Best foreign language dictionaries according to redditors

We found 4,576 Reddit comments discussing the best foreign language dictionaries. We ranked the 1,881 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Foreign dictionaries & thesauruses
Language learning books

Top Reddit comments about Foreign Language Reference:

u/SuikaCider · 446 pointsr/languagelearning

Edit: Apparently I had nothing better to do than this evening, so here's a wall of text. Hope it's useful for you.

EditII: Didn't expect so many people to look at this, either.. so I'll say: this isn't an in depth zero-to-hero guide for Japanese, this is just a tidy gathering of the path I took to learn Japanese to my current level (minus a few textbooks), which is definitely still very far from fluent. I'm personally learning Japanese for its literature, and the vast majority of what I did was aimed at getting into books as fast as possible (cough Heisig cough) -- if you don't care about reading, I'll be the first to say that a lot of what's here might not be interesting to you. Google around and see if my suggestions fit your learning style or not. Japanese is weird in that there are literally resources for everything, so I'm sure there's something that fits you.

EditIII: Just wanted to link the DJTguide, a library of tons of resources organized into different skills and stuff. If you don't like my suggestions, I'd personally start here to find something else.

intro -- textbook stuff -- post-textbook stuff -- tutoring -- loose timeline

I have lived in Japan (for school) for two years, speaking nothing before I arrived (fully intended on going to Spain instead lol)...and am now somewhere between N2/N1, which is the level of fluency required to work with Japanese businesses/join a Japanese-conducted program. At this point no conversation is a problem, I can read modern literature for enjoyment (older stuff literally employed a partially different language and requires its own study), and follow movies/comedy shows/anime without subtitles if I'm pay attention.

I didn't try nearly as hard as I could have, so I honestly think you could reach my level of "fluency" if you make a religion of it -- a research student at my university came speaking nothing one year ago and now speaks notably better than I do across the board (on behalf of being forced to communicate with people for like 12 hours a day). Granted, you don't have the luxury of multiple Japanese people needing to communicate with you in order to do their job, and thus adjusting their language to your level to communicate with you all day every day... but I still think you can learn enough in a year to thoroughly enjoy yourself, at the very least.

Here's how I'd do that.

Textbook Stuff

  1. Read The Kanji -- don't use this for kanji. Make a free account, use it to learn the Hiragana and Katakana (two of Japanese's three alphabet systems; 48 characters each and phonetic. One is for Japanese-origin words, the other is for loan words and other random things). It just throws flash cards at you with each of the symbols; you can probably commit them to memory in a few hours. It's okay if you forget a few or several or even most of them at first; you're going to see these things so often that they'll be impossible to forget before long. We're just shooting to prime your passive memory so that you'll see a word written, have your curiosity irked, and be able to work it out, connecting that forgotten information to more and more recent memories to help remember them. Plus, this is a model for your year as a whole -- contextually acquiring passive understanding that stretches your boundaries, then diving back inwards and working to solidify passive knowledge that has become useful for your current situation or will allow you to express something you want to express currently, into knowledge that gradually becomes active.

  2. Buy Genki I, its workbook, Genki II, and its workbook. This will walk you from knowing absolutely no Japanese at the beginning of Genki I, and while mileage varies, I was personally able to make sense of ShiroKuma Cafe (see the link in the next section) upon completing Genki II. I'm currently taking the first "advanced" level Japanese course at my uni, meaning that I have had the opportunity to talk with other "advanced" (apostraphes meaning take with a grain of salt, looking at myself) learners about how they learned Japanese, and the Genki series is by and large the crowd favorite.

  3. Buy Heisig, or you can probably find a version somewhere on the interwebs....... make an account at Kanji Koohii (a site where people work together progressing through Heisig, mainly by sharing the mneumonics they make for the kanji), and otherwise follow the instructions on Nihongo Shark's Blog. He suggests to completely put learning Japanese on hold till you finish the 2200 Kanji in this deck in 97 days, but I think that's ambitious as is, and eats too much of your year up. So I personally would say learn 15 a day, every day, until you finish -- that will have you finishing in around 5 months, you'll be on target with the 6 months I'm plotting out for Genki I + II even if you miss a few days. (see below).

  4. Others might disagree and you can make up your own mind, but I personally think learning the Kanji is essential. They take time to learn at first, but repay you dividends later on when you accumulate vocabulary basically without thinking, passively, by reading or watching subtitled shows. Plus, any resource you'll use past the beginner stage will require kanji.. meaning if you don't learn them, you can't use these resources, and gimp yourself down the road. They're incredibly logical and like legos; the resources in #3 basically talk about the most efficient way to build things out of those legos (to help remember what each lego is). Also look into Moonwalks with Einstein if you'reinterested in memory in general. The thing about Kanji is that they unlock Japanese, as every single Kanji has a unique meaning, and Japanese words are basically simple definitions of themselves. Take fire extinguisher, for example: 消火器。It literally means extinguish-fire-utensil/tool. Good luck understanding a random word like that in any other language at first sight, but it's easy in Japanese, and the vast majority of Japanese words are exactly like this. Learning the Kanji allows you to take a word you've never seen before, instantly have a reliable guess as to what it means... and depending on your familiarity with the Kanji, maybe even how to read it. This happens to a lesser extent in conversation, also. Kanji are a new system of logic, but once you adjust to it, it's pure magic -- eventually, you sort of stop needing to study vocabulary, because you can just read and passive understand most any word (which you'll eventually work into your active vocabulary). I talk about "The First 2000 Words" in #5, and basically, words give you diminishing returns -- they're a lot of bang for your buck at first.. but past 6,000, 10,000, 20,000 ... learning 10 or 100 or even 1,000 new words might not give you noticeable improvement.

  5. This anki deck is Genki in Example Sentences; pace your daily reviews so that you'll be going in time with your progression through chapters in the book. I really, really wanted to link you The Core 2k(the first 2000 most frequent words of Japanese) because I really liked it and the first 2000 words make up a significant majority of daily conversations (we repeat a lot of the same things over and over, the same bread and butter structures, laced and spiced with more rare nouns, then descriptive words, and the occasional verb)......... but I also think that context is the biggest key when it comes to language learning, and the 2k doesn't have that for you right now. It's eventually going to outpace your Kanji studies (if I'm recalling how I studied accurately), and more importantly, the word order does not follow Genki. You're going to be spending a lot of time with Genki for 6 months, the pace that I want you to complete these words in. You're already going to be stretched thin, so I guess I'm going to recommend you take that Genki deck and use it as a supplement to help you get more out of Genki -- it looks like it's going to take, on average, ~25 cards per day. I don't know if that's ideal, but then again, I stuck with Genki until I finished Genki (no other resources, began Hesig - also below - about 2/3 of the way through), and I began watching Shirokuma Cafe (below) immediately after Genki II, able to (at first, painfully) understand it... and I think I'm just a normal dude, if you're also a normal dude -- or, better, a better than average dude -- I guess Shirokuma should be good for you, too, after Genki II and this Genki Deck.
u/Sazazezer · 121 pointsr/IWantToLearn

A good starting point is the app LingoDeer and its Japanese practise sessions. The first course is free and has a ton of content. Its practise focuses on teaching kana, grammar and building up vocabulary with a variety of guessing games so it's a very natural and entertaining way of learning. This makes it better than a lot of the language apps out there since their main focus is usually flashcard learning and hard memorisation.

Beyond that, Tae Kim's Japanese grammar is considered by many to be a fantastic way to learn the language. It builds up the necessary fundamentals for learning the language in a rational, intuitive way that makes sense in Japanese. The explanations are focused on how to make sense of the grammar not from English but from a Japanese point of view (which means you think in japanese rather than english).

If you want to get a textbook the Genki guides are considered by many to be the quintessial classroom learning book. Japanese for Busy People is also a good one if you don't have a lot of spare time.

Beyond that, watch Japanese tv without subtitles to get used to them speaking. Japanese Children's tv is a great way to go about it. Try watching something like Chi's Sweet Home without subtitles on. There's also Japanese dramas on Netflix where you can turn the subtitles off.

u/zeroxOnReddit · 117 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I have no idea if it’s an efficient method or not but I use The Kodansha kanji learner’s course.
I do 16 new kanji a day and I use the anki deck for the book to keep them in my memory. Whenever I flip a card, no matter the side, I write it down. Helps me remember better. I only try to remember the main On reading for each kanji and even then I don’t force it. If I can’t memorize it I don’t try that much harder. For the readings I just read a lot of texts and when I come across a word that uses a kanji I know I don’t know the reading of, that’s how I learn the readings. Eventually you become magically able to determine the reading for words even with kanji that have a lot of different pronunciations.

u/BlueSatoshi · 68 pointsr/Vive

Here's a couple books to get you started:
The Language Construction Kit, by Mark Rosenfelder
The Art of Language Invention, by David J. Peterson (aka the guy who made Dothraki)
He's made some vids that elaborate on the stuff he covers.

u/hehehu · 60 pointsr/sweden
u/SmokyDragonDish · 25 pointsr/Catholicism

Edit: I just read the rest of what you said and misunderstood. There are podcasts, ask about them in the Latin sub.

Check out /r/Latin.

Also, buy this: Lingua Latina per se Illustrata

u/TheAFCfinalist · 20 pointsr/latin

Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata and Wheelock's Latin are the go to books for learning.

Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata is completely in Latin and makes you learn by reading.

Wheelock's is learning by studying grammar.

What I recommend is looking up "Learn Latin" on Youtube to study the basics of pronunciation and learning what you can from there. If you enjoy it, buy one of those books to dive deeper into the subject.

u/schnapsideer · 20 pointsr/French

French for Reading is the exact book you're looking for. It's written for grad students in exactly your position and will teach you in 80-120 hours how to read academic french writing. I've found it to be quite effective.

u/pewpewk · 20 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Writing and reading kind of come in the same package if you need to learn the Kanji. As Kiruwa said, spoken or written first doesn't have an answer because everybody is different. But here are some general suggestions...

  1. Learn the Kana first and foremost. I can't stress how important this is, because the sooner you start learning Japanese in Japanese the better off you'll be later down the road. Learning the Kana is easy and can be done in anywhere between a day or 2 to a week. But really get Hiragana down with utmost haste.

  2. Once you have a basis in reading the Kana, start up an Anki deck (or any Spaced Repetition System). If you search a bit, you should be able to find the Core2k and Core6k which are some great decks to work towards. I'm not too familiar with working with the Core decks, but I'm sure there's a lot of people here that are so ask around.

  3. If you want to go the free route, Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide is an excellent free e-book on Japanese grammar. Their iPhone and iPad apps are excellent and work extremely well, too. This would be a good place to possibly start learning your way around Japanese grammar. If you want to go down the textbook route, I'd suggest the sort of tried-and-true Genki method. I use these textbooks in my Japanese University class and, while I'm not the biggest fan of them, they're pretty good textbooks for learning the material. Pick up Genki I, the Genki I Workbook, and the Genki Answer Key at your favorite online bookstore.

  4. Once you've got a good foundation with the above three (in the case of my University class my professor started after the first semester, or 6 lessons into Genki) I'd say it's time to start learning some Kanji. If you're going down the self-studying route, I, like many others, highly recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. Start with Vol. 1 and don't use any other method of learning the Kanji. Use it in conjunction with Reviewing the Kanji site and you'll have a great foundation after a while of work.

  5. Practice, practice, practice. That's all I can really say. Immerse yourself in the material, don't give up, and go for it. It's really hard work and incredibly daunting. I'm only a little more than a year into my studies and the further I get the more I realize I don't understand. That said, I keep pushing myself to see if I can't get a little further and when I look back to what I knew a year ago and what I know today, I couldn't possibly imagine even knowing this much. This isn't going to be a quick process, but years upon years of studying.

    But enough of the prep talk. Good luck and if you ever need help, /r/LearnJapanese is a great place to ask! :)

    *Of course, all opinions expressed here are my own and may or may not be conclusive for your learning.
u/Gluyb · 19 pointsr/conlangs

Start off reading about linguistics and some things which interest you in language.

Learn the international phonetic alphabet ^optional ^but ^it ^makes ^things ^much ^easier

Super useful videos for learning it

In that playlist there are also videos on how to actually start your language, DON'T DO THEM YET.

First you need to decide what your language will be for

Now use either the artifexian video in the earlier playlist or this video which is a bit more in depth to start making a phonetic inventory for your language.

The next things you need develop are:

  • Phonotactic rules
  • A writing system
  • A grammar system
  • A vocabulary

    You can find resources for those yourself

    I would highly recommend getting a book like the art of language invention or the language construction kit. I can't speak for the latter but the former was an excellent guide for me through parts of linguistics which I was totally unaware of and how to use them in a language ^the ^author's ^youtube ^channel ^is ^not ^a ^substitute ^for ^the ^book ^more ^an ^expansion

    I hope that helps
u/Spoggerific · 18 pointsr/LearnJapanese

You're starting on a big journey here. Bigger than you might realize. If you want to see this through to the point where you'll be able to understand native Japanese speakers without a problem, it's going to be tough, and you're going to want to give up more than once because it feels like you're just not getting anywhere. I know this because I've been through it many times myself to get through where I am today. But if you persevere, you'll get better, and eventually one day you'll realize "holy shit, I can understand this stuff without translating it back into English", and that's where the fun begins.

The first thing you need to do is familiarize yourself with the Japanese writing system and how each kana (read that link to find out what "kana" are) sounds. Romaji (the Japanese name for roman characters, like what you're reading right now) when using Japanese is a big no-no, for several reasons, not all of which are obvious or even understandable to someone who has absolutely no knowledge of the language. Basically, relying on romaji will slow your acquisition of Japanese reading skills and fuck with your pronunciation. Starting from day one, promise yourself to never use romaji when studying Japanese. It's probably going to be annoying starting off with studying kana by rote and not learning anything about Japanese, but if you keep at it you can memorize it in a week.

Here's what I did to learn kana: I printed off the incredible hiragana and katakana charts (you can ignore wi and we on both sides, by the way; they're no longer used) on Wikipedia and taped them up on my wall. I then copied them down (that's a picture of the first Japanese I ever wrote, by the way) onto a notebook. After that, every day, a couple times a day, I would take a character that I had not yet memorized and decided to work on it. I would look at it once, then write it down on a piece of paper a couple dozen times, then move on to the next character. Then I'd wait a few minutes, just long enough for the shape of the character to pass out of my immediate short-term memory, and try writing it down again without looking up the shape. If I failed and couldn't remember it, that was okay, I'd just start that character over again. Every time I "succeeded" on remembering the shape of a character without looking it up, I'd do the same thing but increase the interval a little bit. First time, maybe only a minute between. The second time, five minutes, then ten, half an hour, etc. until I had it completely memorized. It sounds like it takes a lot of time, but actually writing the characters a few dozen times only takes a minute or two, and in between, during the "forgetting" periods, you can do whatever you want; play a game, browse reddit, whatever. It took me about a week and a half to memorize hiragana and katakana, but I had a lot of free time during that period. It's okay if it takes you longer, but you need to get this, the most basic of basics, down before you can proceed. Trust me on this.

After you've done that, you can start studying grammar and kanji. There are a ton of great sources for grammar, my favorite being Tae Kim's guide, a part of which I linked earlier. As great and free as it is, though, it's not enough on its own; I recommend a textbook to go with. The only one I've personally tried is genki, which while good, has a few downsides that are difficult for beginners to notice. The biggest one is a focus on formal rather than casual Japanese. Luckily, most of them can be fixed by simply using a second source, such as the grammar guide I linked above.

You'll want to start studying kanji the moment you finish with kana, and for that, I recommend kanjidamage. It also has a great introduction explaining why so many Japanese classes and textbooks suck, and I recommend you give that a read before you start your studies. The road to kanji mastery isn't difficult, but it is very long. However, if you start it early and keep at it every day, even if it's only one character per day, before you know it you'll have hundreds memorized.

After you've got the basics down, you'll need more things like ways to find practice partners or reading and listening material, but that's still a long way off. The beginning has been laid before you, and the rest is up to you. 頑張れ!

u/ccoltrain · 15 pointsr/anime

I dont know if this will help but here are some resources I use

Tae kim grammar guide is good for learning grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/writing
anki is really good for making flash cards or you can find pre made decks to study https://apps.ankiweb.net/
If you like reading you could try these https://bilingualmanga.com/
http://syosetu.com/
If you like anime use this, you can watch anime with japanese subs
https://animelon.com/
Also kanji is important to learn because you cant read japanese without them
I recommend remembering the kanji 1 https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=mp_s_a_1_1/135-4585020-0846068?ie=UTF8&qid=1542029781&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=remembering+the+kanji+1&dpPl=1&dpID=51QhUaQJRmL&ref=plSrch

u/LordGSama · 14 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I would very much like for the three Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar (Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced) to be digitized to make searching easier.

u/LostRonin88 · 13 pointsr/LearnJapanese

2-3 years is plenty of time to "learn" japanese. There are a lot of people here who reached N2 on the JLPT in 3 years or less. There a lot of people who have also reached "basic" fluency as they call it, in 1.5-2 years(AJATT/MIA). There are lots of start guides out there, all which can work very well. There is one right here on this subreddit that is a sticky at the top of the page. You could also try NukeMarines SGJL. A lot of people also like AJATT / MIA as it seems to be the most effective way to learn Japanese quickly (but this requires a lot of time each day that most people aren't willing, or cant commit).

Pretty much all of them start the same way though, by learning Hiragana and Katakana (which are the basic writing systems). Some systems also suggest learning some or all of the kanji in the beginning as well. Many will also say to start immersing with native japanese material early on too (aka watch anime/dramas without subtitles in japanese)

From there you want some type of learning resource for grammar. Many here suggest Genki 1&2 if you have some cash and like textbooks. Other systems will tell you to use free online resources like Tae Kim or Wasabi-JP. All of them seem to work.

From there a lot of paths split as to what you should do and at this point you can kind of choose what you like. If you liked the textbook route than you can move onto an intermediate text book like Toriba. Many say learning from sentences is the way to go though. This can either be done with a pre-made deck like the Core 2/6/10K anki deck. Some people say make your own sentence deck by "mining" native Japanese material for i+1 sentences. AJATT/MIA has even recently suggested using the JLPT Tango books for sentences as they are already pretty much in i+1 format.

Here are a bunch of links to what I am talking about:
anki (awesome FREE flash card app): https://ankiweb.net/about

SGJL (method + resources): https://community.memrise.com/t/course-forum-suggested-guide-for-japanese-literacy-sgjl-course-series/1100

AJATT ("intense" method): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PdPOxiWWuU

Genki (grammar & vocab): https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401 (who knows you might be able to find this free somewhere on the internet as a pdf too...)

Tae Kim (grammar): http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

Wasabi-JP(grammar): https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/wasabis-online-japanese-grammar-reference/

DJT (overall great resources just look at it...):https://djtguide.neocities.org/

u/Salamander319 · 13 pointsr/Korean

I’ve been using the Integrated Korean textbooks by Klear. They have lots of grammar and vocabulary, plus they have workbooks you can get (which I recommend) to practice all the stuff you just learned. They’re like 25$ each on amazon. Here’s a link for Beginning 1

u/stellarstreams · 13 pointsr/languagelearning

It's always good to see someone else interested in Nordic languages! Here are a couple resources I use for Swedish, but I'm sure you can adapt them or find equivalents for Norwegian or Danish.

Vocab:

  • This is a good memrise course, with audio and everything

  • Quizlet is also a great resource, you can just search "swedish vocab" and get a ton of sets.

  • There's also Anki, but I haven't been able to find a good deck with audio.


    Grammar:

  • If you're willing to spend $11.72, I couldn't recommend this book more. It's probably the single most useful resource I own for learning Swedish.

    Other:

  • You can get a virtual library card from the Malmö public library, and check out up to 2 e-books a week with it. They have a ton of Swedish children's books that are really useful for practice. If you're interested, I can post the link and instructions.

  • This is a free text-based course from the Stockholm School of Economics that's pretty good. You can download the file on that website.

  • Rosetta Stone Swedish is a really good way to get a strong foundation in Swedish. I personally wouldn't spend that much money, but you don't necessarily have to wink wink

  • And of course, /r/Svenska is a great subreddit for Swedish learners.


    This is everything I have for now, I'll update this list if I think of anymore.


u/Dempf · 12 pointsr/Games

I would definitely recommend Remembering the Kanji along with Anki for spaced repetition flashcards. It helped me with Chinese.

Edit: changed link to latest version of RTK.

u/weab00 · 12 pointsr/languagelearning

The decision is up to you, and your final choice should pertain to your situation/interests, but if you do choose to learn Japanese, then I can give you some pointers:


Learning Material




Start by learning Hiragana and Katakana. This should take you 2 weeks tops. You can learn it through apps like Dr. Moku (apple and android), and practice with Drag-n-Drop.
After that, use the Genki textbooks I and II (make sure that it's the 2nd edition, which has more features added to it), which are the most popular by far within the Japanese learning community.
Japan Times, the company behind the books, also made some pretty neat apps to side with the book. Available for apple and android. There's also a workbook, which is a bit of a drag to buy after buying two $50 textbooks, so I uploaded the PDFs here.


Supplement your studies with Anki SRS (Spaced-repetition-system), which is essentially virtual flash cards.
There's also Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, which is pretty good as a reference, but not so much a sole learning material. His website is another good reference resource.


Please realize that it's okay to forget words and grammar points, and you're definitely going to have to revisit some of them along the way.




I should probably mention Kanji. Kanji are characters imported from China during the 5th century, although many have divulged from their modern Chinese equivalent. Genki I+II will teach you 317 kanji (image for scale (sorry for bad quality!!)), and Tobira (the textbook I'm about to mention) will teach you another. There are officially 2136 "Jouyou Kanji", or kanji used in everyday life (e.g. a newspaper). Some people use Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, which I wouldn't recommend since it only teaches you the meaning (which it sometimes lies about), and doesn't even teach the reading or any words that use it. I'd recommend learning words and then the kanji that they use. That way you're getting more bang for your buck. While I personally don't use WaniKani to learn kanji, I have used it in the past, and it's really good. Sleek interface, gets the job done, forums for questions. All the good stuff you'd expect out of a kanji learning site. The first couple of lessons are free, and then it's something like $8/month. Despite WaniKani and all its greatness, the creator behind it (named Koichi) also made an "online Japanese textbook" called Tofugu, which I definitely wouldn't recommend. It waaaay too much around the bush, and half of it is just "motivational talk" (which I'm pretty sure is just trying to get you inspired for a night or two, pull out your wallet, pay for a lifetime subscription, and then give up once you get to the 〜ます forms).


Edit: I also feel the need to mention that, despite what pop culture might tell you, only a tiny portion of kanji are truly pictograph (e.g. 川 (river), 山 (mountain), 人 (person), and 大 (big)). The more conceptual ones have almost no tie to their actual meanings, which is why kanji teaching resources that use mnemonics fall apart pretty quickly. After being written with a chisel on turtle shells (called "oracle bone script"), imported to Japan 1500+ years ago, written 1,000,000s of times from people in prefectures miles away, and reformed numerous times, almost all of them lost their original pictographic quality. Just take a look at 働, 色, and 起. What do you think those mean? The answer is: to work, color, and to get up (in the sense of waking up).

Edit 2: Learn the stroke order for the kanji, since it makes them much easier to break down in the long run. For that matter, learn the radicals, or parts, of the kanji. There's a list here.


To clear up any more misconceptions, Japanese is not like Chinese in the sense that a character alone can be a verb. The kanji "起" doesn't mean "to wake up" on its own; only when you add the "き" and "る" hiragana does it turn into the verb. This is called "おくりがな" (okurigana). There are also many different readings for each character, unlike Chinese where there's usually only one or two. For example, the character "日" (day, sun) can be read ひ (or び), にち, or じつ. One kind of reading is called 音読み (onyomi), literally meaning "sound reading" because when the Japanese came into contact with the Chinese, they didn't yet have a writing system (their language was called "和語" (lit. "native Japanese language"). So, they "borrowed" their characters and transcribed the Chinese pronunciation based on their phonetic system. The other kind of reading is called 訓読み (kunyomi), which literally means "riverside reading". This type of reading is native to Japan and was prescribed to the kanji that corresponded with the meaning. On the more extreme side, some kanji can have 10+ readings. Don't sweat it though (心配ないよ!), as you'll learn all of these different readings through context in your vocabulary.

Now to bridge the gap between "beginner"-ish to "intermediate"-ish, use Tobira (which literally means "bridge"). The book assumes you to have a certain level of knowledge, some of which might overlap with Genki and other words/grammar that you may have to look up. It's an uphill battle, but you'll come out triumphant in the end.


On a side note, I'd recommend Jisho.org as your go-to online dictionary, even if some of the example sentences are riddled with errors. "Imiwa?" is a great Jp<->Eng dictionary for android and iOS. If you're really serious, then get "Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary".
Also check out /r/learnjapanese. There's a lot of great questions/resource links on there, and you can ask any questions you might have.


Duolingo has opened up alpha testers for its Japanese course as well. I'm so-so on the quality of Duolingo, since it doesn't even really teach you grammar, but just in case.

There are a lot of great resources posted up on the Kanji Koohii forums, which is where I found ヨミちゃん for Google Chrome.


To go further, read 4chan's /int/ guide.
Oh, and in case you didn't know, stay away from Rosetta Stone!!

Native Material


After Genki II, give a go at よつばと! (Yotsuba!), a simple children's manga with furigana, which is kana above the kanji (intended for little kids). There's quite a bit of slang in it, and almost always uses the casual form. Even in a simple manga like Yotsuba, there will still be words and advanced grammatical constructs you haven't even touched yet. You can get the "Yotsuba Learning Pack", which consists of an Anki deck and vocabulary list here.


You can practice speaking with native speakers on a wonderful app called HelloTalk (available for apple and android). It's pretty great.


There's also iTalki, where you can write journal entries in your target language (so you can do this for Italian too) and have them be corrected by native speakers. You can also correct journal entries in English.

About the JLPT


The "Japanese Language Proficiency Test [Number X]", commonly referred to as "JLPT N[X]", is the standard Japanese test. N1 (Number 1) is the highest and most advanced, while N5 is the most basic. You can see how ready you are for each one here. Honestly, N5 and N4 are so easy, they're really not worth the money you have to pay to take it. N3 is a good warm up to N2. Passing N2 will look pretty damn good on any business related Japanese job. I wouldn't worry about these tests until a good way into your studies.

Conclusion




While Japanese might not be the easiest language for an English speaker to learn (far from it, it in fact), and quite daunting due to the scores of kanji you're required to learn, the rewards are numerous. For one thing, you get 130,000,000 more people to converse with on this planet. You're also opened up to the world of anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese cartoons), and the original language of the haiku (俳句). Not only that, but you're also introduced to the literature world Haruki Murakami and other such Japanese writers. Most importantly, you should enjoy it. After all, nobody who doesn't enjoy learning something gets very far into it. If you ever feel incredibly discouraged, take a break for as long as you need. Revisit the material when you feel ready. Never study something if it pains you to do so. PM me if you have any more questions.

u/outbound_flight · 12 pointsr/mildlyinteresting

If you're just starting out, I'd probably recommend the Genki series, or Tae Kim's excellent Guide to Japanese Grammar (free online).

The book OP has is very useful and you can learn a lot from it, but it's specifically made to help folks study for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). You lose a lot of the foundational stuff if you go straight for the JLPT materials, I'd argue.

u/WraitheDX · 11 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Pretty much everyone will tell you that is nearly impossible to accurately gauge. It depends on how much you study each day, what materials you have to help you, how good you are absorbing the information, etc.

I feel that if you have enough time to absorb around 20 vocab a day (not as hard as it sounds, some days I try for around 50) for the first few months (then cut it down a bit as you go, as the grammar you are covering becomes more involved), and practice 1-3 grammar points a day (depending on their complexity/involvement), and avoid kanji for the first month, then start slowly (5 a day, not learning more until you know the current and it's associated vocab), using this book:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568365268/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

I feel like you could read random sentences of a very simple manga within 6-12 months. These numbers are all arbitrary, as it all depends on your motivation and ability to truly absorb and retain all the information.

I can give you a list of materials that I find essential, and I think anyone that used them would recommend them as well:

A general textbook like Yookoso or Genki. I use Yookoso myself, but have heard little bad about either. You can skip this if you are good about learning what you need to focus on next on your own, or if you have someone else guiding your studies, but they are not that expensive, and I would recommend both levels of Genki or Yookoso.

https://www.amazon.com/Yookoso-Invitation-Contemporary-Japanese-Third/dp/0072408154/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496923360&sr=1-1&keywords=yookoso

Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (once you learn the majority of it, they have a second and third level of this book [intermediate/advanced])

https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=4789004546&pd_rd_r=MARVSJ4E1JD75N4JANKK&pd_rd_w=supQ1&pd_rd_wg=oQkTv&psc=1&refRID=MARVSJ4E1JD75N4JANKK

501 Japanese Verbs. Fantastic for learning conjugations, and checking yourself while you practice them each day.

https://www.amazon.com/501-Japanese-Verbs-Verb/dp/0764137492/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496923311&sr=1-1&keywords=501+japanese+verbs

The Learner's Kanji Dictionary. This will help you look up any Kanji you do not know, and does not have Furigana. It gives you stroke order, Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, and tons of vocab combinations for each Kanji. It is tricky learning how to look up Kanji by radicals, but you only need to learn it once. You can learn Kanji from this, but it would be a terrible idea, as it is a dictionary, and not organized in a way that will help you retain anything.

https://www.amazon.com/Learners-Japanese-Kanji-Dictionary-Bilingual/dp/080483556X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1496923666&sr=8-3&keywords=kanji+dictionary

Lastly that Kanji book I linked earlier. Many will tell you it is silly to not learn Kanji right away as you learn the vocab, but it takes a lot longer, most modern texts have Furigana (the hiragana characters of how to pronounce the Kanji) for all the Kanji, and Kanji do not help for listening or speaking skills anyways.

I do feel that learning the Kanji from the get-go is far better for vocab retention, but you will pick up vocab so much more slowly. You can pick up Kanji later, once you can actually understand some basic Japanese and are much more motivated to continue your studies.

I listed the materials I recommend in the recommended order (minus the Kanji book listed early on, which I recommend last). Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions.

Edit: Also, learn the kana first. Both Hiragana and Katakana. There is no excuse not to, they are invaluable. I would go so far as to say do not even bother starting vocab until you are comfortable enough to sound out a word written in kana in your head without a reference. Does not matter if it takes you a while, you will see them every day, and you will get used to them. Bare minimum, write the entirety of both every morning and night, and whenever you find yourself bored throughout the day.

As always, others will argue this, but again, there is no excuse not to learn it. Most good learning resources will use it anyways. They are very easy to learn.

u/Sugarcakes · 11 pointsr/Korean
  • Start with Hangul. (I did this by using Memrise Hangul lessons.) Example I also suggesting writing them down a ton, getting used to them and utilizing many of the other free resources. Although, I would just learn the basics, trying to memorize when sounds change because of their placement in the word is a bit confusing at this point.

  • Move on to basic phrases and the most common verbs. (The beginner lessons on TTMIK might help.) Write these down. Get used to reading them without the romanization.

  • At that point I would get a language partner to help with pronunciation or whatever you are having trouble understanding.

  • Then, I suggest getting a text book, or what have you, like Integrated Korean.

    I only say to wait this long before using a textbook, because the most suggested book -is- Integrated Korean, and I found jumping into it did not help me. (aside from maybe the Hangul lesson at the beginning, but even that was a bit much.) I found the lessons to take a much different course than other languages that I have learned in the past. I really feel basic communication (Hello, Thank You) and the verb "to be" should be included in the very first lessons you take. They kind of jump right in without great explanations.

  • I suggest going with the lessons in the text book as well as doing memorizing of common verbs/nouns/words either via Anki (or since you're limited in time) Memrise.

    I hope that's a good starting point. Its basically how I've gone about it, without all the stumbling around aimlessly trying to figure out what works for me, what didn't work, and lots of wasted time studying things I wouldn't fully comprehend until I had a better foundation of knowledge.

    I find to get the most out of Anki you end up putting lots of time into creating decks, which can be a bit overwhelming or complicated.

    Edited for clarification.
u/Jaggid1x · 10 pointsr/Animemes

Might I recommend Remembering the Kanji by Heisig? Couple it with an Anki deck from here (I recommend this one or any that includes the stories), and it becomes almost trivial.

Ridiculously effective for long-term memory as well.

u/GreatZapper · 10 pointsr/LANL_German

Hammer's German Grammar and Usage (HRG) - simply, the best and most comprehensive grammar I've ever read (but certainly not simple...)

u/yacoob · 10 pointsr/LearnJapanese

There are four great resources out there for checking grammar rules:

u/sukottoburaun · 9 pointsr/latin

Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, Pars I: Familia Romana is quite good. It teaches Latin completely in Latin. There are online exercises for this at http://wyomingcatholic.net/WCCLatin.htm

u/Ibrey · 9 pointsr/Catholicism

Have no fear of learning more Latin than you need. After all, if you want to read the Vulgate, you'll probably also want to read papal encyclicals, conciliar documents, untranslated patristic texts, etc., not to mention secular authors like Cicero and Vergil. I recommend studying by immersion with Hans Ørberg's reader Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. Do all the exercises. Build up to reading unadapted excerpts from classical authors in part II. Then approach the Vulgate.

u/Pipewatch · 9 pointsr/latin

I wholeheartedly recommend this book and this book.

u/Besamel · 9 pointsr/LearnJapanese

That book you linked is only going to teach him Kanji, not vocabulary and grammar. A well respected first step would be the Genki series. There are 2 series and both series have a main textbook and a workbook.

Genki I (second edition) http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449110193&sr=1-1&keywords=genki

Genki I Workbook (Second Edition) http://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449110193&sr=1-2&keywords=genki

u/LogicalTeaDream · 9 pointsr/LearnJapanese

This book has good resources for kanji etymology.

u/diphylleia948 · 9 pointsr/Korean

걸어서 30분 is the easiest webtoon i've found and this is my favorite textbook. there's also a workbook that goes with it and it goes until intermediate 2

u/ErikaGuardianOfPrinc · 9 pointsr/Shadowverse

I think it's a kinda poor way to learn kanji on it's own, but for kana and general vocabulary it's fine. It's a good supplement to use in conjunction with other resources.

For kanji a friend of mine recommended Remembering the Kanji by Heisig. His method is working the best for me.

u/Cokabear · 8 pointsr/videos

The book remembering the hanzi from what I understand is pretty much this but an entire book. I dont know if this book is anygood tho because I have never had it.

I have the japanese version remembering the kanji and its the most usefull book ive ever had for learning a language.

u/NucleoPyro · 8 pointsr/LearnJapanese

There are many different approaches to learning Kanji that people will advocate. Some of the most popular include

  • Learning common Kanji and vocab words that use them (The back chapters of Genki)

  • Brute force kanji without using radicals (Various kanji books)

  • Learning radicals and then Kanji comprised of those via mnemonics (Heisig)

    • Subset: Learn vocab words for each kanji in addition to mnemonics and radicals (Kodansha)

      Or you can take the independent approach: As you come across words you don't know, learn the kanji and that word at the same time. Look up the stroke order for kanji as you come across them and don't worry about systematically learning every 常用 kanji.

      What works best will depend on your learning style. I've briefly tried each of these methods. What I recommend to people now is Kodansha. Here's the basic process for how I learn 8 kanji every day:

  1. First review the last 8 kanji I learned by seeing if I can remember the mnemonics. Try to draw them by hand. If I remember the vocab words I might write them down too, but I usually just review vocab using anki.

  2. Go through 4 kanji and their mnemonics. Write each one at least once to get a feel for the stroke order. Go through the next 4 in the same way.

  3. Add all the vocab that Kodansha recommends memorizing to my custom anki deck. (There is a community anki deck but I prefer to do it in my own style.)

  4. Briefly look over the 8 kanji I learned today and the 8 I learned yesterday again.

    You can choose any number of kanji to do each day, just don't overload yourself with something ridiculous like 100 per day. Basically the way this method works is you learn each kanji via its radical components and you learn the multiple pronunciations or meanings by memorizing applicable vocabulary.

    I review the kanji from days farther back than yesterday using a kanji application on my phone that allows me to make custom kanji lists and practice drawing them. Again a different method might work better for you, this is just how I choose to do it. I could go through my specific problems with each of the other methods if you'd like but I think this post is long enough as it is.

    Resources referenced:

    Kodansha

    Android Kanji Study app

    Anki

    Community Kodansha Deck

    And the other kanji book I used a long time ago:

    Heisig
u/ashwin911 · 8 pointsr/Games

This is the latest edition of Remembering the Kanji
http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921

And here you can find the RTK deck for Anki https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/japanese

u/Lankei · 8 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Check out Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig.

Learning kanji by radicals is a good way of doing things, but for most everyone, an additional layer of abstraction is required to memorize things well. That is to say, creating stories or mnemonics using these radicals is an effective way to learn kanji.

There's been a lot of discussion on Remembering the Kanji and similar programs such as the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, so I'd check that out.

u/Asceel · 8 pointsr/Svenska

Actually their grammer is fairly good. Just make sure you read the notes before you start each skill (available on website-version not the apps).
Comments are quite informative too (not available in iOS app).
There are a lot of grammer books.
Here is a good simple book

u/Etaro · 8 pointsr/Svenska
u/asehic89 · 8 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Why don't you try a book that helps you learn Kanji and Vocabulary associated with those Kanji?

I recommend this: https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

There are also memrise quizzes to drill yourself on what you learned:
http://www.memrise.com/course/196282/the-kodansha-kanji-learners-course/

"こんにちは" is the right way to write Konnichiwa. What were you trying to say with the second part, mainly "多町"?

Good luck!

u/meteotor · 8 pointsr/latin

I advice you to get a copy of Hans Ørberg's "Lingva Latina - Familia Romana". It has an ascending difficulty level, and you can get used to read Latin again with the easier chapters and learn more with the later and thus harder chapters. You can get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410539390&sr=8-1&keywords=lingua+latina

Good luck in learning more Latin!
Vale,
Tor

u/BreadstickNinja · 8 pointsr/anime

/r/LearnJapanese

Best places to start are to learn the two main Japanese alphabets, hiragana and katakana. A good place to start with that is here.

Next, you need a grammar resource. Tae Kim is a good free online resource. You could also get a popular textbook like Genki.

Lastly, you need a resource for learning kanji, the complex characters adapted from Chinese that make up a lot of Japanese writing. The first two levels of WaniKani are free.

It takes a couple months of study before you really start to feel like you're making progress, but after a year or so a lot of easy reading material becomes approachable. There's also a huge and awesome community of people doing the same thing. Give it a try if you feel like it!

u/mca62511 · 8 pointsr/LearnJapanese

You should probably just use Genki

It is possible to learn Japanese using only the internet and free sources, but it certainly makes things more difficult. The advantage of using a standardized textbook and traditional learning methods is that you get a solid foundation, both in the sense that it gets you started on the right foot, but also in that it teaches you what sort of things you need to learn in the first place.

I highly recommend you try getting and using Genki. See if it is available from your local library, for example.

Yes, it is possible to learn Japanese using just free resources found on the internet.

These days, everything you could possibly want for learning Japanese exists on the internet right now.

If you learn how to use Anki (the best and most popular free flashcard program) you can get SRS flashcards without paying for a fancy website. TextFugu's free lessons will get you started with using Anki while at the same time teach you hiragana and katakana (the two syllabaries used in Japanese).

If you use Tae Kim's grammar guide and other online sources, you technically don't need a textbook. Imabi is another website similar to Tae Kim that people like. Duolingo might even be worth your time, assuming you utilize the discussion forums and that community to make sure you understand the grammar which is poorly taught by the app.

If you use HelloTalk, iTalki, and HiNative you can interact with Japanese people who'll help correct your compositions, and that could potentially lead to language exchange friendships where you Skype and practice conversation.

You can find free reading material online for practice, both by nature of the entire Japanese internet being at your fingertips, but also due to free websites like NHK Easy News and Watanoc.

You can assess your skills without ever paying for a standardized test by using the J-Cat.

You can find communities of fellow learners here on /r/LearnJapanese (we've got some good guides in the sidebar, btw), on the Japanese Language Stack Exchange, and /jp/'s Daily Japanese Thread (they've got a good guide for getting started over there).

u/Nukemarine · 7 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Looking over those, this seems like the best choice.

u/ghostofpennwast · 7 pointsr/languagelearning

Memrise chinese a1 course with headphones is something you could do on your phone.

Also, your friendly local library also likely has the pimsleur tapes, which you could listen to.

This book is the standard beginners textbook, and you need the workbook to go with it. Buy both of them used, and then look at the library or university library to see if they have the cds/dvds so you can copy them.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0887276385?pc_redir=T1

u/PianoDevil · 7 pointsr/Catholicism

For my high school we had to take 3 years of Latin. We used Memrise for Latin vocabulary and the book Lingua Latina. I reccomend this book because it is subtly super Catholic and there are many books that help understand. It goes over all necessary Latin grammar which combined with Memrise helped me a lot to learn Latin.

https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205

https://www.memrise.com/course/252632/lingua-latina-pars-i-familia-romana/

u/cwf82 · 7 pointsr/languagelearning

Find a copy of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. Libraries sometimes have copies, or you might be able to find a cheap, used copy. Even better if you can get the audio with it. It is a good, intuitive way to introduce you to the language, and makes learning basic declensions a bit more fun, because you are following along with a story, instead of just rote memorizing tables.

u/rdh2121 · 7 pointsr/languagelearning

If you just want to learn it to read it, there's no better combination than Wheelock's Latin and Hans Orberg's Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. Wheelock gives you the grammar, and reading Orberg will improve your reading speed and comprehension by leaps and bounds.

u/[deleted] · 7 pointsr/latin

As others have said, speak it. Also listen to easy Latin. Evan Millner's material comes to mind. This will help you start thinking in Latin and understanding it on its own terms without using English as an intermediary.

But another important thing to do is this: read easy Latin and read tons of it. This also will help you start understanding Latin on its own terms. If you've had Latin in school, chances are good that you were usually reading Latin that was far too difficult for you, and this is a major reason why it's hard to understand without considerable trouble. Read Lingua Latina: Familia Romana. Read the easier parts of the Vulgate (Genesis, John, etc.). Go through Claude Pavur's elementary readers. Gradually start increasing the difficulty of your reading material.

u/bootlegsoup · 7 pointsr/IWantToLearn

Hi (or should I say こんにちは?),

I'm an American took Japanese for a year in middle school, 4 years in high school, and around 2 years in college. I've also been to Japan but never lived there. I haven't kept up with my Japanese and as a result have started to forget a lot. I'd be a terrible conversation partner but I can give you some advice as to where to get started.

One of the main issues beginners have with learning Japanese is that the letters look all crazy and you can't even sound it out if you wanted to. You may have heard something like "Japanese has 4 alphabets" which is only partially true.

I highly recommend you start by learning the letters, make yourself some flash cards either with index cards or digital, and start coming up with pneumonic devices to remember them. There are plenty of resources out there that teach you the basics as if you're a kindergartener but don't let that discourage you, you are just learning the letters after all, its ok to be a kindergartener for a bit.

The first "alphabet" you'll want to memorize is Hiragana. It's what I used up above to write hello and it's the letter system the Japanese use for Japanese words. There are a few exceptions but for the most part if the word is Japanese, you write it in hiragana, at least when you're first learning. Every letter is a syllable so the first letter あ (a) is prounounced "ah" whenever you see it. い (i) is not pronounced "eye" but more like the English letter "e". お (o) is pronounced "oh" so if you put these together あおい - aoi is pronounced "ah-oh-ee"

The next set of letters to learn is Katakana. Its the same exact syllables as hiragana but the shapes look different. That is to say the same letter is still a prounounced "ah" but instead of あ it now looks like ア. Katakana tends to have more straight lines and jagged curves. This is the alphabet the Japanese use to write non-Japanese words. For example America or hamburger are both words borrowed from somewhere besides Japan and therefore would be written in Katakana. America is written アメリカ with the letters a, me, ri, ka, and pronounced "ah-meh-ri-ka" with 4 distinct syllables.

Those are the 2 main letter systems you'll be writing with when you first start. The other two are romaji and kanji. Romaji is simply writing Japanese syllables with English (latin) lettering. So あおい is written aoi and アメリカ is amerika. The trick to romaji is remembering to pronounce it in Japanese syllables, not how it would sound in English. Amerika looks like it could be pronounced the same as America to an English speaker but you need to make the ah, meh, ri, and ka distinct. You wont use romaji too much in actual writing but it will help you remember the pronunciations when first learning and it is used for typing Japanese on standard qwerty keyboards.


The last "alphabet" is not really an alphabet at all. It's called Kanji and it is extremely discouraging to your starting Japanese student. Borrowed almost entirely from Chinese Kanji is a series of literally thousands of characters that can make up entire words or parts of words. The nice thing about Kanji is that it uses many repeating parts called radicals from one character to the next and once you learn the most used pieces it becomes easier to recognize. The problem is that you can't sound them out if you've never seen one particular Kanji before and for very early beginners it is difficult to look up.

Kanji will often be mixed with other Kanji or hiragana to create a full word. For example 青い is "aoi" from above, same exact word but by writing the Kanji it saves a character and space. It may seem like much more work for 1 character of saving but kanji can sometimes represent several syllables and long words can be shortened into just 2 or 3 spaces. As a result many newspapers and comics heavily rely on Kanji and can be frustrating for beginners. Most Japanese classes will first get you comfortable with everything above before starting on Kanji and then only introduce the most basic ones a few at a time until you get the hang of them.

Just a couple pieces of miscellaneous advice:

  1. First learn hiragana and katakana and don't worry about vocab until you've got a pretty good grasp on it. Do worry about pronunciation though. It can seem weird at the very start but it's better to get it right at the start than to have to break a bad habit later ("e" is pronounced "eh" not "ee" and "u" is "ooo" not "you")

  2. For the most part hiragana and katakana pronunciation follows the same 5 vowel sounds. If you were reading off the alphabet it would sound like this "ah ee oo eh oh / kah kee koo keh koh / tah chi tsu teh toh / mah mee moo meh moh" etc.. notice how in the "tah" line what would be "tee" is now "chi" and what would be "too" is "tsu". That's one of the few exceptions but any decent hiragana guide will cover things like that. Also I was not writing in romaji there, I was just writing how the letters actually sound"

  3. Don't let this massive guide get you down. Honestly you could learn hiragana and katakana in an evening if you crack down on it and in a week if you just look at it for a bit every day. From there you can start to work on vocabulary and grammar. The only thing that really makes Japanese hard is the letters and once you have the basics its really not that bad.

  4. A lot of books, especially children's books or comics will have little hiragana letters over the kanji to help you learn or continue reading if you don't know the kanji. Once you get a decent grasp at grammar don't be afraid to muscle your way through a kid's book or two to get a feel for things. No one expects you to be able to fly through it but with a dictionary by your side and a notebook for translating its really fun to work your way through something like that. I wouldn't worry about that for a bit though.

  5. Since I was taught in a classroom I don't know too much about learning online. I do know there are a ton of resources online if you know what to search for "romaji to hiragana, kanji dictionary, etc". I do know that it helps to have someone who speaks it work on your pronunciation, maybe live mocha could help there. I'd avoid using anime for pronunciation advice because you'll end up with the voice and mannerisms of a cartoon character. :)

  6. The book my university used for people who didn't speak a single word of Japanese was Genki and I highly recommend it. It has a lot of English in it and works you through basics of grammar and vocab at a good rate. Plus it has a mini dictionary in the back of words it teaches you and a hiragana and katakana chart which is handy to have in a physical format. If you do like the book they have several more in the series that gets you to fairly advanced stuff in an easy way.

    Sorry about the wall of text but I hope it helps point you in the right direction. If you have any questions feel free to PM me and if anyone who speaks Japanese has better advice let me know! Like I mentioned at the top I've started to forget a lot from not using it and I've never taught it so maybe there are better resources out there. Good luck and have fun!
u/GregHullender · 6 pointsr/German

Hammer's German Grammar and Usage is excellent.

http://www.amazon.com/Hammers-German-Grammar-Usage-Fifth/dp/1444120166/

u/blapto · 6 pointsr/latin

If you want to learn the language most on here will probably reccomend Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. There's a lot of other options as well and I'm sure others will recommend them. Personally, I went the more traditional route (Wheelock's and Writing Latin, then working through a reader and finally just going through Virgil, Livy, etc.) and am currently going through LLPSI for the first time myself, so I can't really preach it's benefits yet haha.

For the Mantras why don't you post them, if you can, and someone might help you out!

u/Subs-man · 6 pointsr/latin

There's a book called Reading Medieval Latin by Keith Sidwell in which he goes into the cultural & historical context of that particular variation of Latin. However it starts at an intermediate level & does assume you already know basic Latin.

So I suggest to get up to the level expected in this book, read it's predecessor Reading Latin by Keith Sidwell or read Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina Per Se Illvstrata

u/prudecru · 6 pointsr/CatholicMemes

Ditch that garbage app and dive into the easy, comfortable, inexpensive old-world wholesomeness that is the Lingua Latina series.

The best part is Hans Ørberg will never delete your account because you don't have one

u/Willsxyz · 6 pointsr/latin

You want books to learn Latin and Greek, but you don't want books that are written for the purpose of teaching Latin and Greek?

I'm going to throw a textbook at you anyway, but you might like it:

Familia Romana: https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205

Get the Exercitia too: https://www.amazon.com/Exercitia-Latina-Exercises-Familia-Romana/dp/1585102121

u/Vorzard · 6 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Forget the Mangaland books, Japanese the Manga Way is much better, well-structured, covers a great amount of grammar, and deals with the politeness levels.

You should get a reference book (A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar) with it, and The Kodansha Kanji Learners Dictionary.

u/smokeshack · 6 pointsr/japanese

Rosetta Stone sucks donkey dong. Use Tae Kim's guide, Remembering the Kanji, and Genki. For listening, Pimsleur's and Japanese Pod 101 are quite good.

u/silverforest · 6 pointsr/languagelearning

Hey! Good to see someone interested in East Asian languages! The CJKV writing system normally throws a lot of people off.

CJK Writing System

I wrote a short little rant a while back on how the characters are constructed that you might want to read.

There are methods of learning the characters that make use of their structure. Heisig's RtK and RtH books (Amazon link) are the most well known books I think. Fansites such as Reviewing the Kanji and Reviewing the Hanzi also exist which you might want to take a look at.

Not sure if you like RtK? Here's the sampler. See if you like it after learning 276 characters~

Chinese-Specific

The only thing headache inducing about any Chinese dialect is the writing system and tones.

Note that though we call them "dialects", it is a matter of politics as most of them are mutually unintelligible. A Cantonese or Mandarin speaker is unlikely to understand a Hokkien speaker at all, for example.

Written chinese, on the other hand, is in Mandarin and only in Mandarin -- the other dialects do not have writing systems. Well... the notable exception is Written Cantonese, but that's can be seen as a variant of standard written chinese.

Oh! There are have two variants of the standard writing system: Simplified and Traditional. I had learnt the former in school, and I can read the latter after learning about the simplification process, so just pick one and stick with it.

I personally find Mandarin grammar to quite simple. This might be because it's an isolating language.

u/djsnipy · 6 pointsr/UWMadison

I recently graduated but took Japanese in my freshman year. I imagine a lot of people in the class have learned hiragana before to some level independently since it's one of the more accessible things you can learn about Japanese without a class. That said, it's not a prerequisite for the class so I wouldn't be too worried about it (if it's the most beginner class)

If it bothers you that you are slower than others then my only advice would be to just do extra practice from a hiragana workbook (linked below) and in Genki. I really would recommend writing them as that would probably help you remember them better and then practice reading dialogues in the book, etc. In the end, all that matters is that you learn them and pass exams and such so I would worry about that more than how others are doing and I think you'll enjoy it more and actually learn more, which is the whole point :). Japanese is really a labor of love if you wanna get good, especially after the first courses. But don't let that scare you because it is also very interesting! Just find your pace and stick with it.

I used this book when learning and found it helpful by the way.

u/bureX · 6 pointsr/europe

> and I think is almost the same as Croatian

It is, even though plenty of people will take every chance to say that's not the case.

It's sometimes referred to as "BCS" (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian).

u/torokunai · 6 pointsr/LearnKanji

If you want the actual derivations of the kanji,

http://www.amazon.com/A-Guide-Remembering-Japanese-Characters/dp/0804820384

is the go-to book

http://i.imgur.com/xjW6pox.png

for this character's derivation.

n.b. Henshall's book ordered in Heisig's simple -> complex is the best way to tackle the kanji IMO.

* edit but don't use Henshall's mnemonics, they suck

u/Aksalon · 6 pointsr/languagelearning

I tried Rosetta Stone in Korean briefly. It sucked. Like really, really sucked. It wasn't just that it did a bad job of teaching things, it taught some things in a way that was incredibly misleading and would result in you speaking some pretty absurd Korean. If you didn't know any better (I did, but obviously a complete beginner wouldn't), it would actually be harmful to your acquisition process if you used Rosetta Stone. It doesn't go up to a very advanced level either.

So now that that's out of the way:

  • If there is a Korean class available anywhere near you, take it. Korean isn't easy, and self-studying it certainly doesn't make it any easier.
  • Integrated Korean is the most widely recommended textbook series I've seen. I've never used it myself, but you should get a textbook, and it seems that theirs are good.
  • Talk to Me in Korean is a great site to practice listening. It has lessons starting from complete beginner (including a few Hangul lessons).
  • To practice speaking, you should find real-life Korean people to practice with once you've studied it a bit and have something to work with. Unless the person is a Korean tutor/teacher, don't expect them to do much in the way of teaching you though. You can try Meetup.com or classified ads like Craigslist to help you find Korean people if need be.
  • Here's a list of other various resources I use.
u/peppermint-kiss · 6 pointsr/Korean

Just to give you a benchmark, the words you listed are ones I would consider low-intermediate level. Think about what age American children learn words like 'smile' and 'art museum'. Then think about the English vocabulary you learned in middle and high school - I would consider those 'high intermediate' and 'low-mid advanced' respectively. I would guess that your grammar is pretty close to the same level, maybe a bit higher, compared with your vocabulary. Also, It's easy to overestimate how much we understand when listening or reading in the target language. Try translating what you hear in real time and you'll get an idea of where you are. If you really want to be sure, take a practice TOPIK test and see how it turns out.

The reason I tell you this is to try to give you a realistic outlook about your level and give you an idea about what kind of resources you might look into.

If you're enjoying TTMIK and it's not too boring, I would definitely keep up with that. You'll breeze through the beginner stuff and correct any small errors along the way, and then be able to slow down once you get to stuff closer to your level. Generally their material is really natural, accurate, and useful. I would give anything for a resource like that in Romanian or Finnish ㅠㅠ

I also recommend the Korean Grammar In Use series to brush up on grammar. It's easy to use and effective. I suggest starting with the beginning level just because that's my preference as a language learner and as an ESL teacher - review almost never hurts, and can help a lot, filling in gaps and increasing fluency and confidence.

For other textbooks I recommend:

  • the Korean Made Easy series, although this will be majority review for you (you might just want to check out the intermediate book if you're in a rush)
  • the Practical Korean series by Cho Hang-rok, published by Darakwon (make sure you get the right book series - there are several called "Practical Korean" by other authors). You could probably get away with starting at Basic 2 if you like, although of course you know my position on review. ;)
  • The Integrated Korean series is written for university students and can be pretty dry at points, but it's definitely the most comprehensive curriculum I've found and will make a big difference for you. I recommend starting at the beginning levels because there will certainly be a lot you haven't been exposed to.

    So that's grammar, usage, and guided practice covered. As far as vocabulary, I can't recommend using a flashcard service enough. I really like iKnow because I can create my own courses and I like how it quizzes you on audio, reading, spelling, you name it. I haven't looked at many other options though so you may want to investigate. I strongly recommend inputting every single unknown word you come across in your Korean study into this program and using it as often as you can (daily if possible). Listening to the news, reading practice, etc. are also valuable but you don't need to include vocab from that yet unless it's a word you're particularly interested in for whatever reason. Once you're at the advanced stage where you're comfortably reading newspapers, textbooks, etc. I would start in with that kind of advanced vocab study. Also, starting now, consider using it for grammar/sentence practice and not just vocabulary - sometimes I find that's the best way to drill new constructions into my head, although it can be a bit time-consuming.

    Unlike the majority of language teachers it seems, I do NOT recommend trying to be more productive with the language than your level allows. Writing when you're not sure of the correct grammar or vocab, forcing yourself to speak, etc. is not the best path to increasing skill or fluency - only familiarity and drilling are. That said, it's definitely not useless, and you should try to practice when you're with native speakers. But I would recommend against putting too much emphasis on that. The epidemic of Koreans who can pass English tests but not speak is not due to lack of practice, as is common belief there, but more due to the fact that the majority of their English study is geared toward multiple choice tests and very narrow language use rather than natural language. You can tell that's true because they also have trouble understanding TV/movies, reading novels, etc. in English. As a native English speaker and ESL teacher with a degree in linguistics, I would not be able to get a perfect score on their English exams. So don't believe the myth that "conversation practice" is an essential component to fluency - it's valuable, but not the main component.

    Once you get through TTMIK and the textbooks I listed, and have made vocabulary practice a regular part of your life, you should be at least a low-advanced level, which is likely more than enough to communicate most things in your daily life with family etc. In the meantime you can also practice translating songs, young adult novels, etc. from Korean into English. Once you've reached the advanced level I would recommend investing more in your conversational skills, perhaps hiring a tutor, doing a language exchange, taking a trip, etc. as well as doing some of the TOPIK textbooks (just an example; haven't tried that one) and doing more advanced vocabulary.

    OH! And as for slang and independent vocabulary work, spend some time playing around with endic.naver.com. Probably the best source for natural language, although of course there are still some errors and mistranslations. But for the most part that will be your best bet.

    I really hope this has been helpful for you! If you have any other questions or would like any other advice just let me know. :)
u/RamenvsSushi · 6 pointsr/LearnJapanese

YES TOTALLY WORTH!
Khatzumoto : AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com
Khatzumoto learned to be fluent in Japanese in 18 months. He did this through complete immersion. He would listen to Japanese every single day even if he didn't understand most of it at first. Learning is all about TIME. He learned how to read and write fluently by going over many sentences through SRS(Spaced Repitition System). As for Kanji, he recommends the Heisig method which I myself found extremely helpful and have a much easier time learning Kanji. If you don't want to purchase you can find a torrent very easily.

Explanation in video bits:

Watching Japanese videos without subtitles

4 stages of listening

You'll suck at it less as time goes on

I do highly recommend watching all 3 parts of the videos as there is a lot more information in them.


READ THESE:

10,000 Hours of Listening Comprehension

10,000 Sentences


Additional Sources I use for Learning 日本語:

Anki Deck for Sentences

Grammar: imabi.net

Dictionary: tangorin.com

Learning at first is overwhelming but definitely will get easier over time. But that's the thing, you have to give it a chance.

u/SuperFreddy · 6 pointsr/japan

Listen to me right now. Listen to me good.

Remembering the Kanji is probably one of the best ways to achieve what you're talking about. However, according to the introduction of the book, it will hurt you to read it alongside a Japanese course or in conjunction with other Kanji-memorizing methods. So just dedicate a few weeks to learning the 2,200 Kanji this books teaches. It claims that you can do it in 4-6 weeks if you're dedicated enough. Highly recommended.

Edit: Oh, and then there is a second and third volume which help with pronunciation of Kanji and introduce you to advanced Kanji, respectively. But even mastering the first volume puts you at a great advantage to learning Japanese.

u/TrolliusJKingIIIEsq · 6 pointsr/Svenska

I found this book quite helpful. The one I have has a different cover, but has the same title and author, so I'm guessing it's the same book.

EDIT: Found the one with the same cover as mine here.

u/mattreddits · 6 pointsr/ChineseLanguage

"Integrated Chinese (中文听说读写)" Is pretty good. It is written by Yuehua Liu and Tao-chung Yao. This one: http://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Chinese-Simplified-Characters-Textbook/dp/0887276385/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1323580038&sr=8-2

u/kingkayvee · 5 pointsr/languagelearning

These languages form a dialect continuum and are largely intelligible. This is a case of "the same language" being called different languages due to language ideologies more than linguistic structures.

There is one book I see all the time which (supposedly) teaches all three: Bosnian, Croation, and Serbian, a Textbook: With Exercises and Basic Grammar and its accompanying CD. There is also a grammar.

Logically speaking, there should not be any difference in the "one" you choose to learn, and there may be advantages to learning them simultaneously and considering any variation as possible outputs for a given situation depending on the social context (e.g., the same as considering "I'm gonna" == "I will").

Note: I have not used any of these books nor do I speak any of these languages. Just a linguist with ties to multiple language departments at my university. Do additional research to choose your resource.

u/kyuz · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

If you want to learn more about kanji etymology, check out A Guide to Remembering Japanese Kanji by Henshall. A lot of them are pretty interesting.

u/anagrammatron · 5 pointsr/languagelearning

> I've read that you should learn like a child

Your brain is not like child's brain, you have adult's brain. You can try to imitate the environment but you can't replicate what goes on in child's brain/mind. Take "learn like a child" advice with grain of salt. As for children's books, IMHO these are far from ideal for learning because for and adult it may be difficult to relate to the stories and they rarely elicit emotional response that would facilitate remembering.

Integrated Korean is widely used popular textbook series, you might want to look into that, perhaps your library has a copy.

u/rainer511 · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

> What should I do?

You should use a kanji learning method that has you learn radicals (smaller parts of kanji) first, and then teaches you kanji that you can make out of them. One of the oldest popular versions of this method is Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. It teaches you a story and English word to associate with each kanji, which makes learning vocabulary easier in the future.

KanjiDamage takes a similar approach, but uses mnemonics that are a bit more crass. Unlike Remembering the Kanji, KanjiDamage also gives you vocabulary to associate with kanji.

Either of these methods should be paired with regular use of an SRS system. Anki is free, highly customizable, and popular, but is has a steep learning curve. Most people find it worth the effort to learn how to use it. If you search around there are other alternatives, but none of them as widely used as Anki. You could also just make traditional flash cards.

Or, if you're like me and you're too busy (read:lazy) to get books, make flashcards, manage anki decks, etc, you can just buy WaniKani. WaniKani is free to try for the first two "levels". It is pretty much the approach I explained before, except that it's done all the hard work for you. Also, unlike Remembering the Kanji, WaniKani teaches you vocabulary as you learn kanji.

u/hunkofmonk1 · 5 pointsr/sweden

I used Duolingo to get the basics before I moved here. It's absolutely not perfect, but I found it was very good for giving you a fairly decent vocabulary and explaining the basic grammar rules.

If you try working your way through the course a little bit every day, and keeping a notebook with any new words you come across, you should be off to a very good start.

I then also got this book to get the hang of the grammar a little more - it's much more in-depth than Duolingo, but still explains things in quite a simple way, good for getting quick answers if you come across a construction you don't recognise.

Apart from that, the rest of my Swedish I got simply by living here and speaking, reading, hearing it every day, and also taking weekly classes. But I guess that's harder for you to do in the US! Watching Swedish movies with English subtitles (and later Swedish subtitles, once you get better) would help a lot, as well as listening to the radio, watching Swedish YouTubers etc. It can be a slow process, but you'll get better with time.

There's also 'lättläst' (easy-reading) books available - basically condensed versions of popular books written in simple Swedish. They help a lot with reading practice. There's also 8 Sidor, which is a news site/app with all the articles written in simple Swedish. Reading them and looking up any words/expressions you don't know can be a good way to expand your vocabulary.

u/this_xor_that · 5 pointsr/languagelearning

Here are a few free resources I use:

Klartext: simplified Swedish news with audio! They also have a podcast.

FSI: The student text has exercises in grammar! Unfortunately, the phrases are rather formal and dated.

I also have this book, which has been very useful.

Edit: formatting. bah.

u/HolyBejeesus · 5 pointsr/languagelearning

Here is a book for beginners

Here is a book with grammar

Memrise has some good sets of Swedish vocab.

If you're serious about it, I think you'd be crazy not to supplement your study with a class/lessons, whether it be in your area or via Skype.

u/AndrewTheConlanger · 5 pointsr/conlangs

A better question might be how much more expensive it is to learn how to conlanger than pay someone to conlang for you? Good conlanging books never exceed $20 dollars, but to pay an experienced conlanger who knows what they're doing and will deliver something of quality to you will cost no less than $300, per the LCS Job Board pricing guidelines. In a sense, it's like an art commission; something like a sketch will be half as much, but the deliverables will be half as exhaustively written. You get what you pay for, and a full masterpiece might be out of budget for a writer or worldbuilder doing what they love as a hobby rather than as a means of income.

u/FaerFoxx · 5 pointsr/worldbuilding

The Planet Construction Kit is a great resource for worldbuilding, covering almost all aspects of society and general setting from cosmology to biology, history, culture, religion, technology, map making...

http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/0984470034/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286906911&sr=1-2

Its companion book, the Language Construction Kit, is an invaluable resource for creating conlangs if that was of any interest to you as well.

http://www.amazon.com/Language-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/098447000X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268637297&sr=1-1

u/4432454653424 · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I also highly recommend KKLC. You can read the introduction with Amazon's Look Inside! function which really explains the methodology. It takes the best of other existing methods and wraps them up into one. You learn mnemonics for each character, you don't need to study graphemes because they are introduced as the course goes on, and it contains selected vocabulary that represent common compounds with the primary on and kun yomi readings for each character. Vocabulary is, after all, the way to learn readings. Pair the book with a SRS system like Anki (and there is already a deck for KKLC), and you've got an excellent method that you can work through at your own pace. I personally have been trying to average 15-20 characters a day so that I can finish before the end of the year. Some days I'll do up to 50 though.

HERE is why I would recommend WaniKani over KKLC: If you want a system that is all in one, that will give you progress markers, and will hold your hand throughout the process. I'll be the first to admit kanji study is rather tedious, and I think doing KKLC independently requires a lot of dedication. So if you aren't ready to commit to that, you can start with wani kani. I don't want to comment on it because I never used it, but I don't like that it locks you off from further content until you reach a certain level of mastery with the current stuff... I'd rather learn vocab through reading and not be forced to memorize words out of context to advance.

u/clemersonss · 5 pointsr/CasualConversation

you should really check out this book

u/Priapeia · 5 pointsr/latin

Familia Romana by Hans Ørberg is the one that I see recommended the most often around here. It takes a more immersive approach to learning Latin where you jump right in and start reading rather than focusing on grammar tables right off the bat. The Exercitia and Latine Disco books go with it.

u/kavaler_d · 5 pointsr/IWantToLearn

Hi! It's great that you want to learn Latin yourself - I was in a similar position not long ago, and can share my experience. Firstly, it's not going to be very easy, but it will be a lot of fun - learning Latin will teach you a lot about linguistics, history, and even English.

It seems to be a consensus at /r/latin that Wheelock's, while being a good textbook, teaches to translate, not to read. It focuses on rote memorization of grammar. Lingua Latina, on the other hand, focuses on reading comprehension and is considered by /r/latin users to be a superior learning method. It's based on the natural method: it is written completely in Latin, beginning with very simple phrases which speaker of any European language can understand, and slowly progresses further. To give you an idea, its first sentence is "Rōma in Italiā est". You can understand it easily, and you've already learned 4 words!

While Lingua Latina is a great textbook, I would advise getting some supplements to augment your studying process. All of them can be bought on amazon, or acquired by other means if you wish to cut your costs. Excercitia Latina, which follow Lingua Latina chapter by chapter, will give you enough practice to get a firm grip on each chapter's material. I would recommend not just filling the gaps in, but writing whole exercises out in a separate notebook - making the mechanical memory help you memorize words and grammatical structures. Latine Disco and Neumann's companion are useful companions, which will help you understand grammar introduced in each chapter of Lingua Latina (you only need one of them).

Finally, memorizing words is necessary with any language, and Latin is no exception. Some students find Lingua Latina's method to be sufficient for spaced repetition of new words, but it wasn't enough for me. I used anki, a spaced repetition software based on flashcards, to study words. There is a Lingua Latina deck available for anki, divided into chapters: thus you can easily add words into your flashcard pool after completing every LL chapter.

I hope this helps! If you'll have any questions on the material, redditors on /r/latin are very nice and are always willing to help.
Good luck with your studies!

Valē, amīce!

u/herrcoffey · 5 pointsr/latin

One interesting textbook is Lingua Latina per se illustrata, which is designed to introduce Latin to a novice learner solely by immersion. I didn't find it myself until well after I learned Latin, but from what I could tell, it would be a good way to pick up the basics

u/DirtyWolf · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I think is "Japanese The Manga Way" but not 100% sure since I haven't read the book.

Also interested in the answer to OP question.

u/iwakun · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I've answered this question before, so you might find some useful information there. Special emphasis on Japanese the Manga Way and JapanesePod101

To add to that, let me add a few more pointers directed specifically at you.

  • No Rosetta Stone! Although it's popular and probably works in some learner/language configurations, I hear that it's not the best for Japanese. Rosetta Stone tries to fit all languages into its program and Japanese doesn't fit that mold very well. Plus in think that their "Act like a baby" slogan is bulls#!t. Kids are barely coherent even after four years of immersion. Plus you've already learned one language, so you know a lot about how language and communication works (nouns, verbs, etc). Why not leverage that knowledge? </rant>

  • An good offline grammar resource is The Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar but more as a reference book than a guided learning book.

  • I like the Kotoba app for iPod Touch but that's for reference too.
u/Saki_Kawasaki · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Yeah it is. Buying it on Amazon Japan is cheaper than Amazon US I'm pretty sure. Here's a link for it: http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401/

If you've never ordered from Amazon Japan before, here's a guide: http://cdn.halcyonrealms.com/japan/how-to-order-from-amazon-japan-a-detailed-buying-guide/

u/haxdal · 5 pointsr/manga

Honestly I don't understand much written japanese but I've been self studying using the internet and I have signed up for beginners japanese classes in my university next semester (they use Genki which I plan on buying this month and start early) and I have also been listening to the Pimsleur Japanese I lessons (and of course copious amounts of Anime).

u/BigBoyTrader · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I heard Rosetta Stone is quite poor and expensive, but of course, naturally, I am not an expert :)
Here's what I bought on Amazon so far, still waiting for it to all ship to me:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/4805311444/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M3STG9N/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/4789014479/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I am under the impression that it's a good use of time to first learn the Kana (Hiragana + Katakana.) As such, I am currently learning to recognize them by playing https://learnjapanesepod.com/kana-invaders/. Once I learn to recognize them I will move to "Japanase Hiragana and Katakana for Beginners" and drill them so I am able to write them and recognize them more seamlessly, while still continue playing the game to review. I think by the end of next weekend I should be able to recognize the Kana, and hopefully after another 2-4 weeks of drilling I can write them too (I'm not sure if this is realistic at all).

Once I am comfortable with Kana I am going to move to the Genki books, which seem to be highly recommended. I think I will do the workbooks and make Anki decks to memorize Kanji/vocabularly. I think this is approximately 2-3 years of University classes but hopefully this process takes 1-1.5 years of dedicated work? Again, not sure what timelines are reasonable.

u/gegegeno · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I went looking and couldn't find much. There's its web site, which has an overview (incl. contents) and videos about it (note: these start in Japanese, but students talk in English later), but I couldn't find actual sample pages. There's this video review where she shows a few pages and talks about it, but that's it really.

It's been a while since I used it, but basically each chapter is somewhat self-contained and tend to be on a general topic. So I'll take Chapter 1 as an example.

Chapter 10 has the topic 日本の便利な店. The chapter starts with some preparatory stuff before going to the reading about vending machines (自動販売機大国ニッポン), which is deliberately low on furigana apart from some difficult words, but has a list down the bottom of key kani compounds. The reading is about two pages long (earlier ones are shorter) but not especially difficult. Next is a detailed wordlist with the word, its reading, type of word (verb, noun, etc.) and English meaning indexed with its location in the reading passage.

Up next is the transcript of a conversation about convenience stores and how they're different between countries (Japan and America, specifically), the audio of which is online. This also has key kanji compounds at the bottom of the page and is followed by another wordlist. After that there are a series of questions relating to what was in the reading and conversation. Then there's an exercise to write your own conversation based on prompts and paying attention to politeness and stuff. Then there's a conversation with partner roleplay type exercise.

After that is one of the things I found best about this book, the grammar notes. This chapter has 17 grammar points lifted from the readings (with references to where it was from), with explanations of when you might use it, ways that it's translated into English, how it's actually used and example sentences. One issue is that the sentences from the reading and example sentences don't have English translations, but I didn't really have much trouble with that myself. The explanation in English was usually enough to understand what the examples mean, and you can of course look it up online if you're really struggling.

Following that is a table of kanji split into "things you should learn to read and write" and "things you should learn to read", again with where they were. This pretty closely follows the kanji compound lists at the bottom of readings.

The chapter then ends on a "Grammar note" explaining a general grammar principle (as opposed to the specific points in the grammar section). This one talks about dialects and has a little map of Japan with how they say すごくおいしい in different places.

With copyright I don't really want to include scans of pages (seeing as I can't find them anywhere I'm assuming you can't upload them), but the videos at least put up shots of the pages. If you really need to check it out before buying, see if you can find it at a local library or even better find out if any university libraries near you have a copy and check it there. I really like this text myself, and the grammar pages in particular are way better than any other text I've seen.

EDIT: There's a sample chapter on Amazon JP, just click on the picture of the cover.

u/BlackRiot · 4 pointsr/Calgary

Reading, writing, speaking, or a combination of the above? Why are you studying Japanese? How advanced do you want to be?

I'm currently learning some Japanese through self-study because of overseas work. Here's where I started:

u/sauceysalmon · 4 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I think you would be better off with the 2nd editions. I met one of the authors and he told me that they changed some things after some feedback on the first edition. He gave a talk at my school but I don't remember any of the examples.

The GENKI I is about 15 dollar used but I would make sure that it is the 2nd edition.

GENKI II is about 40 dollars

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014436

Possibly better on Abe

Genki I

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=21808789441&searchurl=kn%3Dgenki%2B2nd%26sortby%3D17%26ds%3D20

Genki II

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22386775654&searchurl=kn%3Dgenki%2B2nd%26sortby%3D17%26ds%3D20

u/Kami_Okami · 4 pointsr/LearnJapanese

There's a massive step between being able to read/write hiragana/katakana, and being able to write/read Japanese. I'm not saying you shouldn't get a penpal, but don't be too disappointed when it's almost entirely English to start.

That said, I'd say you should look into ordering a textbook on basic grammar. My university didn't use these, but I hear that Genki series is extremely popular with beginning learners. Try checking that out!

u/DocSeba · 4 pointsr/italy

No, ho un maestro (3h/settimana), ma buona parte del lavoro è soprattutto calligrafia e memorizzazione: di fatto si potrebbe anche fare da autodidatta immagino. Il testo che usiamo è questo


https://www.amazon.it/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

accompagnato da


https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/478901441X


Entrambi si trovano facilmente in PDF se vi interessa!

u/spare0hs · 4 pointsr/musictheory

First, I would check to see if the language requirements are for entering the program or if they are for achieving candidacy. I know it varies widely by program, but if it is a candidacy requirement (or even maybe a requirement to be fulfilled by the end of the first year), the program you enroll in might have a path to achieving proficiency that doesn't require remedial language courses or self-instruction.

That being said, I am doing this right now. I would recommend a healthy dose of Duolinguo, but also some French for reading books. Karl Sandberg's French for Reading is an excellent resource that is aimed at the academic. Additionally, I have heard that Jacqueline Morton's English for Students of French is great, too. I have also picked up a few side-by-side French/English novels to practice on. After about a month of this (maybe 3-5 hours a week), I am already feeling like I could struggle bus my way through the exam if I could beg another half hour out of the proctor.

There are some informal extension courses offered by some universities for rather cheap, as well. Just googling "French reading summer online" or something like that makes a bunch of them pop up.

Lastly, in the next few weeks I am going to be rounding up some music theory/musicology articles in French that have English translations (or perhaps the reverse) so that I can practice. PM me if you want me to send them to you when I get them.

u/ChocolateEevee · 4 pointsr/languagelearning

There's a review for the French one on Amazon that's fantastic. I've grabbed a quick excerpt of it that I've found particularly amusing.

"I should mention some caveats. First, this book is not a booty call. It is a fairly intense study of written French. You can't just say to yourself, "Well, I haven't looked at this book for two weeks but now I'm horny for a little French so I'll crack it open." No, you must romance this book, pay attention to it each and every day, make it feel like it's the only book you're reading. If you leave it alone for a week or two, you will forget what you have learned and the book will find someone else who is serious about learning a language. It's that French."

https://www.amazon.com/French-Reading-Karl-C-Sandberg/dp/0133316033

u/Cigil · 4 pointsr/duolingo

Yes absolutely. I think ideally it would be cool if there was a BCS Duolingo course for the first 1/4th of the tree, just to get the basics and exposure to the differences between BCS, then you can pick which one you want to advance with later on after understanding the basics. Pretty much exactly like the BCS Textbook teaches it. I think this would draw more widespread attraction to BCS learning, and would eliminate some confusion for people traveling to holiday to Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia. I would guess that most people don't know just how similar the languages are.

https://www.amazon.de/Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Textbook-Exercises/dp/0299236544

Example Page of BCS Textbook

With that being said, I am extremely excited about this course. I've been hoping for a Croatian one for a LONG time, and been working my way through my BCS textbooks in my spare time. Super pumped!

And count me in for Alpha Testing!

u/wodenokoto · 4 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I can't believe nobody mentioned A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (and the Intermediate and Advanced books that follows it)

http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546/

Use Genki, skip the grammar descriptions in the book and instead look them up in A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (and read all the sections in the book before the dictionary part)

As linguist you should be aware of second language acquisition theory and therefore sympathise with / understand / appreciate how the teaching of the language progress through a normal textbook. You can't learn a language just by understanding its structure, you need practice and exposure.

For Kanji you can look at A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters, which will go through the etymology of the most common ~2100 characters as historically correct as any other work of etymology on these things can get. You can supplement with http://www.kanjinetworks.com

http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Remembering-Japanese-Characters/dp/0804820384/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1418734675&sr=8-2&keywords=guide+to+remembering+kanji

I think something like Core 2k decks for anki (or the paid version, know.jp) is good enough for practicing listening and reading comprehension, even for a linguist.

u/Daege · 4 pointsr/LearnJapanese

To learn them. For Japanese, this is great and widely considered one of the best ways to learn the kanji (and some vocab along the way); for Chinese, this (Traditional) and this (Simplified) are two of your options. Another is to just learn them out of whichever textbook you get and while studying vocabulary separatedly. There are probably some other hanzi books too; you might wanna have a look over in /r/chineselanguage for that sort of thing.

However, I suggest getting a good base in one of the two character sets (Japanese or Chinese) before you start with the other, to minimise any confusion. I knew probably 1.3k kanji (as in, I could recognise them and sort of figure out the meaning; I couldn't pronounce all of them) when I tried learning Chinese as well, so I didn't have any problems with that.

u/kyobumpbump · 4 pointsr/languagelearning

I started learning to read and write Korean with Hangul Master, then the basics with the Integrated Korean series. Because Korean grammar can be no bueno, I used Korean Grammar in Use as well. All of those books were super worth the price and really helped me understand how the language worked.

If you're looking for something free, Talk To Me In Korean is always a good option, or if you wanna learn Hangul on your own, YouTube has a lot of good videos!

Good luck!

u/-AngraMainyu · 4 pointsr/LearnJapanese

It's actually a system described in the book Remembering the Kanji. But of course you can use software to help with it (e.g. Anki).

u/WirKampfenGegen · 4 pointsr/Svenska

Do you have access to amazon? There’s tons on there for very cheap and if you don’t like them you can return them.

Unfortunately the only Swedish textbook I ever used was made for foreigners already in Sweden, I’ve never seen it online or anything like that

This one is almost 5 stars and is cheap. As for actual workbooks there’s a few on there but they either have only one or none reviews

u/forgottendinosaur · 4 pointsr/Chinese

I've used two textbooks for learning Chinese.

  1. Basic Spoken Chinese. It helped me a lot with survival Chinese. I learned how to answer basic questions, ask for directions, and so on. BSC also explains lots of the culture, and the design of the book inside is good. The downside is that there are two tracks, one for speaking and listening and another for writing and reading. There's also two books for each track, one textbook and one workbook ("Practice Essentials"). This will cost you, but the textbooks are pretty thorough in helping you to use the language.

  2. Integrated Chinese. I've been studying Chinese for three years. The first year I used IC, and now I'm using it again. (The middle year was with BSC.) The pro of this one is that it's very academic. I'm doing level two right now, and I just studied a dialogue on two people arguing about animal rights. It also has a lot more grammar than BSC. It's cheaper, too, especially if you buy an older edition.

    Between the two textbooks, I'd recommend IC for you. It has the grammar, and I think this is what you're looking for. Another thing I love about it is that it doesn't put the pinyin, characters, and English on the same page. After every line of pinyin in the dialogues, BSC put the English translation. This hurt my attempt to focus on Chinese. Going back and forth between English and Chinese doesn't allow you to make the necessary form-meaning connections between Chinese and the real world. In IC, you'll see a page of characters, and you'll have to flip a few pages to find some English and term definitions.

    Edit: The reason I'm back in IC again is that, after spending a summer in China with mostly BSC running through my head (I memorized all 40 dialogues for class), I wasn't able to hold a decent conversation. I could ask for directions, tell somebody that my Chinese wasn't too good, and ask somebody about how many siblings they had (spoiler alert: none), but that was really the extent of it. I went through a lonely phase because nobody around me could speak English, and I was totally unprepared to get to know people on a deeper level in Chinese.

    Edit2: You can find a graded reader/listener on this website. I've also heard some positive things about FluentU.
u/elizabitchg · 4 pointsr/ChineseLanguage

Hey! I’m also 16, I’ve been learning Chinese for 3 years now and I absolutely love it!!!

Don’t know much about online courses, I was lucky enough to take it at my high school. We don’t usually use our chinese books, but if you want to start there, the type we sometimes go off from is Integrated Chinese: Simplified Characters Textbook, Level 1, Part 1 (English and Chinese Edition) but man, that price is ridiculous! I’m sure you can find some better ones at a book resale shop or even a local goodwill, I’ve found plenty of good chinese language related items at Goodwill’s near me, whether it be movies, informational stuff, or made for learning. It just depends on what you find, sometimes you can get stumble across some real treasures!

Sorry to go so far off topic, but yeah, my advice would be to start with whatever cheapest learning book you can find and then see how you like it. But I also can’t stand learning things on a computer, so that could also be personal preference. Sorry I’m not much of help!

I do like the site FluentU a lot, they post lots of helpful videos and I believe that have many more learning tools you can utilize!

Here’s a link on their list of best textbooks and from there you can scour the site for whatever else you can find.

Best of luck, and you can do it! 加油!Oh! BTW, you should download the Pleco app, as there’s a quite large consensus among Chinese learners and teachers alike, all attesting to the notion that it does wonders. It’s literally my Chinese Bible—as in, it is a Chinese dictionary. Much better than Google Translate, (although Translate can also be useful when used the right way and not as a crutch) and Pleco also gives helpful context clues and sentence examples to make things make more sense.

u/BetaRhoOmega · 4 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Most people are going to recommend you use some sort of SRS (spaced repetition system) to effectively learn the vast amounts of information you need to memorize. Many recommend Anki (it's my preferred flash card/srs app) but there are others out there. Here's the link to the manual (https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#introduction). It obviously explains Anki specific functionality, but it describes the use and purpose of an SRS system and why it's proven to be effective for memorizing information.

As for learning Kanji, this is the most challenging part of learning Japanese. You're gonna want to use some structured learning material which will help you understand what radicals are and how the factor into building individual Kanji. I personally use James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" and its sister learning site Koohii (https://kanji.koohii.com/study) to create mnemonics for the Kanji and learn to memorize them. I then make my own flashcards in Anki and practice them when they come up on the app.

I've seen others recommend Kodansha (https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268), but I've never used it so I can't speak to its quality. From what I've heard though it might honestly be preferred to Heisig's stuff cause his mnemonics can seem pretty strange or outdated (which is why I get most of mine from the top upvoted ones on koohii).

You're gonna want an english to japanese dictionary. For that I use jisho (https://jisho.org/). You can search for words in english, romanji, kana, and kanji and you'll find definitions, related words, pronunciations etc. It's incredibly helpful.

I don't know about a discord server but I'd be interested in something like that as well.

It takes a lot of time and dedication, and for most people the payoff will only be achieved after years of learning, but it's definitely doable, and learning can be very fun in and of itself. There's a very satisfying feeling to go from looking at Japanese and seeing it as alien characters, to being able to read a sentence that once just looked like scribbles.

u/tkdtkd117 · 4 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I'm not fluent, but the kanji resource that I like best is the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course; I feel that it does the best job of anything that I've seen in terms of explaining similar kanji and how to tell them apart. There is a decent number of pages available in the Look Inside preview, so maybe browse through and see if any of the explanations for similar kanji early on (木 vs. 本, 休 vs. 体, 牛 vs. 午, 北 vs. 比, 刀 vs. 刃) click with you?

u/gordiep · 4 pointsr/latin

Any of the basic primers (with the exception of the Oxford Latin Course) are probably fine, though Wheelock's is the time-tested standard for many Classics programs. However, once you get beyond the first few units, I would warmly recommend something like the Lingua Latina series, which not only is written entirely in Latin (with a graded difficulty curve as you advance), but also gives a nice in-situ introduction to Roman family life, civic institutions, etc.

Really, the major problem for any Latin student—or student of any language, really—is gaining proficiency in the language via an inventory of vocabulary, grammatical structures, idioms, etc. With a purely textual language like Latin, one can't easily use daily conversation (or 'immersion' in the current pedagogical lingo) as a means of reinforcement, and thus reading great quantities of text is the only way to improve one's comprehension. Since the bulk of extant Latin literature is 'high' literature, attempting to read even so-called 'easy' authors such as Caesar can be incredibly frustrating to a novice, as even these authors were writing in a style that was the result of years of intensive rhetorical schooling. The canned readings in Wheelock's are okay, but none are longer than a few pages, at the most. The Lingua Latina books can help supplement one's reading, particularly with the graded difficulty approach that they are designed around.

A final bit of advice: memorize everything. You will never, never achieve any degree of proficiency with the language if you don't work at it; I recommend (and regularly use) a flashcard program (Anki in my case) for vocab, forms, names, whatever. You simply can't half-ass this aspect. Most student's trouble when learning Latin is the result of imperfectly knowing a) the vocab, and b) grammatical endings, constructions, etc. Despite its reputation and popular sentiment to the contrary, Latin is not any 'harder' or more complex than English or whatever other language one might be native to. Remember that at one time all manner of people learned and spoke Latin: slaves, foreigners, statesman, plebs, etc. You can do it, but you have to put in the time. Be patient with it, work at it, and you will be rewarded. Good luck!

u/devnull5475 · 4 pointsr/latin

Neither of these are online, but they're both good for independent study:

u/AWanderingFlame · 3 pointsr/worldbuilding

I'm building conlangs for my world, but I lean heavily on Mark Rosenfelder' The Language Construction Kit and the program Vulgar which is currently on sale.

u/Higeking · 3 pointsr/German

i have this and im very satisifed.

​

also swedish is indeed nice to know due to it sharing many similar words with german. (im swedish)

u/tomatotomatotomato · 3 pointsr/Switzerland

Does anyone have a recommendation for a book dealing with Swiss German, preferably the Zürich dialect. I'm looking for a grammar reference of sorts (ideally a Swiss version of Hammer's German Grammar and Usage), not a dictionary.
Merci vielmal.

u/Traveosa · 3 pointsr/German

I'm not sure what reader is, but have you considered the following:

u/Sle · 3 pointsr/German

Not at all.

It's modern, it's real, it's in English, it's no bullshit, no messing around.

There's so much nonsense talked about "immersion" and "diving in" by people for whom learning is a distant memory, or who want their achievement to remain mysterious and unattainable. This book, written in English, takes you by the hand, waves all the bullshit away and tells you straight, in plain language how it all works. It's not dry, and is honest about what's really used and what isn't and where.

I bought it on a whim, and being the owner of several other textbooks, was blown away. I've read it cover to cover twice now, it's full of "Ah.." moments. A total cheat-sheet of a book. Look at the reviews too, it's well worth getting a copy and ending the struggle.

u/AFrameNarrative · 3 pointsr/duolingo

I primarily use German Grammar Drills and Hammer's German Grammar and Usage. Also look up Practice Makes Perfect series on German.

u/LeoFragozo · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

While I was using Genki I've used KKLC at the same time, no regrets, I even did the "same Kanji" that i found in both sources, now I'm working in digest Genki by it workbooks, and now to proceed on Tobira.

日本語がペラペラのため頑張って

u/JJ_Harper · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Kodansha KLC is the most serious and quality resource for kanji, and starts right at your level (assuming you can read kana). As an alternative to Anki, try Memrise. It has KLC decks.

u/ssjevot · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Well as far as etymology goes, you can't beat the Henshall text (most recent version here): https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Japanese-Kanji-Understanding/dp/4805311703/

But if you actually want to learn Kanji I recommend using KLC: https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/

This has a lot of Anki and Memrize decks to help you study.

u/AllegroDigital · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Holy hell.... I got it for $37.44 CAD last June, and now it's being sold for over $500 https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1568365268/ref=pe_3034960_233709270_TE_item

u/Sleet_day · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

On amazon the dimensions are listed as 15.3 x 3.5 x 22.9 cm
https://www.amazon.ca/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

Wow that's really cheap for 720 pages 33 Cdn.

u/cpathrowaway3 · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I'd suggest Kodansha for kanji learning, as the Genki I and II books don't really supply you with an adequate amount of kanji imo.

u/lianodel · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

There are plenty of good resources out there, so there's no one best option. So, try what you can, see what jives with you, and then stick with it.

Anyway, here are the resources I used and liked:

  1. Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course. I haven't tried RTK, but I went with this one because I liked the approach. It orders the Kanji taking into account frequency, but also introducing "graphemes" one at a time, and the mnemonics were mostly etymologically accurate. Both it and RTK include all the Jouyou kanji, but KKLC includes a few more (total 2,300) by adding in some common non-Jouyou kanji that are still handy to know.

    I used this to quickly go through all the important kanji and their meanings. I neglected readings, but I think it was worth it, since now I can recognize characters more confidently, and pick up readings in context with vocabulary.

    Unfortunately it's currently unavailable via Amazon, but the item listing lets you preview the book. Use that to see if you like it. Alternatively, see if you can find it at a local bookstore so you can page through it (I bought mine at Barnes & Noble), or check your local library (which may be able to order it if you ask for it). You can also use those methods to preview other books, like RTK.

  2. KanjiStudy. It's an app for Android (and iPhone, but last I checked, that version is considerably behind). Great for quizzes and writing practice, and it supports grouping the kanji by whatever order you want, be it KKLC, RTK, Japanese grade levels, etc. $10 and super worth it (again, at least on Android), but you can try it for free to access the kana, radicals, and one "level" of Kanji for each learning order. The only think it's missing is a spaced repetition system, but that's coming eventually.

  3. WaniKani. I like it as a convenient supplement to keep me studying kanji regularly. You can get many of the same features with an Anki deck, so it's up to you if it's worth the convenience, style, and audio samples. The mnemonics have improved, but are still way too goofy for me, but that's what I have KKLC for anyway. There's a free trial, so it's worth checking out. Plus the people running the site and the community seem cool. Also, it includes vocabulary, which is nice, and has an API to integrate with other apps, like BunPro and SatoriReader, which can add a little value.
u/Raywes88 · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I used it up until about level 8 I think. I liked it and the items that I leveled to mastered/enlightened (as they call it) are definitely in my brain.

However I'm cheap and for the cost of 4ish months of WK (it's like $8/Mo for non beta testers now right?) I just decided to pick up The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course.

This book paired with HouHou is effectively the same thing as WK. Of course you do need to be a little more motivated because you need to add the items to HouHou yourself. I think this is also pretty cool because, for example, I recently switched the language on the weather site I use to Japanese. I've thrown all the new weather terms I've encountered so far along with their Kanji into HouHou.

In the interest of fairness: A major drawback of HouHou is the lack of any app/online review. I've resorted to using Teamviewer to connect to my PC in order to do reviews remotely. WK (and I think Anki) certainly does not have this problem; there is even a pretty good app for WK afaik.

If you're interested, I pretty much do what this guy does (except he uses Anki) and I feel like I've been making as much progress as I did with WK.

Edit: I'd like to add that with WK I never bothered with stroke order or writing any of the kanji at all. Since I've switched to this new approach I've started writing out each kanji ~10 times (sometimes more if it looks really similar to another one I already know etc etc) and I feel like this has helped me remember them immensely YMMV.

u/katapetasma · 3 pointsr/Reformed

Lingua Latina: Familia Romana is one of my favorite books.

u/cinisoot · 3 pointsr/latin

If you're trying to find some sort of "natural method" to learning Latin I reccommend Lingua Latina. The audio recordings can also be helpful if you decide to get them but they aren't necessary.

u/a_cool_goddamn_name · 3 pointsr/IWantToLearn

Lingua latina per se illustrata.

Learn using the natural method.

u/_Qoppa_ · 3 pointsr/latin

Sounds like you're interested in classical Latin. Starting there is a good idea, as church Latin tends to be simpler than classical Latin, meaning if you can read classical Latin, you'll have no trouble reading church Latin. I would recommend Lingua Latina. It is 100% in Latin, but starts off very simply and slowly introduces grammar and new words, so that by the time you finish the book you can read in Latin reasonably fluently. If you have experience in learning languages or speak another Romance language, you may be able to get by with just this book, but if not a traditonal grammar like Wheelock's Latin would be a good supplement. The benefit of Lingua Latina is that it teaches you to read in Latin, not painfully translate it. If you're goal is to be able to read texts for pleasure, this is a must.

u/dephira · 3 pointsr/languagelearning

Yes basically writing a text in German without any explanatory notes. It just came to my mind since your approach is so heavy on cognates so students should be able to understand a text made up of those cognates and half cognates.

​

You can preview some pages of the book on Amazon, maybe it will help clarify what I mean: Amazon link

u/PoorDumbandBroken · 3 pointsr/Catholicism

In college I used Keller and Russel's Learn to Read Latin and didn't have any luck with it.

A few years later I picked up Lingua Latina, (and its supporting materials), and did a LOT better. The latter uses an immersion based method where you try to figure out what's going on based on cognates. Over time you pick up conjugation and declension pretty naturally instead of trying to memorize tables.

There are supporting materials with classical vs ecclesiastical pronunciation which you might find helpful as well.

Edit: Check out the Amazon preview I linked, it should give you a good idea of what to expect.

u/ihatemendingwalls · 3 pointsr/literature

I'm taking a Latin III this year and this is our sorta finale for the Latin program.

The other question is very tricky.

  1. It's taken me three years to get the point I am now and I wouldn't even call myself super qualified. We're all getting by with a lot of help from our teacher. And the rate I've been working at has been anything but steady. So that being said, I'd say anywhere from 1-3 years of learning.

  2. It's very dependent on the book you have. I personally recommend Hans Orberg's [Lingua Latina] (http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367455675&sr=8-1&keywords=Lingua+Latina) and its [companion] (http://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-College-Companion-Vocabulary/dp/1585101915/ref=pd_sim_b_3). The first one is written entirely in Latin; it's meant to teach Latin in a totally immersive way, by bypassing your native language and getting you to connect Latin vocabulary with images and ideas. I guess you don't technically need the companion but it's helpful when grammar concepts get more complex so I'd recommend it.

  3. We jumped into Ovid after chapter 26ish, but I'd recommend at least finishing the book. Also, I hear Orberg's second book is a great bridge between the teaching style of Latin he writes and the poetry of Ancient Rome.

  4. One more thing, take your time. By the time you're finished with each chapter, reading it should be as easy as reading in English. I think its recommended that you read them 7 times before moving on. It'll be dull at first but the repetition only reinforces it more.

    Hope I helped!
u/Elara94 · 3 pointsr/latin

To ease into it I would suggest Lingua Latina, it's a book designed to teach through totally immersion. You'll probably find the first few chapters ridiculously easy, but further on will probably be about your previous level. There are multiple of books with multiple levels of reading capabilities. Here's a link to it https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/1585104205/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523538313&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=lingua+latina&dpPl=1&dpID=41i2-gtD%2BlL&ref=plSrch.

u/Shoyuu · 3 pointsr/IAmA

I'm sorry to hijack this thread.

I'm heading to Japan in 11 hours for 4 months(Going abroad for my college), and I lived there for 10 months in high school. I study Japanese at my college.

My biggest fault in grammar. I've used a couple of resources to help me, so I'll start with that.

Japanese the Manga Way is one of my all-time favorite resource book. It's less boring, and has well written explanations. I've often used this book as a supplement to my other textbooks.

Genki is another favorite. I've used both 1 and 2 in my college class, and if well taught is extremely valuable. It teaches Kanji/grammar/ vocab at a moderate pace.

I've also used this grammar book in the past. It's good, but lacks in presentation.

Tuttle's Japanese Guide to Kana/Kanji provides good practice space for Kana/Kanji. The later Kanji's space can be limited, but if you write it in pencil you can erase and re-write at any given time.

I use the Random-House dictionary, but it's kind of 'old hat'. For online I use Jisho.org or Jim Brean's dictionary. There was another one I used to use that was very similar to Jisho.org that was made by a Redditor but I lost the link. If you have a DS I would recommend Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten, it's like have a full electronic dictionary w.o the full price (Though I wish you could jump from English -> Japanese words [You can do Japanese -> English words] but that's my only grievances against it).

Good luck!

u/ferglovesyou · 3 pointsr/japan

~というよりは

is also a possibility.

["A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar"](http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Intermediate-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789007758 by Makino and Tsutsui) uses both versions.

u/FloydiusMaximus · 3 pointsr/genki

I don't believe there is a 2017 version -- there is the old First Edition and the newer second edition. It is available on amazon for a reasonable price -- to my knowledge there is no legal pdf download.

u/cockPunches · 3 pointsr/AlienExchange

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401

i suggest this book. it comes with a cd for you to follow along in.

best advice is for you to just be able to stay consistent enough for just one semester to be able to make it to a face-to-face class at a community college somewhere. (~350 a class depending on your residency. hopefully you live somewhere close to a comm college)

our japanese teacher who was also japanese with a phd in linguistics taught from this book and it was great.

u/o33o · 3 pointsr/japan

I think you meant you know some Hiragana instead of kanji. You'll need to know all 50 of them before you can read anything. Worry about kanji later. Learning with a textbook is more effective. I recommend the Genki textbook. http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y You can also search for "beginner Japanese" videos on Youtube.

u/dentinacar · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Textbook part 1 This is the main textbook that you need, includes the mp3 cd.

Optional workbook part 1 Extra practice for the textbook.

Textbook part 2 You move onto this book when finished with part 1, also has a cd

Optional workbook pt 2 extra practice that accompanies the second part

These are all the 2nd ed.

u/gamaliel64 · 3 pointsr/gaming

This is what my program used. It's pretty good.

u/Rewin42 · 3 pointsr/NoGameNoLife

More than likely the light novels (7 and 8) will be officially translated by the time you're able to read the untranslated version.

If you still want to learn Japanese though, my best advice is to search around on your own and see what works for you. What I've found works for me has been:

Free Stuff:

First memorize Hirigana and Katakana (Japanese has three alphabets - Hirigana, Katakana (for loan words), and Kanji. Hirigana and Katakana are close to the English alphabet while Kanji is more like pictograms (for example, eye <3 u)). Write them in the margins of notes your taking, buy a set of post-it notes and write down the hirigana and katakana tables every hour or so, and you'll learn it in a few days Certainly less than a week.

For kanji, wanikani (https://www.wanikani.com/dashboard) is a good idea to get started on early (it's slow going at least at first, but a nice review tool - learn the kanji and example phrases on your own if it's too slow). (edit: Actually $10 per month after the first three levels (~1 month to complete first three levels). edit 2: There's a coupon for 50% off forever floating around though.)

Other than that, there are pdfs of the textbook Genki I (link to amazon) floating around (or you could pay $80ish for the textbook and workbook). This is the textbook the majority of people use, and it's basically your standard textbook. The stories of Mary and Takashi are awesome though and pretty fun to follow.

Learning a language requires you to learn a whole host of new grammar rules (Japanese has a good chunk with no equivalent in English) and thousands upon thousands of vocabulary. Tae Kim's Grammar Guide is typically pointed to for those who want to learn the grammar quickly, or have a resource to look at as you encounter new grammar.

Youtube videos. Puni-Puni, and others are quick to watch and really good review.

Watch anime, read manga! It's either very low-cost, or free, and exposes you to the language. You can hear or read the grammar structures your learning about, or see kanji in action. Likely since most are geared towards japanese middle-school-age to high-school-age students you won't be able to understand the vast majority of what you read or hear (without subtitles or translations), but you'll be able to get the gist of it. Here's a youtube channel that takes a sentence or two from currently-airing or recent anime and breaks it down. Also, here's a newer subreddit doing somewhat the same thing.

Lower cost stuff:

I used the workbook "Japanese Tutor" to get from the beginner to intermediate stage. It's $20 but was a very nice way to work my way through the beginner stage to intermediate.

Japanese Graded Readers is a great way to practice reading. They're kind of like scholastic books you would find at book fairs in elementary school. They don't use complex sentence structure or complex words (or complex kanji in japanese's case), and are designed for foreign language learners (so the topics are more adult, less "The dog ran. The cat ate. The bug couldn't swim."). I recommend you start at Level 1 since Level 0 is more about learning odd vocab. You can understand Level 1 books in about 2-3 weeks if you spend around 2 hours each day studying. You get 5 books (15-25 pages each - which is just enough so you don't get tired ever so slowly reading them) for $30.

High cost stuff:

Rosetta Stone is a nice way to learn vocabulary and practice hearing the language, but it's costly at $170-$200 (for all 3 levels - 150 hours). If you have a friend who can loan it to you to try out (or split the cost with) it's a really nice tool since it teaches vocabulary of objects you see in daily life, and you'll be able to look around your house or city and have a word for a good chunk of things.

u/tetsuyaa · 3 pointsr/anime

Hehe, おうえんする = verb for to cheer. おうえんしているよ = I am cheering you on

Edit : P.s. if you wanna get a japanese book get this : http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401, it's what I learned from, theres multiple volumes and this is the first one

Edit 2: おうえん*

u/LovelyVidel · 3 pointsr/bangtan

Thank you so much! Is this what I’m looking for along with getting the workbook? Also since this is completely self-study, would I need the answer key that is shown below “customers who bought this item also bought”? https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401

u/Phailadork · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Yeah I've viewed that wiki before and done research I guess I'm just stupid. And it's more so that I can only afford 1 thing so I want to make absolutely sure that it's the right thing for me. From what I'm getting, get a Genki book because it teaches you a lot more? The question then is...

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401/ this one or https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X/ this one? Or are they both necessary? Both the same thing? etc.

They both say second edition which is kinda throwing me off I guess.

u/Pennwisedom · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I'm not sure what you're seeing, but this is the link to Genki.

u/Sentient545 · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Pick up a grammar guide. Genki is the go-to for textbooks, or you could use a free online resource like Tae Kim or Wasabi.

u/Chat2Text · 3 pointsr/gaijinhunter

If you're in college, see if they offer Japanese classes. If not, you could try to self-study with Japanese textbooks. The one I took in college used the Genki textbooks, so you could try with that.

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Edition/dp/4789014401

There's also a workbook that you can buy to test yourself on how well you learned the material. I don't know if it comes with an answer sheet though :S

u/EvanGRogers · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

In my own opinion, grammar is the most important part of any textbook. How well a book explains a grammar point determines how well I like the book. There are 3 major areas of grammar that I look for: verb modification, particle usage, and how well the book explains 関係節 (using a verb/sentence to modify a noun: "The chair that he sat in")

I've looked at a few textbooks:

Yookoso (which has, apparently changed its cover...) is a sort of intense, high-density textbook that makes it a bit hard to look up grammar points. However, it is well written and has a lot of practice. It also only requires 2 books to "get the job done". The grammar explanations are short and don't really explain away the confusion, but it's FULL of practice. There isn't much translation in the book, so if you have a question... your screwed (unless you have a teacher with you). However, you probably won't have many questions while reading because the sentences kind of stay mundane.

This book gets a 4 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": It explains it, gives good examples and practice, but the explanations are lacking depth. Good for learning the basics, bad for learning the specifics.

Nakama isn't really anything special.

Adventures in Japanese is a series of books that I'm using on my website to teach Japanese a little bit. However, I only chose this textbook because it is the book being used by the local high school, so my students are using it. The book isn't bad, but it teaches a lot of things that really don't need to be taught. Also, some of their explanations/translations are... less than accurate? -- I find myself saying "yes, this is right, but... Really it's this" too much to recommend this book. There is also a stunning lack of practice/guidance. It's NOT a self-study book, you NEED a teacher for it. The workbook for this book is nice, however, and would probably be good practice. The grammar points taught in this book are easily-referenceable.

This book gets a 4 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": Similar to Yookoso, however the practice is lacking. It's a textbook and a workbook rolled into one.

Ima! is a book that I kind of detest. When using it to teach, I found myself having to make my own materials in order to get the point across. It's a thin book without hardly any grammar explanations.

This book gets a 1 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice". I hated using this book. A lot. It was just a glorified workbook.

Genki seemed pretty decent as far as a textbook went. It had plenty of practice, the grammar points were short, concise, and easy-to-reference. I would use it as a textbook in the future.

This book gets a 4.5 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice": Great explanations and easily referenceable. It seems like a pretty good buy.

Japanese the Spoken Language is my bible. The grammar points are in-depth, effective, and incredibly well thought-out. If you want to know exactly how to use a grammar point, this textbook is the one you want. It is JAM-PACKED with practice that can be done completely solo. It also comes with audio cds that are worth a damn. When I want to know the difference between ~て、~たら、~れば、and ~すると, you can expect a great amount of explanation. The practice sentences in this book aren't just mundane sentences, either: the authors intentionally use weird examples in order to show the student the true meaning of a grammar point. That is, it doesn't just use "one-sentence examples", it uses "entire conversation contexts, and then weird 'breaks the rules' verbs to highlight how the grammar works"

HOWEVER- the language is dated - this book was written in the 80s (earlier?) and has never been updated; it uses a weird romanization system (zi = じ, tu = つ, ti = ち); is intended to teach the SPOKEN language (get Japanese: the WRITTEN language to learn how to write); and the grammar explanations are almost TOO long and convoluted (long and convoluted, but extremely insightful and specific).

This book gets a 5 out of 5 on the "Evan Grammar-Explanation Scale of Justice". However, the grammar is SO well-explained that you might be a little confused trying to read it.

-------------

To teach the language, I would use Genki or Yookoso to get people off the ground, then move into JSL. Then the student should be more than ready to self-study and translate native materials.

u/TrveKvltBlackBabymtl · 3 pointsr/SakuraGakuin

I really liked Genki as a textbook. Teaches you grammar, vocab, and hiragana/katakana/kanji assuming no starting knowledge. Definitely recommend getting the workbook that goes with it for practice.

u/Slaxophone · 3 pointsr/Animesuggest

On the other side of the coin, anime can have its place in language study. So, to answer your question, check out http://kitsunekko.net where you can find Japanese subtitles for many shows. They're of course written in Japanese, so be sure to study your kana and kanji.

But don't expect that to be enough to learn the language. Language learning needs lots of practice interacting with others. It's also more difficult to learn the grammar rules from passive listening.

I'd recommend looking for a place that holds Japanese lessons in your area. One possibility if you have the time are universities or community colleges, where you may be able to sit in on classes for no credit, for a small fee (which is called auditing). My old university charges $50 for non-students, which is pretty cheap for a several month-long language course. Other universities may be cheaper or more expensive. Granted, the class times might be difficult if you're still in K-12 or working.

If you can't find any classes, at least invest in some proper course books. The universities I studied at used either Minna no Nihongo (main book in Japanese only, need the English, or your native language, supplement), Genki (starts out all in English/romaji, and gradually introduces kana and kanji), or one other I don't recall the name of. For supplementals, I had found the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar set useful. A good electronic dictionary is helpful as well, which will give you many example sentences. http://jisho.org is so/so as well, and free.

Good luck!

u/DraftYeti5608 · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

In regards to the cost it will be cheaper to order it from Japan, here is the textbook and the workbook it should be about £50 for both including shipping.

u/SeanO323 · 3 pointsr/CasualConversation

The first thing I'd recommend doing is learning ひらがな(Hiragana). Hiragana is one of the three alphabet systems in Japanese. It's made up of 46 separate characters and is used primarily for native words and grammar. You need to be able to read hiragana to actually start learning Japanese. This may seem like it's super hard but it's not actually that bad. I recommend printing worksheets and writing them by hand to start with. After that I'd recommend using flash cards or online/mobile testing programs to drill them in. Hiragana will allow you to read and pronounce most Japanese text (though there are exceptions for particles which you'll learn later on).

I would recommend getting a textbook: Genki is often recommended and you can either buy it on Amazon or find a digital copy floating around somewhere. After that you just need to start working through the textbook. Somewhere in this process you should also pick Katakana, which is used for foreign words mainly. This can be learned in the same way you did Hiragana.

The hardest part about learning Japanese is definitely kanji. Kanji are the (mostly) Chinese characters used for words in Japanese. There are thousands of them and this is where a lot of learners burn out. The important part is to take them slowly and I'd recommend not starting kanji for a little bit anyways just because it's a little overwhelming. That being said, I'd recommend learning kanji with vocabulary. There are flash card sets meant for this using Anki, a flash card program. You don't have to worry about that for a while, though.

This may seem overwhelming at first, but all new languages are, especially one as far from English as Japanese is. The important thing is to take it slow at first so you don't burn yourself out. Languages are learned over long periods of time, not overnight and that's important to keep in mind. Just set yourself a small goal to start and work on completing that, the rest will come in time.

 

Here are some resources you might find helpful:

  • Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese - really good resource for explaining grammar, has lots of examples
  • Jisho.org - Japanese -> English and Kanji dictionary
  • Pretty much everything here
  • /r/LearnJapanese - Good for questions and finding resources

     

    Well, that's all the procrastination I think I can handle from writing this right now. Ending up being a lot longer than I thought it would be. Hope it helps you find where to start. Feel free to ask any questions and message me for help anytime. Good luck with your goals and happy New Years!

    がんばって!(Good luck)
u/furryjannu · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese
u/choolete · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I am not sure if this answer your question but you are looking for this workbook (Genki I Workbook - 2000). I own both, I can confirm.

The second edition of the workbook is from 2011.

u/JaxsSmirkingRevenge · 3 pointsr/japanese

I am a beginner as well and I am probably not as far along as I should be, I am teaching myself in my spare time of working 2 jobs and full time student so I only get like 40 mins a day to work on stuff. But here are some methods I used, I started on duolingo, but I also have these books from amazon that really helped. ( I left the link below). If the library dosnt have them the first 3 are on Youtube.

https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Hiragana-Katakana-Beginners-Mastering/dp/4805311444/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2/131-1360910-3742552?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=4805311444&pd_rd_r=f9db01fd-7454-4f44-9c2c-36fe50c1f395&pd_rd_w=9TX8q&pd_rd_wg=QOKOy&pf_rd_p=a2006322-0bc0-4db9-a08e-d168c18ce6f0&pf_rd_r=E8KBA7WMS9EF5YD9BJAS&psc=1&refRID=E8KBA7WMS9EF5YD9BJAS

u/pinkmagedon · 3 pointsr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon

Gift.. MMMMMM. Probably my latest adoption. Mynah. My fluffy ball kitty cat of awesome cuddles and doom. My mom's friend paid for the fee's. She's AWESOME. and did I mention cute? She's HORRIBLY ADORABLE.

I nominate /u/OfMonstersAndSuicide!

one two I like suprises. You get to pick.

u/replaceits · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I've found that Japanese textbooks do tend to go cheaper on amazon.co.jp then else where. Just make sure the ISBN of the book in question is the same and go for it! Some items wont be able to ship out of japan but most books that I've seen do!

I would switch the language from Japanese to English on the site just to ease the purchase (日本語 with the globe under it, just hover over it.)

And even if you've used the free prime trial on regular amazon you can get the trial again on the Japanese version, so free shipping!

EDIT:

For example this book and this book on the Japanese site both have the same ISBN 4874244475 which you can see in the Product Details so they are exactly the same book.

u/andrewesque · 3 pointsr/French

Also I don't think this is dumb or weird -- there are also books that explicitly teach "French for reading," since this isn't an uncommon request. In some academic fields (particularly some history fields) there's a requirement to be able to read French (or often German) to be able to read primary sources in the original, but this doesn't come with any kind of speaking requirement.

u/yodatsracist · 3 pointsr/AskHistorians

>if my French were better I'd get more from it

C'mon, reading French is easy! They teach it to divinity students in like 6 months (for many PhD programs in religion, one is still expected to have reading French and German as languages of secondary scholarship, even if there's no particularly good secondary scholarship on your topic in those languages. Some, like Harvard, will let you substitute two other languages if you really need it, but others, like Chicago, demand you pass your French and German reading exams no matter what). Because of this and similar graduate school pressures, there's a little cottage industry of "French for Reading Comprehension". I think people were quite keen on the book French For Reading, though there are competitors like Reading French: For Students of Theology, Biblical and Religious Studies and French for Reading Knowledge.

>It's been a pain because work that I assumed would only need minimal revision needs major revision in light of the direction I'm going now, and that is taking time.

Haven't you realized yet that everything in academia takes much, much longer than you anticipated?

u/rkvance5 · 3 pointsr/languagelearning

I had fun reading through this BCS textbook. I keep meaning to go back through and do the exercises and use the workbook, but I've been tied up. It's fun seeing all three presented side-by-side-by-side, though, and you could certainly focus on one (I was particularly interested in Croatian).

u/deus__ · 3 pointsr/serbia

I moved to Belgrade 2 months ago and I'm currently learning the language, too. I have some language lessons in Belgrade. The best way to really learn the language is to live in the actual country, it helps a lot just to hear people talk Serbian every day.

I can also recommend two books, which are really good and go in depth into the grammar, too.

u/mmmmm_pancakes · 3 pointsr/bih

Here’s the textbook I used: https://www.amazon.com/Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Textbook-Exercises/dp/0299236544

It alone could do the trick if you’re industrious, but pairing it with classes or some kind of spoken session would probably be a good idea.

u/arickp · 3 pointsr/croatia

They have Croatian on Memrise.

You can also get these books: 1, 2

You need both because the red one doesn't do grammar, which is the hardest part.

Maybe there's a Croatian Catholic church if you live in a big city. Or a Serbian Orthodox one. (The languages are different, but a lot is the same, except that Serbian uses Cyrillic too.) They probably have classes.

Also visit /r/croatian, /r/Serbian

Really it's not that hard! goes back to studying noun declensions of the genitive case

u/PsychonauticChemist · 3 pointsr/Serbian

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0299236544/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487088409&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=serbian

This is a book I am using. I have a Serbian girlfriend as well. If you are good at teaching yourself languages, this book is amazing. I also have her help me with examples that I can use newly learned words or phrases in. I also use uTalk which is a free app in the play store to help learn useful phrases.

u/creamyhorror · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Very nice survey of the options, thanks.

Some years ago I used Henshall's book and recommended it on another forum as an alternative to Heisig/RtK. I liked Henshall's mnemonics and etymologies, though he never got popular like Heisig/RtK did. I've not heard of Conning's book, it seems to be quite new, so I'm guessing it must be really good if you recommend it over Henshall.

Another +1 for the Core10k deck, though I'm only studying the words that have high frequency according to a particular frequency list I'm using. I've heard there's quite a bit of low-frequency, newspaper-ish vocab in it.

u/ShawninOP · 3 pointsr/japan

http://www.amazon.com/A-Guide-Remembering-Japanese-Characters/dp/0804820384

http://books.google.com/books?id=3ZHD9wdspXgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA32#v=onepage&q&f=false

This is actually a very good book that shows you all of the development stages for the "Official" Kanji (the ones most commonly used/expected to know when you get out of High School) if you're really interested/bored.

u/conception · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

WaniKani or other "Learn Kanji via the Radicals" methods actually make learning Kanji a lot easier and more fun. WaniKani doesn't always use the "real" meaning of the radicals, which takes away some of your ability to figure out what unknown kanji may mean, but it the method is fantastic for learning kanji. www.amazon.com/Guide-Remembering-Japanese-Characters/dp/0804820384/ is really good if you need to learn a certain set of Kanji (via a class or something) and want to learn/use the radicals as wanikani picks your kanji for you.

u/pikagrue · 3 pointsr/AskReddit

There's actually a book series that made memorizing characters really easy. I'm learning Japanese, and with it I was able to commit 2000 kanji to memory in a bit over a month. It doesn't go over readings at all, but you can at least write everything without issue.

And Chinese grammar is great, it takes all those things like conjugation and irregular verbs and noun genders and just laughs at them

EDIT:

Books I used was this for Japanese

Chinese equivalent

u/FruitFarmer2 · 3 pointsr/ChineseLanguage

Personally, I went a different route characters-wise. I learned the meaning and writing of 3000 characters first, and now I'm learning the rest of the language on that foundation.

It was definitely right for me, but it may not be right for you.

u/TeslaLightning · 3 pointsr/korea

I would definitely ask r/Korean as many people there are longtime Korean learners and can offer good suggestions. However, imho the Integrated Korean books are great, specifically Integrated Korean Beginning 1 is a good start as it teaches you Hangul, grammar, and new vocab words with every lesson. I myself use it for self teaching and it's been working great! I also recommend purchasing the accompanying workbook as it gives you more practice. Best of luck!

u/GrimRapper · 3 pointsr/Korean

I haven't used Lingodeer since it went to a paid model, but for an app it's pretty good. Starting out, https://www.talktomeinkorean.com/ is pretty good too IMO

The majority of my studying has come from this textbook series though: Integrated Korean

u/iknsw · 3 pointsr/duolingo

Don't worry it's one of the most popular on Amazon so it's easy to find there. Here it is.

I would also suggest looking up How to Speak in Korean. It's a website that was written by a guy who taught himself to speak Korean and wanted to create a resource that has everything for beginners to become fluent for FREE.

u/Tehmora · 3 pointsr/AceAttorney

It all depends on how you study Japanese. If you're having trouble remembering the kanji, then read Heisig's RTK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0/262-8139763-4834749?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=6VVZW2W0DBRRN4KG8RS2

This is a book I always recommend for people learning Kanji. It breaks down the primitives and from there, it teaches you how to write the Kanji as well as giving little stories to remember them.

If you have trouble remembering his stories, make up your own! Or take a page from other people's stories from this website: https://hochanh.github.io/rtk/rtk1-v6/index.html

Although I can't read Kanji properly (the On and Kun readings), I can still identify Kanji pretty easily. I've been able to remember roughly 400 kanji. By which I mean, I can actually write the kanji with ease, like a japanese person, if you give me the word.

My goal is to remember the Kanji and then learn how to read and speak japanese properly. (So I can finally play DGS! =D)

Edit & PS: But please remember, that RTK doesn't have the readings. It only has the meaning of the Kanji. So don't rely on it to learn Japanese, but rather use it as a supplement to your studying.

u/Ark42 · 3 pointsr/japanlife

RTK + Anki are amazing. My Kanji recognition is significantly better than my speaking or listening now.

u/_sutego_ · 3 pointsr/transgendercirclejerk

> I'm gonna make you insta-wet, despite you got those ugly bits! Watch! /wand_wiggles!

...

I might have noticed that too. I may or may not have made very sexual stories, too. :D

EDIT:

You need this book boo.

Now excuse me while I faint =)

u/urbanabydos · 3 pointsr/japanese

The best method for learning Kanji is a system by James Heisig in Remembering The Kanji.

It's a little atypical—book 1 is meaning only and book 2 is pronunciation—but if you stick with the method it's quite incredible. At my peak I was learning ~100/day with excellent retention.

And then it's just drill drill drill like everyone says. But when drilling focus on writing. Production is harder than recognition as a rule so that's what you should focus on.

I use an excellent flash card app called Anki which has desktop and mobile versions. It's pricey on mobile if I recall correctly but worthwhile. It's got a bit of a learning curve but definitely worth the investment. And you'll find lots of shared decks, including if memory serves, one based on the Heisig books. (Although there is definitely value in building your own yourself.)

I'm on iOS and you can add the Chinese Traditional Handwriting IME in "Keyboards" which allows you to practice your writing. It's not great for general Japanese input, but for Kanji practice it gets the job done. I'm sure there's something similar for Android.

Good luck!

Edit:fixed my mangled link

u/dokool · 3 pointsr/japan

There's a couple decent reference books you could get him (Remembering the Kanji comes to mind) but don't worry about things that might be 'handy' because half the time they're not worth it. Tickets too - you don't want to give him anything time/date-specific, after all.

I say just take him out for dinner somewhere nice that he almost certainly won't get to enjoy while he's in Japan. Decent BBQ, for example.

u/vansipple · 3 pointsr/swedish

Just started reading this the other day. Fairly straightforward explanations: Essentials of Swedish Grammar: A Practical Guide to the Mastery of Swedish https://www.amazon.com/dp/0844285390/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_U2WVCbPT4K42M

u/Surgon · 3 pointsr/Svenska

Here you go, man. This has been so useful in my studies, it's worth the 15 or so dollars for it gives you a massive leg up in grammar and such. Give it a THOROUGH read, find a good partner on /r/language_exchange, and get yourself some decent courses on memrise. As a bonus, feel free to PM with any questions or even to practice your speaking. I'm not a native speaker, but have a pretty decent grasp on the language. Lycka till!

u/Thraxamer · 3 pointsr/MLPLounge

I was a bit into conlangs a few years ago. I made the Vasudan language and writing system for the game Descent: FreeSpace (a space sim for PC from 1998). I have my notes tucked away in a box somewhere.

I've also played with conlangs when writing pieces for choir.

I picked up The Language Construction Kit recently, as I decided I wanted to get back into the game of language making.

I've not thought of trying to make an actual equine language, though. That might be interesting... thinking about how that vocal structure might evolve to produce language and what that language might be.

u/WOULD_QUESTION_MARK · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

[shoutout for /r/VeganForCircleJerkers]

um i'm unfortunately not sure what to say that could help. so it's really to make your application more appealing?

if you didn't hate it more than French, i'd just say you should skip learning french to help with latin...and just dive into latin instead. i wish i could lend you some of my feverish adoration of/passion for french.

you could also maybe just take a French-for-reading approach, which would be faster and easier. There's a book with that title, but i also just mean studying in such a way that you're only going for reading comprehension.

book

u/annerevenant · 2 pointsr/French

Are you wanting to speak French or read it? I use French for Reading, it's created for graduate students to pass language exams. It skips typical language learning tropes like "how to talk about your family" "how to order at a restaurant" and teaches you how to read literature and documents. Since I don't need French for communication it's been extremely helpful, within reading 4 chapters I was able to read articles written in the early 1900s about colonization and only had to pull out my dictionary a couple of times. I also combine it with duolingo to try and help with the speaking/listening but I really only need it for reading.

u/swgohfanforlife · 2 pointsr/bih

Find old school books prewar, or new ones
Or maybe try BCS

Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Textbook: With Exercises and Basic Grammar https://www.amazon.com/dp/0299236544/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_DZdtDb82ZG2N0

u/ChungsGhost · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

Your choices as a foreigner to get going are between titles that contain either "Croatian" or "Serbian" (if you find older material, it'll be likely advertised as "Serbo-Croatian"). "Bosnian" stuff is still pretty much restricted to this book which might actually be overkill as a total beginner learning independently.

The most important thing is to get started with a decent course. Teach Yourself Serbian, Beginner's Croatian and Beginner's Serbian are good starting points if you're really motivated (FWIW, I've used all three). You could also get a taste of the language(s) in everyday life by watching short videos involving Croats and Serbs.

If you learn the basics of any of Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian, you'll be able to start communicating with him. If he plays along and speaks to you in his native tongue, he might adjust somewhat by using fewer features/words characteristic of Montenegrin or speaking more slowly or clearly and using a slightly more formal register than he would when he's with his friends or family.

u/fatalfred · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

Link to free serbian flash cards
https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/serbian
Link to android app for these flash cards (iOS also exists): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki

Probably the best book for learning the language: http://www.amazon.com/Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Textbook-Exercises/dp/0299236544/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417903285&sr=8-1&keywords=bosnian+croatian+serbian+a+textbook+with+exercises+and+basic+grammar

But if you're really serious I'm sure you can find a local school or culture center that has classes.

u/katspaugh · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

If you are interested in mnemonics based on the true etymology of kanji, try Henshall's book.

Here's an Anki deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2081001609

He tracks the form and meaning of each kanji down to the original ancient inscriptions. Kanji are not just random symbols attached to meanings. They contain the wisdom of centuries.

u/t-o-k-u-m-e-i · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I might be the only one, but I like the Henshall book. Reading a little paragraph about how a particular kanji evolved really stuck with me. It also makes for decent trivia sometimes.

Since you know a fair number of Kanji already, what you're doing seems to work for you. Henshall is basically just learning radicals, but not by their proper names in Japanese, and it comes with a neat little explanation of where the kanji came from. I used to just read the entries for any new kanji as I came across them studying in context, and it helped me fix them in my mind. Sometimes I'd make flashcards for his mnemonics if I was having trouble with a character.

u/narodmj · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

it's called, "Remembering the Hanzi". Here's the link to book 1 and book 2 if you're learning simplified characters. For the traditional character books, here is book 1 and book 2. Also, if you don't want to buy a hard copy, here is a link to the 1st simplified book in PDF format.

u/alkrasnov · 2 pointsr/shanghai

Here's a few tips, although this is without knowing your level and your aims:

  1. Naturally, there are plenty of choices of schools. I happen to run LTL Mandarin School, which is located in the French Concession but can also send teachers out to students' locations. A class like this once/twice per week, focusing on specific points of interest, can be a good start for acquiring new knowledge/vocabulary/grammar/etc.
  2. For further practice of listening comprehension, listening material such as the stuff they have on [FluentU] (http://www.fluentu.com/), the ChineseClass101 Audio Blogs or Youtube channels like this thing I used before are very good.
  3. For writing and memorization of characters, there's Skritter, as well as Heisig's Remembering Hanzi book
  4. For vocabulary memorization, simple: Anki
  5. For reading, I personally like using subtitles of movies I know (helps also with review and learning of new vocabulary). A good resource for this is Zimuzu and Zimuku. Also, you would need a dictionary to use - Unfortunately, it does not work on the Mac, but for Windows users, Wenlin is an excellent dictionary, even though GUI-wise, really bad.
  6. For speaking... You just need to speak with people. If your level is not up to the task of speaking in a comfortable speed yet, get a Chinese person who agrees to sit with you every week and listen to you botch his language for some sort of payment (otherwise, he will very quickly tire of it and find excuses for why he "doesn't have the time" and so on).

    There you go, hope this helps! 加油!
u/Vitium77 · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

Just wanted to add in that if you went with Heisig's method, it wouldn't have to be rewritten for Chinese. He's made books for that as well (for both traditional and simplified.)

u/coldminnesotan · 2 pointsr/ChineseLanguage

I'd start with memrise. Memrise has four courses on Hakka. I browsed them all, and this one looks like the only one worth your time: https://www.memrise.com/course/51837/hacking-hakka/

There's one Hakka T.V. station, Hakka TV: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdqg95tSArchPfQaAWquDwg It's worth watching just to get the sound of the language down.

If you have money, definitely try to find a tutor online. I searched for "Hakka" in iTalki and got nothing, but you could probably put an ad out or find a friend-of-family or something.

If I understand it right, Hakka is usually written in Chinese characters. Heisig's books teach you how to read Chinese without learning how to talk in Chinese, so they may of may not be worth your time: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236

u/hongge · 2 pointsr/mexico

Te recomiendo éste libro: Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1 . Es un método de enseñanza muy controversial, pero a mi me sirvió mucho.

u/SigmaX · 2 pointsr/Anki

I just started learning Mandarin with Anki, and here's what I'm doing.

Characters: I'm working through Heisig's Remembering Simplified Hanzi. His strategy (which Japanese kanji learners seem to be a big fan of) is to associate a unique English keyword with every character to serve as a prompt. He orders characters in a rational way, so that you learn radicals first that are used to build other characters later.

For each character, I look it up on Wiktionary to try and find a gif of stroke order (if Wiktionary fails, I use Google images). Then I create cards both from [character] —> [keyword] and from [keyword] —> [character gif]. The second one is where the money is at: I trace out the character on my phone's screen with my finger to answer keyword prompts, and to learn new ones I trace my finger along with the gif to practice.

For example, you can grab a gif for 九 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9D#Translingual

Pronunciation I'm still working this out. But I like using audio, so I've started making one-way cards from [character] —> [audio + pinyin] (ex. 九 —> audio + jiǔ). Wiktionary is also a great source of audio clips for individual characters.

​

Everything else: as usual for any other language. Personally, I make large numbers of audio cards for words, phrases, and practice sentence fragments using my own voice (right now Duolingo is my main source of vocab and example sentences—bonus that it has audio I can mimic carefully when recording my own voice). I write both the hanzi and pinyin on the cards in case I need to refer to them, but I rely on the audio most of the time (and I pretty much "think" in pinyin).

u/tendeuchen · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

Personally having studied both, I feel that Chinese is easier to learn to use because it lacks the psychedelic grammar of Russian. With Chinese, all you have to do is learn the word order (usually pretty close to English) and then plug in the word that you just learned. As long as you practice the tones, you'll be fine.

In Russian, you have to learn all the different verb conjugations, and you have to learn how to change nouns and if you want to use an adjective with a noun, you have to make it agree too.

Get this book about Chinese characters and you'll see how the characters aren't all just random squiggles, but actually have a logic behind them. Once you start learning them, they become easier.

With that said, Russian is a really cool language and so is Mandarin. There is no reason that you couldn't learn either of them on your own, and you'll have to do that at some point anyway after your classes are over.

u/momodarou · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Unfortunately there's nothing out there like this for Chinese. Heisig does have a Remembering the Hanzi book series though.

u/suchuniiqueusername · 2 pointsr/aznidentity

Since we're talking about language learning, I wanna plug the Pleco app. The dictionary is priceless. The paid add-ons are worth their weight in gold. Also has Cantonese support. Amazing app. Truly.

If you think characters are daunting, check out remembering the hanzi which is made by someone who learned Japanese as a second language and came up with a way to memorize the characters and stroke orders with minimal effort. He made the same system work for Chinese and well.

u/lemonfighter · 2 pointsr/MapPorn
u/zhouhaochen · 2 pointsr/ChineseLanguage

Heisig is a pretty good book if you only want to learn characters and he has a simplified and traditional version.

http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Traditional-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833244

u/learnhtk · 2 pointsr/Korean

Well 정보은씨?, you are in luck.
One possible solution for you is to grab a copy of the Remembering Traditional Hanzi series by Heisig and study the "meanings" of the characters. I would also recommend using something like Anki or Skritter that make use of Spaced Repetition Schedule for better retention rate.
I recommend learning the traditional characters because both some Chinese speaking world and Korea use the traditional set of characters. The mainland China uses the simplified characters and if you want to make the transition to the simplified characters, I heard it's not that hard.
As you are learning the characters, you can manually input the Korean way of reading the characters or rely on the Korean readings that Skritter provides.

If you work consistently, I think the above step should be done in a matter of months. Then, you have given yourself a strong foundation in characters.

I would also suggest perfecting your Mandarin pronunciation as you are learning the characters.

u/johnny_blaze108 · 2 pointsr/shanghai

I would recommend Remembering the Hanzi. It doesn't teach you the word in Chinese but the method helps you absorb and learn to write the most common 1,500 characters in Chinese. This method helped me learn to do some basic reading and is a good complement to Chinese studies. This site seems to have a copy of it. Not sure if this site works but its worth a shot.

u/ChinaFunn · 2 pointsr/ChineseLanguage

I started with this. No regrets choosing this as my starting point. Would recommend.

u/8bitesq · 2 pointsr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon

I use these books but I also had a year's worth of instruction in one year. So I'm not picking it up from scratch. I still have all my Yonsei University textbooks, too.

u/BearShlong · 2 pointsr/miamioh

I think it depends on what you want to get out of it, honestly. Chinese is going to be more "practical" since more people speak the language. Also, I find that even just a little Chinese knowledge can be fairly interesting and exciting, such as being able to read a Chinese sign in the background of a movie, etc. There's a lot of Chinese study abroad students, so I'm sure that could open up some cool possibilities, like meeting people in on-campus clubs like the International Student Organization. A decent amount of Chinese customs could also be applied as customs in Korea, so in a way Chinese can provide you part of the culture background. On the other hand, Korean is very unique in the sense that there's a smaller base of people that speak it, however Korean modern popular culture has been slowly influencing a lot more people, in addition to it being such a newer language. It's amazing to see how much thought was put into Hangeul and it's impressive to look at in-depth from a linguistics point-of-view.

I'd look into both a bit. With Chinese, you're going to learn pinyin and also Chinese characters aka Hanyu. Chinese characters have a base pronunciation, and a tone associated with them. Chinese doesn't have any conjugations, and for the most part when speaking, you'll refer to a time that you're talking about. It does have the use of one particle for past-tense or indication that a situation has changed, but that's about it for any kind of tenses. Korean you'll have to learn Hangeul which you could honestly learn and memorize in an hour. However, Korean has a lot of grammar particles (는/은 for marking subjects, 을/를 for marking complements, etc) in addition to verb conjugation for tenses, etc.

If you really wanted to know which would be easiest, I would argue Chinese. While you'll have to remember many characters, you won't have to deal with conjugation. Oral quizzes in Chinese don't require you to know the characters since it's all spoken, and with written tests, if you can identify the character, there's probably a 60% chance it's printed somewhere already in the test in another question. Chinese grammar is a lot like English grammar, unlike Korean where the verbs are always at the end. While there's not too many resources for Chinese or Korean that are a complete course, KoreanClass101.com and TalkToMeInKorean.com can be used as independent-study aids in addition to a textbook like Integrated Korean.

Hope this wall of text helped. :)

u/thevintagecut · 2 pointsr/Korean

I've been using KLEAR Integrated Korean textbooks to learn Korean this summer. It's actually really great and I've been making progress. There are the textbooks and workbooks, plus all the audio files that accompany it can be downloaded online for free. I definitely recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Korean-Beginning-Textbooks-Language/dp/0824834402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1313630860&sr=8-1

u/hiimbears · 2 pointsr/Korean

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0824834402/ref=pe_385040_30332200_TE_item

http://www.amazon.com/dp/082483450X/ref=pe_385040_30332200_TE_item

Currently using this myself. Came highly recommended from friends who have worked in Korea and picked up the language.

u/that_shits_cray · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

It's not crazy. I'm a fluent English speaker who has learned conversational Korean over the course of two years, albeit in a classroom setting. I've found it to be a pretty simple language when compared to other East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese. The best thing to do is get some books and learn the grammar patterns. I recommend [these] (http://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Korean-Beginning-Textbooks-Language/dp/0824834402/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1419721377&sr=8-2&keywords=klear+korean) because they come with listening resources and teach you the basics well. Once you get the basic grammar patterns and memorize the elementary vocabulary I would recommend getting yourself to the intermediate level with the same line of books. Supplement your education by listening to Korean pop music and watching Korean dramas (super fun). There are also many websites and apps that are willing to connect you with people that speak Korean fluently.

My biggest piece of advice is to focus on reading fluently and getting grammar patterns down. Once you have this down you will only have to learn more vocabulary to expand your grasp on the language. Going to South Korea will also help you learn, although a lot of people will only want to speak English with you. You will have to actively seek out people that are willing to speak Korean to you. If you have any other questions about learning the language or going to Korea, then don't hesitate to PM me.

u/dxrebirth · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Remembering the Kanji is very popular: amazon


As well as Genki: amazon

Then there is the Human Japanese app: http://www.humanjapanese.com/home.html

Or the Anki app: http://ankisrs.net/

And then sites like:
http://www.memrise.com/ time based flash cards
http://lang-8.com/ correspondence with people that are also trying to learn your language.

I don't know. I am a beginner myself, but these are a good start as far as I am concerned.

u/Qichin · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

Not a website, but I will always recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. There's a sample (Pdf) if you want to try before you buy.

u/PandaHatDude · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

If Kanji is an issue try the Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig and get the Anki deck to go with it.

​

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542637329&sr=8-1&keywords=remember+the+kanji

u/Maarifrah · 2 pointsr/japanese

The best way to learn a language is to interact with it as much as you can in every way you can. Yes, you can and probably should spend some time seriously studying from a good resource like tae kim's complete japanese guide(the whole thing is free), but you won't want to do that all the time for all of your free time. Get some Japanese books, manga, tv shows(this is one way to watch the region-locked Japanese Netflix) video games, listen to Japanese music, listen to podcasts in japanese. (You will want to find things with both japanese speaking & japanese text - subtitles are not good for learning!).

Kanji is a difficult hurdle, and there are a few popular ways to tackle it (this is by no means a comprehensive list):

  • Heisig's Remember the Kanji book

  • Anki is a flashcard program with spaced repetition, and it is useful both by itself or with a RTK deck. There's also good vocab decks. Anki is completely free.
  • Wanikani is kind of like Heisig's RTK and Anki glued together and glossed over with a fresh shade of paint. I've never used it but it looks good.

    Well hopefully that helps. My personal take on learning kanji is to just learn it as you go from new vocab you acquire. Finding things like games or manga with furigana is very helpful as you can just search for that character in Jisho and all of a sudden you have its basic meaning, on/kun readings and most importantly, its stroke order.
u/chibicody · 2 pointsr/shogi

It's like asking how long it will take to reach 1-dan, it varies so much depending on time commitment, motivation, personal ability and method. I'd expect it would take at least a couple years, though there are examples of people becoming somewhat fluent in 6 months, so anything is possible.

As for the best approach, you'll find lots of opinions. I think people are generally bad at remembering what it was like when they started learning and knew nothing, so all those "here's how I'd do it if I started all over again" are not always the best advice but I'll try to give you my version of it anyway:

  • Start with a generic "learn Japanese" method, those won't take you very far but you have to start somewhere. Your first goals should be to get a feeling for how Japanese works, basic grammar, a few basic words and most importantly learn to read and write hiragana and katakana (the phonetic system used in Japanese writing). I recommend the Japanese in Mangaland series of books, but any other decent beginner method will do.

  • In parallel get the JapanesePod101 podcasts. Those really helped me a lot, as I would listen to them every day and build listening ability. They start from the very beginning too. Continue listening to them, especially during the next step for motivation.

  • Now this is going to be controversial but after doing introductory material for some time, if you're really committed to learning Japanese and be efficient at it, you have to bite the bullet and learn the Kanji (Chinese characters): all 2000+ of them that are in common use. Fortunately that isn't that hard if you use the Heisig method, you can use the Kanji Koohii website to manage the flashcards you'll use for memorization. It's a bit controversial because with this method you're learning the Kanji in isolation without learning how they are actually used in Japanese. It's still 100% worth it. This turbo-charged my Japanese learning like nothing else before. It took me 3 months to go through the book and learn all the characters. Once you're familiar with the characters, it's 10 times easier to learn vocabulary, even if your goal is to listen to shogi commentary, it's still the best way of doing that in my opinion (plus you'll be able to read shogi books eventually)

  • Once you're done with the kanji you need to start building vocabulary, using your new kanji knowledge, it will be much more efficient, as you learn vocabulary, you learn how to write them using kanji you already know and as a consequence learn how those kanji are pronounced and used. This is why this method works so well. For vocabulary I recommend using the Anki flashcard software, you can download pre-made decks of vocabulary. Look for Core 2k, 6k and 10k which are a set of most common words complete with example sentences and audio, there are alternative but I think those are the best lists. A few thousands words plus shogi specific vocabulary should be enough to get a decent understanding of shogi programs.

    Anyway this isn't everything, you need to continue with more grammar, practice, and so on while doing that, but this is the gist of what I wish I knew when I got started. I guess it can seem a bit overwhelming but just get started and go one step at a time...

    Also you'll need this: Dictionary :)
u/kaoskastle · 2 pointsr/japanese

Hey!

For learning the Jouyou kanji, I used James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji volume 1 (and volume 3 for an extra ~1000 kanji). It requires a bit of re-thinking how one should go about learning these things:

Usually when learning kanji, people go in grade order, learning the English meaning of the kanji and memorizing all of the possible readings (for some kanji, you'll have two pronunciations -- for others, you can surpass 10 different pronunciations). I feel that this method is ridiculously inefficient, and Heisig agrees. With RtK1+3, you completely ignore the readings, learning only to write and recognize the kanji, as well as their English meanings. On top of that, you don't learn them in grade order, but rather in the order of the elements that make up those kanji (for example, these are taught to you in order: 口→日→刀→召→昭 ...and so on). Instead of being given a bunch of unrelated complex characters, you're given the building blocks, and then shown how to create the more complex kanji by being able to see them as just their individual parts (for example, 鬱, despite its 29-stroke-count, is super easy when you break it down).

As for actually remembering the kanji you learn, check out Reviewing the Kanji, a free web-based SRS specifically for use with Heisig's books.

A common argument against RtK is the fact that readings are totally disregarded; after all, you can't read Japanese if you can't read the kanji, right?? Of course. But the way we've usually gone about learning them isn't all that great. That's not to say it hasn't worked -- people have used it to success before -- but it's slow, inefficient, and prone to failure. Instead, once I'm able to write and recognize a good 2000+ kanji and can read ひらがな/カタカナ, I've got the ability to use everything I need to learn readings: a dictionary. When you're reading and you come across a word you don't know (say, 竜巻), simply look it up in the dictionary. The dictionary will have the reading right there for you (たつまき!).

Traditionally, people would look at 何 and memorize that it can be read なに, なん, て, が... and probably some more that I don't know. Then do this for every kanji they learn -- memorizing these lists of sounds. My thought is, though, even when you know all of the pronunciations for something... you still don't know which of those readings to use in a new word (the 何 in 如何体... the answer may surprise you!). So you're gonna have to look up the word; heck, you'll probably be looking it up anyway because you don't know the word! If that's the case, why not forget about memorizing these contextless sets of sounds and just look up words as they come? In that way, you naturally begin to pick up how kanji are read, in context.

Sorry for the novel of a comment, but I hope it makes sense. Getting through the kanji can seem like a huge, daunting task, and it takes longer than one might want, but if definitely doesn't take as long as one might fear! Find a pace that works for you -- I went through the first ~300 or so kanji of RtK1 at about 30 a day, but then bumped it down to 10 a day for the remainder of it and RtK3, and it was a glorious pace. Slow? Maybe. But I was making real, consistent progress, and it feels huge to reach the finish line. :) Hope this helps! Have fun!

u/Kitsune_Gakuin · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

It's listed as companion here. The Amazon page for the most up to date RTK even mentions "Updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the Japanese government in 2010 as "general-use" kanji".

All of the 2010 additions are listed here, and you can see companion is 侶. 朋 doesn't even appear anywhere on this list.

u/firstgunman · 2 pointsr/anime

Please don't do it. Serious.

Anime characters have a very distinct speech pattern, and you do not want to speak a language like their cartoon character. Trying to learn Japanese from anime is flawed from first principle; you will get endless shit from native speakers if this is the route you choose to learn the language.

It's kinda like how some Japanese learn English by listening to Elvis Presly songs. Just don't.

It sounds like you're new to the process, so I suggest you pay /r/LearnJapanese a visit. They are a great community, and you'll learn about what you have to learn in order to master the language.

Other resources:

Heisig's Remembering the Kana. A fantastic way to learn the basic alphabet. You want to start reading Kana and stop reading romanization as soon as possible, and this can help you do it literally over a weekend.

Remembering the Kanji by the same author is the next obvious step. Much more tedious, but that's the thing with Kanji. You sit down, shut up, and learn it. This book makes it as painless as possible.

With that said, trying to memorize a lot of information is a solved problem in human psychology; this means there are softwares implementing proven techniques that will help you do it. I highly recommend Anki.

Finally, if you want a glimpse at the grammar, there's a fantastic guide over at Amaterasu translation.

Good luck, have fun!

(Full disclosure: I'm essentially a n00bie at the process myself. I tried to learn the language too, but it's on shelf right now due to other stuffs in my life. I do not know Japanese.)

u/vgambit · 2 pointsr/Gunpla

You're young. You'll have a much easier time learning Japanese if you start now.

http://ankisrs.net/

http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0824831640

http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0824835921

u/pussgurka · 2 pointsr/Svenska
u/Airick86 · 2 pointsr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon
  • Stockholm, Sweden so I can visit my uncle and spend some time with him. Haven't seen him since I was 7 or 8.

  • Hopefully in This hotel, it's where I stayed when I visited there as a wee lad.

  • Probably bring this so I can understand what's going on.

  • I'd take my girlfriend and my father with me. Girlfriend has never been out of the country and my dad could help translate and show me where he grew up.
u/TEDIUM88 · 2 pointsr/pics

Yeah, I've certainly sailed that ship many times, but for Swedish I actually take classes at my college for it. Honestly there aren't that many books out there for Swedish, but one I would recommend is this one http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Swedish-Grammar-Practical-Mastery/dp/0844285390/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1325031203&sr=8-3

u/puresteel · 2 pointsr/australia

It's the same 'cultural' education you get in any language course. They use a standard text for university courses: http://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Chinese-Simplified-Characters-Textbook/dp/0887276385 and I don't see why the work they do in schools would be any different.

This thread is A Current Affair tier insane.

u/Hazachu · 2 pointsr/ChineseLanguage

Take the academic route. Start by purchasing or pirating Integrated Chinese (from what I understand it is by far the most popular chinese textbook) and the equivalent workbook if you'd like.

Use this site's vocab and definitions (they correspond with the vocab in the book but provide more accurate definitions). The rest of the site is actually also pretty useful for learning grammar and practicing reading, listening, and pronunciation.

Then learn how to use quizlet's 3 way flash card option for Chinese (its really poorly implemented but it does work, allows you to study character->definition or character->pinyin and vice versa). If you're curious how the quizlet feature works (its really poorly explained online) it requires you to make a set with one side set to chinese the other to english, on the chinese side have the character/word you want, on the english side have the definition and the pinyin within parentheses (if you have any other parenthses it will screw up and break the whole set, so I use brackets when I want to clarify definitions)

For example the chinese card would read: 水

the english card would read: water (shuǐ)

here's a template for further clarity

Also www.archchinese.com is the best site for stroke order and audio

In terms of vocabulary this combo of resources is working really well for me, I'm currently in a 6 hour a week chinese class but all the vocab learning I do at home and this is how. This so far has allowed me to recognize any character I've learned in the past, but if you want to have it solid enough that you can always write any character from memory you might want to make your own anki and update it as you learn new words since you'll end up forgetting how to write some of the lesser used characters if you don't.

As far as grammar it'll be tough on your own but you can do it from Integrated Chinese and other online resources.


u/ImpressiveRole1111 · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

https://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Chinese-Simplified-Characters-Textbook/dp/0887276385/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1536811226&sr=8-2&keywords=chinese+textbook

get a used copy of this and start pounding away.

it is a great textbook. used textbook and workbook should run about 40-50. There are 4 "levels" it is equal to the first 2 years of college chinese

u/kvece · 2 pointsr/aggies

You can check out what you'll learn right now if you'd like. The book is Integrated Chinese Level 1 Part 1 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0887276385/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdo_t1_91RMAbTQJKWP1). There's also a pdf copy floating around the internet somewhere if you just want to check it out without buying. The beginner 1 class goes over the first 5 chapters and the beginner 2 class goes over the next 5 chapters. The entire book is equivalent of one semester long college class so it's a little bit of a slower pace than taking a class at A&M (which I kind of liked, since I didn't know anything going into it, it provided a no pressure environment).

For a large part of the beginner 1 class, we would start with like 5 mins of going over the tones individually and the teacher would correct us. The teacher was also usually pretty good about correcting our tones when speaking to answer questions. Our teacher also provided time at the end of class to answer whatever other questions we had. I guess the experience is entirely dependent on your teacher so YMMV.

I'm not sure of your background but here's some info in case you have no/little experience. Be aware that there are two sounds in Mandarin that aren't in English: the 'r' sound isn't quite the same, and we don't have the ü vowel. I don't know if you speak any other languages, but don't be discouraged if you can't get those quite right, it took me over a year and I'm still not confident I say them right (although I've been told I do). Also pinyin (the phonetic romanization system that tells you how to pronounce characters) isn't a direct mapping to English spelling. For example, "hui" in pinyin is pronounced more like "hway". The app "Pleco" is free (with paid add-ons) and shows you characters, pinyin, definitions, and example sentences, and it can read everything out loud for you so you can mimic the pronunciation. It's a must have.

If you have any other questions, I'd be glad to help out!

u/tapkap · 2 pointsr/ChineseLanguage

This is the textbook I had in college, and seems to be what many universities in the USA use. If you get more, be care as there are textbooks and workbooks with similar covers for the various levels. The books were useful enough for me that I would recommend them. If you're only self teaching, then you could probably save your money and only get the textbooks.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0887276385/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526269716&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=integrated+chinese+level+1+part+1&dpPl=1&dpID=51M7k%2Bq1OaL&ref=plSrch

u/creepyeyes · 2 pointsr/conlangs

For the most realistic results, I would reccomend purchasing these two books:

The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder and The Art of Language Invention by David J Peterson

u/I_pity_the_fool · 2 pointsr/LANL_German

> If you're stuck on this, do some more reading on the different uses of the imperfect and perfect tenses. My favourite, the one I refer to all the time and the one I refer my students to, is Durrell's pretty much definitive Using German, which I've used for 20 years but looks quite pricey now sadly.

That's good. But I really love this book. If you own that, you know you have the father of all German grammar books written in English, the one that their writers have looked through and tried to simplify into two or three hundred pages.

u/Mrstarker · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

The main benefit is that you learn kanji in a systematic way. They teach you to take kanji apart into their components and are structured so that you don't learn new kanji without being familiar with the components.

Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course has a pretty good breakdown of each character along with a simple etymological explanation of how it was formed and a few example words. It's excellent for using with Anki and there is a pre-made deck for this.

Wanikani, however, is a self-contained online SRS platform with a paid subscription model. It teaches you first the components, then kanji that are made of these components and then words that are made of these kanji. It's divided into 60 levels and you have to complete each level before you can go on to the next (as it's an SRS), so it takes at least over a year to complete it.

As for whether to use either of them, you'd have to decide for yourself. WK has first 3 levels free at an accelerated pace and KKLC has a preview on Amazon, so you could check them out for yourself:

https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

https://www.wanikani.com

u/snowbell55 · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Can't really say for an actual order between all of the books but you should learn hiragana and katakana before doing anything else (it's not so intimidating to do), and you can probably go on to use Genki 1 then Genki 2 after that.

That said you did pick several well recommended books so assuming you can get a study plan going (and stick with it) you should be on a good footing.

As far as other recommended resources, I've heard (but not tried it myself) Tobira mentioned as a good way of moving on after finishing Genki. For Kanji and (to a lesser extent) vocab you could also use Anki (free) or Wanikani (subscription / one off payment), or if you prefer textbooks KKLC.

u/CruickshankB · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I can't match 20-30 per day, but I was able to manage learning 8 kanji a day from the Kanji Learner's Course (that's how many kanji appear on two pages). They mostly stuck because the book has a solid system for remembering kanji meanings, and the vocabulary words always use the earlier kanji so you keep reviewing them as you go along. I also looked up sentences on jisho.org for practice.

The book tries to guide you toward more reading practice after kanji #1200, and away from just cramming more kanji. By that point I was sort of addicted to the book, and it was easier to keep using it than do real reading in the wild. But there's a balance.

u/scodeth · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Does the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course teach kanji using radicals?

I prefer learning with radicals and have been using wanikani to do so, but 10 levels in my hands can't keep up due to weak hands due to an injury a few years back.

Has anyone tried this textbook, and can vouch for how effective it is?

repost but didn't get any answers in the last thread.

u/megumifestor · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Hey, friend. Can I please have a link to where you bought Kodansha from?

EDIT: [Sorry, found it] (https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268) further down in this thread for anyone looking for it!

u/Toast- · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

If you can't read hiragana and katakana, find an app for that and learn them right away (really doesn't take long).

You'll want some way to study grammar, and while a textbook like Genki is probably best, Human Japanese or Tae Kim's Guide are good options that I really like.

You'll also probably want a way to learn Kanji, in which case I would pick up a copy of the Kodansha Kanji Learners Course and the Anki app plus related decks. If you want to stay entirely on mobile and don't mind monthly fees, try out WaniKani.

As for vocab, Anki with one of the "Core" vocab decks would be a good start.

u/Kai_973 · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Nice! That's a promising start.

I'll tell you what I wish I'd known when I first started:

---
Know that the more you expose yourself to it, the better you'll get. The less you see, the more it will slip away. Studying every day is the key to success.

Once you've got Romaji completely out of the picture (it's a terrible crutch), try to add as much Kanji as you reasonably can. If you're really serious about the language, start looking into Kanji vocab building sooner than later. (Don't learn isolated Kanji 1-by-1, you'll never know how to read them when you see them in words if you do that.) Learning the core ~2,000 for genuine literacy sounds daunting, but the sooner you start, the sooner you can get there.

The starter's guide in the sidebar here recommends either WaniKani or Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course to tackle it. I started WaniKani about 2 months ago, and it's taken me through ~400 Kanji and ~1,150 vocab terms so far. If I had started a year earlier, I'd have learned all its 2k Kanji and 6k vocab by now!

u/shadyendless · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

http://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

There's the book on Amazon. You can click "Look inside" and see the book for yourself. Not sure where you looked for samples at.

u/pexeq · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Just buy it?
https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/

And if you use that method I recommend these books as well:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JK29T2/

Personally I use WaniKani because I like the way it works, but I also have KKLC as a backup incase WK gets too freaky with the mnemonics and radicals.

u/Kamik77 · 2 pointsr/italy

Certo! Il fatto che conosci hiragana e katakana è un'ottima cosa, visto che in questo modo puoi partire già da subito. Io ho seguito gli (ottimi) consigli di r/learnjapanese e ho quindi acquistato il libro che praticamente tutti consigliano: genki (2 volumi che vengono 50€ ciascuno su Amazon). Unica pecca è che esiste solo in inglese, Ma il livello di inglese è ragionevolmente basso e, personalmente, mi ci sto trovando bene. Purtroppo genki non è abbastanza per imparare anche i kanji, per cui ho acquistato il "kodansha kanji learner's course", il quale utilizza un inglese un po' più "avanzato" e del quale ancora non ti posso ancora dire nulla, dato che per impegni non sono riuscito ancora a iniziarlo. Comunque una volta completati i due genki dovresti essere all'incirca al livello del JLPT N4, per cui in grado di leggere o manga semplici (con scrittura furigana, se non hai ancora iniziato uno studio approfondito dei kanji) oppure giochi come どうぶつの森 (conosciuto in Italia come animal's crossing). Come bonus ti lascio questa lista, sempre di giochi che utilizzano un giapponese semplice, per quando avrai completato i due genki. Scusa per essermi dilungato così tanto, spero di esserti stato d'aiuto!

u/weabot · 2 pointsr/polandball

Most Latin learners will recommend you Lingua Latina per se Illustrata with a latin dictionary, online or not. Wikipedia's fine too. It's one of the best ways out there to learn it to a comfortable level, because it gives you true immersion in the language. There's no English past the cover. And then you can practice on random texts you find on the internet, the book should give you a nice idea of Latin grammar and common words, nice enough to keep going on your own without help but a dictionary.

u/svatycyrilcesky · 2 pointsr/Catholicism

If you speak a Western European language, Latin will be probably be far more familiar to you in terms of vocabulary, word roots, and even common phrases. It's also a lot easier to "see" it in daily life, since it uses the same alphabet and is the root of every Romance language. Grammatically Greek and Latin have a lot in common, so if you become proficient in Latin then Greek grammar will be - I won't lie and say easy, but at least a lot more manageable.

In addition, there's just so much written in Latin since it was/is such a prestigious language in the West. I read that about 75% of Latin literature was written after 500 AD, and that includes medieval drinking songs, Issac Newton's physics, and every university motto everywhere ever. You'll have a lot to practice with!

EDIT: I hear lots of good things about Lingua Latina Per Se Illustra, although I use an old copy of Wheelock's because it has lots of grammar and resources and I'm a masochist. Maybe join us at r/latin/ or r/languagelearning/

u/versorverbi · 2 pointsr/Catholicism

To learn Latin, I always suggest Wheelock--I think the fourth edition was new when I studied Latin, so I can't swear by the 7th edition, but it probably hasn't changed too much. Others frequently advocate for LLPSI because it's closer to immersion (the way most modern languages are taught) than grammar-first (Wheelock's and my preferred method). Obviously you'd need more than just the first volume of LLPSI, but that's where you'd start.

As for Latin resources, the Latin Library has a ton of free texts, including the Latin Fathers. At least some of them are OCR scans, though, so be aware that there may be typos here and there.

For Ancient Greek... I learned with Groton, which tries to be the Wheelock of Greek, but doesn't do as well. Every time someone asks this on r/AncientGreek, there's never a consensus on the best textbook.

Once you understand how the language works, you can start reading texts without translation, as long as you have a dictionary handy. My recommendation is that you always try to figure out each word yourself before turning to other resources, but if you get really stuck, you can use parsers (Whitaker's Words for just Latin, Perseus has parsers for both). Perseus also has a lot of texts available, both original language and public domain translations, and the code for their database is open-source. Even if you don't use their parsers, Perseus has Liddell & Scott (the Liddell-Scott-Jones "Great Scott"/"LSJ" and the "Middle Liddell" sizes), Slater, and Autenrieth dictionaries for Greek and the Lewis & Short (as well as its abbreviated Elementary Lewis) dictionary for Latin.

If you're flush with cash, the Loeb Classical Library has, I would like to say, almost everything in Greek and Latin side-by-side with translations. It's an easy way to read and study the classics without first learning the languages (or while you learn the languages). If you have access to an academic library, you can usually find/access them without having to buy them. Now that I work far from academia, I just have to lament sadly that I can't afford it. (Before I get too old, maybe I'll buy an individual license for the digital version.)

As for Church Fathers in general, like I mentioned above, many Latin Fathers are available for free, and most (not quite all, I don't think) Church Fathers are available for free in translation. The Greek texts are harder to come by, mostly because they aren't collected in one quick place that I'm aware of (except perhaps sites like Perseus).

Trying to find free resources can be a challenge because university presses are behind most publications of classical texts, which means (1) they get to copyright the texts because of their translation, critical apparatus, or editing, and (2) those copyrights last a long time when assigned to an institution instead of a person, especially when they keep refreshing them with new "editions" that barely change.

u/Terrance_aka_Magnus · 2 pointsr/latin
u/TMWNN · 2 pointsr/AskHistorians

Lingua Latina. (Also see the reviews for the edition without the illustrations.)

u/crwcomposer · 2 pointsr/mylatintattoo

I just do it for fun, I've got no real Latin qualifications. I've learned a lot from hanging around this subreddit and from the Lingua Latina per se Illustrata books, the Perseus Digital Library, and Wiktionary.

u/Jandar1 · 2 pointsr/latin

Acquiring a language takes time. There is no shortcut. Reading the book once or just a few times is NOT enough. A single book like [Familia Romana] (https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-per-Illustrata-Pars/dp/1585104205) would normally take 2-3 years (300-400 hours of classes, homework etc) in a classroom setting. So, if you do the math, you should spend about 10 hours on each chapter! If you intend to spend all that time 'just reading' that would boil down to reading each chapter 20-60 times depending on your reading speed. You'd probably have acquired the Latin by then, yes. I would however prefer a bit more variation.
E.g. read aloud, record and play back. Read Colloquia Personarum, recording one part with pauses and then speak the other part, then switch roles. Also read Fabellae Latinae. They all cover the same ground as the main book. Do the Exercitia Latina and note that each exercise is in fact a summary of (part of) the chapter, which you could just re-read as such... now combine 2 of those to create a larger overall summary... then, using these as models, try to write a summary by yourself. Keep re-reading everything. As long as you are working with the chapter's text for 10 hours...

u/its_ysabel · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

As a Latin student, I'm obviously biased, but you should choose Latin. Latin is a really fun language, and it's really not that difficult. Since you've studied Russian, you already have a background in declined languages, and your Spanish will help with the vocab. English will help too, regardless of the fact that it's a Germanic language.

If you pick Latin, look into Wheelock's Latin. I use this book, and I think it does a really good job of explaining everything. It's also loaded with examples and practice work, and has a nice answer key in the back if you get stuck. Since it's a course "based on ancient authors," many of the passages are excerpts or adaptations from authors like Cicero or Caesar. It teaches you about Roman history and culture in addition to the language, which I think is nice.

I've also heard plenty of good things about Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, but I haven't used it very extensively.

There's also the Perseus Latin Word Study Tool, which is really helpful. They also have a Greek version, if you decide to go with Greek.

Wiktionary can be useful as well, as it gives full declensions or conjugations for tons of Latin words.

If you progress to a high enough level, you can read the news and tons of ancient authors in Latin.

Also, if you study Latin, we can be language twins. :P

u/poppasan · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Sure. To regain motivation, have fun.

Do you need to learn kana? Make mnemonic charts with your own art.

Genki's method of kanji is bad? Textbooks don't excel at that. KanjiStudy does.

Japanese Graded Readers are fun, tho you may not be ready yet.

Rosetta Stone [insert obligatory condemnation in the next reply] costs money, but if you have it and it doesn't bore you stiff, it's worth a try. (Do the demo first to see if it's for you.)

You can do Japanese the Manga Way ( https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Manga-Way-Illustrated-Structure/dp/1880656906 ) or online versions of the defunct Mangajin almost from the beginning, tho you get more out of it the better you get.

Whatever you do, if it's learning or practice at all and you like doing it, you've got something to make it fun.

u/Down_The_Rabbithole · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

At level 10 you should be able to somewhat guess the meaning of most sentences if they only use the kanji you've already learned.

I recommend watching these videos:

They actually show you the grammar being used with context. It also covers more grammar than Tae Kim. If you want to read and take it with you I would recommend "Japanese the manga way" It's a cheap textbook with manga examples of grammar usage.

u/Twofoe · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

It's pretty neat. The author takes panels from various manga along with a brief description of the context, gives a translation and breakdown of what each word is doing, and explains the grammar point for that section. It's a very fun read, and actually teaches you a lot. I suggest clicking "look inside" on the amazon page to see what it covers in the table of context. Read the preface, too.

A Google search reveals that it'll bring you up to about an N4 level of grammar, which is as good as what the Genki 1+2 gets you. The difference is that it's actually fun to read, and it teaches you casual speech in conjunction with the formal stuff. If you're taking a class, Genki takes 2 years to finish; I finished The Manga Way in 2 weeks.

u/limetom · 2 pointsr/badlinguistics

I've found the Dictionaries of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar to be the one of, if not the most useful thing, I've found to help with learning Japanese.

Sam Martin's Reference Grammar of Japanese is also excellent, but good luck finding a copy.

u/FermiAnyon · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I'm not a fan of textbooks either. I figure if you're at that level and are not particularly interested in passing a specific test, then nix the textbooks and get a grammar reference like the beginning and intermediate levels of this and get a good electronic dictionary and dive straight into novels. When I got into novels earlier this year, and I don't even have the grammar reference... I'm planning on picking those up in a few weeks, things really started taking off for me. So I'd recommend doing that.

u/Zombie_Mochi · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Did you mean A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar and A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar? My Basic dictionary is sitting right next to me, so I figured thats what you meant, but wanted to clarify for the OP.

u/Eric_Wulff · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I would recommend purchasing the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series (Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced), and then entering the plethora of example sentences into Anki.

In my opinion it's harmful to directly memorize grammatical explanations, as it's contrary to the way that a native's cognition works when producing sentences. Instead, one should use grammatical explanations to gain intuition for how the moving parts of the example sentences add together to produce the meaning (as illustrated by the translation), and then forget the specific grammatical explanations while reviewing only the sentences (looking at the translation if necessary but otherwise just trying to visualize the meaning).

u/TeeHee20 · 2 pointsr/japanese

I'm currently using a couple of things -- The trick is to find what works for you the best :D (And these work for me, but yea everyone is different :D)

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u/Blu-shell · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Well do you care if it's a slightly older edition? Because those you can get on amazon for $10 before shipping.

u/BlobTheOriginal · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Yeah, thanks, seems so This comes out to about £26 (then add conversion, shipping, etc) so still much less than £70!

u/vivianvixxxen · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Katakana above all else. If you decide you hate everything and don't want to learn any more, or you've gotten distracted and run out of time to study, at the very very least, learn katakana.

Yes, you should learn hiragana as well, and a few of the most important kanji, and basic survival phrases, but.... If all else fails, cram those katakana in on the flight.

Beyond that, the First Grade Joyo Kanji (of which there's only 100 really simple ones) are probably the most essential.

I'd grab Lonely Planet's Japanese Phrasebook. Even if you're planning on learning the language with a textbook (go with Genki, imo), the LP phrasebook is invaluable for your first few months in the country.

u/Snakey1024 · 2 pointsr/japan

First, learn how to read these. I would recommend getting Genki, to teach you basic grammar and vocab. There is probably a downloadable version somewhere.

I use Anki for mostly vocab. You can download packs here. I also use Tae Kim's site and iOS app for advanced grammar.

u/Razor0310 · 2 pointsr/manga

That's the first edition, and while not a lot is different between the two I definitely recommend getting the second edition as it comes with the CD and prices for the first edition individual CDs are criminal. The workbook and answerkey also help.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Genki-Second-Edition-Integrated-Elementary/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411588323&sr=8-1&keywords=genki

I also have some social anxiety, but I think what helps me is that I have a teacher I can talk about my interests with easily. I had a teacher closer to when I started learning and the lessons weren't nearly as enjoyable and I'd try to look for excuses to cancel them. Now I look forward to them and don't feel nearly as nervous about making mistakes (which happen often, my speaking is pretty bad).

u/corporalgrenwick · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

If you can directly import from Amazon Japan, the prices aren't that bad. They are currently ¥3,780 each for the textbooks, ¥1,728 each for the workbooks, and ¥864 for the answer key (note these prices have tax included so if you are ordering and shipping them outside Japan they may remove the tax--I paid ¥3,500, ¥1,600, and ¥800).

Links:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014436

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/4789014444

http://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014479

u/Hawkuro · 2 pointsr/AceAttorney

Genki, a textbook for English-speaking Japanese learners, has an infamous character called Mary-san, who's a huge asshole. I believe there was a Tanaka-kun in there somewhere as well.

u/Iwashi94 · 2 pointsr/BABYMETAL

Sounds like a cool idea, maybe we could set up an IRC channel, or something? I've started going through this book by /u/capitafk 's suggestion over at /r/SakuraGakuin. I've done the first 2-3 lessons, and it's been great so far, though I'm still slow when reading kana and I can't necessarily write that well...

u/ferragut97 · 2 pointsr/brasil

Precisa ser um curso ou só um material com uma estrutura linear basta? Se você vai virar autodidata de qualquer jeito e a grana ta curta talvez seja melhor já ir começando. Dá para aprender japônes de graça na internet, o que muda é a qualidade do material e o tempo toma para te levar um certo nível.

Tem o Genki que é um dos livros mais usados para aprendizado de japonês. A estrutura dele é extremamente linear, bem fácil de entender e os capitulos iniciais são bem intuitivos para quem esta começando. A ideia é você tentar achar esse livro de graça na web (ho ho ho), dai ver os primeiros capitulos para ver se tem compatibilidade com o livro.

Como duas pessoas já mencionaram aqui, também tem a Misa-sensei e Nama-sensei . Uma é super fofa que explica grámatica de básica até avançada com vários exemplos e o outro é um bêbado(no bom sentido) que usa mais comédia para explicar os básicos. O nama é mais fácil de assitir mas ele tem vários problemas como: letra horrível, errar as ordens de kana e meio hit-or-miss com o jeito que ensina.

Esses são os caminhos mais lineares que têm. Porém, se você mudar de ideia e quiser ir para autodidata desde do começo, sugiro ler o guia do /int/ que te dá objetivos claros que precisam ser atingidos. Se você quer algo mais direto que o Genki (sem história, mais grámatica) , tem o guia do Tam Kim que é bem direto ao ponto. O Tam Kim é de graça, ao contrário do Genki, então pode ser uma boa alternativa se não quiser pegar o livro por outros meios.

Quando você começa a ser autoditada estudando uma língua aparece vários métodos estranho que você não tem certeza ou não. Um canal que pode falar mais desses métodos é o Matt vs. Japan. Esse cara perdeu boa parte da vida dele usando métodos extremos para aprender japônes e nos vídeos ele fala o que funciona ou não. Algumas coisas dele são muito extremas, mas sobre métodos de aprender kanji e spaced repetition system(SRS) são bem interessantes e realmente funcionam.

De qualquer jeito, você vai ter que aprender usar o Anki, seja para decks pré-feitos ou preparar ou seus próprios (decks próprios são sempre melhores que pré-feitos). Não há uma sombra de dúvida que o Anki é o instrumento mais forte para se aprender japônes ( e qualquer língua). Ele entra no SRS que eu mencionei anteriormente. Pra você ter uma ideia tem pessoas que estudam sem material/livros, só através de input (animes/videos/filmes) e Anki.

Para output(conversação), você vai precisar: ou procurar algo em RJ que tenha grupos de conversas em japônes, ou vai ter que achar pessoas na internet (o que é mais fácil). Tem vários aplicativos que te conectam com nativos, assim como canais de discord onde treinam japônes/inglês.

u/Tonster911 · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

If you are okay with spending some money you can buy Genki Volume 1 textbook (Amazon page). It's the basics of the grammar and reading. If you don't want to spend money then duolingo (link) is a good site for learning Japanese. Though I personally don't like it as much as just taking a class and learning from a textbook

u/Tonnot98 · 2 pointsr/Animemes

I started off with DuoLingo for the same reason, and while it was helpful to learn the Hiragana and some basic things, I personally found myself dissatisfied with the teaching style, and started taking a college course. I found that the book, combined with other self study (like music, anime, reading and deciphering comments on youtube, and trying to read untranslated hentai), was very helpful.

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401 This link has the book that I have, though you might be able to find a free PDF if you look hard enough. There's a workbook companion book with it for review.

It teaches mostly polite forms of speaking, which you should almost always use if you're planning on attempting to speak to anyone that's Japanese, unless you know them very well. Just a heads-up.


Edit: It's also best to have a study buddy to practice conversations with, and to correct each-other's mistakes. So grab another weeb and try to learn alongside them!

u/durafuto · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499677957&sr=8-1&keywords=genki
Is a great starter as a book.
You also have http://www.imabi.net/beginnersi.htm if you rather start online (and free) It's very extensive and the guy is really a nerd about the language but imho it's a bit blunt for beginners.
http://www.textfugu.com/ is online and beginner friendly but I find it quite verbose (maybe you wont). First "season" is free so go check it out as the WK team has done a nice job there too.
頑張って

u/pokitopockets · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

(sorry, for some reason I only got the notification of your reply now)

Yes, the cheap one is the workbook. A workbook is an optional book that only contains exercises, it won't teach you japanese. It's useful, but if it's up to you to buy it or not. What you need is the textbook, which is the book that actually teaches you stuff (vocab, grammar).

This one is the textbook and this one is the workbook.

u/LFGUBRS · 2 pointsr/yuruyuri

Always start with learning hiragana and katakana. These are a handful of phonetic symbols that you will need to read basically anything. The guides below will cover them, but just make sure it's the first thing you do.

Tae Kim's guide starts at the basics and then continues with grammar. It's very much based on a "casual first" principle where it starts informal and builds up to formal speech, unlike most textbooks that focus on the latter. You could also check out the pdf version if you find that more comfortable.

Speaking of informal, you might like Namasensei's videos. This is how I made a start years ago. His handwriting is terrible, but it's a very motivational way to learn your hiragana and katakana.

A popular tool for learning vocabulary is Anki with a Core 2k/6k vocab deck. I found a guide here, but I haven't checked if this particular one is up to date. Anki is a flashcard program, and that vocab deck contains the 6000 most frequently used words in Japanese. You can build up your vocab knowledge daily, and get reviews on words you've had before. There's also a mobile app (free on android, paid on iphone), which is really convenient if you commute a lot.

If you like textbooks, possibly the most commonly used are Minna no Nihongo and Genki. I have no experience with these myself, so I can't really comment on them. Apparently the Minna no Nihongo book I linked expects you to know hiragana and katakana before you even dive in, so be aware of that.

For reading practice, look for children's books or simple manga. These texts usually have furigana, which basically means that all the complex characters (kanji) have little hiragana on top that show you how to read them. It's going to make your life a lot easier when you're just starting out.

Another website to keep in mind is Jisho, which will help you look up kanji by piecing them together. Useful if furigana aren't present, which is the case for most advanced texts. Kanji are a huge roadblock for a lot of people, but don't be intimidated by them.

The only thing I can't really help you with is listening practice. I have tried watching some TV shows, but it's often very fast and hard to follow. Anime is fine, as long as you're aware that it's not always exactly realistic.

In summary:

  • Learn hiragana and katakana first
  • Build up your grammar and vocabulary
  • Find material to practice reading and listening, appropriate for your current level of grammar/vocabulary
u/Tomato_Farmer73 · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I accidentally bought the Genki 1 workbook thinking it was the textbook; I'm guessing it won't be much help without the textbook? Also, is this the textbook I'd need?

u/osu-ez · 2 pointsr/Philippines

Don't worry about the N# levels, they really don't indicate your skill at all. Many people have studied for those tests specifically and had no skill in Japanese other than those tests, and still managed to pass N5. It doesn't test you for anything other than reading.

For learning hiragana and katakana, you can do that over the weekend and the kanji you can learn in two or three months. Personally I'm doing 50 a day. You should look in to a tool called Anki, and some books. Specifically, Teach Yourself Complete Japanese, Colloquial Japanese and GENKI I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. Send me a PM and I'll see what I can do for sending you some E-book versions of those books.

For Kanji, check out Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. There's a shared deck for it on Anki. I changed the particular deck available on Anki so the kanji is on the front, and the meaning and the story are on the back. It doesn't teach you the meanings of the kanji, which I believe is a good thing; you should learn the readings of the kanji from the context in certain words. I'm currently learning 50 new kanji a day with Anki + doing my reviews.

u/Cuoted · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

That's the first book I considered but right now it is not available on Canadian Amazon with Amazon Prime

and it is a bit out of my price range as a high school student

u/555ic · 2 pointsr/IWantToLearn

/r/LearnJapanese if you haven't found it already. I am trying to learn as well!

To be more specific, the FAQ is a great place to start. I am using a textbook called Genki along with a flashcard program called Anki for vocab memorization.

Start by learning Hiragana and Katakana, then you can start to learn vocabulary. I'm obviously not going to claim this is the best method, as learning a language is a unique process for everyone. Good luck!

u/EmmaWinters · 2 pointsr/dbz

Lots of studying.

If you want to get started, you'll need to learn Hiragana and Katakana before anything else. The demo of Human Japanese will teach you Hiragana, and Anki flashcards will help with Katakana. From there, move on to Genki, and maybe supplement that with Anki and a Genki vocab deck.

It's not that difficult. You just gotta keep at it and never stop.

u/somnusXmemoria · 2 pointsr/Philippines

Hello, does anyone know where I can buy a Genki I textbook?

I tried asking at fullybooked and apparently it costs 10k for a special order. The one at national bookstore simply stated that they don't have one (which I doubt, since she was busy chatting with her worker).

u/ochitaloev · 2 pointsr/secretsanta

We all have that phase. I recommend the Genki series if you are serious about starting to study Japanese. It's what they use in beginner university courses.

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

It's a little pricy, but worth the money in my opinion. I bought mine 10 years ago.

u/mseffner · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

You need the textbook itself, as well as the workbook. Scans of the answer key are among the first results on Google when you search "Genki answer key". There's nothing else you need, though pencil and paper will probably be helpful. I also recommend checking out Anki, which is a flashcard program that will help you memorize vocabulary.

u/pissygaijin · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

> Can anyone give me some advice, as well as any websites/books that I can read up on to improve in my understanding of the language?

The book Genki 1 is often recommended.

u/JTadaki · 2 pointsr/softwaregore

四/よん/yon = 4
Try https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/imiwa/id288499125?mt=8 if you have iOS. I'm not sure if Imiwa is on Android, this app serves as a dictionary.

Also checkout the 1st Genki textbook and workbook, they are used by schools all over the US and my professor teaches from it daily.

Textbook: GENKI I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese (English and Japanese Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/4789014401/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gxGPCbTNRWJB9

Workbook: Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese Workbook I [Second Edition] (Japanese Edition) (Japanese and English Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/478901441X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GxGPCbQEZBF16

I started with Duolingo as well and it wasn't a great start. These books will help further your Japanese learning. I've been studying for two years starting in August, they really work.

r/learnjapanese is also a great place to check for viable resources besides the ones I mentioned.
Good luck! 頑張って!

u/Haitatchi · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I've never used Japanese for Dummies, so I don't know how far it takes you and how well it allows you to transition to more advanced learning materials. As has already been mentioned, the easiest method is to exhaust all the grammar your current book can teach. The most popular alternatives to JfD are Genki and Japanese from Zero. If you asked anyone who studied Japanese for a while, if they used either book or at least heard about them, they'll most likely say yes. On top of that, it's easy to build up on your knowledge after you finished the textbook. After Genki 1, you can use Genki 2 and after you finished that as well you'll be quite good at Japanese.

If you want to practise natural speaking and writing, I'd recommend to take a look at an app called HelloTalk. It basically lets you chat with native speakers of a language of your choice for free. It might feel like it's still a little too early to try that but when I look back at how I learnt Japanese, I wish that I would have used that app much, much sooner. It's never to early to start speaking/ writing!

u/curiousQbit · 2 pointsr/transphotography

This is the best way I've found outside of classes.

First of all pick up a copy of Genki I and Genki II, really good textbook to learn Japanese Grammer and basic Kanji.

Here's a link: Genki I

Next I'd head over to /r/LearnJapanese to get some more resources and find someone to talk, italki is also a great way to find a teacher, a proper J-teacher, prices range quite a bit.

And next read everything you can in JP, change your phone language and learn kanji EVERY DAY.

u/masamunecyrus · 2 pointsr/japan

If you're anything like me, I would wager that you're not focusing because your curriculum is painfully slow.

I got my Japanese degree from Indiana University, and in first-year Japanese (two semesters, 5 credit hours each) we went through the entire first Genki. By the second year, we were already on Genki II.

If you're still learning this level of Japanese at the 200 level in college, I'd really recommend you jump into something more intensive--provided you have enthusiasm about learning the language. I study my best when the curriculum is too difficult. I study hard, and I fail. But ultimately I learn more failing at difficult curriculum than I do exceeding at boring curriculum.

My absolute top recommendation for learning Japanese is the Kanzen Master series levels 2 and 3, but those seem to be out of print. It looks like you can purchase the "New Kanzen Master series", but they only publish starting from JLPT level 3 and lower, which is more difficult than the old JLPT level 3.

u/OTRawrior · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

It can be quite confusing! Firstly I did a lot of looking around and unless there is a seller on ebay/amazon UK selling a second hand copy cheap, I found it was cheapest to order it new from amazon.co.jp

http://imgur.com/ZiYfwrh

http://imgur.com/visBrmu

Here's the link to 2nd edition Genki 1 textbook (all you really need, but the workbook is at the bottom of the page too)
http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/aw/d/4789014401/ref=s9_bbs_awgw_d6_g14_i1/375-3555975-0547058?pi=SL115&aid=aw_gw_jp&apid=154199649&arc=1201&arid=1MAW3KEVFNH08PQBG3X1&asn=center-4&pf_rd_i=aw_gw&pf_rd_m=AN1VRQENFRJN5&pf_rd_p=154199649&pf_rd_r=1MAW3KEVFNH08PQBG3X1&pf_rd_s=center-4&pf_rd_t=1201

There should be a button somewhere to view the site in English.

(sorry about the formatting, on my phone)

u/MisterInfalllible · 2 pointsr/Whatisthis

Try learning some verbal japanese?

https://nihongoshark.com/japanese-greetings/

​

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4789014401/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0

​

Also, take her to a japanese bookstore or the japanese books section in a library?

plus this:

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/howto/

​

Along with anime - start with miyazaki's "howl's moving castle" or "kiki's delivery service".

u/hardkoretom · 2 pointsr/AskNYC

the 2 apps I use are Kanjibox and Imiwa. Both are for IOS.

Kanjibox is a quiz type of app that teaches the kanji characters based on the JLPT certification levels. If you don't have IOS there is an internet based version here.

Imiwa is just a really extensive english - japanese dictionary.

If you are looking for a textbook, this and this are a couple of the more well regarded ones. This is another book for learning just the kanji.

Good luck

u/nguyen846 · 2 pointsr/genki

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/478901441X/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1510270538&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=genki&dpPl=1&dpID=51cdvoP7fPL&ref=plSrch if you're referring to this one, I'm not sure why it says Japanese edition in the title. In the description it does say Japanese/English. There is a few full Japanese pages at the beginning, which is like the introduction, but there's the english version after it. This book is surely both in Japanese and English as it is meant for english speakers to learn Japanese.

u/kochochan · 2 pointsr/LearnJapaneseNovice

I used [NihongoMaster] (https://www.nihongomaster.com/14-1-1-5.html), as it taught the kana, simple vocab and then quizzed you on it all. The Introductory part where it teaches all this is free. I kept up with this to continue learning grammar and kanji.

For books I used Japanese Hiragana & Katakana for Beginners for mnemonics and writing practice.

To perfect my knowledge, I used http://iknow.jp/home. I'll be continuing with this to learn more kanji/vocab.

I read the Heisig book last month, just out of curiosity, by this time I knew my kana very well.

u/janeplow · 2 pointsr/genki

My coworker is getting me the genki books in Japan since he’s going there this week. More than happy to work with you when I get it.

I don’t know your level of Japanese but I’ve been using the below guide to get me through self studying. Not to the T because I discovered it after I started studying.


https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/

I used the below book for hiragana and katakana, although you could use free charts online


https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Hiragana-Katakana-Beginners-Mastering/dp/4805311444/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?keywords=learn+hiragana+and+katakana&qid=1570587326&sprefix=learn+hi&sr=8-5

Right now I’m using WaniKani.com to learn kanji. I’m on level 4. That guide says not to touch a text book till I’m on level 10, but I’m going to start early cause I’m hard headed and love to suffer...

I just dumped all this info lol And you probably don’t need it or already know

u/clabern · 2 pointsr/MechanicalKeyboards

I picked up this from Amazon to start with, but was thinking that I needed graph paper or something to practice writing on!

u/mfish139 · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I found it easier for a physical book for the kanas as well. This book was good for me and cheap enough to justify the purchase.

u/NXTDj · 2 pointsr/imouto
u/eduardozrp · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Try satori reader, from the guys who made human japanese.

If you really need a textbook you should probably go with Tobira, it covers more advanced stuff than genki but you can probably handle it since you finished Human Japanese.

I can also recommend ["Making Sense of Japanese"] (https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Japanese-What-Textbooks/dp/156836492X) by Jay Rubin, it's a short read but gives you a deeper understanding of a few different topics.

Imabi is probably the most complete japanese resource in english and it's free, definitely give it a try.

u/therico · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Try some other schools? Usually you don't need to come in at rank beginner level if you already know a lot of Japanese. (I haven't been to one, but I am going to one in October).

The advantage of a school is that it offers you a 2 year visa. If there are other visa options, I'd recommend those - working holiday visa is available for some countries, etc. Then you can self-study and practice conversation. Assuming you're sufficiently motivated!

As for books, I did this book. It overlaps a bit with Genki 2 but it's a natural step up. Towards the end it gets quite difficult as it uses native texts. I'm now doing Tobira which is really fun and is placed between N3 and N2.

u/fabulouslyposh · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Is the tobira book you're describing the one listed below:
https://www.amazon.com/Tobira-Japanese-English-Mayumi-Oka/dp/4874244475/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499474116&sr=8-1&keywords=tobira

Also, what's the difference between this tobira and tobira "grammar power?"

u/nadine-nihongo · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

The full title is Tobira: Gateway to Advanced Japanese and I think it's pretty good.

http://www.amazon.com/Tobira-Advanced-Japanese-Learning-Multimedia/dp/4874244475


ISBN 978-4874244470

u/AlaskanWolf · 1 pointr/gaming

I can't speak for the quality of Rosetta Stone, but he is correct in recommending the Genki series of books. The best I've encountered so far.

u/Hodsulfr · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

This and This you don't happend you know the difference since there's such a huge price difference.

Edit: nvm textbook and workbook. Would i need both or is textbook enough?

u/10yearbazooka · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

If you like anime and manga this site is fun:

It would really help you to get an actual textbook though. I use the Genki series, and it is much, much more affordable than Rosetta Stone and a million times better too.

u/Koyomii-Onii-chan · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

I don't know if it answers your question but I learn Japanese using this book . It's fantastic and it starts from the basic.

u/IllPresence · 1 pointr/Bonn

While I won't be able to teach you myself, I've got a spare copy of this book that I could give to you.
https://www.amazon.de/Genki-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

It teaches basic Japanese by using one or two short sample dialogues for each chapter with emphasis on a certain grammatical form.
If you want to get any use out of it, it is vital to at least being able to read Hiragana, one of the three writing systems Japanese is composed of, though.

If you're interested just send me a message.

u/Captainobvious89 · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Yeah, I figured that. Seems overly redundant if you ask me. This is the one I was planning on grabbing; I'm guessing it's the textbook?

u/etalasi · 1 pointr/languagelearning

/r/learnjapanese's Getting Started Guide

> ###Online Guides
>
> Luckily for the modern language learner, the internet is full of free resources for study. When using them, however, make sure that you are using a credible source. One extremely popular and quality guide is Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese. Written, and even available through Amazon, as a book, Tae Kim’s Guide covers everything you need to know to get started learning Japanese.
>
> Another great choice is Pomax's Introduction to Japanese.
>
> If you’d like to follow a different path, you can follow the subsections below.
>
>
> ###Textbooks
>
> If you’re interested in a more traditional form of study, you may be looking for a recommendation of a textbook. In /r/LearnJapanese, the most commonly recommended textbook series is Genki. Currently available in its second edition, the Genki consists of two textbooks (GENKI I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese and Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese II) with companion workbooks. The books and associated media are designed to be used to help in learning speaking, listening, reading and writing skills, with additional segments for cultural information. These textbooks are commonly used in college and university settings and cover the first two years of study at a common pace.
>
> These books are available for purchase from many sources, such as Amazon.com (Amazon.com Purchase Links: Genki I | Genki I Workbook | Genki II | Genki II Workbook ) and traditional brick-and-mortar resellers.
>
> Additional choices for textbooks, such as the Nakama series, can be found on the Resources page of the wiki.

u/Sav1n · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Thanks Man, Think I got it all This Is it right?

u/empire539 · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Ah, yeah. There are two Genki books - a textbook and a workbook.

The textbook is what has all the lessons, dialogues, grammar explanations, vocabulary lists, and so on.

The workbook is meant to be a companion book which provides you with a lot of exercises to complete after doing a lesson in the textbook.

You want the one that doesn't say workbook on it, like this one, for example.

u/naevorc · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Do you have a local university where you can audit a summer class? I recommend doing that if you can, and also you can ask your professor recommendations.

Force yourself to learn Hiragana and Katakana in 1 week or so and get that over with quickly. Do not go easy on yourself and move on from reading the Romanized pronunciations. There are flash card apps you can use as well, my preferred is called Anki. I live in Japan and still use it as there are flash card decks for everything, and especially since it's on my phone (free on android, paid on iphone).

Find a language partner if possible. There are also online Skype services.

For now though, I recommend either of the first two books, and the third. My organization's Japanese language advisor prefers Minna no Nihongo, because he thinks the Genki series uses too much English. But I first learned in the states during college and still feel that Genki 1 & 2 were great introductory books. The third book is from my language advisor's preferred Japanese Language Proficiency Test prepbook series:

Genki

[Minna no Nihongo] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/4883196038/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522710731&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=minna+no+nihongo+1&dpPl=1&dpID=41T4AzzZhzL&ref=plSrch)

[Nihongo So Matome N5] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/486639076X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522710835&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=nihongo+sou+matome+n5&dpPl=1&dpID=51HKNmOKvfL&ref=plSrch)



Learn how to count, along with the basic various counter words (ex: the first 10 days of the month are special words, 10 people, 10 things, etc)

Learn "すみません sumimasen" for "I'm sorry / excuse me / thank you" (sometimes). Use this especially if you need someone's attention or want to ask a question.

"arigatou(gozaimasu/gozaimashita)" = thank you

Toire wa doko desu ka? =
Where's the bathroom?

男 "otoko" = man

女 "onna" = woman

Also check out /r/movingtojapan /r/japanlife

Blessings on you




u/Triddy · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Hey, this is very late, but I am procrastinating studying for my Kanji test tomorrow, so I'm going to write this out again! I hope you see it.

Free is going to be hard. I would suggest less than $50, as that's a hell of a lot more feasible.

Step 0: Get your expectations in Check

You have 3 - 5 months, depending on when you are going. That's enough to learn some stuff, but not as much as you'd like.

You will need to study at least an hour a day, every day. At that point, you'll likely be able to form basic sentences, read basic signs and instruction, and absolutely struggle through the most basic of basic conversations. That's really about it.

You can do more if you study more, obviously. But you also run the risk of burning out. Personally, I would suggest setting an hour a night aside, and at the end of that hour, ask yourself, "Am I good for another 30 minutes?" and continue doing that until you can't honestly say yes.

---

Step 1: Learn Hiragana and Katakana

There are lots of apps and books and stuff for this: It's a gigantic waste of money and time. Make yourself some flashcards, drill them into your head at every spare moment over a few days. You should have a basic sense of them. You'll still forget some, that's normal, don't worry. As long as you don't have to stop and look up every other kana, you're going to be fine.

Step 2: Get a Grammar Resource

Textbook, unfortunately. Alternative: tutor or classes but that gets expensive quick.

Any one of us can give you a massive list of vocab and useful grammar points and flash card decks. That will give you a wealth of information and no direction. The important part of a class or a textbook is that it's a lesson plan. You don't need to waste the time deciding what to learn in what order: Just flip the page.

Genki is the standard recommendation, because it's used in University/College classes across North America and there are resources for it everywhere: Downside: You need 4 Books + The Answer Key to use it effectively. That'll end up at $225USD ish.

Skipping Minna No Nihongo because, while it's another popular recomendation, it's MORE expensive.

I used Japanese for Everyone (I have also used Genki and I own a copy of Minna No Nihongo 1 from school, but haven't used it) and I'm going to recommend it here stronger than I normally do. Reason: It's super cheap, because that's the only book you're going to need. Downside is less internet resources and a faster pace.

Free Alternative is Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar. It's useful, but it contains no useful practice problems and a not so great selection of example sentences.

---

Step 3: Practice

Once you get 6 or 7 chapters into your textbook of choice, you need to start using it. Even if you're not speaking, at least be writing to someone in real time in text. Input is probably more important than output, yes, but you need some output at least. Lots of people (Me included) put this off far too long and I Definitely suffered when I first came to Tokyo for it.

Free? You want HelloTalk. It's an iPhone/Android messaging app specifically tailored for people exchanging languages. It's pretty much your only/best option for free. Conversations tend to fizzle out when both people are low level, so be persistent.

---

Step 4: Additional Resources

  • imabi.net

    One guy writing hundreds of pages of guides that go into mid-depth of Japanese Grammar. This is not a primary resource. It takes the problems I have with Tae Kim to the extreme, and it is very grammar term heavy. It's best used for additional explanation when you don't understand something. Say, you get to ~てしまう in a textbook and don't understand? Imabi.

  • Anki/Ankidroid/Memrise

    Spaced Repetition Flashcards. They work, they're useful. Anki is more powerful and has more community vetted resources, Memrise is more "Game-ified" but less powerful and with less resources. You should never use either of these programs as your first contact with any grammar point. They are flash cards. They are used to review.

  • A Dictionary App

    Goes without saying. Take your pick, 99% of them use the same base database so the only difference is UI. I use mine 500 times a day (But I am in Tokyo).

  • NHK Web Easy

    Here. 3 Articles a day (5 on Friday) taken from the NHK main site and simplified heavily, intended for foreigners and elementary school students. Includes Furigana on every kanji, colour coding places/names, and full audio recording for each Article. Too advanced for you now, but good god is this good to know about it.

  • Erin's Challenge

    Here. Originally made to go with a textbook, and for learning it's pretty well impossible without that textbook. This site is still a fucking goldmine, with over 100 1-5 minute skits and videos in normal Japanese (Except the main character, who is correct but intentionally slow). Full scripts and line-by-line break down in Japanese, Kana Only, Romaji, and English. Listening Practice and Shadowing does not get better than this.

    ---

    Step -1: Things to Avoid

  1. Massive Pre-made Vocab Decks on Anki. They have a time and a place, but neither of those are "At the beginning of your studies".
  2. "Learn Japanese" apps. Duolingo is bad. Lingodeer is less bad, but still not ideal. Human Japanese is even less bad, but provides no practice beyond shitty quizzes.
  3. "Remembering the Kanji" or RTK. It basically teaches you English Key Words for all the standard Kanji, with little mnemonics and mnemonic forming tips. It requires a 3 - 5 month investment, during which you are not learning Japanese. The key words are incomplete at best and wrong at worst. It has a place if you're willing to not learn Japanese for 3 - 5 months to make the following 3 - 5 months significantly easier on you, but that's not going to help you in Japan.

    Have fun!
u/ninjininja · 1 pointr/unt
u/HiImGarrett · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Sorry to bug you one more time. Would you suggest this one with the CD-ROM or would I just need the workbook? Thanks again.

u/ventlus · 1 pointr/leagueoflegends

http://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458446988&sr=8-1&keywords=genki

sorry for late reply. These books are one of the most popular series. You can have conversational japense after learning from both text books. after that you have to by a kanji text books to learn kanji, or you can find something online.You honestly just need to learn the common ones cause even japanese people forget kanji they don't use very often.

u/d4nnyw4yne · 1 pointr/dragonquest

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401

Learn Japanese and you will have no problem finding hype for Dragon Quest.

u/meattbone · 1 pointr/NJTech

I actually took the class at Rutgers. It was very fun and interesting, but you could probably do all the work on your own (if you're dedicated enough). The textbook we used was Genki 1
https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491451953&sr=8-1&keywords=genki+1
The workbook as well
https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1491451953&sr=8-2&keywords=genki+1

Not all Rutgers classes are on the NJIT schedule builder. Japanese you'll have to find in the Rutgers schedule builder:
https://sis.rutgers.edu/soc/

Finally, to register for any class at Rutgers, you need to fill out this form and bring it to our registrar:
http://www5.njit.edu/sites/registrar/files/lcms/forms/RUTG.pdf

u/vashtiii · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

£53 for volume 1, £49 for volume 2.

That's not counting the workbooks, which are about £20 each.

Edit: It would be considerably cheaper just to import them from Amazon US.

u/Creep3rkill3r · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Okay, so I'm also new to Japanese, and I'm 15 too, so I'm in the same boat as you. I should probably let you know though how often people tell me to learn Hiragana and Katakana before jumping in to anything else.

You can do that through hiragana and katakana courses on the flashcard site Memrise. It's recommended for general language learning and specifically Japanese vocab. and writing systems often, and I've had a generally good experience with it. Pick up a book on them if you feel like it.

It could take you between a week to a month depending on your skill level and your general ability to pick up knowledge, but once you have them under your belt and only then, start learning speaking, listening and general grammar and vocabulary then. Pick up a textbook like Genki if you feel like it. Genki 1 is recommended a lot here too.

I should probably emphasise the FAQ, wiki and other info here on this subreddit, too. The /r/LearnJapanese starters' guide is your friend, and will give a more wholesome rundown than I did.

One final thing - I'm new to this too, so to you and any other new learners like me reading this: I'm not an expert; I'm just doing what's working for me and is generally advised. To people with more experience learning Japanese with a better idea of how to start: please comment with anything I've missed or messed up; like I said, I'm not a genius. I've seen people here who I think are, and they're friendly, good people. I try to be good and friendly, but I'm no genius at all, I'm just starting like you.

Sorry for the long post, I can't feel my fingers from typing fast. Good luck to you, /u/Harry-kun!

u/bvoss5 · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese
u/galaxyrocker · 1 pointr/duolingo

No, they're two resources. Tae Kim, genki

u/Xen0nex · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Thanks for the reply! Are these the Genki books you're referring to?

Offhand I'd put myself as an Intermediate-Beginner. Kana is no problem, but I only have around 60 or so Kanji under my belt, and my vocab/verbal was about the level to get me though typical everyday conversations, albeit with some groping around with very basic and bad grammar to make myself understood when I don't know how to say something. One of the bigger points is just that I haven't been speaking / listening to it for the last 4 years.

Is Nikkei this website?

I guess I would want to get a lot of math / physics / mechanical vocab so I can describe results from stress tests and failure loads and so on. I'm not aiming to have easy, flowing conversation skills in 2 months or anything, but if I can understand most of what the other engineers are saying, and make myself understood quickly at least, I'd be satisfied.

Yeah, I haven't set myself up for success very well; all of my blocked-off self-study time ended up getting eaten up with business trips and late nights in the lab, and then the transfer date got set recently.

I've been hoping to find an outside tutor / course if for no other reason than to have some time that I know couldn't get sucked into work-time, but you may be right; setting some focused time each day to work on vocab could be my best bet.

u/ShotFromGuns · 1 pointr/lifehacks

A few thoughts off the top of my head...

  1. Spend as much time as you can listening to native speakers of the language. Watching Japanese shows, even with English subtitles, is going to really help your pronunciation, colloquial language use, etc. Even better would be conversing with native speakers, but that can be harder to arrange.

  2. This is the textbook series my American university worked from. This is the textbook series my Japanese university worked from. It can be kind of confusing to switch series of books in the middle of learning, so I'd recommend picking one and sticking with it. Learn Japanese was great with a professor guiding me through, but Genki may be better for a solo learner. (Grain of salt: I am not familiar with the earlier Genki books.)

  3. Japanese uses three writing styles: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The first two are both syllabaries, which are kind of like alphabets, only each "letter" stands for a mora (a syllable, more or less). For instance, what we would write in English as ka is expressed in hirigana as a single "letter." They also are used to represent the exact same set of sounds, and some of the "letters" in each syllabary look pretty similar to each other. You'll want to learn hiragana first, then katakana. If you're able to focus on your work, with lots of practice and flashcards, it shouldn't take you more than a month to learn all of them. Once you have the hiragana down, learn katakana. You'll probably find it goes much faster, since so many of the "letters" are similar. Next will come kanji, which are characters whose meaning and pronunciation can change based on context. You will eventually need to learn about 2,000 kanji to be functionally literate in Japanese, but don't panic; even in Japan, they spread the teaching of them over years. Whichever series of books you pick to learn from will introduce kanji to you gradually.

  4. Once you learn to read hiragana, WWWJDIC is going to be your best friend. There are features to look up individual words, search for kanji, and perform text glossing of entire chunks of text. Dictionary entries include a ton of features, including example sentences, verb conjugations, and the ability to examine individual kanji in a word. Additionally awesome if you have an Android smartphone is the app, which comes with a kanji recognizer: you can draw out kanji you don't know, and it will give you its best guess. (Accuracy increases hugely if you're drawing the kanji with the correct number of strokes and stroke order, so the tool gets more useful once you've started learning kanji.) Note, however, that WWWJDIC is a dictionary, not a translation engine; it can give you a bunch of useful vocabulary, but it can't tell you how to use it to construct a sentence.

    Source: Japanese was my foreign language in college, which included a semester abroad in Tokyo.
u/Vegotio · 1 pointr/japanese

Thank you by the way for helping me out so far. If you don't mind, could you help me figure out which first 2 books I should be looking at, or what order to get them in?

​

My assumption would be, in the order listed,

1st to get:

GENKI I: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese (English and Japanese Edition)


by Eri Banno

​

2nd to get:

Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese II [Second Edition] (Japanese Edition) (English and Japanese Edition)


​

I am not sure on that second one, I assumed it would be the second book due to it saying Japanese II, but it saying second edition is throwing me off.

u/_TheRocket · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

thank you very much. I have heard a lot about genki. Is this the right one? amazon link

u/nofacade · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Welcome! Check out the wiki to get an idea of where to start. Around here, most people (myself included) suggest getting Genki I to start off, as it goes through the basics of Japanese quite well. Feel free to ask any questions!

u/RockMe-Amadeus · 1 pointr/vancouver

I've had success with Genki.

https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401

Pretty sure you can find it at Chapters or for free online.

u/sumirina · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

I don't really know why but the books are listed twice on Amazon... on the more expensive base listing (the 90€ one) the alternative shops are actually a bit cheaper (see here) so at least you could get the textbook for around ~50€ and I think the workbook is around 23€ here (the picture shows the second edition so it should be the right one), maybe if you get them from the same shop you could get lucky with cheaper shipping as well, but I don't know about that (same goes for the answer key )

Apart from looking for cheaper shopping on Amazon de you might also want to check Amazon jp (the shipping costs are pretty high but the base price is much cheaper). I'm a bit too lazy to look it up right now, but you can change the site to English so it shouldn't be too hard. Just don't forget to calculate the shipping in as well!

u/condemn_the_truth · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

The book alone is £39 and the workbook is £20 incl shipping. You pay £5 more to buy it in that bundle lmao.

u/Nineyfox · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Hmm, you might want to try buying those from the amazon.co.jp sites instead. I bought them for $130 (GENKI 1 & 2 costed me $69) and the workbooks too + a dictionary. I think you could buy them for ¥6400 which equals to $55 shipping included.
Here the links:
Workbook 1 ||
Genki 1 ||
Genki 2 ||
Workbook 2

u/1000m · 1 pointr/japanese

A dictionary is good, but won't get you what you want.

  • Take a class (optional but helpful)
  • iTalki or other online tutor/teacher arrangement
  • Apps: LingoDeer, DuoLingo, Human Japanese, Learn Japanese w/Master Ling, RosettaStone, etc.
  • Online resources: TaeKim, Tofugu, r/LearnJapanese, YouTube, etc.
  • Genki 1 book
u/Kortheon · 1 pointr/Philippines

Won't you prefer to learn by yourself? This book is a workbook with audio for you to practice with. (I've used it myself). Look around the internet for an "online" copy for 'free" (it's what I did but my source was recently shutdown yeah we all know which one it was pretty kickass)

u/AllOfTimeAndSpace · 1 pointr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon

My classes start on the 4th. :) I've bought most of my textbooks already but I really need this Japanese workbook for my intro Japanese course. I moved it from my books list to my main list so its easy to find if you end up picking me. :) This is a really great contest and even if I don't win I think it's fantastic that you're willing to help people get their hands on much needed textbooks. <3

u/Yunihorn · 1 pointr/SakuraGakuin

Yeah, Marin's English speaking skill was unexpected knowing that most/some Japanese people are not good at it. Maybe she goes to cram school and learn advance English. She's smart and adorable too :)

I recommend using Genki book for beginners(like me lol)
You should try it if it's available near your area.

u/nillllux · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Should I get the Genki 1 book as well as the workbook? Or will just the g1 book be fine on its own?

u/klistwan · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese
u/supn9 · 1 pointr/AskReddit

Start off with Hiragana for Beginners and then move onto Katakana

I used the first one.. It comes with flashcards. Then I moved to the Katakana. Same author..

http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Hiragana-Beginners-Mastering-Writing/dp/480530877X/ref=pd_sim_b_58
or
http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Hiragana-Katakana-Beginners-Mastering/dp/4805311444/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324364592&sr=1-2

These books have vocobaulary that has the letters you are learning. So as you learn the letters, you can learn words with the letters youve already learned.

Then you can move onto books like :

This one focuses more on dialogue

http://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789009637/ref=pd_sim_b_2

Sentence structure:
http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Sentence-Patterns-Effective-Communication/dp/4770029837/ref=pd_sim_b_2


u/coolman25 · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Well first let me tell you how much i appreciate the very thorough and helpful reply! I think i pretty much have it, the textbook i am currently using is this one. http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Hiragana-Katakana-Beginners-Mastering/dp/4805311444/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416891998&sr=8-1&keywords=japanese+book

I think the book mainly focuses on this type of characters 教科書体 which is pretty much impossible for me to imitate lol but you're saying as long as i use this font while writing 明朝体 then i am not doing anything incorrect? As long as i can tell the difference between the characters with serifs or without then ill be fine? i can see those websites being extremely helpful but how can i type in a kana or kanji on an american keyboard? as you can see i am very new and clueless lol sorry!

u/PinkyWinkyBlinky · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

If you find that you remember better with a physical component, like writing, you can try a book (I'm using this one and my handwriting is terrible but I get a better memory result if I am writing it and saying it at the same time. There is not enough room in the book to copy a character enough times to memorize it, so use notebook paper once you have the idea, and do them in groups of five.

The Anki (or AnkiApp for iOS if you can't afford to donate $25) is also a very useful and important tool. SRS is a magical thing.

The third thing to try is drag & drop hiragana or real kana which you can also use for Katakana (and learn different font recognition, which is very difficult at first, but very important!!)

u/Colololure · 1 pointr/japanese

Don’t use Duolingo to learn Hiragana. It doesn’t teach it correctly. Buy this Japanese Hiragana & Katakana for Beginners: First Steps to Mastering the Japanese Writing System (CD-ROM Included) https://www.amazon.com/dp/4805311444/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Isr4DbJDGCNJC. It really helped me learn how to read in hiragana and katakana

u/Symbi0tic · 1 pointr/japanese

I purchased the Genki I textbook, workbook, and answer key. However, reviews seemed to indicate I'd be better off knowing how to read Kana going in..so I purchased Japanese Hiragana & Katakana for Beginners, which has been really helpful thus far.

Just studying in my free time at work I've quickly familiarized myself with reading and writing Hiragana; about to move on to Katakana. Pronunciation may be a little spotty, but I've yet to use the CD included.

Yet to embark on Genki I (waiting until I finish the aforementioned Beginners book), though I've read nothing but good things about it..so I'd imagine it's a good resource as well.

u/skinnyAssDisaster · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Is this the correct version of Tobira to order? I'm looking to finish Genki II in about 6ish weeks (hopefully) and I wanted to ahead and get this book on order.

https://www.amazon.com/Jpn-Tobira-Japanese-English-Mayumi-Oka/dp/4874244475/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519529443&sr=8-1&keywords=tobira

u/Zarmazarma · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

A lot of people move on to Tobira. That's what my college does, too.

u/DJFiregirl · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

TBH The easy news can be too easy, and it's not really going to launch you much further in reading comprehension. It's not a bad resource by any means, but if it isn't challenging you, look for something that will. Reading will require you to know a ton of kanji (RIP), so I advise just getting books and going to town. There's also several styles of writing, so academic/news/similar read pretty differently from manga/light novels/etc. I am personally quite fond of the Gakken elementary school books. They cover science, autobiography, folktales, so on. They run from 1st~6th grade on the Japan scale, so the content and furigana are all in line with what's expected at that grade level. For reference, the 4th grade list. The 5th grade book I'm reading covers why we have a belly button, why albino rabbits are different from non-albino, why humans can't breathe underwater, why stinkbugs stink, and a ton of others. It's pretty easy to read, and it definitely challenges my vocabulary. Plus, it's a lot of things I'm at least vaguely familiar with in English, so it's easier to catch on.

I definitely recommend the Tobira textbook. I much prefer reading from paper (computer eye strain 2 real), so I have a lot of books. Concerning Tae Kim, I haven't treated it as a text by any stretch of the imagination: I use the search function and ctrl+F to get what I need and close the tab.

Also, the JLPT is... a test. And if you get 50%-ish of the material, you pass. IMO, it's not really worth anything unless you need the N2 or above to get a job in Japan (or where ever). I just passed N3 and I was genuinely surprised at my results. It's a good resume builder, but it doesn't test your ability to use Japanese, just if you understand it. It doesn't really help you much with anything besides reading.

u/masterswarm · 1 pointr/Team_Japanese

There's a few different textbook options for continuing after げんき, but it seems that the most common choice here is とびら. I use it myself and I know several other members do as well, and I've found it to be quite comprehensive. Just a warning though: it is a pretty big leap in difficulty from what げんき had you doing, so be prepared to struggle a bit in the beginning.

u/ChuckFinley97 · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

So I'm going to acknowledge that I feel dumb in asking this, is this the workbook for Tobira?


I want to order Tobira but I also want to get the workbook in the same order (so that way they ship together) and there's a couple Tobira books. Also, does anyone else recommend the Tobira kanji book?

And in case this causes any questions, where my understanding that it has a workbook is from is from this post.

u/Fuwaraido · 1 pointr/gaybros

Japanese textbook. I thought I could get away with not spending money on textbooks this semester. I thought horribly wrong.

u/kamakie · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Just found it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4874244475/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=4874244475&linkCode=as2&tag=xedi-20

It's a relatively new book. It seems that my school imported it in bulk and sold it to us. Hopefully the price will go down as more classes use the book and more copies hit the used books market.

u/uufo · 1 pointr/languagelearning

I don't like these novelty-approaches to language learning like duolingo, they seem like a waste of time.

I think the most efficient way is to study the basic grammar structure, acquire a good vocabulary, and get as soon as possible to a point where you can read written text. If you decide for German, I suggest the book "German for reading" by Sandberg or "German quickly", combined with the daily use of Anki to acquire a basic vocabulary (say, the most commonly used 3000 words).

If you choose French, French for reading + Anki.

Even if you want to speak or listen, I still suggest your first move must be to reach reading competency as soon as possible. It can be done in 2-3 months (read the reviews of those books), and after that it will be very easy and enjoyable to work from there toward your other goals. And if you lose your enthusiasm, you can keep on practicing by just reading books or sites you enjoy, instead of just quitting and forgetting what you have learned.

u/traviscounty · 1 pointr/French

take a look at this book, it is great for translation exams.


https://www.amazon.com/French-Reading-Karl-C-Sandberg/dp/0133316033

u/mimnermos · 1 pointr/AskLiteraryStudies

although i haven't used it personally, something like this might be helpful

u/Monk_In_A_Hurry · 1 pointr/French

I've got a copy of French for Readng which I've found helpful. Its focused entirely on increasing reading comprehension and French-to-English translation skills, plus it briefly reviews grammatical rules covered by other materials.

Also, English Grammar for Students of French is an excellent resource for improving your grammatical foundations in both English and French.

u/Andrew_Tracey · 1 pointr/French

This book, French for Reading, sounds like exactly what you need, I'm reading it now myself.

I recommend buying used, I got my copy for $33.50 including shipping. It's not a workbook so a used copy shouldn't be marked up too much.

u/brohio_ · 1 pointr/bih

Colloquial Croatian (textbook by Routledge)

Colloquial Serbian by Routledge

Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Textbook

Le Croate sans peine par Assimil

Naški resources. In some ways Bosnian is between Croatian and Serbian. I’d go with Croatian resources since no real need to learn Serbian alphabet unless you want to... no need to get political but linguistically “BCSM” is one language. But Croatian also has its own words that Bosnian/Serbian usually share... Unfortunately there aren’t as many resources for learning straight up Bosnian. The text with all three is cool because it shows standard Zagreb/Sarajevo/Belgrade versions of the same text so you can see zrakoplov/avion/авион. So it’s like a British/American/Australian textbook.

u/erfraf · 1 pointr/Serbian

For me, the most helpful tool has been https://www.hr4eu.hr, although it teaches Croatian. The page has plenty of exercises for grammar and vocabulary, and there are even written assignments that they check for you. Just keep in mind the differences between Serbian and Croatian.

If you're into textbooks, this book is said to be very useful: https://www.amazon.com/Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Textbook-Exercises/dp/0299236544

u/WildberryPrince · 1 pointr/languagelearning

This textbook, combined with the accompanying grammar, provides a pretty comprehensive introduction to the language and with enough study should get you to a satisfactory level. Plus it includes examples of not only Serbian, but Bosnian and Croatian as well, which are pretty much the same with some slight differences in vocabulary and grammar that you'll start to pick up on as you study.

u/tactics · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Some Kanji facts.

There are 1945 Jouyou "Daily Use" kanji. Newspapers use these. Of these, about 1000 are designated Kyouiku "Educational kanji, divided into six grades to be learned by the end of elementary school. You might want to try and learn them in that order.

For reference, Kodansha's The Kanji Learner's Dictionary is unbeatable. It's compact, being almost small enough to fit into your pocket. It uses SKIP, which is the fastest, easiest way to look up characters.

When learning kanji, make sure you memorize the basic rules for stroke order. Enclosures first, left to right, top to bottom, horizontal before vertical, vertical piercings come last. Knowing the stroke order will make your handwriting look authentic.

Radicals each have their own meaning. A Guide to Remembering the Japanese Characters is very good for learning the meanings of each of the radicals and creating a "story" for each character to help you remember them.

One common pitfall with learning kanji is if you neglect to WRITE kanji out by hand, you will be able to READ them, but you will forget how to WRITE them. Just make sure that even if you're using a computer to write out your Japanese by hand.

Try to memorize WORDS instead of CHARACTERS. For example, don't just learn that 続 means "continue" because it's not a word on its own. Instead, learn that 接続 means "connection" and 続く means "to continue".

There's a lot of Kanji. You don't learn them in a few years. It takes Japanese natives over a decade of schooling before they are able to read their own language fluently. And they are immersed in it! Just keep working on them and don't get discouraged.

u/nuts_without_shells · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

First off, thank you for sharing your personal background.

If English is not your native language, yet you are striving to learn a third - honestly, I can't send enough kudos your way.

As far as kanji is concerned, I highly recommend A Guide to Remembering the Japanese Characters: https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Remembering-Japanese-Characters/dp/0804820384/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501029816&sr=8-1&keywords=a+guide+to+learning+the+japanese+characters

"Remembering the Kanji" seems to be far more preferred, but me, I've found that learning the historical basis of the kanji has helped far more than mnemonics that may be counter to their actual origin. Again, that's just me - everyone is different.

tl;dr version - Looks like you've decided to start learning Japanese and join the group that may have other people looking at you weird. Ignore 'em. We're glad to have you. :)

u/pcmmm · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

When you say you have studied Japanese for 2.5 years that's really not enough information. Have you been to Japan? Have you been there for an extended amount of time (e.g. several months?). I doubled my number of Kanji while I was staying in Japan, whenever I saw a sign / something written on my milk carton / my aircon remote, I would look it up and learn it that way. While in the subway I would take my time to look up random Kanji I saw in the advertisments.

I would use Kanji flashcards of the kind you can by in 500 box sets and go through a couple of them after a day of life in Japan: some characters I would have seen today but maybe would not remember, so going through the flash cards would help me remember them and clarify their reading. I would not learn with flash cards of Kanji I hadn't ever seen before - a useless exercise for me, I can only remember characters I've seen used in a real-life context. I don't "learn" Kanji programmatically taking them from some list and remembering the on- and kun-readings, I will only ever care about what I need to know in order to understand the text I'm working on. A children's book, song lyrics I got from the internet, texts for learners, Wikipedia articles, NHK news. The real lesson is: in order to get good at reading, you have to read a lot. Today I got a copy of a printed newspaper (読売新聞), you can buy those internationally, I got one from my local retailer at a train station in Germany. Reading an article takes an hour and a PC with a Kanji search by radical and a dictionary site, but I can do it.

For refreshment, I use resources like the amazing etymological dictionary "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters" which will tell you the historical evolution and proper decomposition of Kanji, some stories can be really interesting. With this help I can tell that when seeing a character such as 緒, it consists of thread (糸) and the pronunciation しょ/しゃ(者), hence "the word meaning together (=bound by a thread) pronounced kind of like 者)". Next to etymological help you can also use pure visual clues.

When you read real Japanese texts, you quickly realize that 2000 Kanji is not enough. Even children's literature would use characters outside of that official list. 3000 is more realistic. You should have material (dictionaries, flash cards etc.) that covers more than the official list. Don't despair though, actual Japanese native speakers take their time learning them, too! The more Japanese you come in contact with every day, the better.

u/thefuckamireading · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Depends how you're learning.

I've been liking this book, which I got recommended a while back:

http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Japanese-Characters-language-library/dp/0804820384

Unlike heisig which is a program in itself, this book can be used to supplement class study which suits me just perfectly.

u/Isopu · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

You Sir, have answered every question I have. A few hours on reddit has equaled a few months of asking people IRL. I think I would definitely go down the road of learning the Kanji in context. It makes a lot more sense to do it that way because it will add to my vocabulary. Henshal it is!
ありがとう!!!
p.s : http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804820384/ Is this the book?

u/KTGuy · 1 pointr/kelowna

Seeing no better advice yet, I would try italki (what I use, though in my case for Japanese). Particularly in the case of Mandarin you should be able to find native speakers via italki willing to help you 1-on-1 over Skype for less than the cost of any kind of instruction from people living here in North America. If italki is too expensive, I would look for other online options with as small of class sizes as possible to maximize your practice time. If learning Mandarin is anything like learning Japanese (my experience), you will also want to avoid hearing other non-native speakers (ie. students) speaking your target language so you don't pick up their bad pronunciation.

Assuming you go the italki route, check around for vbloggers on YouTube giving away italki promotions before you sign up (or wherever you can find a promo). Usually you can score an extra $10 for your lessons.

If you want to learn Chinese writing, I'd recommend a system like the one used in this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Book-Characters/dp/0824833236. I used the equivalent by the same guy for Japanese ("RTK"), the idea being that Chinese characters can be broken down into simple parts you can recognize easier. An fast example is that forest (森) uses 3 trees (木), so if you learn 木 first that's easier to remember than the 12 individual strokes... Another quick one, "difficult" (難) can be reduced to 2 components most people call "Sino-" and "turkey", etc... Heisig then uses mnemonics (little stories) to tie them together and help you memorize them.

Anyways best of luck. I've heard getting used to speaking a tonal language is tricky, but that Mandarin grammar is relatively straightforward (compared to Japanese).

u/shuishou · 1 pointr/languagelearning

I have always used the Chinese Link textbooks. I also see Integrated Chinese everywhere. Also, I highly highly highly recommend all of the Demystified books! I have both the Chinese and German and they are fantastic! Also Heisig's books are really popular and they also come in traditional. Hope this helps! I am pretty experienced in trying out tons of different resources for Mandarin! :)

u/amilliontomatoes · 1 pointr/ChineseLanguage

Thanks! I'm living in the UK at the moment, and about to move to a new city. I think i'll be able to find some chinese students there (it has two universities), so this should really be useful in practicing my mandarin!

Someone earlier recommended this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1CVOOAPOKFUGL&coliid=I3KK8RBNU3V7L0

I've been reading the sample version on amazon, and it seems to have a very well-thought out approach to learning chinese symbols; basically showing you the basics first (sun, mouth, companian, old, etc.) and then suggesting how they might alter the meaning of symbols when they form part of a symbol. Then it builds on chapter on chapter. It also comes with neat little stories! Is this the kind of thing you were suggesting?

And your general advice on writing chinese is very good! Once i've nailed a few basic phrases and greetings, i'll give the webchat one a go!

My plan of action is currently to take a listening course. Chinesepod seems to be the one that comes highly recommended, whilst at the same time working my way through the book of characters I posted earlier, and trying to find chinese friends to talk to!

In january I hope to start a proper chinese course at a local college.

Does this sound like a reasonable aim?


Thanks so much for your help. I have been quite overwhelmed by the level of enthusiasm and commitment on this subreddit!

u/warpzero · 1 pointr/ChineseLanguage

It's not the 214 Kanxi radicals per-se, but for my first 1500 characters I used method in the book Remembering Traditional Hanzi. There's also a Simplified version of the book. I find this method makes it really easy to memorize characters (well enough to write them), but actually one of the biggest benefits of the book I found was the order in which the characters are presented, making them even easier to remember.

Beyond that, if you really just want to memorize the 214 Kanxi radicals, I'd recommend using SRS flashcards like Mnemosyne or Anki. You can use these to memorize anything. Before I moved to Taiwan for instance, I compiled a list of all of the street names in all of Taipei and used Mnemosyne flashcards to memorize them all. It was unbelievably useful to make it easier to remember addresses and to speak to Taxi drivers while I was there.

There are lots of flashcard decks for the Kangxi radicals. Here's one I found with a very quick Google search. I'm sure there are others. Good luck!

u/Detective_Conan · 1 pointr/AskReddit

Any recommendations? I've heard this one is pretty neat:

http://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Korean-Beginning-Textbooks-Language/dp/0824834402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260972037&sr=8-1

Was also considering trying out koreanclass101.com and talktomeinkorean.com, any thoughts on those?

Thanks everyone for the replies / suggestions.

u/Diego_of_War · 1 pointr/UTAustin

I haven't taken test or seen what's in the test but Ive taken the first year Korean at UT. These are the two books we use for the first year:

Integrated Korean: Beginning 1, 2nd Edition (Klear Textbooks in Korean Language) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0824834402/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_G7bOzbJE8SESN

Integrated Korean: Beginning 2, 2nd Edition (KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0824835158/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_97bOzbVCJARQ1

If you need some pics of contents of the book to see if you are past the level of Korean year 1, pm me.

u/Translation_Geek · 1 pointr/TranslationStudies

I can recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji to you, if you don't know it yet. It was incredibly helpful to me for remembering kanji and to also understand the different parts that a kanji consists of. To find kanji you don't know, you can either search them by radicals or you can draw them into this online dictionary. There are also apps that let you do this so you can check on your phone while reading.

u/unknownbreaker · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Have you tried Remembering the Kanji?
Remembering the Kanji 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters https://www.amazon.com/dp/0824835921/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_y76rDb13E5KC0

it uses mnemonics for memorizing the characters by making you imagine a picture of something. makes the kanji much more memorable that way.

the book eventually expects you to come up with your own stories/mnemonics after giving you several hundred.

u/deneru · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Check out Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". Learn the kana, know stroke order, pronunciation, etc, but realize they are not a substitute for kanji. You need both to be able to do anything besides read children's books and play really old video games.

Get yourself an SRS (Spaced Repetition Software). Basically really intelligent flash cards. The software tells you when to review them so you don't waste time reviewing what you already know. I recommend Anki, but Surusu also has a large number of users. Both are free.

Check All Japanese All the Time. The author, Khatzumoto, tends to take things to extremes, and he verges off into personal developement a lot. If you stick to the Table of Contents I just linked to and take everything he says with a few grains of salt you'll be fine. A more moderate, more Spanish-focused view can be found on Spanish Only.

u/BaconUnicornTamer · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Considering that hiragana is far easier than Kanji, I was thinking of starting with it, in a way I would learn Kanji, so I can feel in a familiar zone. That or I get the over-suggested book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=pd_sim_sbs_14_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=51QhUaQJRmL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR107%2C160_&psc=1&refRID=3M7KCY676DQKC5N3P85S)

u/joshbeoulve · 1 pointr/Philippines

N3? That's pretty tough for a first-timer, but manageable if you put in the time to study.

On a related tangent, I highly recommend James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji series paired with spaced repetition app for reviews. It helped me break the well between the old Level 2 and old Level 1 and I wouldn't be where I am now without it.

u/refrained · 1 pointr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon

I've been working on learning Japanese for a few years now! My focus comes and goes, and I understand far more than I can write/speak, but I'm getting there! Yes, I am an anime fan, and that's how my interest was sparked, but I love the sound of the language and the challenge of something without a Roman alphabet!

This book seems promising! And bonus! Awesome reviews. Kanji are so difficult to remember, and I've only ever been able to memorize about 20 of them before things start slipping away.

And this is one of my favourite songs. I was introduced to Hyde a long time ago by a good friend, and his voice has always been something I adore!

As for something funny... this has always frightened me with it's super happy intensity! It's one of those things that never fails to make me grin in response!

u/AsunonIndigo · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

If you really, really start feeling uncomfortable with kanji, like I did, RTK can help.

It's controversial on this subreddit for a number of reasons:

  1. It does not teach you the readings of any of them.

  2. It teaches you one, concrete meaning for every kanji it introduces. Nearly every single jouyou kanji ("essential" kanji) has multiple meanings. It's nice to have an anchor point for each kanji you come across, but for some people, it can be hard to attach extra meanings to a character they've already memorized as meaning something else.

  3. Some of the meanings are just plain incorrect and wrong altogether. In fact, I made a post about it. So, every single kanji you learn using this book, ALWAYS cross check with jisho.org before committing the meaning to memory.

    The pros:

  4. It breaks kanji down into easy easy EASY to remember parts, all of which logically come together to form any particular kanji. Or at least, after you've formulated your own story to help you remember it, they do.

  5. It teaches you to dissect more complex kanji instead of just looking at some big, scary character and thinking "Oh God". For example, 夢 (dream) looks scary, doesn't it? Well it's not. It's composed of these "primitives" (every other resource you encounter will call these primitives "radicals".): Flower, Eye, Crown, and Evening. They're all separate pieces. It's not like "Dream" is just some insane, unique kanji. It's composed of parts, like a puzzle. 95% of all kanji I've encountered are this way. Even kanji I've never seen before can be dissected into these parts. Very few are completely, 100% unique and require their own memorization.

  6. You will remember them like it is your job. You won't know how to READ them; but assigning readings to kanji you already know is so easy it's disgusting. That's why I took a break from Genki upon starting lesson 3 and started RTK. It's been 25 days and I've learned 330 kanji thus far, 15 new ones today. It's hard, hard work, but it has paid off so far. Anki helps a great deal (free flashcard program, look it up if you haven't heard of it before).

    The biggest, most important part of this book, to me, is the fact that it shows you that kanji aren't impossible to learn. Challenging, definitely. Difficult, definitely. But not in the SLIGHTEST impossible.

    At my current rate, it'll take me about 5 and a half months to finish it up. The average time is 3-6 months, and it can be faster or slower depending on how comfortable you are with it. I try to do at least 15 a day. But sometimes, I have no time and skip it, and other times, I have excess time and will do up to 30. No matter what and no matter how many, it's always easy to remember. Just remember you aren't actually learning Japanese; you're merely making ACTUAL learning of Japanese potentially easier.
u/Evil_Roy · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Hi, I'm fairly new to learning Japanese too, here is what I know so far: At first it seems like there is a brick wall that you have to break through. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. If vocab are the bricks.. grammar (particles, canjigation etc.) Are the morter that hold everything together. Its more like having to build a house by yourself then it is breaking through a brick wall. It requires hard work, sacrifice and dedication. First thing is to learn kana, then focus on grammar and reading. Don't study kanji starting out and when you do start learning kanji, make sure to learn it in context. At first you will be focused on each character, then you will start to recognize words, and then you will begin to see sentences and then have to get used to keeping track of what the topic is (は).

SRS is good but won't help you learn well unless you are reading native materials also (such as graded readers or manga). At first I studied as much as possible for the first 4 months to get past most of the absolute beginer grammar. Also, after the first 3 weeks of learning vocab and honing kana skills I started wanikani. Now there are a lot of people who push RTK but having memorized 350 kanji from the book before getting serious about learning.. if I knew then what I know now, I would have gon straight to wanikani. (Anki is ok too if you're on a budget). RTK is good for overcoming fear of kanji and for learning correct stroke order (which comes in handy when looking up kanji that doesn't have furigana). This to me doesn't justify using RTK though in my mind.

I will say that it is better to go at your own pace instead of burning out like I did at first. To me, studying is what you must do in order to achieve your goal. Learning is enjoyable and even leisurely. Finding a good balance is important.

Also, I was in a class that was being taught on discord for a while. Now I'm learning on my own. The internet is full of resources that can help you.

Here are some good resources:

Takoboto (android or windows)
http://takoboto.jp/

WaniKani (I know there are wanikani decks for anki for free too if your watching $$$)
https://www.wanikani.com/

Anki (Free)
https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Japanese Graded Readers (level 1-2 I hear will get you high enough to start reading manga, but I cant confirm this as fact.)

Level 1
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079Y2GR81/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_pr9nDb0JQRYY3

Level 2
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079XY9XTM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_vt9nDb32S5E9H

RTK (1st book is the only one worth using)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0824835921/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_Eu9nDb5SK9WP7

Genki 1 & 2 (more for in class but can be used to study on your own too)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M3STG9N/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_jw9nDb50CDXS6

u/quiquejp · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Is it? Amazon.com

u/PurpleHawthorn · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Non-native here. I'm still in the process of learning kanji and I'm using the Kanji de Manga series along with Heisig's Remembering the Kanji.

My pace is pretty slow -- perhaps 10 - 15 kanji per week.

u/fellcat · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Awesome, thank you. Should I just buy the book or do you know of any online resources?

u/mrzombieland · 1 pointr/OreGairuSNAFU

I unfortunately don't have many sources to use as practice reading since right now I'm at the stage of learning advanced Kanji so I can read and understand with greater facility. The one thing I use a lot to improve my reading though is to read manga in Japanese on a daily basis so that's what I would recommend since is has a lot of furigana. Otherwise, I'll link you my kanji book if you are interested on that.

Remembering the Kanji: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CCBYW3VAFYWQQB4PSJ0Q

u/Vladz0r · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

I feel like you might have done kanji->keyword, in which case that might explain why you didn't get anything out of learning the kanji individually. You're supposed to learn how to write the Kanji, so that you can recognize each individually, because kanji meaning reinforces.

Remember the Kanji: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1492022765&sr=8-2-fkmr0&keywords=remember+the+kanji+6th

There are also Anki decks and free pdfs for the book floating around.

There's also http://kanji.koohii.com where you can learn and look up mnemonic stories for writing kanji.


>Wether I read a sentence with furigana or without furigana doesn't really matter, what matters is that I can consume and produce the language so that the structures and vocabulary I've learnt are put into practice and stabilize in my memory.

Uh, go to Japan and you'll notice that people don't speech with kanji and furigana appearing underneath them as speech bubbles.

I feel like what you're trying to say in that big vague paragraph is that you understand that 学校 is school rather than "learning school building." An example of when knowing kanji helped me out recently - I knew the word 赤道 (equator) 富士山[ふいじさん] aka Mt. Fuji. Learning the word 山道[さんどう] was aided by learning those kanji, since I wasn't too familiar with the readings for 山. The word also literally means "mountain path" but it's not やまみち. It's its own word that you just know.

I don't get how you struggle to learn kanji and learn words when they literally reinforce the meanings of each other.

Knowing the meaning of each kanji helps dramatically with reading words - I don't get how anyone could think otherwise. The "occasional word that sounds like nonsense and is unrelated to the word's kanji" and giving examples like "大丈夫 meaning large length husband" or something doesn't discount the 10,000s of common words that are logically constructed by kanji and follow a lot of common rules and pronunciation patterns.

But hey

u/lonniganseaweed · 1 pointr/IWantToLearn

Scroll through to Japanese for a resource list. And also this video. You didn't really mention what you will be using Japanese for (speaking, reading, etc.) so this is only a general overview. Also, keep in mind this is coming from a highschool student self-studying Japanese, so some of my recommendations may not be the best. Here are the basics of the writing system:

  • Hiragana: a 46 symbol "alphabet" used for particles and sentence structure. Each symbol represents a specific syllable. Chart and Wikipedia Article

  • Katakana: Also a 46 symbol "alphabet", this is used for constructing foreign words and sometimes for emphasis on a word or phrase. chart and Wikipedia Article

  • Kanji: a logographic system, that is, it uses unique symbols for each object or word. There are about 2200 Kanji used in everyday situations.
    Each Kanji can be read different ways depending on how it functions in a sentence. Wikipedia Article

    Here are the resources I use for learning Japanese:

  • Learn Hiragana. Hiragana will get you started on reading and pronouncing Japanese. Go at our own pace, but try to memorize some everyday. After memorizing Hiragana, do the same with Katakana. Use the same picture-word association with Katakana, it really solidifies the symbols in your mind. Use RealKana to practice or refresh.

  • For Kanji, Dr. Heisig's Remembering the Kanji I think is hands-down one of the best resources for learning Kanji. It uses mnemonics to memorize Kanji. One strange thing about the book is that it doesn't provide pronunciation guides for the Kanji. For instance, it would have a Kanji 雨. It would tell you, this is "rain" and how to write and remember it, but no pronunciation for how it is said in Japanese ("ame"). For this reason, it is necessary to use Jisho to find the pronunciation.

  • For vocabulary, I use japaneseclass.jp . It has both vocabulary and Kanji memorization.

  • Tae Kim's guide is a great beginner-intermediate guide for grammar.

  • For a all-in-one beginner's course, I recommend using Memrise and specifically, jlptbootcamp's course.

  • To practice all you have learned, use Lang-8. You post in Japanese and native Japanese speakers will correct you. On the flip side, you will correct their English. You can also live chat or video call on howdoyoudo.do. Use Anki to make flashcards for practice.

    Everybody has a different way of learning, but the absolute first thing to memorize is Hiragana and Katakana. After that, you can juggle learning Kanji and grammar or learn common phrases, or whatever. Use what works for you.
u/Gekusu · 1 pointr/Team_Japanese
    1. The First 100 Japanese Kanji: A great first step into the world of kanji. Basic, but at first you just need something to help you dip your feet in the water.
    1. Berlitz Essential Japanese: Better than I expected, by why bother with non-academic textbook if you're a serious learner?
    1. Genki I: This was my real first foray into Japanese. Great series, especially for self-study. Holds your hand but covers a lot of territory. It helps to read it, then go back and read it again. I used the workbook on a few occasions, but not much. NOTE: The link is to the old version.
    1. Genki II: The follow-up to Genki I. Goes into more complicated grammar. Again, a great book. I used JGram and Tae Kim's a lot to reinforce my learning with the Genki series. NOTE: The link is to the old version.
    1. N3 Speed Master Series: I really liked these, however I didn't use them for long before moving on to N2 materials. It wasn't well edited, though, and some placeholder text was repeated a lot in the grammar book.
    1. 合格できるN3: This is just practice problems. Really useful for the N3, though.
  • 7. 絵で見てわかる 日本語表現文型 初中級: This was recommended by a friend. I love it because it was my transition into using primarily Japanese to study. It's a list of grammar points from high N4 to low N2 level, with related phrases lumped together. There are example dialogues and pictures along with a few sparse English notes. It's not perfect, though (some sentences don't give you a very good understanding of the grammar points).
    1. Remembering the Kanji: I dropped WaniKani to study faster, and used RtK as my new curriculum. I used Reviewing the Kanji more than this book, though.
    1. Shadowing: Let's Speak Japanese: Okay, so I only ever used the CD (not the book). Still it's great. I realized my listening was weak and conversation skills were even weaker so I found this. Starts slow, builds up. Funny and interesting. Transcribing the sentences helped my ear a lot.
    1. 新完全マスターN2 Series: These are amazing for intermediate Japanese and preparing for the N2. The Kanji and vocab books are probably the weakest and least necessary. The others are essential for N2 study.

      I know there's been a few others but I can't think of them right now.
u/Forgetwhatitoldyou · 1 pointr/AskWomen

Try the book Remembering the Kanji to, well, learn the kanji. If you already know vocabulary and grammar, it'll be a cinch to learn the kanji too. There's a ton of decks on Anki (app) that have SRS flashcards based on this book.

u/emilsgnik · 1 pointr/dragonquest

Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig is a really good place to start. Best of luck!

u/Justanotherbiomajor · 1 pointr/lifehacks

For the Kanji, read Remembering the Kanji by James W. Heisig.

If you're are serious about it, you will learn all the kanji you need to know in less than 6 months.

u/thestarheart · 1 pointr/gaming

That wiki is wonderful because it offers the ability to group by radicals. This is an approach that Heisig would approve of, who has written the incredibly popular Remembering the Kanji.

If you're really committed to learning Japanese, find every way you can to engage yourself. You are in control of how much you learn! Make sure you know whatever lessons you're assigned strongly. go over them enough times to never forget them. Talk to native Japanese speakers, read books, make flashcards, watch TV and movies, do everything you can to use the language.

Recommended movie

u/SuperShadowP1ay · 1 pointr/Svenska

This is a great book

u/Cithara · 1 pointr/Svenska

I have a background in linguistics as well, and found this grammar book very helpful: Essentials of Swedish Grammar
It's efficient and streamlined. You can read through the whole thing in a sitting or two, and come away with a really good overview of Swedish that helps prime you for further study. So while it's not comprehensive, it's great for diving in to Swedish at the start.

Regarding the Alman Kültür you mentioned, the closest thing I am aware of in Sweden are libraries and other organizations which frequently host what is known as Språkcafe (Language Café) where people gather to learn and practice Swedish.

u/SilentTyst · 1 pointr/Svenska

I started learning a few months ago and i'm doing it slowly because that's what works best for me.
So here it is my routine:

pimsleur - 1 or 2 lessons a day (done)

anki - main resource 20 words a day + 2 times review (every day)

memrise - 25 words a day + review (every day)

swedish grammar book - for some grammar with exercises (not everyday because it becomes boring to me)

watch swedish tv/films/videos- to emulate immersion + motivation tool (every day)

listen to swedish radio - whenever i can (every day)

reading books- starting with childrens books and work my way up (haven't started yet but i have to find the motivation)

I still have to find a conversation partner so i can advance faster. (Doesn't need to be a native speaker but if you want to help i'll be appreciated.)


u/WizardOfWisdom · 1 pointr/ChineseLanguage

I used this series in school: http://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Chinese-Simplified-Characters-Textbook/dp/0887276385 They're pretty good books with very reasonably lengthed and fluid sections. The only thing I suggest is supplementing the grammar with some crosschecks online. I didn't find their explanations for 了 usage to be adequate, for example. But, they're pretty cheap and you can add on the workbooks if you want to do guided writing exercises. There is also a Traditional version if you want that instead.

u/pending-- · 1 pointr/languagelearning

Would love to recommend this book to you:

https://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Chinese-Simplified-Characters-Textbook/dp/0887276385/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=integrated+chinese+level+1&qid=1573484927&sr=8-1

Integrated Chinese. You can use this in conjunction with the book you are looking to buy (glossika). When I first started learning Chinese in middle school they used much more juvenile books, but for my friends who continued Chinese in university, this is what they used. I've seen the book in real life and I really like it and would recommend it. Let me know if you have any questions :)

u/jamessfoster · 1 pointr/ChineseLanguage

I haven't used it extensively, but every time I've looked through it I've been very impressed by the quality of the Integrated Chinese textbook. It has LookInside on Amazon, so you can check whether it's suitable for you.

Also, have you considered joining a class in your area?

u/toolboks · 1 pointr/ChineseLanguage

Sorry. It’s an English to Chinese textbook. Has levels introduction and up. It’s called integrated Chinese in English. https://www.amazon.de/Integrated-Chinese-Zhong-Cheng-Language/dp/0887276385

There’s a link.

u/LikeYumi · 1 pointr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon

I love languages! Although, I only know two right now (my native English and Esperanto).

  1. I am trying to learn German while also improving my Esperanto. In the future, I would like to try to learn French and Japanese. I also want to construct my own language.

  2. I have German Demystified. I am using it along with with Duolingo, Memrise, and Deutsch to help me learn German. If I do win this contest, this book would mean more to me than a book on German. I already have everything I need (textbook-wise) on German right now.
  3. I live in Germany and I used to hear this song on the radio every morning before work. I really like it, and am a bit disappointed it doesn't come on anymore.
  4. This one is tough. I'm still not very good at German, so I haven't really read any comics in it before today. I found a website with German comics that looks like it would be a nice daily to read. I could understand some of it, but not enough to understand the joke. :/ Someday, I'll understand...

    So what led you to want to learn Russian? It seems like an interesting language, but I've never tried to learn it.
u/BuddyDharma · 1 pointr/fantasywriters

What u/everthing-narrative said. I'm a REALLY inexperienced conlang maker, but I think even a super crude language like Watership Down's lapine immensely improves a story.

​

Some resources:

Artifexian youtube channel

Langauge Construction Kit

r/conlangs

​

There are a bunch of conlang subs, actually. I'm too shy about my efforts to visit any of them yet, but... they're there! used the other two links extensively.

​

u/Jonlang_ · 1 pointr/conlangs

Go and buy these three books: The Language Construction Kit, Advanced Language Construction (don't worry, it's not that advanced), and The Conlanger's Lexipedia. And if your conlangs are designed for made-up worlds, then get [The Planet Construction Kit] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Planet-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/0984470034/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=W79ND56BKPK8EKXT2VQZ) too. If you want to make cultures that are not European then I'd also suggest The China Construction Kit!

Of all of these I'd suggest that you definitely buy The Language Construction Kit and see how you get on. I'd also suggest buying some grammar books of languages you're interested in, and even go so far as to learn a second language if you don't speak one. Having knowledge of at least one other language will help you a great deal.

u/p0lar_ · 1 pointr/languagelearning

If you need a grammar book, I highly recommend Hammer's German Grammar and Usage, along with Practising German Grammar if you want a workbook.

I was totally blown away by the quality of these books, it's super complete and easy to use.

u/kctong529 · 1 pointr/languagelearning

If what you want to achieve is A1 and nothing beyond, you best bet would be getting one of the many course books:

u/edafade · 1 pointr/German

Any book written to prepare you for the DSH will have these exercises and more.

I took the DSH (and passed with a level 2) at my current Uni and it's considered one of the hardest to pass in Germany. So my opinion may differ slightly than other people's so take the following with a grain of salt:

I strongly suggest you work on your writing style and your grammar basics (especially endings and vocabulary). The best way to improve the former is to read copious amount of German texts, especially news from like Tagesshau. I mean, read this level of material until your eyes bleed. The DSH prep books will have tons of texts for your to read and reading comprehension exercises to solve, and additionally reading news articles or random internet articles for C1 will bolster your effort.

For the latter, use these series of books:

  1. A2-B2

  2. C1

    If you do intend on buying these, make sure to buy the Answer Book to correct yourself. Every single professor I ever encountered, used these books to some capacity to practice German grammar. Every. Single. One. I abused the hell out of mine, I'll tell you that. Not to mention, they are cheap for how effective they are.

    For a more in depth explanation(s) in English check out Hammer's German Grammar Bible. If it wasn't for this book, I would have been lost for much longer when it came to things like Passive.

    Good luck on your exam.
u/ich_auch · 1 pointr/LANL_German

the books that I have are:

Hammer's German Grammar and Usage - it's a huge comprehensive in-depth look at everything grammatical, breaks everything down completely. good as a reference book but not really to go through and study

English Grammar for Students of German - it's a really brief overview comparing English grammar to German grammar with examples, but doesn't get really specific

Berlitz Self Teacher: German - some of the vocab is a little outdated but it's a cute concise book that's really good to carry on the subway or whatever and read in short spurts. there's special parts dedicated to helping you "think in german" which is important for fluency. it's a pretty good book for beginners I think.

I also have Barron's 501 German verbs but I actually haven't started looking through it yet.

and then if we add an audio section to this list is highly recommend Pimsleur's audio courses, though they're pricey so you may want to try and obtain them ahem another way.

u/pseupseudio · 1 pointr/German

that's a fine point - textbooks do tend to assume the frequent availability of at least one other person.

so what OP looking for would probably be less of a textbook and more of a book aimed at the individual learner.

at my level it's difficult to find good no-cost stuff for self study (where "good" generally means "not so beginner it bores me and not so advanced i'm lost), for a beginner looking for two months' worth of learning material, i think that's available in the subreddit sidebar alone.

I haven't heard anything about Schaum's, but Hammer's is an excellent resource. There's also a companion workbook which is intended for self-study, and I think I'll be using that first in light of your insight.

edit - add link to hammer, clarity

u/Roskitt · 1 pointr/languagelearning

If you are planning of getting Hammer's Grammar, be sure you also get Practicing German Grammar. You can get it as a bundle just like i did, and i believe the price was around 50-60 euro range.

Hammer's German

Practicing German Grammar

u/FranzUndAnti-Franz · 1 pointr/languagelearning

You'll need a solid grammar, and I wholeheartedly recommend Hammer's. Very comprehensive, easy to use, clearly written, tons of examples, great at pointing out differences between formal, colloquial, and regional uses.

The list of verb principal parts could be a little longer, that's what Wiktionary or "500 German Verbs" are for. Otherwise, it's a very solid resource for you. Find grammar points that are tricky for you and work on those.

u/Schottler · 1 pointr/German


Hammer's German and Usage

Hammer's German and Usage Workbook

German Grammar drills

Secondary grammar book

Personally, Hammer's Grammar book is quite enough. It is around 500 pages of dry grammar. It is very well constructed and very easy to understand, get it with workbook. It is logical, as it teaches you from the most essential and easiest structures. Nouns -> genders, -> cases, that way it is easier to learn.

Secondary Grammar book is not necessary.

Advice her to use Anki, its a very helpful tool i think for the most easiest words to learn. Especially it helps a lot with German genders.

u/bikemowman · 1 pointr/languagelearning

/r/German might be a better place to ask. The community there is excellent, I've found. But I'm going to second the recommendation of the guy who said Hammer's. It's a tome with all the Grammar you'll ever need. It's great for looking up individual rules and situations, but is probably too in-depth for a beginner student.

u/IveGotAName · 1 pointr/German

Hammer's German Grammar and Usage is comprehensive. Sometimes I find it perhaps even too comprehensive - I'll dive in to find an answer to some question that pops into my mind and not emerge till an hour later when I've finished reading just about every exception and caveat. But If you already understand the basics or you have a simpler grammar book as well, I've found that this is the one that answers every question I have, no matter have obscure or minor a point.

u/alb404 · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Kanji in KLC are arranged in order of frequency. Amazon has a "look inside" for the book, so you can actually read about the author's motivations. Some of the pages are missing on the amazon preview, but look at actual book's page number 18, middle of the page for info on order. While you are on this page, take a look at the explanations of the sample entry.

You can read about how radicals (he uses the term graphemes) are introduced on page 12 of the preview.
http://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step-/dp/1568365268/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463557402&sr=8-1&keywords=kodansha+kanji

u/JohnnyNonymous · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Thanks for the detailed post. I think the textbook-search site'll be especially handy, since I've never heard of it before.

And since you seem to know of a lot of good resources, I have a few questions (if you don't mind).

  1. Would you happen to know the difference between these two Kodansha kanji dictionaries?

  1. I'm interested in the All About Particles book, and other such supplementary texts, but is there a chance that the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series might make them redundant?

  2. How is Kodansha's Communicative English-Japanese Dictionary? Wouldn't it be redundant to the Furigana dictionary, which lets you do look-up in both JP-EN and EN-JP? Or is it nuanced enough to be worth it on its own?

    Thanks!
u/SaeculaSaeculorum · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

xizar answered already, but KLC, Kanji Learner's Course, is a book by Andrew Conning that presents the kanji in an order that prioritizes both useful to building up future kanji vocabulary as well as usefulness to the student of Japanese. All kanji from the Joyo list are included, as well as kanji popular in names or that are expected to be added to the Joyo list. Each new kanji also has a mnemonic story that helps a student remember the kanji. I really do suggest checking it out if you are looking around for a kanji resource, it's worth far more that what you pay for it.

u/Theodorin · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

I really like KLC, the Kodansha Kanji Leaner's Course: https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268

Combined with the Anki deck for it: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/779483253

It condenses the meaning of the kanji into a mnemonic "keyword". It gives you sample vocabulary so you can see how the kanji is actually used/read in Japanese words. It teaches you the stroke order (some people don't like learning stoke order, by I find that writing a kanji I'm trying to learn really solidifies the specifics of it in my mind). It groups kanji that look similar together, and makes you intuitively learn how to distinguish them from the beginning instead of it being a huge pain later. It teaches you via "graphemes", which are basically radicals that kanji are constructed from. It does all of this while also teaching kanji by frequency of use, so that you learn the most useful kanji early.

Not to mention that it was a course created more recently, so it contains all of the jōyō kanji (kanji that the Japanese government determined you need to know to be literate in Japanese), including the 196 that were added in 2010, and the most useful non-jōyō kanji. 2300 characters in total.

As you're learning the kanji, I would also study grammar and vocab alongside it, so that the kanji aren't just these abstract concepts in your head that you never use, and you understand how they're applied in practice. I recommend Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

Also start trying to read real Japanese: manga, TV subtitles, newspapers, whatever you like, as soon as you can. You can probably start trying that at around 1500 kanji or so with a Japanese dictionary. In my experience, nothing has taught me better than actually trying to read Japanese works and understand them.

WaniKani was too slow and didn't click for me, but that might be something you like.

u/ishigami_san · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

As expected, my N5 didn't go well for me, as I only seriously started practicing like a few days ago. Although, listening part went well (or so I think) for me, as I'm watching Japanese stuff on a regular basis for ~7 years now.

In any case, I'm more determined now. I'm following KLC book, KLC Anki deck, JLPT N5 Vocabulary Anki deck, and An Introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar, & Language. Also, I have Making Sense of Japanese but haven't started reading it yet.

I tried Memrise too but didn't go well for me. I found Anki better. Now just have to devote some time off Anki to study grammar too.

Hope this helps, and all the best!

u/yokokiku · 1 pointr/japanlife

I think the Kodansha system is far superior, having tried both myself. I finished the entire Kodansha book, which covers about 2300 kanji.

It incorporates some of the good from RTK, without neglecting the actual readings and important compounds along the way.

u/ywja · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Kanji learning is by far the most popular topic on this subreddit. I wish they would just ban it, at least as top-level submissions, so that people can spend more time discussing the language as opposed to learning methods.

The interesting aspect of your question was that it was something that couldn't be satisfied by the usual answers because it involved characters that couldn't be easily imported into a computer. If a certain kanji is in computer memory, you can always copy it, throw it to Google and get results. In you case, however, even OCR doesn't work, so you must resort to the old technology, the indexing and searching method that has been used since before computer. It was refreshing.

Practically speaking, I guess most Japanese learners don't need to learn it because they will never wander out of the computer space as far as the Japanese language is concerned, or they will have some workarounds when the need arises, such as guessing the reading based on kanji components or guessing the number of strokes. But your question was specifically about "decomposing" them for the purpose of searching, which was also refreshing.

As for the concept of radicals in WaniKani, I think this recent thread will give you the basic idea.

On kanji learning that isn't Remembering the Kanji or WaniKani, I don't have a good link right now. There simply aren't many people here who endorse other options. The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course sounds promising but I can't vouch for it because I've never read it.

In any case, recognizing radicals is an acquired skill and you have to put an effort in it. There are 214 radicals, and each kanji has only one radical, or rather, each kanji is classified according to the one radical it is assigned. 214 might sound overwhelming but practically speaking many of them are obvious and easy to remember, and many of the obscure ones aren't actually so useful for searching purposes or any purposes for that matter, so it' OK to skip them in my opinion.

u/KenmaXhan · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese
u/hans_grosse · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

No problem... thanks for the reply!

So a little over a month ago (after I made that last post), I bought a copy of The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, and it's absolutely awesome. If you can get your hands on a copy, I'd definitely recommend it.

Basically, the book lists 2300 basic kanji... and for each one, it gives the meanings, the readings, a few example compounds, and - most importantly - a useful note on how to remember the character. For example, with the kanji 作 (as in つくる, "to make"), the book recommends viewing the right radical (乍) as a hacksaw, and the radical on the left as a person - thus, a person using a hacksaw to make something. That might not be the true etymology, but it's still a good way to remember the kanji. Some of the suggestions are a bit of a stretch (and kind of hilarious)... but I figure, as long as it helps me with memorization, then why not?

I was starting to go crazy trying to come up with mnemonics to help me remember kanji, so this book has been a huge help (and time-saver) for me.

u/Roy_ALifeWellLived · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Just started on Genki 1 not too long ago and a friend recommended I pick up Kodansha KLC to work through alongside Genki. While Genki is my main priority, I find it very nice to have something else to turn to when I start feeling kinda burnt out. Kodansha KLC is a very awesome book for learning kanji and I'd highly recommend it to anyone learning the language! I feel like this is starting to sound like a sales pitch haha, but really I'm so glad I bought it.

u/alegrilli · 1 pointr/languagelearning

Yes this, or the newer Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course. You can find sample content online:

  • Remembering the Kanji
  • The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course (Amazon link—click on "Look inside")

    Whichever you choose, do read Heisig's RTK introduction. I haven't used KLC but from what I've seen of it, it improves on RTK while also adding some extra problems; in particular, too much information per character, which you'll need to learn to filter out to focus on what you need.

    The gist of the method is that you memorize the core meaning and the writing of the characters through their component parts, devising mnemonics from these components, and going from character to character in a sequence that takes advantage of this method. The point of this is that it'll make learning vocabulary much easier, and give you hints to understand words you read and don't know. You don't learn how to pronounce them—I suggest you learn that through vocabulary rather than per isolated character.

    Take into account that neither book is perfect, in particular the mnemonics can be quite bad, so I suggest taking Heisig's words to heart in his introduction, and while going through your chosen book you invent mnemonics that work for you, and assign a meaning to the components that is concrete and memorable.
u/ragnar_deerslayer · 1 pointr/latin

You absolutely need Pars I: Familia Romana.

If you are an autodidact, you also need the Teachers' Materials & Answer Keys.

I would strongly suggest you get the Companion to Familia Romana, since it makes explicit all the inductive teaching from Familia Romana. If you let it become a crutch, then the course becomes "Just like Wheelock's, but with extra reading material." However, it's invaluable if you're banging your head against the wall, unable to figure out what something means or why something is done a certain way.

You should also get Fabellae Latinae for extra reading material, since it's a free download.

Since the whole point of the course is "lots of reading that teaches you inductively," I'd also get the Colloquia Personarum, which is extra reading material (like Fabellae Latinae) tied to each of the chapters in Familia Romana.

I did not get the extra book of exercises. Following the advice of Justin Slocum Bailey, I'm spending that time reading more.

u/prhodiann · 1 pointr/latin

Lol, I promise I never spent any nights weeping into my coursebook! The main online resource I use is the very excellent Vicarius interface for Whitaker's Words dictionary, which you can find here: http://vicarius.thomasleen.com

​

I like reading so I used a lot of supplementary readers, and I would recommend doing that in addition to whatever your main textbook is. I have particularly enjoyed the LLPSI series, the first book of which is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Familia-Romana-Lingua-Latina-HansH/dp/1585104205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549409155&sr=8-1&keywords=familia+romana

​

There are also some free online readers: search for Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles and Puer Romanus. Geoffrey Steadman has an annotated version of Fabulae Faciles here: https://geoffreysteadman.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/ritchie-10mar17.pdf (his other annotated texts are good too!)

​

And when you want something more advanced, there's an absolute shitload of classical texts with facing-page translations available here: https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus/

​

Have fun!

​

u/softball753 · 1 pointr/iamverysmart

Ooooh, if you're still interested, over at /r/Latin we're doing a weekly study of Lingua Latina.

Here is this week's thread. We're only up to week 3 but the first chapters are really easy to handle, so you could catch up.

u/RenlyIsTheFury · 1 pointr/IWantToLearn

That's true I guess, I could just buy one from the same publishers/stores that colleges get them from, if I can actually find them.

Also, I think that /u/kavaler_d took care of that for me, mostly. According to the seller of Lungua Latina, they're the most popular Latin textbook for universities (although, I bet some others also claim that...).

u/Rynasaurus · 1 pointr/AskReddit

Absolutely! In fact, I started reading one called Lingua Latina: Familia Romana. It did the same thing but for Latin. It starts out with a map and says where each country is and after that it starts introducing a Roman family who speaks Latin. Very cool, I'd love to see one for another language.

u/TheNevermind · 1 pointr/AskReddit

I started learning Latin once. I didn't make it too far, but I really would love to get back into it. I was using this book: Lingua Latina. It's actually really neat, it uses no translations for anything, and you still learn a lot (although I might be biased, since I've studied other languages and knew what to expect.) But yeah, verb conjugations and noun declensions = <3

u/pkonink · 1 pointr/latin

Are you familiar with Lingua Latina: Familia Romana? it works really well for solo study, and it gets you in the habit of reading Latin directly (not translating it).

https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205

u/OccamsAxeWound · 1 pointr/latin

Would this be everything? Or should I some other things?

u/ClearandSweet · 1 pointr/TrueAnime

I'm all up on Wanikani. It costs like $5 a month with a coupon code you can google for, but it's worth it in the end.

For gramar, Japanese The Manga Way is amazing, and I supplemented that with (Japanese Demystified)[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071477268/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1).

It was enough to navigate Tokyo and order food after a year of study.

u/WhaleMeatFantasy · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

You're not just going to be able to guess/work it out/get an answer in even a long reddit post.

Are you actually studying Japanese? You need a self-study book at the very least (many people recommend the Genki series) or, if you just want to dabble, look at the Pimsleur or Michel Thomas audio series. Another fun approach you may enjoy is Japanese the Manga Way.

It's well worth making the effort. Good luck!

u/joeflux · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Ah, I was just writing a comment that this looks really similar to Japanese the Manga Way. I've been reading that, and really like it:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/Japanese-Manga-Way-Illustrated-Grammar-Structure/dp/1880656906/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459375417&sr=8-1&keywords=japanese+manga

But I do wish that it used hiragana instead of romaji.

u/Telmann · 1 pointr/JapaneseFromZero

Japansepod101 is great! But they are super spammers its true. Great product made to look terrible. Why???? Not as good as JFZ though.

George, I guess the reason people want you to recommend books is they trust you. You should be proud of that.

Books I'd recommend (even in you won't!) are:

Making Sense of Japanese by Jay Rubin (very funny and lots on interesting bits even if some of it was beyond me)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Japanese-What-Textbooks/dp/156836492X/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486317692&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=don%27t+tell+you+about+japanese

Japanese the Manga Way by Wayne Lammers (Really terrific and great practice on your kanji too.)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Japanese-Manga-Way-Illustrated-Guide-Grammar-Structure/1880656906/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486317895&sr=1-1&keywords=japanese+the+manga+way

Actually I don't think these books compete with your ones in any case.

And finally I recommend this explanation of when to use wa and ga. Its a video thing and you can throw away all textbooks after watching this. (I suppose it is just barely possible there is more to it than this guy says but surely not).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU9rjYZe2P4

Oh, just realised George did a video on this subject I haven't seen. Well, I am sure they are both equally good . . .

u/omgitsmalson · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

This is the one I have. I don't know if it's related but I really liked it; it was a lot easier for me to grasp grammatical concepts this way.

u/rilwal · 1 pointr/ajatt

Several things I'm thinking after reading your post:

First: MIA bases a lot of its work on the assumption that you don't want to learn grammar consciously separately from acquiring it. I think in order to do this you need to acquire the grammar in order, starting from basic particles, conjugations and helper verbs and build up. The alternative is to learn further ahead, allowing you to understand more grammar consciously, with the tradeoff that time spent learning is not spent acquiring. Personally I think there is a balance to be had between the two, as increasing the comprehensibility of your immersion, even a bit, will speed up your acquisition by a lot.

Based on that I think you have a few general options to increase your grammar aquisition:

  1. The most MIA compliant option: before active immersion each day, read the Tae Kim article for the next thing you aren't getting. You say you only have the past tense and ください, so maybe try picking a particle or a conjugation you want to focus on. Let's say you want to focus on the negative ない form today. Given that you should read what Tae Kim has to say on the matter here, then go immerse and listen for those negative verbs. In a few hours of basically any Japanese content you will definitely hear quite a few sentences which are just a negative verb, and hundreds which contain one. You should be able to get a feeling for how the conjugation is made and its meaning. If you do that each day for a different point I think you'll get a good idea of the grammar really quick. Even better if you make a sentence card or two for each point.
  2. Make more grammar based cards from a grammar resource. You could make cards from Tae Kim, or from another resource like the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar. That's what Yoga did and he had great results as we all know.
  3. Build a stronger mental model of Japanese grammar. This one is the least MIA compliant, and likely to be controversial around here, but if you learn the grammar in a way you understand better on a conscious level, you will comprehend more sentences and therefore acquire language faster. The things you need to think about with regard to doing MIA correctly are: 1. Don't produce based on the grammar you learn. You should only produce based on acquired grammar you know is correct, and 2. don't let active grammar study take away too much of your immersion time. The most important part of MIA is immersion, and if you need to sacrifice something it should be active study, not the other way round.

    For number 3, the resources I like for grammar are: Japanese the Manga Way by Wayne Lammers: this gives a great intuitive view of Japanese grammar, with each point backed up by a real example from a real manga. One downside is that it delays by some time plain negative and past forms which I think is really fundamental. Another is Cure Dolly's Youtube channel which is really good if you can get over her weird voice. Also her pronunciation is weird, both in English and Japanese, so make sure you just get the grammar from there and solidify / acquire it through immersion. If you're doing MIA I would avoid all her videos on "organic immersion" too, and stick to her "Japanese from scratch" stuff. With either of these sources I would recommend going through one "lessons" every few days, and making sentence cards from your immersion for each point from the lesson. So the first lesson of Japanese the Manga Way covers basic sentence enders and polite forms, so I would look for sentences which use all of those forms (and from which I know all the vocab), and add them as sentence cards to my deck.
u/crab_balls · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

You might check out Japanese the Manga Way. Yes, it will go over all the same grammar in Genki I/II, but it has a lot more as well.

It also has a fair amount of colloquial expressions/grammar in the explanations, especially since it pulls straight from various different manga. I went through Genki I/II first, and then I did Japanese the Manga Way. I learned a lot of new stuff in it.

I don't know what is covered in Intermediate Japanese, though. YMMV.

u/weekendblues · 1 pointr/linguistics

It's like you're not even reading what I'm saying. I've read that book cover to cover as well as this one. It isn't about whether there is a に or not-- it's about whether or not the topic is dative (a case that is sometimes marked by に in Japanese) and whether or not 好き should be literally translated as "liked" or "likable." You seem to have fixated on one aspect of my speedily written post and decided it was grounds to categorically disqualify everything else contained therein.

u/Dayjaby · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

I'd say the first one. I bought it, it's decent - but somehow I think it'd be better to not buy this basic one. Learn basic grammar in a textbook like Genki and for advanced grammar you can still buy https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Intermediate-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789007758

Because as soon as you finish Genki, you are already very familiar with everything in this basic book.

u/Hunsvotti · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Your comment—and the general consensus around here—convinced me that I should get that series of grammar books. However, I'm not sure I found the right series. If there's any chance you could confirm it's these (basic, intermediate and advanced, seems to be all for ¥11,130) it would be highly appreciated. :)
Thank you!

u/TheLittlestSushiRoll · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Lots of people here are mentioning Tobira, which I don't have any personal experience with, but I just wanted to chip in by saying that my university/universities went from Genki I and II to An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese + its workbook and almost all of the the JLPT N3 books. After that there were a bunch of different textbooks in Japanese; can't remember that well, but I can see if I can dig something up later.

Edit:

One of the Japanese universities used the 中級を学ぼう books which was...okay. But at least the first one could be comparable to the Genki level, though.

They also used this, but that would be for later, when you start wanting to write more advanced reports/essays.

Had a look at someone's 聞いて覚える話し方 日本語生中継 books, which was quite rubbish and/or very basic.

Some also bought these and these but I can't vouch for them.

u/fuyunoyoru · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

> I don't really care if Hayashi did his homework or if the lady reading the newspaper is Tanaka and neither do the people I want to talk to.

At my undergrad school, I taught the language lab (1 hour per week required intensive practice session where we drilled the students) for three years. I was surprised at how surprised the actual instructors were that the students often wrote very similar criticisms on their course evaluation forms. No one gives a fuck what Hayashi is or is not doing. But, everyone was up on the latest chapter of whatever Shōnen Jump manga was popular at the time.

I'm a huge fan of manga. Even as a first year student I enjoyed plodding along in my favorite story with my trusty denshi jisho, and copies of my Yellow and Blue. (The Red one hadn't come out yet.)

Pick a story and go for it. Even if you have to keep a translated copy nearby to help understand.

u/knappador · 1 pointr/IAmA

Resources in order of value:

  • alc.co.jp search for tons of sentences and phrases. can't be beaten
  • Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar http://www.amazon.com/A-Dictionary-Intermediate-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789007758
  • Rikaichan or Rikiakun plugins to get past weird words when reading JP
  • Kanjibox for drills on vocab

    alc.co.jp is free and the dictionary is worth every penny to explain the finer points and get you to use canonical Japanese.
u/IM_Panda · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

You know what? You're right. 50 bucks is nothing down the line anyways. Might as well invest. Just to confirm this is the right item?

u/leoneemly · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

The various Dictionary of * Japanese Grammar books are all pretty good. They have good explanations and example sentences and if you use Anki, there exist decks that cover all of the example sentences in the books.

The only issue for self-study is that they are laid out like dictionaries, so they go in alphabetical order. I would also recommend the Kanzen Master grammar books if you want something a little more guided.

u/Kaywinnet · 1 pointr/AskReddit

-Stay motivated. I tried learning Japanese on my own for about 2 years (didn't get very far) until I finally got to college and was able to take a class. The foundation I'd already established helped SO much, and now I'm learning at an incredible rate. But that's because I have 4 classes a week, and I'm constantly using everything I know to write and speak frequently.
-For learning hiragana, katakana, and kanji, try to make up stories or associate the pictographs with things that you can remember. There are certain workbooks that will teach you hiragana and katakana, giving you cutesy little ways to remember the characters. That's a good starting place.
-I'm using the textbook Genki...learning from a textbook helps you go through grammar in pretty logical steps.
-Pay close attention to the sentence structure. Once you get that down, it's easy. (Ex: Instead of Subject Verb Object - I kicked the ball - Japanese uses Subject Object Verb - I the ball kicked.)

u/whateverman1579 · 1 pointr/AskReddit

the genki books are good for starter-intermediate learning.... kana's the easy part though. you need to find a kanji book to really know how to read.

edit for teh TL;DR better infoz: the first genki book teaches roughly 100 kanji if i remember correctly and the second's like 150 or something. the follow up book is called An Integrated Approach to Japanese and is more difficult as kana to assist kanji reading is mostly gone, but you'll learn enough from those three books if fully studied to understand basic news prints/read childrens' manga...
here's genki 1:
http://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789009637/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291080055&sr=8-1
there's a supplementary workbook that you don't necessarily need but can order as well, good for writing practice/exercises.
Genki II:
http://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789011631/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1291080055&sr=8-4
I'm not sure where to get copies of the third book as i bought it for university but you can probably find it on amazon or abebooks. just be sure you're not getting only the workbook that is mostly fill in the blank.

u/fai1 · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

If you don't mind having the first edition, you can get a used copy off of Amazon for around £25

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Genki-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789009637/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1347125733&sr=8-3

u/Noct_Stella · 1 pointr/languagelearning
  1. Cry


  2. Essential Japanese Grammar: A Comprehensive Guide to Contemporary Usage, Genki I, and Genki II


  3. JAPAN: Understanding & Dealing with the New Japanese Way of Doing Business


    Even if you disregard my advice on everything else you must must must must follow three in getting some books in understanding how to do business in Japanese.


    Language barrier is easy to overcome if there's money involved, cultural barriers less so. For learning Japanese and/or doing business in Japan culture and etiquette is everything.
u/Max9419 · 0 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Hello!

I'm interested in taking genki too, i would like to know if you bought only the book

or if you also bought the exercises ( question and answer)

thank you!

u/cygnus54 · 0 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Im pretty sure you could buy it straight from amazon.jp with the cd: https://www.amazon.co.jp/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/478901441X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505791406&sr=1-1&keywords=genki+workbook

I bought genki 2 from amazon jp a while back, and shipping to the US wasn't that much.

u/psaraa-the-pseudo · 0 pointsr/languagelearning

Why do you want to learn French? The answer can have an effect on what kind of course materials you should look for.

If you're main focus is conversation, than Language Hacking French would probably be the best fit for you in conjunction with italki lessons and videos on youtube.

If you're main focus is reading (to read literature and that sort of thing) than something like French for Reading would be a better fit, in conjunction with something like Duolingo stories.

Language learning, as I once heard, is like travelling. There are planes, trains, cars, and boats, and whatever you pick is based on what you want to experience/personal preference.

u/tarkonis · -1 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Buy this instead: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/0824835921 Seems like more effort at first but it helps so much to be able to recognise the characters.

u/urkesaa · -1 pointsr/LearnJapanese

Is this one good? this I'm sorry that im suddenly offending everyone im just trying to learn...