Okay I have all the kana memorized and quite a bit I kanji and thought maybe in ready to read some manga now. But I'm really confused because a lot of the manga is in kana. Actually 80% I in hiragana 15% is in katakana and only 5% kanji. So how do I read it? I have looked up kana vocab but to no avail. I have tried putting the kana into a jap to eng dictionary but what comes out doesn't make sense. How do you read just straight kana, how do I know where one word or sentence ends and another begins? Please help!!

You can't just go straight from kana to reading. You have to study the grammar; it's the only way you can know where one word ends and another begins if it's just kana. Also dictionaries only have the base forms of words, so if you don't know the conjugations you won't know what to look up. e.g. if you see かいて you need to look up かく, or if it's たかくて you look up たかい. A lot of people use Tae Kim because it's free; there are other resources as well.

Thank you so much I bought the manga university collection and memorized it all and at the end it was like now your ready to read so i tried and failed lol and when I tried looking up vocab and stuff every website kept saying that all you need to know. Is the kana and then you can read it but obviously I need to know what hey mean when they are put together. I started to think I was just crazy or missing something that everyone else seemed to understand. Thank you

Kmmoore Wrote:Okay I have all the kana memorized and quite a bit I kanji and thought maybe in ready to read some manga now.

You know the Latin alphabet too. Did you also assume you can read Latin?

yudantaiteki Wrote:Also dictionaries only have the base forms of words, so if you don't know the conjugations you won't know what to look up. e.g. if you see かいて you need to look up かく, or if it's たかくて you look up たかい. A lot of people use Tae Kim because it's free; there are other resources as well.

One of the good things about 'Japanese' on the iPhone is that it indexes all conjugations, so it's possible to search for かいて and the like. It's something I take for granted, but it could actually be a very useful feature for beginners.

You don't need to memorise conjugations if you download rikaichan https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox...rikaichan/

If you're having trouble working out where the word boundaries are then just type the whole sentence in to a textbox and highlight different sections to see what makes sense. Your best off trying to read something that also has a translation available so you can use that to help you understand the Japanese. I'd also recommend that don't dwell too much on the bits that you can't understand. Focus on the basic stuff and use the translation to make sure you can understand the story.

You might also consider finding something you want to read that's already in text format so you can skip the transcribing phase.

Javizy Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Also dictionaries only have the base forms of words, so if you don't know the conjugations you won't know what to look up. e.g. if you see かいて you need to look up かく, or if it's たかくて you look up たかい. A lot of people use Tae Kim because it's free; there are other resources as well.

One of the good things about 'Japanese' on the iPhone is that it indexes all conjugations, so it's possible to search for かいて and the like. It's something I take for granted, but it could actually be a very useful feature for beginners.

True, but there's a limit to that -- something like 手紙を書こうとしたら or some other phrase with hiragana particles and auxiliaries piled up on top of each other will probably defeat that as well. And that just conjugations, it's not even getting into overall sentence structure.

I've seen people claim before that they went straight from learning kana to reading native materials, but I've never been able to get a clear answer out of them exactly how they did it.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I've seen people claim before that they went straight from learning kana to reading native materials, but I've never been able to get a clear answer out of them exactly how they did it.

I would imagine they did it somewhat like I did. You open the book or manga to the first page, find the first sentence, and spend hours breaking it into enough parts until you get some sort of meaning out of it. With a bit of practice you can get to the point where you trade complete comprehension for speed and of course over longer periods of time this trade off gives you an increasing amount of comprehension for the same speed.

I think you have to figure out what you have patience for. I had absolutely no patience for any of the materials made for Japanese learners and I had a massive army of people willing to answer my dumb questions.

The nice thing about the whole process is you don't have to deal with an SRS or repping or anything like that. The vocabulary and grammar that you need to know naturally repeat themselves over and over.

Ultimately I don't think many people can learn this way but for me I cannot understand how people can endlessly rep SRS decks. I guess we all understand there is a certain level of masochism needed to learn Japanese but we all have to figure out which version of pain is actually pleasurable for us. It certainly isn't universal.

Okay so I spent all day yesterday looking over vocab and particles and conjunctions. The Suffixes added on to adjectives, verbs, ect to tell you whether it's present, past, positive, negative and so on. Tried to read it again and I think I was doing pretty good until this ものだから it was in a text box all together it read あまりにまぶしいものだから I know that あまりに means too much or excessive and まぶしい means dazzling or radiant but the only thing I can come up with for the rest is therefore or so which doesn't make much sense

tokyostyle Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:I've seen people claim before that they went straight from learning kana to reading native materials, but I've never been able to get a clear answer out of them exactly how they did it.

I would imagine they did it somewhat like I did. You open the book or manga to the first page, find the first sentence, and spend hours breaking it into enough parts until you get some sort of meaning out of it. With a bit of practice you can get to the point where you trade complete comprehension for speed and of course over longer periods of time this trade off gives you an increasing amount of comprehension for the same speed.

I tried this and literally could not do it. Now this was back in the olden days before all the computer tools people have now (I didn't even know about JWPce). But I was spending 15 minutes on one manga word bubble and maybe understanding 60% of it. I still remember one of the early bubbles was 誰にも邪魔はさせない。 I hadn't learned passives yet so I didn't know if this was は　させない or はさせない. My dictionary didn't have either はさせる or させる so I was lost. I had no idea what the にも did. I came up with "Who dares to oppose us?" for the "translation". To me it was a complete waste of time and I gave up pretty quickly.

Kmmoore Wrote:Okay I have all the kana memorized and quite a bit I kanji and thought maybe in ready to read some manga now. But I'm really confused because a lot of the manga is in kana. Actually 80% I in hiragana 15% is in katakana and only 5% kanji. So how do I read it? I have looked up kana vocab but to no avail. I have tried putting the kana into a jap to eng dictionary but what comes out doesn't make sense. How do you read just straight kana, how do I know where one word or sentence ends and another begins? Please help!!

Bro, I think you need to learn how to crawl, walk, then run. Learning Japanese straight from manga seems like a big mistake to me, not only because it's material designed to be read by people who already have a fairly firm grasp of the language and culture (i.e. young Japanese natives), it uses relaxed and sometimes ungrammatical Japanese in a sort of conversational style, much like you would see in English comic books.

I say use a standard beginner Japanese textbook or language learning program (then later intermediate and advanced programs or books) in congruence with your attempt to read manga so you have a basic "foundation" to attach your newly learned manga vocab and sentence structure to. The goal here is to familiarize yourself with good, or at least standard, grammatical and sentence structure so you'll be able to recognize the "correctly incorrect" language found in entertainment media.

I should say that I'm not trying to say that beginners should stay away from native materials. But I don't want people to be discouraged by the initial difficulty of native materials either. If someone had come to me in winter 1999 while I was sweating through those manga speech bubbles and said "This is the way you have to do it to learn, forget textbooks" I wouldn't be here today, I would have given up long ago.

I started reading manga when I had just barely learned the kana and bought a slim little grammar book so I could at least (more or less) parse out where the particles were.

I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. I think it worked for me, to the extent that it did, because:

-I was doing "Minna no Nihongo" and every Japanese textbook I could find at the public library at the same time, so I was at least getting some grounding in the basics of sentence structure

-It was a REALLY simple manga

-I was totally OK with only being able to parse half of it; I expected it to be way over my head. I was still picking up SOME vocabulary, and I was getting good practice with reading hiragana and katakana, so for a suburban teenage kid in the days before BitTorrent that was about as good as I could hope for

-I think there is a great deal of variation from one person to another on whether they find enjoyment in the sort of laborious decoding that reading way above your level requires; I used to write notes to myself in ROT13 when I was a little kid, it was just something I enjoyed. I guess I'm just that kind of person.

As I've learned more about language learning, I've become more and more convinced that learners need material that is entertaining, and relevant, and not "textbook-ish," and really simple. There's been progress done in making those kinds of materials for Japanese, like the Tadoku graded readers series. But a lot of the time, there's no such materials, and you've got to either find the motivation to use materials written at your level even when they're a little boring and textbook-y, or find the motivation to use materials that are still too hard for you.

eagles980 Wrote:

Kmmoore Wrote:Okay I have all the kana memorized and quite a bit I kanji and thought maybe in ready to read some manga now. But I'm really confused because a lot of the manga is in kana. Actually 80% I in hiragana 15% is in katakana and only 5% kanji. So how do I read it? I have looked up kana vocab but to no avail. I have tried putting the kana into a jap to eng dictionary but what comes out doesn't make sense. How do you read just straight kana, how do I know where one word or sentence ends and another begins? Please help!!

Bro, I think you need to learn how to crawl, walk, then run. Learning Japanese straight from manga seems like a big mistake to me, not only because it's material designed to be read by people who already have a fairly firm grasp of the language and culture (i.e. young Japanese natives), it uses relaxed and sometimes ungrammatical Japanese in a sort of conversational style, much like you would see in English comic books.

I say use a standard beginner Japanese textbook or language learning program (then later intermediate and advanced programs or books) in congruence with your attempt to read manga so you have a basic "foundation" to attach your newly learned manga vocab and sentence structure to. The goal here is to familiarize yourself with good, or at least standard, grammatical and sentence structure so you'll be able to recognize the "correctly incorrect" language found in entertainment media.

While using textbooks certainly helps, they are not necessary. If he loves manga and he wishes to learn Japanese by reading them, he can. Textbooks are for the people who like and want them, not for everybody.

Also, just because you go through a few textbooks, it doesn't give you the ability to recognize incorrect grammar in Japanese media. And not reading them doesn't prevent you from gaining that ability. I have never studied English grammar, and can tell you what's correct and what isn't just fine.

eagles980 Wrote:

Kmmoore Wrote:Okay I have all the kana memorized and quite a bit I kanji and thought maybe in ready to read some manga now. But I'm really confused because a lot of the manga is in kana. Actually 80% I in hiragana 15% is in katakana and only 5% kanji. So how do I read it? I have looked up kana vocab but to no avail. I have tried putting the kana into a jap to eng dictionary but what comes out doesn't make sense. How do you read just straight kana, how do I know where one word or sentence ends and another begins? Please help!!

Bro, I think you need to learn how to crawl, walk, then run. Learning Japanese straight from manga seems like a big mistake to me, not only because it's material designed to be read by people who already have a fairly firm grasp of the language and culture (i.e. young Japanese natives), it uses relaxed and sometimes ungrammatical Japanese in a sort of conversational style, much like you would see in English comic books.

I say use a standard beginner Japanese textbook or language learning program (then later intermediate and advanced programs or books) in congruence with your attempt to read manga so you have a basic "foundation" to attach your newly learned manga vocab and sentence structure to. The goal here is to familiarize yourself with good, or at least standard, grammatical and sentence structure so you'll be able to recognize the "correctly incorrect" language found in entertainment media.

Okay first before the he and bro thing goes any further just want to give everyone a hed up that I'm a 21 year old woman not a guy lol. And I think everyone got the wrong impression. I'm also learning japanese as I go using textfugu and other online resources. I have had the Tae kim app for about a month and I knew about particles and such. My problem was that I couldn't find anything that just showed me the grammar/vocab. Like actual words put together using hiragana. That is until I found some old papers I had printed out in high school when I originally tried to learn Japanese. They were from a site that is still up and running (thank god) http://www.learn-japanese.info/. And yes when I wrote my original post I was frustrated and didn't feel like writing a whole lot so i summed it up and it may have come off like I assumed Japanese was such an easy language that I could breeze through. And part of it also was when I bought the manga universities book I was mislead and took them too literally. Not to say they aren't good for learning and memorizing the kana and kanji and for reference because they are. OKay anyway to sum up my little typal wave (it's a pun lol) I think with the website fom back in the day and the new web textbook textfugu I'm well on my way to reading this manga that I so desperately want to read. Though by the time that I finally finish the dern thing I'm sure it will be out in an english scanlation.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

eagles980 Wrote:

Kmmoore Wrote:Okay I have all the kana memorized and quite a bit I kanji and thought maybe in ready to read some manga now. But I'm really confused because a lot of the manga is in kana. Actually 80% I in hiragana 15% is in katakana and only 5% kanji. So how do I read it? I have looked up kana vocab but to no avail. I have tried putting the kana into a jap to eng dictionary but what comes out doesn't make sense. How do you read just straight kana, how do I know where one word or sentence ends and another begins? Please help!!

Bro, I think you need to learn how to crawl, walk, then run. Learning Japanese straight from manga seems like a big mistake to me, not only because it's material designed to be read by people who already have a fairly firm grasp of the language and culture (i.e. young Japanese natives), it uses relaxed and sometimes ungrammatical Japanese in a sort of conversational style, much like you would see in English comic books.

I say use a standard beginner Japanese textbook or language learning program (then later intermediate and advanced programs or books) in congruence with your attempt to read manga so you have a basic "foundation" to attach your newly learned manga vocab and sentence structure to. The goal here is to familiarize yourself with good, or at least standard, grammatical and sentence structure so you'll be able to recognize the "correctly incorrect" language found in entertainment media.

While using textbooks certainly helps, they are not necessary. If he loves manga and he wishes to learn Japanese by reading them, he can. Textbooks are for the people who like and want them, not for everybody.

Also, just because you go through a few textbooks, it doesn't give you the ability to recognize incorrect grammar in Japanese media. And not reading them doesn't prevent you from gaining that ability. I have never studied English grammar, and can tell you what's correct and what isn't just fine.

I am a female but thank you for your encouraging words. I don't want people to think I'm just learning because of this manga. Because I'm not i have been wanting to learn Japanese since I was in high school. The manga is just what finally motivated me to do it. So thank you for your kindness. I am also using some textbooks but when I was in high school learning spanish our teacher made us read these short book made for kids in the early years of middle school and doing that really helped me to learn and kind of submerged myself in it. So I was hoping that trying to read some manga in Japanese would do the same thing. I mean let's face it textbook are boring. But luckily I found one that really helps with that even though it can sometimes be a little long winded. http://www.textfugu.com/

tokyostyle Wrote:I would imagine they did it somewhat like I did. You open the book or manga to the first page, find the first sentence, and spend hours breaking it into enough parts until you get some sort of meaning out of it. With a bit of practice you can get to the point where you trade complete comprehension for speed and of course over longer periods of time this trade off gives you an increasing amount of comprehension for the same speed.

This is how I did it too. I eventually gave up attempting to have 100% comprehension. It's odd to expect 100% comprehension when you know less than 50% of the words in a sentence. Even if you are capable of finding grammatical explanations, it's questionable whether it's worth the time spent. A lot of people will reccommend a two pronged approach where you're studying grammar on the side, but even this is a bit of a crap-shoot because much of the time the grammar you encounter in wild is either completely different or unrecognizable as what you've been exposed to in textbooks. When you first start reading, meaning and grammar can be very opaque but a big part of this comes from simply not knowing the words. If you focus on speed and learning a lot of vocabulary the meaning of sentences and how the grammar is operating will start becoming a lot more transparent. If you know the words and have some understanding of the context you can essentially guess the meaning of the whole and your accuracy improves over time. This is how kids learn to parse sentences I think. They just listen a lot and guess meaning based on recognizable vocabulary and context, and out of that process an intuitive understanding of grammar emerges over time.

I should mention though that for beginners, something like taekim is good to get a basic understanding that things like particles and conjugation exist. Also I think manga is not ideal for figuring out grammar because there's so much slang and word shortening that is opaque to beginners. For beginners things like children's novels are really good because sentences are short, plot-lines are simple, sentence structure tends to be relatively simple and words are correctly spelled etc. Also webpages (news) etc are really good because you can use popup dictionaries.

Stansfield123 Wrote:While using textbooks certainly helps, they are not necessary. If he loves manga and he wishes to learn Japanese by reading them, he can. Textbooks are for the people who like and want them, not for everybody.

Also, just because you go through a few textbooks, it doesn't give you the ability to recognize incorrect grammar in Japanese media. And not reading them doesn't prevent you from gaining that ability. I have never studied English grammar, and can tell you what's correct and what isn't just fine.

Well, I don't remember half the stuff I learned in grade school about superlatives, adjuncts, articles, etc., but I can recognize and use proper grammar fairly easily too. This shouldn't be surprising, though, seeing as I'm an English speaking native and all, but my point is that it takes a lot of exposure to correct grammar (forced English grammar lessons (!) and introductions to classic literature, for example) for one to be able to recognize and distinguish between incorrect and correct grammar. That helps out a great deal in the long term, I think.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying reading manga as a total beginner is wrong, but reading it exclusively as a means of learning Japanese (which I now realize OP isn't doing) is an easy road to frustration and a lack of motivation for a lot of people. I say people should broaden their horizons and read from a bunch of different sources.

Kmmoore Wrote:Okay first before the he and bro thing goes any further just want to give everyone a hed up that I'm a 21 year old woman not a guy lol.

Ah, my bad. I typically assume forums are nothing but sausage fests for some reason or another (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-...e-internet), heh. It's always good to have someone offer up a different perspective from a language learning standpoint, especially one from within my own age group. College kids, ASSEMBLE!

Quote:And I think everyone got the wrong impression. I'm also learning japanese as I go using textfugu and other online resources. I have had the Tae kim app for about a month and I knew about particles and such. My problem was that I couldn't find anything that just showed me the grammar/vocab. Like actual words put together using hiragana. OKay anyway to sum up my little typal wave (it's a pun lol) I think with the website fom back in the day and the new web textbook textfugu I'm well on my way to reading this manga that I so desperately want to read.

I'm a beginner like you and have had people tell me about the experiences that led to the greatest amount of success for them (so far, most of those ideas are working great for me too) and I just thought I'd share them with you because, like you said, you ended up getting frustrated. Thanks for clearing things up a bit in that regard. Just do what works best for you and keep at it.

Good luck!

Stansfield123 Wrote:While using textbooks certainly helps, they are not necessary. If he loves manga and he wishes to learn Japanese by reading them, he can.

How can you learn Japanese through manga without any textbook or grammar guide? I've seen people claim it's possible but they're always vague about the details.

Usually when I've pressed people about this they eventually say they did use a grammar guide or textbook but they said they "didn't study grammar" because to them that meant reading long technical English explanations or such.

Stansfield123 Wrote:While using textbooks certainly helps, they are not necessary. If he loves manga and he wishes to learn Japanese by reading them, he can. Textbooks are for the people who like and want them, not for everybody.

I'm not sure many people necessarily love reading textbooks. Likewise, instruction manuals rarely make for stimulating reading, but sometimes reading the relevant part of a manual for say, a computer program, can be more efficient than wading through random menus and dialogue boxes until you find the option you want. That doesn't mean you can't use the software until you exhaustively read the manual, but having it nearby to efficiently navigate trouble spots isn't a bad idea. Similarly, I wouldn't discourage a beginner from trying to read manga/watch TV/read books, etc., but I also wouldn't recommend forgoing resourses like textbooks and grammar dictionaries, just because they're not particularly exciting.

yudantaiteki Wrote:How can you learn Japanese through manga without any textbook or grammar guide? I've seen people claim it's possible but they're always vague about the details.

Usually when I've pressed people about this they eventually say they did use a grammar guide or textbook but they said they "didn't study grammar" because to them that meant reading long technical English explanations or such.

As somewhat of an example, I was really into J-pop for about 3 years before I formally began studying Japanese. By looking at lyrics sheets, etc., I actually was able to learn a bunch of the kana, and even a few words and kanji, but came away with no real understanding of grammar. Granted, this wasn't really a serious attempt to learn Japanese, but it was something I was really into and constantly exposed to, and yet, what I learned the first couple weeks using a textbook easily surpassed whatever I had picked up in the previous three years.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I tried this and literally could not do it. Now this was back in the olden days before all the computer tools people have now (I didn't even know about JWPce).

The very first time I attempted it was with a visual novel and a paper kanji dictionary and I did lookups with the SKIP method. That was years before I started taking studying seriously but it did lead to the feeling that I would never be able to learn without moving to Japan. (This was probably about 7 years before Khatzu started his blog. Back then most of the advice in English was that it was impossible to learn Japanese if you didn't grow up there.)

nadiatims Wrote:This is how I did it too. I eventually gave up attempting to have 100% comprehension. It's odd to expect 100% comprehension when you know less than 50% of the words in a sentence.

I switched up media a lot, visual novels were by far easier than anything else, and started SRS decks especially for grammar. Also once I actually went through RTK and started studying vocabulary from full sentences then things got a lot better. However I think the most important thing you learn from brute forcing books is that you can get a lot of enjoyment with just a small amount of comprehension and you learn that full comprehension is a long-term goal and not something you should force from every sentence you come across.

On one hand I wouldn't really recommend this method but I run into so many people here in Japan that have similar stories that there must be something to it. I think even Khatzu's original sentences method was probably devised from him brute forcing native books and manga.

In any case the choice was pretty easy for me. I was never going to spend the time study grammar and vocab decks but brute forcing books and dramas was fun for me.