As a resource for basic grammar, I recommend Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication. It's cheap, it has very concise grammar explanations, and it's loaded with example sentences. It's not comprehensive, but after going through the book and with one year of college Japanese (during which I learned very little), I was able to go through Kanji Odyssey pretty easily.

Whatever resource you use, like some others here, I recommend learning some basic grammar before delving into "real" Japanese. It really doesn't take very long, and I think it will make reading manga and the like much less tedious.

Textbook, Minna no Nihongo is best that I know. Genki is also good, but I like mnn more, because of supplementary books. I own both series.

A) Minna no Nihongo I Textbook (Shokyuu beginner)
B) Minna no Nihongo I English Translation & Grammatical Notes
http://www.thejapanshop.com/home.php?cat=319

stoked Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:I'd say Minna no Nihongo is a perfect source of mining for the beginner.

Which one?

http://www.nihonya.de/shop_minna_no_niho...ihongo.htm

Minna no Nihongo I Honsatsu, right?

http://www.nihonya.de/shop_minna_no_niho...uecher.htm

Or the one with English (or German) translations?

http://www.roellin-books.com/de/bookstor...store.html

Oh, and is there an audio CD for the dialogs? This is confusing...

Yes, honsatsu. At my school in Japan, it was the only book we used (with the Audio CD of course). If we wanted the english supplement, we had to buy it ourselfs. No one did.

Use anything but Genki and Minna no nihongo-like textbooks. Focus on natural text always. I totaly agree with Hans here.

1) First, focus 100% on RTK. Finish it. It is worth it. Know it can be done under a month. If you plan to take more than a year, there are better methods.

2) Check Tae Kim's guide. Don't worry about memorizing anything.

3) Start adding sentences to your SRS. Japanese dictionaries have awesome sentence examples.

Always, from the start) Listen to tons of Japanese audio. It'll activate your memory for Japanese.

Tobberoth Wrote:

stoked Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:I'd say Minna no Nihongo is a perfect source of mining for the beginner.

Which one?

http://www.nihonya.de/shop_minna_no_niho...ihongo.htm

Minna no Nihongo I Honsatsu, right?

http://www.nihonya.de/shop_minna_no_niho...uecher.htm

Or the one with English (or German) translations?

http://www.roellin-books.com/de/bookstor...store.html

Oh, and is there an audio CD for the dialogs? This is confusing...

Yes, honsatsu. At my school in Japan, it was the only book we used (with the Audio CD of course). If we wanted the english supplement, we had to buy it ourselfs. No one did.

Cool, thanks. So the book is Japanese-only? But then how to understand anything after RTK1? Will I have to look up every damn word?! Not planning on taking a class, 100% self study for me...

What do you guys think of the Japanese in Mangaland books? I have those, and I like them a lot. I think I'm going to mine those. I'd recommend them.

Jarvik7 Wrote:3 lessons per semester? wow!

Doesn't Genki 1+2 have like 50+ chapters? It'll take you guys a decade to get to JLPT3 at that rate!

TELL me about it. It's pretty agonizing. Well, the first semester, I think it was because we all had to learn hiragana/katakana and it took forever for a lot of people to get it. This semester, now that I check the schedule, it looks like we're doing 4 lessons. I really hope that maybe these first two semesters of japanese are just for the hobby crowd and after that, they'll pick up a bit. I mean, I don't expect to become fluent from a class, but it would be nice if I could learn something new.

And yeah, mearii-san is so lame I always feel so bad for Takeshi. He tries so hard

Evil_Dragon Wrote:When it comes to Genki.. am I the only one who thinks Robert is a stoner?

No, it explains quite a lot, actually.


Genki I is 12 chapters, and Genki II is another 12 chapters. But doing 3 chapters a semester is punishingly slow. How the hell do you learn anything? I mean, yeah, ーて form is a little tricky, but it's not THAT tricky. Sheesh.


Everybody has a different learning style, so that means we're all going to recommend different approaches.

All you really need is a good basic Source that gives you what you need. That can be a textbook, a website, or your 10,000 year old spirit guide. Just make sure it meets your needs. It doesn't even have to be one thing. It can be a combination of things. Just make sure you and it cover what it is you want to be proficient in, and make sure your Source explains it to you coherently.

Because if you don't understand what the hell is going on, it's going to take you longer than it needs to.

All a textbook really does is give you a suggested pattern for learning the language, with exercises, vocab, explanations, and audio. I'd say it's important to pick up some basic vocab as you learn the basic grammar, simply because you need to know some basic words to understand the grammar examples, and that's why I'd recommend a textbook over a grammar site that doesn't provide any vocab or exercises. But if you can find a source for vocab and exercises on the side, then that would work fine, too.

You don't need to know what 原子力発電所 means, but developing vocab is useful in that it saves time looking a lot of common stuff up.

But to me, the most important thing is deciding whether you like the language in the first place.

EDIT: And yes, I managed to pull that sucker out of my memory. Thanks, Anki.

Yes, you'll have to look up every single new word, or figure them out from context.

What else where you expecting?
Even if you were taking a class the teaching would not be able to put it down your throat.

The task is daunting. To achieve success, you'll have to know by heart 20.000+ words.
Gladly, learning new words is much faster than RTK and you can also do it by enjoying your favorite anime.

stoked Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:

stoked Wrote:Which one?

http://www.nihonya.de/shop_minna_no_niho...ihongo.htm

Minna no Nihongo I Honsatsu, right?

http://www.nihonya.de/shop_minna_no_niho...uecher.htm

Or the one with English (or German) translations?

http://www.roellin-books.com/de/bookstor...store.html

Oh, and is there an audio CD for the dialogs? This is confusing...

Yes, honsatsu. At my school in Japan, it was the only book we used (with the Audio CD of course). If we wanted the english supplement, we had to buy it ourselfs. No one did.

Cool, thanks. So the book is Japanese-only? But then how to understand anything after RTK1? Will I have to look up every damn word?! Not planning on taking a class, 100% self study for me...

There's really no need for English. It's so obvious what everything means in those first basic chapters. And really, regardless what source you use, you will need to look words up constantly in the beginning... I mean, even if you get an easy line like "この車は赤い" with the translation "This car is red", it would be a good idea to check up on the words used the first time, right? Relying solely on context (that is, checking the Japanese sentence, then read a translation and leave it at that) works fine, but one should have a grasp of the basic words first. It's also important that one doesn't assume they know what a word means just like that. If you don't know basic grammar, you should never learn from context alone since you won't understand the meaning of the sentence. Personally, I never had a problem with Minna no Nihongo. You get every word in a clear context.

mentat_kgs Wrote:What else where you expecting?

Having a book that gives me vocabulary lists to put into Anki.

That way I would not have to look up anything and could save a lot of time.

Isn't this something a good textbook should offer?!

stoked Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:What else where you expecting?

Having a book that gives me vocabulary lists that I could put into Anki and learn before doing each chapter...

That way I would not have to look up anything. Isn't this something a good textbook should offer?

nononono never vocabulary lists. Enter sentences in Anki, not words. Here, i'll give an example from the first chapter of the first minna no nihongo book:

[あなたは]マイクミラーさんですか？
はい、[わたしは]マイクミラーです。

From the context and pictures in the book, it's extremely obvious what this is. It's obviously a mini-introduction so to speak. Mike Miller is obviously a name. Let's say that you don't know the word "anata" and want to learn it. Instead of using some vocabulary list which says:
あなた - you

You simply put the whole line into Anki: あなたはマイクミラーさんですか？
And on the answer side, you could simply put something like:
Context: First conversation between a stranger and Mike Miller.

Not only do you learn あなた, you learn how the AはBです pattern works, the most basic form of Japanese.

Hmmmmmmm....interesting, thanks.

So あなたはマイクミラーさんですか would be on the question side? Why not go English > Japanese? Bad idea? Why? I'm new to this, still busy with RTK1...

stoked Wrote:Hmmmmmmm....interesting, thanks.

So あなたはマイクミラーさんですか would be on the question side? Why not go English > Japanese? Bad idea? Why? I'm new to this, still busy with RTK1...

Yeah, very bad idea. That will get you into the habit of thinking "I want to say "blablabla" in Japanese, how do I do that?" which means you will think in English then translate it to Japanese in your head. It's a slow process which lends itself well to becoming very unnatural. Instead of translating English sentences, you should create Japanese sentences as-is. That makes sure the Japanese you output is the same as the Japanese a Japanese person outputs.

You should try to not connect Japanese to English too much. Thinking that 赤い means "red" is fine, it won't mess up your Japanese. In general however, it's better to connect japanese words to real concepts since oftentimes, there are no good English words to represent the exact same thing as a Japanese word.

igordesu Wrote:What do you guys think of the Japanese in Mangaland books? I have those, and I like them a lot. I think I'm going to mine those. I'd recommend them.

Yes, they are excellent. A frequent complaint about textbooks in general is that the example sentences are artificial and not natural Japanese. This isn't the case with the Japanese in Mangaland series. Even though the drawings have been remade to avoid copyright violation, the example sentences come from real Japanese manga.

It's a shame that a lot of people aren't going to take those seriously because the marketing target is manga fans. It's really one of the best introduction available.

stoked Wrote:Having a book that gives me vocabulary lists to put into Anki.

Tobberoth already got this one.

stoked Wrote:That way I would not have to look up anything and could save a lot of time.

I guess you are used to huge paper dictionaries. There are many online dictionaries, that are simply awesome.

Check this: http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8...=1&dtype=3

What a textbook has that is not here?

Codexus Wrote:

igordesu Wrote:What do you guys think of the Japanese in Mangaland books? I have those, and I like them a lot. I think I'm going to mine those. I'd recommend them.

Yes, they are excellent. A frequent complaint about textbooks in general is that the example sentences are artificial and not natural Japanese. This isn't the case with the Japanese in Mangaland series. Even though the drawings have been remade to avoid copyright violation, the example sentences come from real Japanese manga.

It's a shame that a lot of people aren't going to take those seriously because the marketing target is manga fans. It's really one of the best introduction available.

Really? That's good news for me then, since it means I've got a good starting point (got all 3 books ). Well, the part about it being taken from real manga is mentioned in the introductions I think.

Mining sentences from those books, where would be a good starting point? Book 1? And then continue over to 2/3?
Also, if I've gone through the first book once before, should I even bother reading the chapters? Or is it just a nice source for mining natural sentences? >.<

(Lol, seems I have a bad habit of thinking way ahead.. I'm only halfway through RTK1, and I've got almost all my sentence stuff planned already.. ^_^)

Jarvik7 Wrote:How is that? By following your steps he still would have no vocabulary and a VERY basic grasp of grammar (not even enough for Doraemon without a lot of puzzling stuff out) at this point. Jumping directly into trying to read a manga, even a children's one, from (virtually) nothing is pushing a bit too hard imo.

That's what made me say what I did. It will be too had in the beginning. But when I look back at my own progress, I wish I had read those kinds of books/mangas. I do think a graded approach is necessary at the same for a while. What I really wanted to say is that, even if it's just one article, one paragraph of "Real Japanese" a day, go read it. You will see a lot of twist and turns in what you are reading. You probably won't understand all of it. But, it will let you know exactly what monster you are up against.

For example, words like:
出来る、違う、犬、猫、etc. are words that come up so often you don't even
have to try to remember them. If you read enough, even if it's a little a day, then you will natural learn those words. That's why I also recommend things that tend to repeat topics(like manga) which you can read over a long period of time.

The higher you push yourself now, the farther you are going to be in the future. But, this is much easier said than done.

Elphalpo Wrote:As a resource for basic grammar, I recommend Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication. It's cheap, it has very concise grammar explanations, and it's loaded with example sentences. It's not comprehensive, but after going through the book and with one year of college Japanese (during which I learned very little), I was able to go through Kanji Odyssey pretty easily.

Whatever resource you use, like some others here, I recommend learning some basic grammar before delving into "real" Japanese. It really doesn't take very long, and I think it will make reading manga and the like much less tedious.

yeah i have this book. recomended by a friend. as im still working on rtk1 i usually just skim and pick things out, once ive finished rtk1 (already know hira/kata) im going to go through this. give myself some basic patterns to work from to help speed up listening and reading, reading is mostly just recognising whats infront of you rather than go through word by word, so in this essense i think it will help immensly. also has a lot of sentances that can be mined for srs use.

only problem is trying to ignore the romaji written under everything.. its distracting because its a lot faster (at this level) to read.

Gingerninja Wrote:only problem is trying to ignore the romaji written under everything.. its distracting because its a lot faster (at this level) to read.

Go through the book with a black marker and cross it out. I did similar to some of my books that have furigana (although I used a green marker so that they only become unreadable when overlaid with a red transparency).

Sleepyhead Wrote:

Codexus Wrote:

igordesu Wrote:What do you guys think of the Japanese in Mangaland books? I have those, and I like them a lot. I think I'm going to mine those. I'd recommend them.

Yes, they are excellent. A frequent complaint about textbooks in general is that the example sentences are artificial and not natural Japanese. This isn't the case with the Japanese in Mangaland series. Even though the drawings have been remade to avoid copyright violation, the example sentences come from real Japanese manga.

It's a shame that a lot of people aren't going to take those seriously because the marketing target is manga fans. It's really one of the best introduction available.

Really? That's good news for me then, since it means I've got a good starting point (got all 3 books ). Well, the part about it being taken from real manga is mentioned in the introductions I think.

Mining sentences from those books, where would be a good starting point? Book 1? And then continue over to 2/3?
Also, if I've gone through the first book once before, should I even bother reading the chapters? Or is it just a nice source for mining natural sentences? >.<

(Lol, seems I have a bad habit of thinking way ahead.. I'm only halfway through RTK1, and I've got almost all my sentence stuff planned already.. ^_^)

The stuff in book 1 seems to be very, very basic. I think I'm just going to read through the books again (I pick them up and read random chapters whenever I'm bored since I'm not done with RTK yet), and then just mine the good sentences that I like. A lot of the sentences in the first book are more advanced sentences that are just used to illustrate small, simple details, and, as a result, many of the larger example sentences in the first book lack an explanation. So...I think I may just end up skipping most of the first book. Whatev.

s0m31john Wrote:Whatever I do I would like to be able to at least attempt reading some real stuff. I have a subscription to Megami Magazine and even being able to pick through that and understand a little would give me motivation to keep going.

I've been formally taught French, Spanish, and German (only the basics) and I remember there being a ton of time devoted to grammar rules and verb conjugations. I don't know how the Japanese system works or if it's even similar to those languages in terms of grammar in any way. I just have a hard time thinking I'd be able to pick up on all the grammar rules and conjugation rules by example.

Like I said, while studying other languages I got my motivation by being able to put a use to my knowledge right away in real world applications (ex. magazines, newspapers, etc). What in your opinion would be the best path to take to be able to do that?

I totally know what you mean. Being able to just use the language right away in reading and such is so much fun. Why not just do it, then? Read a bunch of stuff and you'll pick it up. Which is more or less what I did for a while and now I can understand most of what I read.

Here's some shameless pimping of my blog:
Read and watch anyway
Grammar points...

With the Minna books - I have looked on Amazon in the UK and you seem to need to buy a whole set to be able to use them (3 books and 1 CD set?) and also they seem quite old. Also the second set doesn't seem about either. How are they compared to genki?

I have been using Japanese for busy people, as all the courses in this area (when they run!) use them. Book 1 was ok but book 2 is just horride. I try online places but reading on the screen for hours hurts my eyes so I end up printing stuff out anyhow.

AmberUK Wrote:With the Minna books - I have looked on Amazon in the UK and you seem to need to buy a whole set to be able to use them (3 books and 1 CD set?) and also they seem quite old. Also the second set doesn't seem about either. How are they compared to genki?

I have been using Japanese for busy people, as all the courses in this area (when they run!) use them. Book 1 was ok but book 2 is just horride. I try online places but reading on the screen for hours hurts my eyes so I end up printing stuff out anyhow.

Genki is not even close to minna no nihongo. The only thing Genki has over minna is that you get English in the books. That's why you "have to" buy a set of Minna no nihongo books, there's the real book, the english translation book (which isn't needed) and the textbook with normal text exercisers (useless unless you get an answer key, and kinda useless regardless). The CD is kinda nice I guess if you want to train your listening at the same time, but the real textbook is really all you need.

One great thing about minna no nihongo is just that: It's pure Japanese form the start. No English, no romaji. There's certainly a lack of kanji in the start (there's kanji in the first chapter already though, so it's not like they keep it in kana all the time).

I actually picked up an all japanese text book from a Japanese book store a few months back. Its quite interesting and is good as it introduces kanji from lesson 1, but it actually starts from basics. So its kinda nice.

I sometimes wonder if I am just moving my book hoarding addiction from English books to Japanese books. But each time I watch Read or Die I become more inspired to buy more books ;(