrote:Luckily, Japanese is a very visual/spatial written language, and much of the spoken communication occurs nonverbally, with more emphasis on tacit situational context than English.

In my experience, Japanese communication is no more or less "nonverbal" than English. Of course Japanese is a pro-drop language but so are some Western languages.I'm just not sure that there's anything inherent in the Japanese language that would make it easier for a deaf person to learn, if that's what you're trying to say.

(Idon't think there is any evidence for the idea that a deaf person would have an advantage over a hearing person in studying Japanese because of the presence of kanji.)

(Of course, a major question is whether you are "prelingually deaf" or not.)

yudantaiteki Wrote:Of course Japanese is a pro-drop language but so are some Western languages.

Forget pronouns! In the dialect of English I speak, you drop all but one or two words and replace them with"like," "dude," "n'," "gots ta," etc.

Pronouns are only optional about half of the time, though.


Here is a conversation I had this morning:
"Oi! lil' dude! goin´ somewhere? Gots ta stay. like, bus." (waves arms wildly)
"meh. I got time. like, ya know...(...) anyway, thatsa sick car! "
"Like, totally. Think it's for sale?"
"naaaahh. like, there´s no sign or nuttin'."¨
"awww, duuude."
"hey, time to go. Wanna come, or are ya just gonna sit there"


It gets far worse when I´m talking to my family, though. "gots" is always prefered over "have," and all verbs are in the third person.

... and I have no idea why I'm writting this.

Carry on.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Luckily, Japanese is a very visual/spatial written language, and much of the spoken communication occurs nonverbally, with more emphasis on tacit situational context than English.

In my experience, Japanese communication is no more or less "nonverbal" than English. Of course Japanese is a pro-drop language but so are some Western languages.I'm just not sure that there's anything inherent in the Japanese language that would make it easier for a deaf person to learn, if that's what you're trying to say.

(Of course, a major question is whether you are "prelingually deaf" or not.)

I think it's definitely more 'high context', both spoken and even written, than English. But spoken in particular, I think there is less explicit verbal information to process, and more use of body language, facial expressions, and knowledge of situational context to utilize as a learning resource where sound is de-emphasized.

Likewise what I said before about 'visually decoding' referred to focusing on using kanji as visual icons for meaning, not to the exclusion of furigana/okurigana/etc., but in addition to it, and being able, while developing one's literacy, to glean more understanding and appreciation of the written content than one could with an alphabetic language. I already know that you're phonocentric and have a narrow view of literacy, and don't really respect your opinion in that regard, nor do I feel we could gain much from repeating an argument, so, let's agree to disagree, if you like.

Edit: And there is evidence that memory for logographic systems/kanji is increased amongst deaf users, I already posted some links to that in the HBPK thread, but feel free to Google it. I'm not sure where you get the 'better than non-deaf' comparison, what a silly relation to make. I'm speaking of making use of logographic multiliteracy to offset the missing aural component when learning a non-alphabetic language. Was there some other purpose to your posting in this thread? Gosh, I thought I offered good advice that others could disagree with indirectly while posting their own tips, but with these selfish tangential responses I somehow generated, perhaps I shouldn't have bothered. I feel bad for pharaun having to read through this thread and only getting nonsense replies to someone else.

@pharaun: re: The scoffers. Definitely ignore those people. ;p I think you'll find most of the people here are open minded and feel like we can pretty much learn anything we want. Do let me know if you look further into yubimoji (指文字)/fingerspelling) as a general tool--to replace the 'audio' with the 'physical'/gestural in the same way that the handwriting of kanji gets converted into the ability to trace the strokes in your mind whenever you want and can help you memorize. That's only if you have trouble with the kana to 'articulate' as you read, though. Plus it's easy for me to suggest it, but I guess it could be a lot of trouble to mix into everything else, hehe.


http://haruru1113.hp.infoseek.co.jp/syuw...imoji.html <-- Drawings. I think there are probably many similar pages. I turned this one up with a search for 'yubimoji'.

http://www.geocities.jp/tenkara2005/yubimoji.html - Pictures.

Edit: To put it another way pharaun, I'm speaking of using yubimoji not as a communication tool but as a memorization tool--it wouldn't even have to be exactly the same gestures. Just something gestural to internalize, replacing the audio-->subvocalization internalization process, and kind of paralleling the similar sensorimotor stuff we use for kanji.

IceCream Wrote:yudan: the major advantage is simply not needing to learn the readings, i think...

That was my point with Chinese. With Japanese, you DO still have to learn the readings.

EDIT: Hence the 指文字 (maybe)

IceCream Wrote:why would you still need to learn the readings? even if just for typing, there are other, more logical input systems available, right?

nestor: i don't think theres any significant differences in the amount of body language, or other nonverbal communication, it's just different. certainly, i think japanese men are often a lot more unreadable than british men, or the cues are just more subtle and i don't know them all yet...

@IceCream: Really, you don't think that spoken Japanese is less explicit than English? That there's more use of context than verbage to carry information? I'm surprised anyone would even argue with me about this. Perhaps I just have bizarre views on the world? ;p

For my use of 'high context', while I think such models are prone to oversimplification, I think this is relatively accurate, especially for the point I was making about speech: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_context_culture

Readings are useful as intraword parsing cues. Note I say useful rather than necessary.

Edit: The @name thing is kind of redundant with quotes, eh? hehe

IceCream Wrote:why would you still need to learn the readings?

Uhh, stuff is written in hiragana. And katakana. And stuff that's ususally kana-ised is often put into kanji. And katakana is used for emphasis. And other stuff.

Don't tell me you've never had to read kana!

For example, I got 46,700,000 google hits for 面白い　and 16,500,000 for おもしろい. You have to know both.

EDIT: 653,000 results for "オモシロイ".

IceCream Wrote:yeah, spoken Japanese is, in general, less specific than english.

but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is more context in itself, it just means that people make more use of the context that's already there.

A moot point. Speaking for the purposes of communicative information presented in a film or show (fictive narrative), it means relatively, there will be a greater proportion of context carrying the speech that doesn't require as many words/sounds to decipher (in the sense I used in my first comment on the topic). I specified for films/dorama, but I think this also applies to 'real life', though the context/prior knowledge/etc. is more dependent upon the parties involved than the artifice of the author/director.

Anyway, my comments were opinions presented to the OP, I think I shouldn't engage with my usual antagonists here, lol (I use the word in the fondest way possible), so as not to distract from the purpose of the thread. Please continue posting your own thoughts and tips. <3

＠icecream

I got 3,100,000 hits for "えいぎょう," 154,000 hits for "営業," and 69,000 hits for "エイギョウ"

Some of the hiragana results might be bits of other words next to each other, though.

(EDIT: I was looking through the results, and I really don't know, but まくらえいぎょう looks funny to me. The kanji 枕営業 made it less funny... I was thinking 枕絵偉業 :o)

Anyway, you still have to know both. There are few exceptions to this, I think.

IceCream Wrote:man, that totally sucks. sorry!! i wasn't thinking at all about that. (i think it includes all 営業 when you search えいぎょう too, btw)

@nest0r: its not a moot point. we were talking about body language. Film and drama visual cues are a different thing, and more dependant on the skill of the director than the culture anyway. Its equally possible to have a very highly context dependent film in english as it is in japanese.

You were talking about body language. I was talking about numerous factors, emphasis on situational context. And it's not 'more dependent' (not sure why you even think that) on the director, it's informed by, made for, the culture, and involves the actors and writers and set designers and composers, etc as well. It's equally possible, hence the word 'relative' which is also stressed in the Wikipedia article on high context cultures, but not equally likely, hence the general definition of high context vs. low context. Anyway, once again I've trapped myself into these pointless tangents and immediate replies. Let us devote our energies elsewhere. I can honestly say that every argument I've had with my hair and a comb in the mirror has been more productive than my back and forths with you and yudantaiteki on this forum.

Yes, Google has recently gotten smarter at Japanese. It converters kana to kanji and vice versa (and katakana to hiragana and back), so it is hard to do a google fight now.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Yes, Google has recently gotten smarter at Japanese. It converters kana to kanji and vice versa (and katakana to hiragana and back), so it is hard to do a google fight now.

Glad you keep posting, Jarvik. I'm deathly afraid of taking second place on the forum for the most posts.

IceCream Wrote:(i think it includes all 営業 when you search えいぎょう too, btw)

hereticalrants Wrote:46,700,000 google hits for 面白い　and 16,500,000 for おもしろい.

Quote:Yes, Google has recently gotten smarter at Japanese. It converters kana to kanji and vice versa (and katakana to hiragana and back), so it is hard to do a google fight now.

Wouldn't I get more results for the kana then?

I'm also getting entirely different results for each.

It's never 100% conversion for some reason, but my results are a lot closer than yours (I think you forgot to use quotes?). Using quotes disables the smart conversions, but leaving them out gives you lots of garbage results because it treats each kanji like a different word.

"面白い" の検索結果 約 19,800,000
"おもしろい" の検索結果 約 16,300,000

It also does romaji in the suggested searches.

Nestor: Your post count is higher than mine if you account for membership length (and the fact that you post using multiple accounts), making you the bigger loser

Jarvik7 Wrote:(I think you forgot to use quotes?)

I used quotes.

My results are entirely different, too. Compare the first image result for　面白い

with the first result for おもしろい

It doesn't really matter, anyway. I was just pointing out that both kana and kanji are used for many words.

We also may have discovered that Google doesn't work the same way for me as it does for you, which is odd.

@IceCream: Pretty much. If it helps to find me less irksome, be sure not to make the mistake of thinking of me as a person. I'm just an abstract construct with no real identification with their own accumulated posts, except when reflecting from a specific thought on past posts (such as wasted time in previous interactions). ;p

@Jarvik: Oh yeah? Well... my dad could beat up your dad in a fight.

Your dad has more forum posts than my dad.

To the original poster: Have you watched the drama "Orange Days"? It's about a deaf girl, has lots of sign language, talks about lip-reading and stuff, and I think it might be a generally useful (and very interesting) thing to watch.
You can probably get along pretty well in Japan without needing to speak, even easier than in America maybe. Almost all restaurants have picture menus, and if you go to a McDonald's or something, when they see you are a foreigner, they will probably have it ready for you to point on

I think it might be worthwhile trying to learn how to speak Japanese. You mentioned that you learned how to speak some english words. By comparison, Japanese is much simpler and straightforward, as for the most part, the characters don't change sound like they do in English, so once you learn the sound each hiragana character makes, you can read and speak any words that use that character.

As for studying, just focus heavily on reading. Learn grammar and some vocab, then hit up some easy manga like よつばと！
If you have a good electronic dictionary, that can help you with signs and stuff when you actually go to Japan.

nest0r Wrote:Likewise what I said before about 'visually decoding' referred to focusing on using kanji as visual icons for meaning, not to the exclusion of furigana/okurigana/etc., but in addition to it, and being able, while developing one's literacy, to glean more understanding and appreciation of the written content than one could with an alphabetic language. I already know that you're phonocentric and have a narrow view of literacy, and don't really respect your opinion in that regard, nor do I feel we could gain much from repeating an argument, so, let's agree to disagree, if you like.

Edit: And there is evidence that memory for logographic systems/kanji is increased amongst deaf users, I already posted some links to that in the HBPK thread, but feel free to Google it. I'm not sure where you get the 'better than non-deaf' comparison, what a silly relation to make. I'm speaking of making use of logographic multiliteracy to offset the missing aural component when learning a non-alphabetic language. Was there some other purpose to your posting in this thread? Gosh, I thought I offered good advice that others could disagree with indirectly while posting their own tips, but with these selfish tangential responses I somehow generated, perhaps I shouldn't have bothered. I feel bad for pharaun having to read through this thread and only getting nonsense replies to someone else.

@pharaun: re: The scoffers. Definitely ignore those people. ;p I think you'll find most of the people here are open minded and feel like we can pretty much learn anything we want. Do let me know if you look further into yubimoji (指文字)/fingerspelling) as a general tool--to replace the 'audio' with the 'physical'/gestural in the same way that the handwriting of kanji gets converted into the ability to trace the strokes in your mind whenever you want and can help you memorize. That's only if you have trouble with the kana to 'articulate' as you read, though. Plus it's easy for me to suggest it, but I guess it could be a lot of trouble to mix into everything else, hehe.

Yudanteki didn't even say anything negative he just said that he thought a deaf person may not have any particular advantage over a non-deaf person in learning how to read, just because of Kanji. In fact he wasn't even sure of the point he was making.

You're going off at him for no particular reason :S? Ease up


But yes welcome to the forums dude! I also recommend Orange Days, It's probably my favourite drama out there. I wanted to learn sign language after watching it even~