Wolfire Games Forums

I've recently gotten interested in learning Japanese, and was wondering if any of you had suggestions on what software would be the best. Thanks in advance!

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi- ... dic.cgi?1C
Web dictionary/translator. Choose "translate words" and paste Japanese text to get the translation of all the phrases the dictionary understands, and guesses at some of those it doesn't. For some words (many? most?) you can also press the play button and hear an audio clip for the pronunciation.

I understand many people use flashcards software to learn Japanese and Chinese.
http://www.flashcardexchange.com/
Choose Japanese from the tag cloud. Choose a card list (e.g. Remembering The Kanji - Lesson 01). When you STUDY it, you're shown first one "side" of the card, e.g. '女'. Then you try to remember the other "side", e.g 'woman'. If you didn't remember the correct answer, you're supposed to click the "incorrect" button, so the program knows that card should be repeated more.

You can also choose "Flashcard Memory" from other options, to get a memory game.

You'll probably want to find a card set with the Japanese symbol, the English translation and a "third side", the pronunciation. The third side is always shown on the second side of the card even if you choose to reverse the order. Otherwise, you might remember the pronunciation aid and not the character: [onna] and not the '女'.

I just found the site while I was trying to remember what the downloadable programs are called, so I don't know if they have audio flashcards.


A book explaining where the symbols come from would also be helpful, because it will allow you to recognize the interplay and the symbols-inside-symbols and the meanings they bring to the symbols, which should help remembering them all. Some examples from Chinese, just because I happened to find them faster, and I've read a bit about Chinese. The following are quotes from the 'net:

The word "scold" (骂, mà) consists of a semantic part "mouth" ( two 口's), and a phonetic indicator 马 (mǎ) that tells how it should be pronounced.
An example of a compound characters is 众 (crowd), which is comprised of three 人 (man). So, "man" + "man" + "man" = "crowd". Another would be "bright" (明), which is "sun" + "moon."
And if you look at the symbol of woman 女 and compare it to man, well, IIRC it's evolved from a symbol "man holding a child".
At least in Chinese, some of the characters are like magnificent puns:

Have you ever seen the Chinese character “福”pasted upside-down on someone’s front door?

The character “福”means “happiness”, or “good fortune”. The Chinese character for upside-down is “倒”, pronounced the same as“到”, which means “arrive”. So when “福”is upside-down, it is“福倒”, which sounds exactly like “福到”, meaning “happiness/good fortune has arrived/will be arriving”.

http://www.livemocha.com

Thank me later, however, this site assumes you already understand the alphabets.

Wow, learning Japanese is not a small task. But don't let that discourage you, it is a beautiful and funny language.

What I can add to the tools needed for learning Japanese on a (windows) computer is the Microsoft input method, that will enable you to type Japanese characters on a western keyboard and also lets you draw them with a mouse(this comes in handy, when you want to look up a kanji in a book, but don't know the pronunciation).
Here is a tutorial how to use it:http://newton.uor.edu/Departments&Progr ... _write.htm
I don't know about input methods for the mac, but there are tutorials on that also.

The flashcards and the translation site Endoperez suggested seem pretty descent to me. I would recommend you to start learning the hiragana first before you start with kanji. Hiragana are a fixed pronunciation syllable alphabet and you can write every Japanese word with the <50 hiragana. The reason I recommend it is, because I experienced that relying on (one of the many) transcription to roman letters won't get you very far. It maybe helps in the beginning, but it becomes just a nuisance very fast. Also when starting to learn the kanji(the pictorial letters, that can have several pronunciations), I would recommend to learn two or three words or expressions, where they are actually used. Otherwise it will get hard to remember after you got your first 100 kanji covered.

For example, 人(which means human or person in Japanese). It can be read as

• NIN
• JIN
• hito

And simple examples of its use are

• 人間(NINGEN) which means 'human' as in "human race"
• 人生(JINSEI) which means 'life' as in "this is my life"
• and just 人(hito) which means person, man, human or people

See how the first two words are compounds made up of two letters? Those will happen a lot and it is better to make connections like this(this kanji, has these pronunciations and is used in these compounds with these meanings) early, because it will be easier to remember and use what you learned. Well, just an advice from someone who started learning Japanese 5 years ago.

Also, this focused a lot on the kanji now, but kanji are not the most important thing, just the most difficult one. If you just want to speak and understand, of course, grammar and syllable pronunciation will be more important and that is relatively easy, at least for me as a German native speaker coming from one of the most horrible grammars of the world.

One last thing: watch anime, original with subtitles, those help a lot and are quite easy to get your hands on.

As far as flashcards go, I'm set. I've got studyjapanese.org, and they're really good with those. What I'm looking for is something that can help me with pronunciation and flow. No matter how many flashcards I use, if I don't hear another person speaking the language, I'll never learn it.
I'm not so much interested in the writing yet, I have no talent of writing in ENGLISH none the less Japanese. The only reason I'm able to spell things correctly is because of ocd and spellcheck.

Well, I can understand that you mainly want to speak and hear and not write and read. It basically was the same with me. The problem is that the Japanese language is deeply rooted in their writing, which is kind of curious as the whole character system was imported from China not that long ago.
To give an example, how close the connection between language and writing is: It is common for one Japanese explaining something to another to take the hand of the instructed and write a kanji in it to emphasize the point and avoid disambiguations. To know how the language works you need a basic understanding of the characters. That said I really would recommend to learn about 100-200 basic kanji to have a kind of foundation.

Now to the problem of speaking and hearing. Of course you are absolutely right, that you never will be able to communicate in Japanese if you don't listen to real people. But I don't know any software that can help you. I guess you should try your luck in real life with that.
Try to make Japanese friends(ok, I know, easier said than done). What can help is something called tandem partnership(at least here). It's basically a Japanese helps you learn Japanese and you help him learn English or whatever is your mother language. Maybe nowadays you even can make a kind of pen pal in Japan and talk over the internet using skype or other instant messaging with voice chat.
You also could try to go to Japan as part of a volunteer project with several organisations(I had some good results from that, made a lot of friends), but maybe you are too young for that(Sorry, cant remember your age, but it was below 18 right?) and of course that is a big step.
Other advice I already gave you: Japanese television shows, anime or live action, drama, whatever with subtitles. It is kind of easy to get your hands on fansubs nowadays. It helps a lot for conversational flow and pronuciation.