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I am at the point where my grammar, kanji and my vocab brain bank is decent but if that fails, I have a electronic dictionary.
Textbooks teach the polite masu form, the formal humble and honorific, and the casual dictionary form. However, it is not casual enough. In anime and video games, I can understand most things I guess but it is the moderately casual speech that throws me off like slurring and contractions.
The most basic and common example is tabeteiru to tabeteru (eating). I learnt that a long time ago but it wasn't a textbook that told me about it. I had to find out myself, why was this gerund form missing an i?
Another example I haven't seen explained in textbooks are old men and ja in place of da. I think some textbooks mention the washi pronoun though.
More examples: kore wa to korya, sore wa to sorya, itai and sugoi to itee and sugee, janai to janee, sumimasen to suman, warui to warii.
If video game characters talk like textbooks, then I wouldn't need to make this topic. But they don't so how can I give myself a good casual speech foundation?
I am looking for something like the last few pages of Tae Kim's guide, except more material.
Edited: 2013-01-14, 4:53 pm
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You're looking for different textbooks or services that teach casual speech?
I would just rely less on all the formal teaching material. It's interesting because it usually seems to be the other way around - the slang and the casual stuff comes easy and the refined speech is the hard part, because one tends to just plug in to the kind of sources that use fun and cool Japanese, and care less about textbooks. Almost nobody probably studies the examples like you mentioned (aside from reviewing custom srs cards) because their use and function come so naturally through encountering them so much.
If your "unorganized-casual-learning vs. textbook-learning" situation is in reverse to that, I'd just do more of the opposite and relax.
...waiting for someone to come with the obscure, super-rare colloquial examples from uncommon dialects to counter argue
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The reality of Japanese casual speech and slang is that it is by dialect, and that in the media you basically get a version of Tokyo casual speech and a watered-down Osaka casual speech. I'm not sure either is really that close to reality (I know Kansai's casual speech much better than Tokyo's, and in real life it's a lot more varied than in the media). If you ever move to Japan you're going to have to learn to deal with the slang in that area, and there's no way to prepare for that as a learner.
(Actually, for learning Kansai Dialect I watched the show "Lovely Complex" a million times and read the manga. It is one of the few shows that is really done entirely in Kansai-Ben, and is pretty close to reality when it comes to how high schoolers speak in Osaka. It's a rarity. I grew to love it even though it's clearly written for a high-school-girl audience. The movie's awful though.)
I think though, that if you just go about understanding all standard Japanese grammar, and learning vocab, you can pick up the slang stuff overtime with exposure. I'm usually a much more formal learner, and I disagree strongly with people who say that you will figure grammar out just by exposure or will be able to output just through lots of input. But in my experience you can pick up slang and casual speech well enough with time, and there's no real other way to do it because the type of casual speech you'll encounter varies so much by what situations you find yourself in.
My advice is that if a sentence you see in a manga or something seems important or you're interested in it, but you need a better explanation of the slang, ask on the 'What's this word/phrase' thread. Over time you'll learn a lot.
My new girlfriend is from Ehime and her Japanese confuses me sometimes, since she only moved to Kansai a few months ago. So far I figured out that she sometimes ends sentences with けん (still not sure exactly what this means [edit: I guess this means that the sentence is giving a reason, similar to から--「暑いけんTシャツを着た。」]), and she uses 'とる' a lot instead of ている (so, for her 'I'm eating' is often たべとる). She has a weird way of asking questions that confuses me sometimes, but I can't figure out why yet. You just try your best and deal with it.
Edited: 2013-01-14, 9:52 pm
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the best book i`ve found that focuses on spoken communication is
Nameraka nihongo kaiwa published by ALC
it has various topics including contractions, particle ommissions and appropiate styles for different situations.
do note that there isn,t much english except in the chapter introductions so may not be suitable for beginners
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Are you looking for a resource to understand speech forms in anime/video games, or are you looking for casual speech forms for you to actually use?
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I'm bumping this thread because forumers here have recently been complaining about causal/colloquial speech in manga like Naruto and One Piece being hard to decipher because they don't get taught in conventional textbooks.
Apparently, you can "magically" understand these types of causal speech/grammar through repeated exposure. I'm more inclined to disagree: you must have been made aware of its existence beforehand or it must be taught after you see it.
Argue away and/or stay on topic and suggest more learning resources.
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Japanese the Manga Way had a slightly higher than average amount of phrases it talked about with very casual speech/slang (at least compared the to textbooks I first started with). It still didn't have as much, but it helped clear a few phrases up that I wasnt clear about
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Tbh casual speech is hard not only because some grammar structures get shortened but because there seems to be a lot more ambiguity in an already ambiguous language. More often than not I "get to" parse text that has very little information in it on the first sight, plus the little information there is can't be directly associated with English words. What doesn't make it any easier is that the few sounds Japanese has are used in so many situations with totally different meanings (not only depending on the words themselves, but the context surrounding it). You remove a syllable or add one and the phrase means something else (of course it's all in hiragana). This is a problem in "normal" Japanese too but there little to no grammar is omitted and the sentences are usually longer with more information in them.
It is honestly the hardest part of understanding the language for me. I'll look up some examples one of these days to show what I mean.
Edited: 2014-06-02, 4:48 am
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I think manga is your best bet. I remember picking up common, "standard" contractions from Doraemon, like 〜とく、〜てんの、〜たげる、〜てく, 〜けりゃ、こった etc relatively naturally. You can read at your own pace and have a lot of context to help you. Detroit Metal City is probably the most vulgar, slang-filled series I've read.
You really need to get used to deciphering strange contractions if you read manga. Often characters are given whacky speaking styles or use dialects for effect. Try Black Jack for an extreme example.
There's little replacement for a friend or two of a similar age and personality though. Attempting to use slang without much familiarity with it can be awkward, but after hearing certain phrases in specific situations I feel like I can do it naturally. A substitute might be a chatty variety show or podcast where people are just being themselves.
