Japanese

[tarkin]

So i want to start to learn japanese, would like to visit japan sometime in my life, what are some good websites to start me in the right direction. I heard that rosetta stone works, but i don't have 400 dollars.

Japanesepod101 on youtube looks like it may me good. but if you know of any better please let me know

[MoogleDee]

All Japanese All the Time is a nice place to get you started. Mind, it's going to be long and difficult road, but it's fun learning a new language, especially if you've never studied any Eastern languages before.

[Megumeru]

get a tutor, or better yet if you're in college or uni get a class for that.

I speak Japanese--still rough on the edges, but I can hold a conversation just fine

[Snow_Storm]

If you're learning Japanese because of anime or video games, you're doing it wrong and you should quit.

Now, if you are doing it for the enjoyment of learning a new language, business, have plans to travel to Japan, or any other legit reason that is not anime or video game related, my advice to you would be to go to a community college or a class and learn Japanese or get a tutor who knows what he/she's doing.

[guest2]

Another vote for the community college class (it's cheaper than uni, at least here it is). There's just no replacement for the ability to have people to practice with. There will be lots of homework, sure, but how else are you going to reinforce that knowledge in the same amount of time?

Otherwise, I'm told a book called Genki is good.

Be sure you really want to do this. If you really like learning languages, you'll probably be fine, but Japanese is hard. Probably harder than Chinese, which I took a class for. The dropout rate was huge. We went from like 20-something students to 8 real quick, and two of them knew Chinese already and were taking the class for other reasons, lol.

Definitely don't learn from anime, whatever you do. Japanese people will be correcting your speech for years. Maybe.

[Beoran]

If you like self study, first learn the kana (katakana and hiragana) by heart. Listen to how they sound on the web, make flash cards (or use PC based flash cards) and practice until you can read and pronounce all those characters relatively fluently. This will take about 2 weeks to 1 month of study if you study an hour per day. Don't bother with the kanji just yet, you should learn them together with the vocabulary.

Then get a good Japanese book with CD's, that uses only kana and kanji with furigana (small superscripts in kana) to teach Japanese. for starters, can recommend the books + CD series "Minna no Nihongo" http://www.3anet.co.jp/english/books/books_01.html. Avoid "Japanese for busy people" at all costs. The reason why you should also avoid any romanisations of Japanese is that those romanoisations are *not* Japanese. The Japanese already have their kana, and that's enough to know how to pronounce the Japanese. Try to get in at least half an hour, but preferrably an hour of study per day, more if you have the time.

Of coure, live talking practise with a Japanese person helps the most. And if you make some progress, you might want to save up for a trip to Japan while you're at it, you might as well learn the language for a useful purpose and get a unique life experience to go with it.

B.

[Mirage_GSM]

I started to learn Japanese in evening courses. It's probably the cheapest way at... well, I paid about 60€ per semester, not sure what they charge where you live.
Since I don't have the time to go there anymore I found a tutor who is teaching me via skype.
Advantage: very flexible times.
Disadvantage: More expensive (about 17$ per lesson).
This might be a god place to find a tutor.
I tried Rosetta. It's good if you want to practice what you already learned, but I don't think it's a good way to start, since it hardly explains anything.
As for textbooks, if you're going to find a teacher you'll have to use what they use, but if you plan to self-study, I recommend Japanese for Busy People. Don't mind the silly title, the book is really good and explains everything in an easy to understand manner. There are two versions of the first book, one with a romanized version of the texts and one written completely in Kana. I recommend learning the Kana alphabets as soon as you can and use the kana only version as soon as possible.
One drawback of the book is that it teaches only few Kanji, but you can compensate for that in other ways. (You won't get the most out of this site, unless you know at least a bit of the language already.)
If you have more questions, feel free to ask.

[micechasekittens]

I recommend the series 'Japanese for Busy People'. Despite the name, it is actually a rather in depth course of books (make sure to get the kana version, not the romaji). It flows like and resembles a book that would be used in a university classroom. I used it to brush up after my Japanese has become rusty. I studied three years at a university, but funnily enough, I'm not using any of it despite living in Asia. Though I learned how to read Korean (which first looked like tetris blocks) and my korean friends are always excited to teach me new words and expressions so maybe I will become trilingual. As I pretty much only hang out with Koreans as opposed to foreigners, I really need to get studying on it =).

[Axelownz]

I have a friend who went to a University and was a Language major. He started with Japanese but said it was really hard and eventually switched to German. He was pretty good at language too so it must have been challening. Im no good with learning language (took 3 years of Spanish in High School and struggled with it) so i dont know how tough it actually is, i assume it would be tho.

[Mirage_GSM]

Switching to German because Japanese is "too hard" almost had me laughing out loud.
I'm glad that German is my native language, because I would definitely not want to have to learn it as a foreign language.
Of all the foreign languages I've ever learned (English, French and Latin in school and a few beginners courses of Spanish, Russian and Arabic), Japanese is by far the easiest to get started in. (Okay, I found English pretty easy as well, but you get plenty of exposition to that no matter where you live.)
Japanese does get harder later on, when you start to learn Kanji and special levels of politeness, but you can get pretty far without those.

Japanese grammar is extremely easy compared to the multitude of irregular words of French, all the different conjugations and declensions of Latin and the numerous exceptions of German.

Japanese vocabulary is also quite easy, because of the many English loan words. When in doubt you can often get by by pronouncing an english word the way the Japanese would.

I guess Japanese pronounciation might come a bit harder to native English speakers than to me, because the way the syllables are pronounced is very similar to the way they would be pronounced in German (with a few exceptions).

[Paul Atreides]

Switching to German because Japanese is "too hard" almost had me laughing out loud.
I'm glad that German is my native language, because I would definitely not want to have to learn it as a foreign language.

And I was considering Germany and Austria to be my first options to study abroad one year...

[Mirage_GSM]

Don't get me wrong, I really like the German language - just expect there to be a lot more grammar than you're used to from english. Then again, the same goes for almost any language I'm familiar with.
Also, I guess both Germany and Austria are nice places to study abroad in.

[Paul Atreides]

My native languages are Spanish and Galician, not much related to German, i guess. But I think it would be a nice challenge to study German. Also, I considered The Netherlands because I visited the country not long ago. Do you know if are similarities between German and Dutch?

[Palas]

Switching to German because Japanese is "too hard" almost had me laughing out loud.
I'm glad that German is my native language, because I would definitely not want to have to learn it as a foreign language.
Of all the foreign languages I've ever learned (English, French and Latin in school and a few beginners courses of Spanish, Russian and Arabic), Japanese is by far the easiest to get started in. (Okay, I found English pretty easy as well, but you get plenty of exposition to that no matter where you live.)
Japanese does get harder later on, when you start to learn Kanji and special levels of politeness, but you can get pretty far without those.

Japanese grammar is extremely easy compared to the multitude of irregular words of French, all the different conjugations and declensions of Latin and the numerous exceptions of German.

Japanese vocabulary is also quite easy, because of the many English loan words. When in doubt you can often get by by pronouncing an english word the way the Japanese would.

I guess Japanese pronounciation might come a bit harder to native English speakers than to me, because the way the syllables are pronounced is very similar to the way they would be pronounced in German (with a few exceptions).

Same here. Portuguese is the devil. Now, what's difficult about Japanese is that damn Chinese heritage they call "kanji". Other than that it's pretty easy AND fun. I'm learning Japanese at university and hell it's lots of fun. Most enjoyable language to read and speak since Korean, except Korean is a lot harder.

And you probably found English easy because you are German. It's as if I were learning Spanish or maybe French.

[Mirage_GSM]

And you probably found English easy because you are German. It's as if I were learning Spanish or maybe French.

I don't really think so. Grammar-wise there's not much common ground between English and German. I'd even say German is closer to French or Spanish. I think a native English speaker would have great difficulties learing German. Of course, all that's just my personal opinion, and I'm not a linguist.
But, let's not derail the thread too wildly from it's original topic - Japanese.
I'll be glad to discuss other languages in PMs or such.