Hashiriya Wrote:i know at UGA they mostly do the genki 1 & 2 books and then the intermediate book after that...

Ryuujin27 Wrote:Yeah, we skip that intermediate book completely. It's like they just except us to know it somehow. Fortunately, I did self study and I do know a lot of it, but many students in my class don't. And if you're going to follow an acceptable curriculum, how can you just jump levels like that? I think it's pretty stupid. But that's mostly because I hate the book.

Just out of interest as I haven't finished the intermediate book yet, what would be a good textbook to advance to after an integrated approach to Japanese? I haven't looked into it much but I'd like to check out some recommendations in advance. Thanks!

kazelee Wrote:

phoenix Wrote:Wow this all sounds pretty horrible. Over here in the Netherlands, I think you're expected to know all the jouyou kanji by the end of your first year. And in the third (and last) year it is mandatory to stay in Japan for like a half a year. Not a single person who finishes his third year won't be fluent in Japanese.

本当?

That's great. I wonder how many people pass that course though?

I think the first year they have like 60% dropping out. Same goes for Chinese.

Found out I was wrong about the kanji, they indeed continue to learn Kanji in the second year. They also start reading Old Japanese in the second year though. So the speed at which you learn Japanese really is rather high.

the book after the intermediate series is this one (i think) http://www.thejapanshop.com/product.php?productid=17108

CaLeDee Wrote:Just out of interest as I haven't finished the intermediate book yet, what would be a good textbook to advance to after an integrated approach to Japanese? I haven't looked into it much but I'd like to check out some recommendations in advance. Thanks!

Hashiriya Wrote:the book after the intermediate series is this one (i think) http://www.thejapanshop.com/product.php?productid=17108

Yes, this is the book that is after the intermediate one. However, I would not recommend it. I'm in a living learning community at my college, where I have Japanese roommates and live on a floor with a lot of Japanese transfer students. None of them like this book. It uses a ton of terms that no one commonly uses (according to the Japanese students) as well as a lot of useless grammar. I would recommend just getting sentences from manga/drama/novels/etc when you finish the intermediate book.

Well that's a downer. I already ordered it :/ but I prefer structured text books over finding sentences/grammar from random sources anyway. I read text books for fun! I don't know what you mean by useless grammar, though. I know terms can be useless because no one ever uses them, but that can be expected from any text book. Grammar though? I have never said to someone learning English, "Oh, we never use this grammar."

I'll be using more than just this textbook hopefully, so if you can recommend any others I'd appreciate it!

I grew kinda envious of netherlands. Never heard of courses like this around here.

CaLeDee Wrote:Well that's a downer. I already ordered it :/ but I prefer structured text books over finding sentences/grammar from random sources anyway. I read text books for fun! I don't know what you mean by useless grammar, though. I know terms can be useless because no one ever uses them, but that can be expected from any text book. Grammar though? I have never said to someone learning English, "Oh, we never use this grammar."

I'll be using more than just this textbook hopefully, so if you can recommend any others I'd appreciate it!

Well, it's commonly referred to as grammar, one could call it structures. Japanese has TONS of grammar structures which have certain meanings, it's commonly one of the things you study for JLPT2/1. It can be stuff like に従って or に応じて, word or combination of words which connect in sentences in a special way to mean a specific thing. There are TONS of those, and many are, like those japanese students are saying, rare. It's still important to learn them IMO because they are sort of ideomatic, it's rarely possible to understand them from context (unless you have several example meanings and can cross-reference), and they ARE used. Many of them are not used in conversation, but they are used in essays, newspapers etc.

I had one of my former Japanese profs recommend that book for me recently, specifically because it was full of stuff that's not normally covered in average textbooks. In my limited experience with it, I've stumbled across expressions that are tough to find in any of the grammar reference books I have. I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing-- it's useful to know some uncommon stuff.

But if you're going to use it, you should probably keep in touch with someone who can decipher some of the stranger grammar bits. (I know I'm keeping my prof's email address handy.)

I bought "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese" , but I noticed that a "Revised Edition" came out... (including 2 cd's)
Does anyone know if it is different? (besides the 2 cd's)

I agree it's important to learn them Tobberoth. I don't think grammar is something that should be cherry picked.. I'd like to cover most of, if not all grammar, even if it is rarely used.

Cool rich_f, if a Japanese professor can recommend it then it can't be that bad. Unfortunately I don't know anyone to help explain grammar, though. I suppose lang-8 could be useful for that sort of thing.

Codexus Wrote:I have no problem believing that. I have heard the same things about the Japanese section at Geneva's university. They go really fast, I think they read the Tale of Genji in second year already.

You have to remember that we're talking about full-time students and that the goal is to train them to become high-level interpreters and translators.

If the goal is to train people to become interpreters and translators, why would they spend the time to teach them classical Japanese?

Edit: I don't know why firefox's spell-checker didn't mark "interpretor"

usis35 Wrote:I bought "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese" , but I noticed that a "Revised Edition" came out... (including 2 cd's)
Does anyone know if it is different? (besides the 2 cd's)

Apparently a lot of the dialogues were updated to be more natural & modern. There is a list of the updates in the jacket if I recall.

mystes Wrote:If the goal is to train people to become interpretors and translators, why would they spend the time to teach them classical Japanese?

So that they can translate classical texts? Anyways I seriously doubt that they are reading Genji in the original. At best it is a modern adaptation meant for young readers.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

mystes Wrote:If the goal is to train people to become interpretors and translators, why would they spend the time to teach them classical Japanese?

So that they can translate classical texts?

Well if you want to put it like this, I suppose you have a point, but it's not like there's a market for classical Japanese translation so the only people who would usually learn it are those who intend to study it personally. If the stated goal is to train them as interpreters and translators, I would assume that would mean that training them as professors of Japanese literature would not be a primary goal and so taking a large amount of time to teach them classical Japanese would be a waste of time of sorts.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

usis35 Wrote:I bought "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese" , but I noticed that a "Revised Edition" came out... (including 2 cd's)
Does anyone know if it is different? (besides the 2 cd's)

Apparently a lot of the dialogues were updated to be more natural & modern. There is a list of the updates in the jacket if I recall.

Thank you, I will have to get the new one then.. (I don't want to learn old Japanese)

Ryuujin27 Wrote:I'm in a living learning community at my college, where I have Japanese roommates and live on a floor with a lot of Japanese transfer students. None of them like this book. It uses a ton of terms that no one commonly uses (according to the Japanese students) as well as a lot of useless grammar.

Jumping in a little late, but that mostly highlights the fact that you should never listen to anything Japanese people tell you about their language (when it comes to generalities, and not "What does this mean?"). Like, ever. It's absurd what they don't think you need, and what they think you do need. People saying you only need a few hundred kanji... I actually heard someone the other day tell someone studying Japanese that she didn't think "んだ" was a useful construction to learn. んだ! Every third sentence I read ends in an んだ, for crying out loud. I'm not sure what definition of 'useful' these people are working off of.

For the record, English speakers say the same completely stupid stuff about English as well, it's not an isolated thing. And to be fair to both, there are a lot of constructions that can genuinely be considered 'not quite important yet' to newbies, (or in the case of vulgar language, a concern that people will use them in the wrong situation, prompting us to give a blanket condemnation "Oh don't say that word ever," despite the fact that we use them every day). For instance, the use in English of 'for' as as a conjunction meaning 'because' is kindof limited to classical texts and poetry, so it's not necessarily very 'useful' when you're still really low level, and you're not going to see it very often.
However, one of my English-learning friends ran into that usage while reading a childrens book. (Actually, there's a LOT of classical language in our childrens stories.)
So.....

phoenix Wrote:

CaLeDee Wrote:At least you guys have classes. There are no Japanese classes in my country. Not at university, college or high school. ZERO :/

If your profile is correct and you are from the UK; I'm sure that at least Oxford has a Japanese course of sorts.

Yeah and Cambridge definitely has one as well - it's just not called 'Japanese', it's contained within 'Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. That doesn't mean you do more than one language though, it's just a generic banner for chinese, japanese, hebrew, persian, arabic etc.

tokidokibenkyoushimasu Wrote:Yeah and Cambridge definitely has one as well - it's just not called 'Japanese', it's contained within 'Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. That doesn't mean you do more than one language though, it's just a generic banner for chinese, japanese, hebrew, persian, arabic etc.

I know Universities in England/Scotland have Japanese courses but I can't afford a University course, never mind moving to another country to study.. If I could afford that I'd probably just go straight to Japan though.

QuackingShoe Wrote:Jumping in a little late, but that mostly highlights the fact that you should never listen to anything Japanese people tell you about their language (when it comes to generalities, and not "What does this mean?"). Like, ever. It's absurd what they don't think you need, and what they think you do need. People saying you only need a few hundred kanji... I actually heard someone the other day tell someone studying Japanese that she didn't think "んだ" was a useful construction to learn. んだ! Every third sentence I read ends in an んだ, for crying out loud. I'm not sure what definition of 'useful' these people are working off of.

I agree with this, and I would also like to point out that even if the Japanese students in question were correct that they rarely used a certain word that would not necessarily be a reason to disregard it anyway.

First of all, just because they don't use it often (or even ever), especially in conversation, doesn't mean that nobody uses it. Perhaps in other situations or in writing people would still use it often enough that it would be important to learn. I think a lot of grammar falls into this category.

Secondly, however, even if you succeed with the mission to learn all common words in Japanese, there are still going to be a huge number of uncommon words. The Japanese students who say it was uncommon, by virtue of saying just that, indicated that they were familiar with the word. This means that is it used and that it will eventually be necessary to learn for fluency. In reality, since the first 10,000 (unique) words in Japanese only provide around 90% coverage of the (non-unique) words on pages in writing, it must be necessary to know lots of useless-seeming words. By comparison, the newspaper word-frequency list from the WWWJDIC ftp site has around 140,000 words. Even if you look at only the words that were used 48 times - once per month during the 4 year period - the number is close to 30,000.

CaLeDee Wrote:but that can be expected from any text book. Grammar though? I have never said to someone learning English, "Oh, we never use this grammar."

I'll be using more than just this textbook hopefully, so if you can recommend any others I'd appreciate it!

When to use "who" or "whom" springs to mind. But generally I think you're right - never a bad thing to know a bit more grammar!

Here at OSU, it's actually not too bad. I'm taking independent study, so I can't comment much on the Japanese majors (neither am I one myself, I'm a math grad student, just taking the classes to augment my self-teaching, so the independent study classes are a cakewalk).

It's almost like they took a few plays from Khatzumoto's playbook: you memorize sentences outside class and recite them in class. Unfortunately, the TAs who teach it take that to an extreme, and want you to literally memorize the sentences. Which I guess is good, but it makes it annoying for me since I actually know a lot of Japanese. So it's more like studying for a play than studying Japanese. But I still think it's good practice.

Same thing goes for the Mandarin class, too. I only took Mandarin 101, but that was an actual class and it was very much immersion, using the memorized sentences and derivatives of them to do the communication.

My big complaint about OSU japanese is the writing. Everything in the first year's textbook is romaji. In 101-102, the only Japanese reading/writing is katakana. Not only is the text romaji, it's some bucked up moon-romaji which is absolutely retarded. Though, it does include Toukyou-ben tones. Example dialog to show the romaji:

"Kore mo sore mo, onazi zassi desu ka?
Ie, tigaimasu yo."

(In case your brain breaks trying to read that horrific romaji system, it is
これもそれも、同じ雑誌ですか？
いえ、違いますよ。)

snispilbor Wrote:Not only is the text romaji, it's some bucked up moon-romaji which is absolutely retarded. Though, it does include Toukyou-ben tones. Example dialog to show the romaji:

"Kore mo sore mo, onazi zassi desu ka?
Ie, tigaimasu yo."

(In case your brain breaks trying to read that horrific romaji system, it is
これもそれも、同じ雑誌ですか？
いえ、違いますよ。)

Just looks like Nihon-shiki to me. The class wouldn't happen to based around JSL, would it?

Holy damn, that is bad.

And I thought I had it rough.

We also used an obsolete romanization system when I took Japanese linguistics. For some reason linguists ALWAYS use outdated romanization systems. Resistance to change?

My extremely awful Korean textbook also uses a romanization system that hasn't been in use in Korea for 11 years, although they only use it in the first 2 or so chapters.

Maybe I was a bit rough on the book before. I mostly blame it on my teacher, who makes the process very painful for us and generally makes me hate even looking at the book.

I went through the whole thing (well, almost all of it) with my Japanese friend the other day. He's pretty damn good at deciphering Japanese, and knows all the conjugations (and luckily their english names as well). While we went through it, we discovered that there are actually quite a few grammar points worth knowing, even if you don't actually use them yourself.

Also, as far as vocabulary, some of it is useful, but often times (I'm looking at you, Unit 2), the Japanese word (in this reference a long string is kanji) is indecipherable to Japanese. Even my teacher stumbled the first time reading it, not knowing what it was suppose to be.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:Also, as far as vocabulary, some of it is useful, but often times (I'm looking at you, Unit 2), the Japanese word (in this reference a long string is kanji) is indecipherable to Japanese. Even my teacher stumbled the first time reading it, not knowing what it was suppose to be.

Uggggh.... Unit 2 is the like apartment hunting/floor plan chapter, yes? It made me want to cry so many times. I went through the first few units last year, but got frustrated with the crazy vocab and set it aside to focus on the JLPT.