Firstly, don't be too hard on yourself! There's a tonne of information (both on this site and everywhere on the web, of course) so processing too much is bound to be difficult!

xNicolex8 wrote:

should i learn kana now? i know there are a few pages already about that but im still unsure wether i should or not, if its not going to harm then i think i'd like to but scanning the AJATT website he seems to be against it

I don't want to speak for anyone else, but it seems like the general consensus is that most people learn the kana first. You'll find it easier to pick out readings of kanji in dictionaries that don't use romaji, be able to read at least something (which is a big motivation booster for a lot of people) and so on. If you do find it as hard to stick to things as you say, given the relative ease of learning kana plus the positive feeling you get from learning it, I'd say do it first to set you up nicely for the journey ahead!

xNicolex8 wrote:

I'm slightly stupid, so don't seem to understand some of the things i'v been reading, i've got Anki but after finding this site today i prefer to use the one on here.. i just wanted to ask for future reference, when people are talking about adding sentences to their decks, are people making their own deck or are people talking about downloaded decks :S

So is everybody As far as decks are concerned; they could be talking about either (Anki allows you to add cards to existing decks, whether you downloaded those decks or made them yourself). This site doesn't support adding cards like Anki does (at least not as far as I know) so generally if they're talking about adding cards, it's either to an Anki deck or some other SRS program's deck.

xNicolex8 wrote:

and i'm jumping abit far ahead here but i like to be organized.. what should i be looking to do once i finish the book? does anyone have any good recommendations for kids japanese learning books. (or should i stay away from learning books altogether)

It might be a bit much to take in right now, but try to take a look at Nukemarine's thread here and here. Out of curiosity, what is your current Japanese level? When you say you started learning yesterday (despite your first attempt), do you mean Japanese in general or just Remembering the Kanji?

Also, what are you interests (music, reading, tv, etc), as it might help people give recommendations.

As far as "Children's books" go, you could take a look at these (And the other levels in the set, level 0 volume 2, level 1, and so on) if they're within your budget. They're graded readers, so the difficulty increases with each volume. If you look at the images on the book page, you can see the stories are written in hiragana and kanji with furigana - so learning hiragana is a good move to begin with. They also come with a CD. I don't think they come with English glosses though, so you might want to get a paper (or digital) dictionary. An easy to install one for Windows is Tagaini Jisho.

I probably missed something but hope it at least answered some questions and maybe gave you more to ask!

That's no problem!

If you go to Tae Kim's site, he has some tips for learning Kana too, and there are Anki decks available, and so on. He also has a grammar section here which is a lot (imo) less tedious than some textbooks that I've used,  so if that was ever a barrier, then maybe that's a good place to start It's also available in PDF format to download and also free iPhone/iPod app!

Don't rush anything at first, just take your time, read through some of those links and Tae Kim's site a little, come back here and ask more questions, rinse and repeat, and eventually you'll get more comfortable!

I'm sure if anyone has any disagrees they'll say; so try to aggregate the advice and try to do what feels best for you too.

PS: Btw, about the music and stuff: Could you be more specific? What genres of music/games and so on? Partly out of curiosity and partly because it might help to know to link you to some decent resources at some point.

For Kana, I suggest Hesig's Remembering the Kana. If you don't want to pay for it, you could probably find it online (though it would be illegal - just a heads up).

It breaks down the Kana into "primitives" just like Remembering the Kanji does, but it is much faster and you'll be done in 12 30-minute sessions (I spread it out over 6 days, some do it all at once in 3-hours per Hiragana and Katakana).

As for what to do after, I am going to acquire new Vocab by adding sentences from the Textbook Genki 1 into Anki (Front = Japanese sentence, Back = Kana for pronunciation and Meaning) for vocabulary. When I'm done with that, I'll read Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, which a lot of people recommend. I've already looked into it and it seems pretty good.

A lot of people also use something called Core 2k (or Core 6k) to pick up vocabulary. I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know what it is like, but a lot of people seem to like it.

Once you acquire some vocabulary and understand some Grammar, you can start reading/viewing native material (it helps as most TV shows and songs have subtitles in Japanese).

If you like lyrics, I'd recommend downloading japanese sheet music.
What's interesting about Japanese sheet music is that it's all in kana.

The reason why is that each syllable might be a different musical note. So they need
to explicitly write out all the syllables one-by-one. This means that all Japanese
sheet music is purely kana and there is no kanji.

The 2 best sites to download japanese sheet music are http://www.at-elise.com (I use this site) and http://www.print-gakufu.com (my credit card doesn't work on this site for some reason).

NOTE: the image below is a free sample from the at-elise website.

Here is an example of what Japanese sheet music looks like:

Last edited by chamcham (2012 June 04, 10:36 pm)

xNicolex8 wrote:

as for games, i guess, adventure, action/adventure, point and click.. for a person with alot of games i've forgot what type of games i like.. i presume i can only get japanese games for my ds & pc? as xbox & ps3 are different region? or is that only with dvds

Check out this wiki page for a list of what's region locked and what isn't; for example, while the Wii is region locked, the PS3 appears to be region free for PS3 games.

For the DS, you could look into the Pokemon games As far as I know, they all come in Kana only. Some words might be a bit confusing without the kanji to tell the exact meaning, but in general it will be a fun way to find new vocab if you like the series. (My thinking is, if someone likes playing pokemon/final fantasy/and so on, they probably will want to talk about those things as well, so learning some game specific vocab won't be totally useless, even if it's not every day use stuff!)

Of course, the best place to start after doing Kana really is probably some basic grammar, as the words won't mean too much without the grammar knowledge to back them up.

Personally I've not used the Remembering the Kana books too much; I rote memorised hiragana (which is  pretty easy anyways), but my kana still sucks for some reason; probably due to lack of exposure, I dunno! So I'll  probably take another look at the Katakana part of that book!

BTW, this forum has a feature to add kana to your texts without using an IME; If you don't know what an IME is, then that's also a useful skill to learn once you start to build your knowledge

BBCode wrote:

Romaji text enclosed with the 。。。 tags will be automatically converted into ひらがな and カタカナ. Lowercase text will convert to ひらがな while UPPERCASE text will convert to カタカナ. See the Hepburn romanization charts.

Code:

[kana]sono RINGO, amakatta?[/kana]

produces this :

その　リンゴ、　あまかった？

You can not use [kana] tags directly into the subject of your posts. A simple work around is to type the subject with the [kana] tags into the body of your message, click "Preview", then copy and paste the kana from the preview into the subject of your message.

A very small remark...

I think that most people find Kanji hard, and learning Japanese sentences as a beginner perhaps even harder! Basically, the more complex a Kanji is, the harder it is to learn; you'll probably learn 'mouth' or 'one' without too many problems, 'entrails' may be a tad trickier. Also, I think that many people underestimate their own memory, since they know all the things that they forget, but don't know all the things that their friends and colleagues forget (people seldom brag about how much they forget!)

First of all, you may want to keep your learning speed reasonable, since you will have to do lots of reviews later; 10-20 kanji per day may be a good speed in the beginning; for every new card you'll learn per day you'll get 5-6x the number of repetitions, and having to review 350/400 (5x70 to 6x70) cards a day is not a very fun thing!

Second, if you feel that your memory is bad, you may want to read some books on memory improvement (I like Kenneth Higbee's 'Your memory, how it works and how to improve it'). Basically, study when you're fit, pause when you notice that your attention is waning (10-15 minutes is my usual concentration span before I need a break; visualisation/making stories can be hard work); try use visualisation or a 'loci' method (I myself try to link Kanji to places I know; for example "sign of the tiger" to the house of a friend who is a tiger (according to the Chinese Zodiac) where I visualize that I walk into in his house/living room (the house/roof radical) and see from the ceiling (the one/ceiling radical) hanging a huge Brussels sprout with animal legs. You can even try use movements for acting out Kanji that you tend to forget.

Finally, some Kanji will remain hard for now; but they will seep into the brain with repetitions and patience.

For me the hardest part of RTK was actually staying motivated during the months that I did it; what I personally did was print out some wikipedia and newspaper articles in Japanese that seemed interesting (judging from the pictures/my understanding so far), and every night hunted for some Kanji I now knew and circled them; keeping some track of your progress (like every week/month doing a 'challenge' with recognizing Kanji from for example www.asahi.com, and keeping a record/printout of it) will help; whenever you feel you are not making much progress, look where you were two weeks or a month ago!

Good luck!

Last edited by EWLameijer (2012 June 08, 2:38 am)

I'd advice you to learn kana first. What I did with katakana was to write down names of classmates, friends, places, and so on, until they all stuck. I had to look up many of them in the beginning, but after a while, I never had to look them up anymore. I repeated the process with hiragana too. (This might be easier with Norwegian though, as almost every vowel used is the same as in Japanese, except for the ø (like "i " in "bird"), æ (like "a" in "cat"), o in many cases (like the German "u").)

It's kind of brutal, but remember that kana are often much simpler than kanji, and do not carry any special meaning by themselves.