Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby smallwhite » Sun Jan 29, 2017 3:06 pm

Fortheo wrote:
I wish I had friends who would buy me these courses haha.

PS. This thread is really making me want to revive my Japanese studies.


And I want to revise my entourage.
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby Xenops » Sun Jan 29, 2017 8:24 pm

smallwhite wrote:
Fortheo wrote:
I wish I had friends who would buy me these courses haha.

PS. This thread is really making me want to revive my Japanese studies.


And I want to revise my entourage.


Your entourage of languages to learn? :mrgreen:
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby Seneca » Sun Apr 16, 2017 5:58 pm

Getting caught up in life over the past few months, I forgot to come back and give an update. My friend was on vacation in Spain, and I could not help myself and also ordered "Reading Japanese" by Jorden and Chaplin.

Ready for the twist? He is a bit more of a free-spirit than I, and met a couch surfer from Buenos Aires who he fell for. He has taken a leave of absence from his job and is now cavorting around South America with her. Return date TBD, but he took a full year from work, so...yeah.

Sorry for my inability to give any updates on the quality of these products via him, haha. Also, Japanese has never really intrigued me, so I don't see them being used in the near future by me either. But, at least they make my bookshelf look cooler....
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby david93 » Sun Sep 10, 2017 1:22 pm

JapanesePod101 delivers a portion of the most astounding quality Japanese student podcasts and apparatuses accessible. Every scene incorporates demonstrate notes with a total transcript in kanji, kana, and roumaji, and an English interpretation.
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby Seneca » Fri Nov 17, 2017 12:55 pm

Seneca wrote:I forgot to include some information in my last post that may be of interest to others who come across this thread.

Regarding Assimil, when I was still considering Japanese With Ease, I contacted the company to ask about Volume I not being available in an English base from their website. The response was to apologize for it being out of print and then it was noted that Japanese With Ease will be published before the end of 2017 in one tome. No note on if anything is actually changing content-wise, but it read to me like it is purely just a combination of the older Volumes I & II into a single book.

I also found this Comparison of Japanese Textbooks wiki that seems like a good place to start for someone wanting to read up themselves on choices for the Japanese learner.


I had set a calendar reminder to follow-up on this. I reached out to Assimil, and was told, "a new edition will be published in 2018 but we can not give more details."

womp womp. Though, from what people have said, the unavailability of Assimil for this particular language is not much of a loss.
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Nov 17, 2017 1:23 pm

What of Heisig's remembering the Kanji book? I only just started using it but it's been fantastic for helping me learn the kanji by teaching me to recognise the component parts
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby Sylarv » Fri Nov 17, 2017 2:17 pm

"Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self‑study Course" by Taeko Kamiya

This is the dream book for intermediate learners. After you get down some of the basics of grammar, you still won't be able to construct a lot of sentences properly. In indo-european languages, you can often start producing correct sentences by the logic of your native indo-European language, but it doesn't work for exotic languages like Japanese. The basic "logic" of Japanese is different, so there's no way you'd guess it.

When I came across this book I felt like it was sent from heaven.
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby Seneca » Fri Nov 17, 2017 9:09 pm

Sylarv wrote:"Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self‑study Course" by Taeko Kamiya

This is the dream book for intermediate learners. After you get down some of the basics of grammar, you still won't be able to construct a lot of sentences properly. In indo-european languages, you can often start producing correct sentences by the logic of your native indo-European language, but it doesn't work for exotic languages like Japanese. The basic "logic" of Japanese is different, so there's no way you'd guess it.

When I came across this book I felt like it was sent from heaven.

Did you get to intermediate Japanese via the classroom, or do you have advice for a beginner as well?
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby Sylarv » Sat Nov 18, 2017 9:31 am

Seneca wrote:
Sylarv wrote:"Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self‑study Course" by Taeko Kamiya

This is the dream book for intermediate learners. After you get down some of the basics of grammar, you still won't be able to construct a lot of sentences properly. In indo-european languages, you can often start producing correct sentences by the logic of your native indo-European language, but it doesn't work for exotic languages like Japanese. The basic "logic" of Japanese is different, so there's no way you'd guess it.

When I came across this book I felt like it was sent from heaven.

Did you get to intermediate Japanese via the classroom, or do you have advice for a beginner as well?


I try to get the core of a language into my head, which consists of a relatively small set of important lexemes (words and set word combinations: prepositions, time, space, pronouns, adverbs, basic nouns and verbs, etc) and important phrasemes. I set about learning one or two thousand high frequency words and phrases because I know that's the only way I'll ever understand anything. (Important: I do this WITH native audio pronunciations. I do not guess at how to pronounce words in the beginning) At the same time, I go through a self study course, read a grammar book and listen to a lot of spoken content. I try to construct sentences on my own to find gaps in my lexicon and grammar.

From that core of ~2000 words and a few hundred phrases, a basic grasp of the grammar, you have to fill in all the rest of the words and phrases, logic and idiosyncrasies. 6000 to 10000 word families. Practice speaking, writing. Eventually you get to the point where you can start reading novels and that's when the real schooling begins.

Where do I find these? It's all online. Wikipedia has frequency lists. There are books you can buy from amazon too. You could use iknow's Japanese word list which is free and they even have audio. You want to learn all the words in whatever course you are going through. I like Assimil and Linguaphone, but colloquial, TYS and such are fine, and you can probably find them for free at your public library. Anki decks are free and some of those are amazing. I generally customize them for my own style, L2 to L1, and I write them down into lists for drilling. Tatoeba for example sentences. This is a language learning golden age. There's simply no reason to spend any time in a classroom. Maybe I'm a freak, I dunno, but I don't get the point of classrooms. Classrooms are extremely inefficient. 70% of the time is spent not doing anything with the language, and 30% spent on the language is the WRONG STUFF, then there's travel time and listening to other people fumble around in the language you're trying to learn. Classroom language learning is a vestige of a bygone era before information technology. In fact, classrooms have been basically irrelevant since video cassettes became available. With the internet, you have the country in your home. You can even find people to talk to through chat, skype, discussion forums, facebook, twitter. Unlimited content to read. Podcasts, videos, radio stations. You can even get your writing corrected on sites like lang-8.

You know... I sometimes can't believe people these days don't know how to do it. I forget I'm just deep in it so to me it's all obvious how to learn a language. But if I think back, once upon a time, I didn't know how to do it. I actually gave up once on trying to learn French before I finally figured it out. Hmm. I think I should write an eBook:

"How to learn a language to fluency, on your own, online, for free."

I think I should vlog my next language from terrible to fluency, so people can see it can be done.
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Re: Buying Gifts for an Aspiring Japanese Learner. Help!

Postby Seneca » Sat Nov 18, 2017 12:13 pm

Wait, that seemed like a kind of broad answer. :lol: Are you actually intermediate in Japanese and that was how you did it? Or was that how you got to intermediate in French and are assuming it will work the same in Japanese?

If the former, which self study course and grammar did you use for Japanese?
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