So, you jerks growing old yet?

[Josh]

25 here. Been here for around 10 years. Thanks to Sprung, I'm not feeling quite as old now.

[Elin]

As usual I agree, but I think motivation is the biggest problem for most. As in, not giving up. You're a special case and as for myself, I needed it for school so quitting wasn't an option. But for most people it's a very scary language and as much as I'm in support of others trying their hands at it, not everyone has the necessary free time that's needed to be devoted to such an undertaking. Hell even I spend most of my waking hours memorizing new and unknown kanji, and it's still not enough for me to be content with myself.

(Don't listen to me btw, it's a fun language and very satisfying once you start seeing the results! Also you get to play awesome JRPGs that never made it to the west! )

Edit: Also it's not just free time, but money as well for classes and such. Many people do need teachers, even if others can manage alone.

Sorry for hijacking your thread Elmdor!

I don't think I'm a special case. I'm not fabulously talented or anything, as proven by my experiences with other languages in a formal environment. In Chinese I was top of my class mostly because I already knew a large chunk of the characters and lots of vocabulary, while other people were starting from scratch, but in Russian and French, I was pretty average. I'm not hugely motivated most of the time, either. I think it's very possible for anyone to achieve the level I have in Japanese, and to do it in a much shorter time to boot. Heck if nothing else, I think your current level is proof of that. If you continue at your current rate, you'll be way ahead of me by the time you've been studying as long as I have.

Also, in terms of free time, I think even those who are very busy can find the time to learn a language. It takes a long time, but that long time doesn't have to mean eight hours a day. One hour a day over a year or two will quite quickly start to yield results. I've met workaholics who have crazy schedules that allow them almost no free time at all who have still managed to study a foreign language to a fairly high level. Obviously the more you can study the better, but I don't think foreign language learning is exclusively for those who can afford to dedicate their lives to it. I think it can be, and should be, for everyone.

EDIT: Yeah, sorry about that, Elmdor.

[gezegond]

going off topic a bit but...

As for me, learning languages should be fun, or else I will never be motivated enough to learn it. I learned english in the first place because of films and games. As for japanese, I've learned a bit by watching animu, but the writing is ultra difficult compared to other languages. It's not something you could just casually learn over time.

For now, I've identified 2 possible ways to learn kanji which would work for me. First is to play games on emulators and/or read raw manga and use japanese OCR software to learn the frequent kanji's, and then putting them on anki to memorize them. This heavily depends on how good would a free ocr software be at recognizing kanji.

Second, is to memorize a small, essential number of kanji, and use that simple knowledge to play games, and while at it, learn more kanji bit by bit. The problem with this one is I have troubles finding a good essential kanji list. Everything I find has way too many kanji. what I'm looking for is around 100-250~ words to put on anki and memorize. More words won't work with anki for me. Learning these would have to allow me to recognize most kanji in regular casual sentences seen in games and manga.

If only there were some equivalent of rikaichan for games... I wouldn't even have to learn japanese at all.

[Gare]

going off topic a bit but...

As for me, learning languages should be fun, or else I will never be motivated enough to learn it. I learned english in the first place because of films and games. As for japanese, I've learned a bit by watching animu, but the writing is ultra difficult compared to other languages. It's not something you could just casually learn over time.

For now, I've identified 2 possible ways to learn kanji which would work for me. First is to play games on emulators and/or read raw manga and use japanese OCR software to learn the frequent kanji's, and then putting them on anki to memorize them. This heavily depends on how good would a free ocr software be at recognizing kanji.

Second, is to memorize a small, essential number of kanji, and use that simple knowledge to play games, and while at it, learn more kanji bit by bit. The problem with this one is I have troubles finding a good essential kanji list. Everything I find has way too many kanji. what I'm looking for is around 100-250~ words to put on anki and memorize. More words won't work with anki for me. Learning these would have to allow me to recognize most kanji in regular casual sentences seen in games and manga.

If only there were some equivalent of rikaichan for games... I wouldn't even have to learn japanese at all.

(I sure hope you can display Japanese characters, otherwise half of my post will be useless to you)

Actually, kanji can be learned casually over time. The important part is to keep coming back to it so you don't forget/get rusty. In my previous post I didn't quite mean 24/7 studying, like Elin suggested, an hour a day should be fine. Like you said, anime can help if you take notes while watching. This also improves your listening. Manga is good too for obvious reasons stated by yourself.


If you just want a list, the vocab lists for all JLPT levels are here: http://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/skills/vocab/

Scroll down and you should find the .doc files. JLPT N5 is beginner level, N1 is demigod/Elin. I've personally never used OCR programs. I look up completely new kanji with this, but as I'm getting better I find myself relying on it less and less: http://www.jisho.org/kanji/radicals/

As for memorizing kanji, my own method was to first learn the most basic kanji (more about this below) to give me a good, solid base to work with. Then it's all about the kanji compounds and mental connections. I don't think you really need to sit and memorize each reading individually. Way too time-consuming. Instead, you learn new kanji by associating it to stuff you already know. You will also, over time, naturally familiarize yourself with the various readings of each kanji. Random example:

You will learn very early that 来る (kuru)　is "to come". Then a bit later you'll learn that 未来 (mirai) is future. Oh shit, the kanji for kuru is pronounced as "rai" in that compound! You've just learned a new reading, which you will also see in 来年 (rainen - next year, the "coming" year)、来週 (raishuu - next week)、来月 (raigetsu - next month) and so on. Similarly, one of the first kanji people learn is 食べる (taberu), to eat. Then, still as a beginner, you'll come across 食事 (shokuji), which can also mean "meal". As you can see the kanji for taberu is pronounced in compounds as shoku, as in shokuji. Then, when you see stuff like　食材 (shokuzai - food ingredient)、食欲 (shokuyoku - appetite) and so on, you'll already know how to pronounce it. This is just the surface of things, but you get what I mean.

The Japanese language is awesome in a weird way because sometimes you can also guess the meaning of a kanji if you don't necessarily know how to pronounce it, just by examining the kanji it's made up from. Example: 後悔（する）(koukai(suru))　By this point you may know that 後 is generally speaking "after", and 悔 (from 悔む, kuyamu) is to lament something. Put them together, you have a general meaning of "lament something after(wards). You guessed it, the meaning of 後悔（する） is to "regret" something. And as we know regretting is done *after* you've fucked up. Another cool example is 助言 (jogen), which is constructed from (助, 助ける - tasukeru - to help someone) and 言 (to remark/say something, generally related to talking/language), therefore the two put together as 助言 is literally "helpful saying/remark". It's not very hard to figure out that 助言 means "advice/suggestion". Pretty cool, amirite? And guess what, you've also just learned that the kanji of tasukeru can also be pronounced jo, like in 助手 (joshu - assistant, the two kanji literally meaning "helping hand"). 助言 (jogen) also tells you that 言う (iu, to say) can appear as "gen" in compounds (like 発言, hatsugen - utterance), and from joshu (助手) you can also find out that the kanji for hand (手 - te) becomes "shu" in compounds, which you will later see in other examples such as 手術 (shujutsu - operation/surgery), or 手段　(shudan - method/means/way of doing sth, handling sth), and so on. My point here is that everything is connected to everything, so you learn new things from... well, everything rather quickly if you pay attention. Also, you wanted fun, well isn't this fun? I THINK IT IS.

What I'm gonna write about next is just based on my own experiences. Maybe it'll help, maybe it won't. What I'd recommend is starting with some basic textbooks, the one I stared with almost two years ago was Genki 1 and 2, I think you can find these online via Google. These will start you from the beginning, with all the basic and easy kanji. A few hundred at best, but I think this is what you're looking for. After that... well, I went on to more advanced books. Genki already teaches you the basic grammar, but at some points it plunges into a bit too much "dry, classroom Japanese", but for beginners it's okay. Also, avoid any textbook that uses *only* romaji. Genki does this for the first one or two units, but then it switches to full kana + kanji, which is the best way to go. You'll just have to get used to reading hiragana very early, it will serve you well in the long run.

For more advanced and in-depth grammar I've found　どんあ時どう使う 日本語発言文型 kinda useful, even if it contains stuff you already know it's recommended to soldier through it for practice and potential new kanji. There are more than one versions of this book based on the skill level you're looking for. If you manage to get through the advanced version of this book that teaches high-level grammar (JLPT N1-2), you'll basically be set for life, more or less It's that thorough. For communication, マンガで学ぶ日本語会話術 is what I used and found it pretty great. It gives you the various nuances and is basically a "what to say, when, and how" sort of book. Its greatest advantage is that it contains language the way it's actually spoken by natives (half of the book is basically a manga illustrating various situations in daily life, the workplace and so on). Basically it's not the dry, classroom Japanese I've mentioned above.

Many people also bring up this site: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

It's good, but I remember checking it out as a beginner and being somewhat confused and overwhelmed. But know that the option is there, and you can always look up stuff in it that you don't know.

And yes, I always recommend playing Japanese games. Personally I started with easier PSP games that 1) don't use too complicated language and 2) use a generous amount of hiragana instead of certain kanji. Be careful when choosing a game though, because the language used by, say, Shining Blade is infinitely simpler compared to something like Final Fantasy Type-0 or Valkyrie Chronicles 3. If you can emulate, PS2 via PCSX2 is also a good idea, since the emulator can render the game in a much higher resolution, making the kanji that much easier to read.

And actually, you can use Rikaichan for games. Visual novels, to be precise. It's a lengthy process but very much worth it if you want to get into visual novels. Obviously I wouldn't recommend VNs when you're still starting out, but once you've reached a certain level it's great for expanding your vocabulary and just reading practice/comprehension. There's basically a program called ITH that extracts the text from the game you're playing. You can set it up so it automatically copies each new line in the game to the clipboard. That's basically what I did, and every time a new line came around, I just pressed Ctrl-V and used Rikaichan for the unknown kanji. You're probably a bit confused right now, so below is a screenshot of how I usually read a visual novel with this tool.

As you can see: game on the right, copy-pasted text on the left, ready to be Rikaichan'd when needed. Very comfortable and great for learning.

(and no, I don't actually use Google Translate, I just use its little window because it's kinda neat )



@Elin: Sorry for not responding to you, we can just talk about this via Skype next week if you still want to. Would be much more comfortable than typing.

[Varun Highwind]

me here is only 16, i don't even feel like im 16

So you've already hit the menopause?

[Rok124]

So you've already hit the menopause?

Sometimes

I may just feel 12 forever

[Tassadar]

I'm 23 now and in terms of physical features, I still don't feel like I'm starting to degrade physically in any aspect, in terms of fitness I think I'm at my peak right now. I have no grey hairs I look younger than I am (I still get asked for ID when going into places), so physically I feel great. Mentally, my memory was never very good and it feels like there's tons of stuff I've learned and just as easily forgotten which is annoying to say the least.

[Nick Naim]

35. I've been told that's old, but I don't feel old. Anyway, 100 years is basically nothing and we come and go in that time.

[Roux!]

30?

I'm feeling OK... But my mind has gone a bit -- well... I blame the Doctor for that last one!

http://www.rxlist.com/klonopin-drug/...de-effects.htm

[Ace Ventura]

I'm only 19, but sometimes I feel like I'm 60. I already have Arthritis in my knee, (only due to multiple injuries to it.)

[Strongbad]

Coming up on 26.

Arthritis in my back, left shoulder, and hip. My ankles and knees crack when I walk. My hair is falling out at a rapid pace and I will probably be bald in 2 years. I have to buzz my hair because it grows out all wild on the sides and I look like a mad scientist. I have had tinnitus for the past 3 years. My vision is perfect and I can grow a beard in like 2 days.

Listing things like this is depressing.

[MidniteHermit]

I am 37, to put it into technology terms I was 6 when the Commodore 64 was released.... I have both gray hair and a slight receding hair line, but I do not feel old, except for the days I do, and my favorite saying is "I am still young enough to do it, but old enough to need pain pills afterwards". I have seen many gaming consoles come and many die. The computers I learned computers on in high school were the Apple IIGS. So I say what defines how old you are? The year you were born? The events you have witnessed? How you say first thing in the morning " Oh god I am still alive"?

[Cosmic]

I'm in my mid 20s, can't grow a decent beard and constantly get asked for ID.

You tell me if I'm getting old.

[Roux!]

My vision is perfect and I can grow a beard in like 2 days.

Floaters in my line of vision! A couple o' years, now...

[Videogamebetabook]

Im 84.