What do you guys do when learning Japanese names and places. This is something I always have trouble with when reading. Any good tips?

I can't think of any tips per se, but I do have a special deck for people's names. I add new cards to it every now and then, with names picked from every medias under the sun ... it's a pretty fun way to practice unusual readings to boot.

jordan3311 Wrote:What do you guys do when learning Japanese names and places. This is something I always have trouble with when reading. Any good tips?

Here are a few things I do.

LOOKUP

Place names are easy to look up in Wikipedia, and always have the pronunciation of the name in hiragana. Names of famous people can also be looked up in Wikipedia.

For other people's names (authors, news eyewitnesses, characters in stories, suspects in crimes, etc.) that don't have accompanying furigana or parallel audio, it can be harder, as a given last or first name can have various pronunciations. For these, I look up either first or surname in Wikipedia, and then look at the various results for trends - i.e., how is that name *usually* pronounced?

LEARNING

I plug most place names and a fair number of people's names as vocab words into Skritter. When i started this, I focused primairly on place names - e.g., the 都道府県、city names, the wards of Tokyo. Now I'm adding in surnames and first names that primairly get a lot of results when I search Wikipedia, and that feel more or less "common". I know there are decks that provide you lists of "common" names, but I find names and places a lot harder to learn if I'm not running into them in the wild.

yeah names are a bitch to learn in short. i think the best way to remember it is to first hear it and then find out it's made up of x kanji. if you see the kanji with the reading and try to remember which readings are used and what onten it'll get complicated. there's also the option of not learning japanese names or just learning the top 100 or 200 (whatever the number is... there is a deck online that's shared)because there's so many out there it's almost never-ending and not every japanese person hows to read every japanese person's name. HEARING the name is really helpful for remembering it... There's only so much drilling can do especially without audio.

I personally go for the "not" learning japanese names (especially people's names) i have other stuff to do and remember. Like this sometimes happens when I read japanese novels. so, the author usually puts furigana on the first instance so usually 10 pages later i don't how to read the person's name but i know the kanji so i know which character is doing what and whatnot (I forgot and i don't waste my time flipping back to the earlier page when the character entered the story. I see no point doing that). I'm just not proactive about learning names. I just don't care personally....