Quote:
Originally Posted by SaginumaEki
1) Don't make anime your primary source of learning. Anime is bad for learning Japanese because it teaches you rude language.
2) Do not use online sites. As helpful as they may seem, they're not explained at all. I'm sorry, but the basics of Japanese are harder to understand than what a webpage may tell you.
3) What I mean by that is that new language learners want things to be direct translations. Remember, there are never direct translations, especially with Japanese which is a language isolate and Eastern.
4) BEFORE YOU GO TO JAPAN, make sure you know as much grammar as you.
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A very interesting post indeed. I am a Chinese living in Hong Kong. I started learning the language when I was 12 and have been working as a Japanese tutor / translator for quite a while now.
I agree with point 1 to a certain extent. I did read a little bit of manga when I was already 2 or 3 years into learning the language and I picked up some of the stuffs there, thinking that they would sound more like spoken Japanese. But boy, did I get told off by my then Japanese fiance?!
I think if you have a few years of studies behind you, you can filter out the rude stuffs and adjust it accordingly. But it takes a lot of confidence and a very, Very, VERY solid foundation in grammatical knowledge.
As for point 2, I have not looked at other online sites, so really cannot say. But when I teach Japanese either in a class or as a private tutor specialising in teaching English-speakers Japanese, I find a shortage of really good books. The problem is that a lot of Westerners (NOT all) want to learn to speak it without going through the grammar, so books are structured as such. The grammatical instructions usually are a bit messed up in terms of sequence, making it difficult to rely on it to teach the students. I often find myself having to write supplementary notes and exercises for my students.
For point 3, isn't that true for all foreign languages though?
Point 4, I strongly agree with this. I have had a few English speaking students coming to me saying that they want to skip kanji, skip grammar and just learning the conversational language. Ermmmm, but sentences used in conversation must conform to some grammatical rules.
So, I usually have to talk them into learning the grammar as well. The kanji, I usually let them skip it.