Let's Learn Japanese

Yeah. You read right. This is for everything that doesn't have anything to do with Eva.

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Monk Ed
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Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby Monk Ed » Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:42 pm

Tired of localization perturbing the experience? Hungry to know what that game that's never been translated is like? Look no further!

ITT we share resources and lessons on the Japanese language. Example, taken from another topic:

View Original PostIronEvangelion wrote:I've been making good on my statement about learning Japanese, by the way. I decided to just go ahead and do it since it would help me with Japanese games I already own as well as the Japanese Playstation Store. It's somewhat difficult, but not nearly as difficult as I feared. I've already got some of the Hiragana memorized. It is worth noting that the language actually has 3 alphabets (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji). The first 2 have roughly 40 characters each, but the Kanji alphabet has about 2,000. The reason there's so many Kanji is that instead of only representing a syllable, a single Kanji represents an entire word or phrase. What's strange to me (and a bit intimidating) is how a single sentence can easily have characters from all 3 alphabets in it. Anyhow, this is the site I'm using to learn the language, in case anybody else wants to learn it and render the localization of games meaningless.

http://www.learnjapanesefree.com/
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Re: Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby IronEvangelion » Fri Feb 05, 2016 1:18 am

I was actually wrong about the number of Hiragana and Katakana, there's a lot more than 40-something of each. Here are the complete charts for Hiragana and Katakana, and a beginner chart for Kanji:

http://www.learnjapanesefree.com/japanese-hiragana.html

http://www.learnjapanesefree.com/katakana.html

http://www.learnjapanesefree.com/Kanji-N5-List.html

According to the site I'm using, you should learn Hiragana before any of the others. Katakana is actually just a simplified form of Hiragana with simpler characters, and is mostly used for translating foreign words into the Japanese language. Both Hiragana and Katakana use the same five vowel sounds as English for their foundation. There is a character for each vowel (a,e,i,o,u), and each of those has its own line of five characters consisting of the vowel combined with a consonant. For example: a, ka, sa, ta, na. Then there are compound characters based on those, such as: kya, sha, cha, nya, hya. Basically everything starts with the vowels and almost everything else is built on top of those. The best way to get the characters memorized is the same way you learned English letters as a child: practice drawing them and repeating their sounds to yourself.
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Re: Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby Mr. Tines » Sun Feb 07, 2016 4:50 am

/a/ has been running a daily Japanese thread for some years now, starting with the kana, and going from there. That thread has a bunch of links in the first post of each incarnation.

One cautionary note, something I heard about back about the time I started making out some signal out of the noise in the Japanese audio, and which I was reminded about by a thread in the last few days, which was about the perils of learning your spoken Japanese from anime -- it's OK to be a little girl on an anonymous imageboard, but if the habits of speech you pick up are from CGDCT material, you'll end up talking like one as well.
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Re: Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby Reichu » Wed Feb 10, 2016 5:54 am

View Original PostIronEvangelion wrote:Both Hiragana and Katakana use the same five vowel sounds as English for their foundation.

Maybe English before the vowel shift, but certainly not the modern incarnation...
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Re: Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby pwhodges » Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:05 am

English has far more than five vowels, though. The comparison I often see is with Spanish vowels.
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Re: Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby A.T. Fish » Wed Feb 10, 2016 8:23 am

View Original Postpwhodges wrote:English has far more than five vowels, though. The comparison I often see is with Spanish vowels.


It works with romance languages in general.

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Re: Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby Rosenakahara » Wed Feb 10, 2016 9:23 am

Have fun with that, I still cant do hiragana,katakana or standard kanji and I grew up learning the language, that shit is hard.
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Re: Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby Mr. Tines » Wed Feb 10, 2016 2:48 pm

The learning involved is going to be different if all you want to do is watch your anime or read your manga from raw, or whether you are going to want to communicate with other people in Japanese. I couldn't write much in kana, nor would I get stroke directions and order correct, but context is a wonderful thing for reading (or listening). On its own I couldn't tell you which of 'a', 'e' or 'u' ク indicates after the 'k', but when presented as part of ごちうさマイクロビキニ部, the reading becomes obvious.
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Re: Let's Learn Japanese

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Postby IronEvangelion » Wed Feb 10, 2016 8:56 pm

View Original Postpwhodges wrote:English has far more than five vowels, though. The comparison I often see is with Spanish vowels.
Whoops, I goofed up there. I should have said 'vowels' instead of 'vowel sounds', because if we're going by vowel sounds then you're right, English has a lot more. Japanese vowels only have one sound each as far as I know.

My goal right now is to reach a read/write proficiency level with the language so I can play Japanese games without issues, speaking it correctly isn't that important to me right now since nobody in my area speaks it and I have no plans to visit Japan any time soon. The one big thing I'm unsure of right now is stroke order. I have no idea what the correct order is and it hasn't yet been explained in my lessons. Right now I just try to draw the characters in the order that makes the most sense to me. As far as Kanji go, however, I'm pretty sure stroke order refers to the order in which you have a stroke while trying to write them. :lol:
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