Ruzbeh said:
Ok. I wanna learn some Japanese.
Soooo. I wanna take classes because I don't think I can do it all by myself, maybe I can, not sure. How long does it take to learn Japanese? Like, how many years? Aaaaaand. Is it, like, expensive getting taught Japanese? And how did
you learn Japanse?
kthx
Good news - learning Japanese is do-able. Especially if you can do it in Japan.
Bad news - To pull off any level of intermediate fluency, you need at least a 6 months of an intensive program, or 1-2 years of daily classroom study in a college environment. I work in translation, and everyone on my team (ages 23 (me) to 30 (my boss)) has studied Japanese for at least 5 years. In fact, everyone I know who works at a "real" Japanese company has at least 4-5 years of study behind them (not counting english teachers).
My advice is to either enroll in intensive classes in Japan, study abroad in Japan, or connect with a local Japanese society that will provide you numerous opportunities to speak and listen. Limited exposure in a classroom is not enough to cut any level of low-intermediate fluency for a variety of reasons.
Finally - evaluate why you want to learn Japanese, and how serious you are about it. The typical anime otaku will last through 2 years of college courses before giving up. They come to the realization that the level of understanding needed is not worth the amount of effort required. Around 150-200 people took Japanese I at my university. Half that continued to Level II. A quarter that continued to Level III. There were 8 people in my advanced 4th year reading/translation seminar. The weedout process is vicious, and learning an east asian language from an american english background is a tough thing to do.
Beginner books I recommend, if you hire a private tutor and want to select a text yourself, are the Genki series published by the Japan Times (and made at Kansai Gaidai, where I studied abroad) as well as the Yookoso! series we used at UF. Genki is a little bit easy to understand. I recommend a college textbook shop as a great place to pick these up outside of Amazon.com. The grammar book linked earlier is also quite good, as are some of the dual language manga once you attain a level of at least 300 kanji.
It should take you no longer than 3-5 weeks of an hour a day study to get down katakana and hiragana. If you cant pull that off, you should be studying harder, because your retention level will never be there when it counts (kanji).
