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[muteki]

You can get Genki I for about 30-40 dollars, and have a comprehensive guide that starts you out in kana, kanji, vocabulary and grammar. Chances are if you were to start a college 101 course that book or similar is where you would start.

There are free guides out there too, like Tae Kim, that are good as well though lack the amount of examples and practice questions a text book would have.

 

[TheSporkWithin]

Hey everyone! So I just finished learning all of the hiragana characters and now I'm a little confused about where to go from here if I am self-teaching myself. Any recommendations?

Genki is probably worth getting, though it's absolutely designed to be used in a classroom so while the explanations and examples are valuable, many of the exercises will be inefficient. This will be true of pretty much anything though.

I'd also recommend taking a look at www.imabi.net . I didn't actually learn of its existence until fairly recently so I didn't use it myself and therefore can't vouch 100% for its accuracy, but what I have browsed through was well presented and thorough. You'll probably want to start with this lesson here, and then double back to the pages on katakana and the introduction to kanji.

 

[Resilient]

i've never used Genki, when was it first published?

woah 1999. that's some time ago.

classroom books are a drainer IMO, anything that asks you to answer a question (written), with only one answer in the book and no explanation. mind fuckery. multiple choice textbooks FTW.

 

[shanshan310]

Hey everyone! So I just finished learning all of the hiragana characters and now I'm a little confused about where to go from here if I am self-teaching myself. Any recommendations?

basic grammar and vocab would be the best place to start, and then katakana yeah. You should start thinking about taking some classes, or finding a Japanese club in your area or something so you can start getting feedback about your progress through real communication. Even if it's just basic stuff it's very useful.

If you're interested in a non-language specific guide to language learning, especially through self study, check out Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner and Learn Any Language by Barry Farber.

 

[RangerBAD]

i've never used Genki, when was it first published?

woah 1999. that's some time ago.

classroom books are a drainer IMO, anything that asks you to answer a question (written), with only one answer in the book and no explanation. mind fuckery. multiple choice textbooks FTW.

Yeah, it sucks.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

My N1 certification finally arrived in the mail. Sure took a long time to show up considering the results were out over a month ago. Oh well, at least I was able to confirm that the score posted online wasn't a mistake.

 

[Resilient]

Shouldn't come as a surprise but I read a post on r/LearnJapanese, and one of the most helpful comments I've seen on that sub ever came from none other than TheSporkWithin. Love your work dude.

Cross posting the podcast that he shared over there, it may come handy for some people. 2 people chatting about STUFF.

ひいきびいき http://hkbk.fm/

I personally recommend HOTCAST, again it's 2 people talking about STUFF (usually food, cooking etc). They also read listener mail.

HOTCAST http://radio.hotcast.info/

and if you really, really, really, really like something a bit more cutesy, you can try out ねえ、ねえ、聞いて！ which is one girl talking about her life as sort of an Audio diary and letting you know what's been happening. i've warned your ear holes. i just wanna put it out there, i've listened to a few of these and stopped, it was too much for me and I wasn't getting anything out of it. that said, it think a few people in here may enjoy it so i've shared it. don't judge or shame me pls.

ねえ、ねえ、聞いて！https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/nee-nee-wenite!/id78218702?mt=2

 

[TheSporkWithin]

I posted about ひいきびいき in here at least twice, once specifically to you, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, it's a fantastic weekly podcast, very easy to listen to and great for improving ones' ability to parse conversational Japanese, as opposed to so many other podcasts which are much more "presentational" as opposed to "conversational". My own listening ability has gone way up since I started listening to it.

 

[LorDjidane]

Yeah I read about it some time ago here on this thread and tried it out a few times. I'm still at a low level of grammar though so I have a really hard time understanding it but within two months it should be ok.

Thanks for sharing the goodness.

 

[Kilrogg]

I posted about ひいきびいき in here at least twice, once specifically to you, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, it's a fantastic weekly podcast, very easy to listen to and great for improving ones' ability to parse conversational Japanese, as opposed to so many other podcasts which are much more "presentational" as opposed to "conversational". My own listening ability has gone way up since I started listening to it.

I just wish they had better sound quality. Last time I checked (episode 100+), the sound was as awful as ever (both quality and volume). Come on, even if you don't have tons of money to spend, you don't have to stick to a $50 Blue Snowball, especially if you're gonna put background music on top of it all.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

I just wish they had better sound quality. Last time I checked (episode 100+), the sound was as awful as ever (both quality and volume). Come on, even if you don't have tons of money to spend, you don't have to stick to a $50 Blue Snowball, especially if you're gonna put background music on top of it all.

Ugh.

This is why I don't listen to most Japanese podcasts I've encountered.

 

[Kilrogg]

Ugh.

This is why I don't listen to most Japanese podcasts I've encountered.

To be fair, IIRC it's not too loud or grating. It's just an ambiance kind of thing.
I was just talking about it because you don't want to add any sort of sound on top of voices if the voice recording doesn't sound great in the first place.

I mean the very intro to the show is a pain to listen to because the microphone sucks and the gain isn't set properly so the sound saturates (is that the word in English?) when the female host says ひいきびいき. Hurts your ears.

 

[Resilient]

Ugh.

This is why I don't listen to most Japanese podcasts I've encountered.

To be fair, IIRC it's not too loud or grating. It's just an ambiance kind of thing.
I was just talking about it because you don't want to add any sort of sound on top of voices if the voice recording doesn't sound great in the first place.

I mean the very intro to the show is a pain to listen to because the microphone sucks and the gain isn't set properly so the sound saturates (is that the word in English?) when the female host says ひいきびいき. Hurts your ears.

Zefah, it's pretty bad most of the time if you have sensitive ears. it's exactly like Kilrogg describes. there are moments where it can be really bad in conversations that have excitement (?) in them. haven't encountered it as much with ひいきびいき but HOTCAST can be grating at times. especially if you wear in-ear phones...yeah...don't do that. it is piercing it times.

 

[KanameYuuki]

Guys may someone explain to me the difference between 楽しい and 楽しみ、Currently my brain is off and I can't even.

And regarding the podcast, even if I won't understand them at all, at least for now, should I still dl them and listen to them regularly?

 

[Deleted member 17706]

Guys may someone explain to me the difference between 楽しい and 楽しみ、Currently my brain is off and I can't even.

And regarding the podcast, even if I won't understand them at all, at least for now, should I still dl them and listen to them regularly?

To put it simply, you're looking at an adjective vs. noun thing. There is far more nuance to it than that, but I feel that the most important thing to understand first would be that difference.

楽しい adjective
楽しみ noun

 

[Stalk]

Those of you that are doing the whiteboard method, can I ask what kind of format your lists take? I'm starting off and I have a prompt word in English and a vocab / common word section next to it in a spreadsheet I'm working from. For grammar I have the same. Would this be the right way to go about it or am I missing something?

I get the idea is from memory but I need some kind of prompt surely hah.

 

[urfe]

To put it simply, you're looking at an adjective vs. noun thing. There is far more nuance to it than that, but I feel that the most important thing to understand first would be that difference.

楽しい adjective
楽しみ noun

I honestly just remember them as "fun" and "looking forward to".

 

[Kurita]

To put it simply, you're looking at an adjective vs. noun thing. There is far more nuance to it than that, but I feel that the most important thing to understand first would be that difference.

楽しい adjective
楽しみ noun

楽しみ is used in 楽しみにしている (or other variants) to say "Look forward to".

 

[Resilient]

Those of you that are doing the whiteboard method, can I ask what kind of format your lists take? I'm starting off and I have a prompt word in English and a vocab / common word section next to it in a spreadsheet I'm working from. For grammar I have the same. Would this be the right way to go about it or am I missing something?

I get the idea is from memory but I need some kind of prompt surely hah.

on phone so can't dig through my posts. the honest advice and best advice I can give is to read experts method again for your answer. you don't have to copy it exactly, if you want a prompt, make a prompt. I left a lot of vague hints to help trigger the more complicated ones

If that doesn't help do a username search on me from the last 3 months ITT and you should find a grammar and kanji sample of my lists.

 

[Stalk]

on phone so can't dig through my posts. the honest advice and best advice I can give is to read experts method again for your answer. you don't have to copy it exactly, if you want a prompt, make a prompt. I left a lot of vague hints to help trigger the more complicated ones

If that doesn't help do a username search on me from the last 3 months ITT and you should find a grammar and kanji sample of my lists.

like the Japanese readings or the English meanings, whatever, as long as you're not looking at the actual kanji because you want to write the words from memory, not from copying

You were right, fair enough hah - I sometimes tend to miss key details. I've got no reference to the actual kanji nor anything. I was thinking of putting some tinyurl links next to my stuff incase I needed quick reference but with my current format that might not work too well actually. Cheers though.

 

[Kilrogg]

Ugh.

This is why I don't listen to most Japanese podcasts I've encountered.

To be fair, IIRC it's not too loud or grating. It's just an ambiance kind of thing.
I was just talking about it because you don't want to add any sort of sound on top of voices if the voice recording doesn't sound great in the first place.

I mean the very intro to the show is a pain to listen to because the microphone sucks and the gain isn't set properly so the sound saturates (is that the word in English?) when the female host says ひいきびいき. Hurts your ears.

Zefah, it's pretty bad most of the time if you have sensitive ears. it's exactly like Kilrogg describes. there are moments where it can be really bad in conversations that have excitement (?) in them. haven't encountered it as much with ひいきびいき but HOTCAST can be grating at times. especially if you wear in-ear phones...yeah...don't do that. it is piercing it times.

I've gotta revise my opinion on HKBK.
Listening to the latest episodes just now, there's two things I should note:
1. The sound quality is a bit better than it used to be. Still not perfect, but it's less echo-y. They should definitely work on reducing that sibillance though.
2. Contrary to what I said, the podcast doesn't have any background music anymore, except for the first minute or so when they introduce the show and start talking. Earlier episodes have it run throughout their entirety though.

So, Zefah, KanameYuuki, you might still want to give ひいきびいき a shot.

 

[LorDjidane]

Those of you that are doing the whiteboard method, can I ask what kind of format your lists take? I'm starting off and I have a prompt word in English and a vocab / common word section next to it in a spreadsheet I'm working from. For grammar I have the same. Would this be the right way to go about it or am I missing something?

I get the idea is from memory but I need some kind of prompt surely hah.

I have a list of english vocabulary words, I write the translations in japanese.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

I honestly just remember them as "fun" and "looking forward to".

楽しみ is used in 楽しみにしている (or other variants) to say "Look forward to".

Except when it's not used to mean "looking forward to" and is instead used to simply mean "enjoyment," for example, or in a sentence about ruining someone's fun such as "人の楽しみを奪う（うばう）."

 

[RangerBAD]

I'm not doing the whiteboard method, but when I do a vocab list I just put everything in hiragana. Those are the prompt words. Of course I look up the meaning first, but that's just when I'm putting together a list.

 

[shanshan310]

You were right, fair enough hah - I sometimes tend to miss key details. I've got no reference to the actual kanji nor anything. I was thinking of putting some tinyurl links next to my stuff incase I needed quick reference but with my current format that might not work too well actually. Cheers though.

Anki with English and/or hiragana on one side and the kanji on the other is really helpful too That way you get instant feedback about whether you were correct or not and handy data about it.

 

[Porcile]

Someone made a Chrome extension for toggling on and off the furigana for NHK Easy News. Still such a great resource.

Google "NHK Easy Furigana Toggle"

 

[Alanae]

Looking at the mood of the thread, I'm not quite sure if I should do this, but I feel like there's some people it could help so here goes.

I don't think the method of learn through use of games/anime/manga/etc deserves the shunning it getting, because if you go about it properly, these are very viable methods of learning to read and listen to Japanese, which I think is the goal of a lot of people that are trying to learn the language.

Sure, doing things like watching English subbed anime forever without doing anything else will probably be an ineffective use of time, but that doesn't mean these methods are useless.

Through studying some basic grammar first and making use of tools that enable you to look up words quickly you can simply learn as you go along reading the things you've wanted to. It will be quite the struggle at the start, but if you're reading something you've been really hyped for it turns into something manageable.
And I think it's safe to say it's a bit more fun than grinding kanji like crazy for months.

One of the things I'd recommend is to learn vocab directly instead of kanji, as by doing that you'll be "learning" kanji at the same time with little extra effort, thanks to pattern recognition. Simply recognizing the same kanji in multiple different words will eventually make you build a mental list of the readings it can have and a general sense of the type of meanings the words that contain the kanji have (if applicable). Which makes remembering new words easier as you go along, since you can often make a good educated guess at a new word if it contains kanji you've encountered before, so more effort can be spent on memorizing the meaning of a word.

Meanwhile, if you focus on memorizing individual kanji instead, even if you learn a bunch of words that go with then, you'll still have many other words you'll need to learn later on anyway, as the ratio of words:kanji is very shifted towards the former.

Learning words also has the advantage of being able to learn them as you read. Each time you look up a word, you'll remember it a bit better than the last time, until you don't forget it anymore. the non-basic grammar can be learnt in the same way. It might be hard to notice yourself making process this way and it will be very tough in the beginning, but trust me you will.

Furthermore, I don't recommend using the JLPT tests your main goal, to the point where your studying is spearheaded at mainly just the grammar points and the vocab tested in them. Unless the main reason you're learning the language is to take the JLPT, it would be a good idea to widen your focus a bit more to learning the words you'll be needing to read. The JLPT is a test that tests your reading/listening skills, so even if you just study to be able to read well in general, you shouldn't have much of a problem with passing even the N1.

Once you've gotten the foot in the door and can read well, learning to speak and and write well as well shouldn't be much of a problem, just remember that people in reality don't speak the same way as fictional characters do and you should be fine.


In the 1.5+ years I've been studying Japanese so far, I've mainly been enjoying myself through playing the various stuff I've really been wanting play to but couldn't.
Learning a language, especially one like Japanese, is often thought of to be this incredible impossible hard thing which you'll need to suffer through and endlessly grind through in order to get any good at, but it really doesn't have to be this way. Seeing people being so dismissive of methods to actually making things enjoyable saddens me a lot.


In any case, I helped on writing a guide that contains general advice and how to use the tools that will make your life easier:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15uvv72eVFBtcOlfHaHUfT_HhZsgWxd7VjT9u-zVSwdw/edit

Please take a look if you're interested, hopefully it will be of help.

Now that I have an account, I'll probably be checking out this thread more often and answering questions if people need help.

 

[RangerBAD]

I see you mentioned IRC (which I use daily), but I've never found a good channel with actual Japanese people.

 

[Alanae]

I see you mentioned IRC (which I use daily), but I've never found a good channel with actual Japanese people.

the ##japanese channel on freenode has a few.
the #japanese.utf8 channel on rizon is linked to a similarly named channel located on a japanese irc server, but I don't hang around there enough to tell if there's many japanese people that are active in it.

 

[RangerBAD]

the ##japanese channel on freenode has a few.
the #japanese.utf8 channel on rizon is linked to a similarly named channel located on a japanese irc server, but I don't hang around there enough to tell if there's many japanese people that are active in it.

I've idled in the rizon one before. There's very little activity.

 

[Porcile]

Egh, the whiteboard method combined with reading and listening (do people always ignore this part?) is pure consumption and you'd handily be able to read and play anything you wanted in Japanese if you took it all the way up to JLPT 1. Also, the vocab on its own only covers something like 6000 words, and it isn't enough to even read a newspaper so you have learn words as you go along. It's just a lot easier because you already have the key ingredients stored in your head. It's much easier to learn a new word if you know the kanji and common readings already. Also you're much more likely to see words in the correct context if you read more realistic stuff like newspapers and magazines. Anyway, I find it pretty damn enjoyable to read newspapers and magazines and listen to radio so...

 

[Aizo]

I'm pretty sure even expert has said that if you want to learn through games, manga, anime, whatever, and that's all you want to do with the language, that's fine.

For those who want to speak Japanese or use it a lot in our lives, especially at a professional level, that kind of study isn't the most efficient. Sure, it is a method, and if it is the method that stops you from becoming burnt out, that's fine. If you can handle a more rigorous study, though, do it. Doing those things for fun while using the language can only help, but more intensive study means more progress.

 

[RangerBAD]

Fun stuff to solidify what you've already learned can't be bad.

 

[TheSporkWithin]

The only problem is when you start chalking that stuff up as "study time". It isn't. Supplementing your 1-2 hours of study time per day (or 30 minutes, or whatever you do) with a few hours spent playing games or reading novels in Japanese when you would otherwise have been playing/reading them in English is enormously beneficial. On the flip side, spending two hours bungling through a game in Japanese, chalking that up as "study accomplished", and spending the rest of the day playing video games in English is much less so.

Also, unless your goals consist solely of playing VNs with a text-hooker for training wheels and never removing them, I would strongly advise against relying on one. The time that you spend looking things up and working to recall them from memory is what strengthens your ability to remember words. If you just scroll your mouse over each line of text and count that as reading Japanese you're deluding yourself. That's why I keep Rikaikun disabled unless I'm just trying to get some information from a webpage in a limited amount of time, like at work or something. If I'm doing leisure stuff in my leisure time I look that shit up in my denshi jisho and add it to a study list.

Edit to add: That's not to say that there is no value at all in doing these things, just that your returns are not going to be nearly as good as they could be when tied in with actual study. At the same time, if someone is happy with what they're accomplishing and the rate at which they are accomplishing it, nobody else has the authority to say that what they are doing is wrong for them personally.

 

[TheSporkWithin]

From now on when people ask what they should study first, we can now give them the optimal study order for katakana and hiragana based on their frequency in EDICT.

To finally get these results. The rows of hiragana and katakana that most appear in words in the dictionary, that is, these are the most frequent kana in words, which mean if you are learning the basics, you should probably do it in this order:

You'll have to click through to find out the actual optimized study order. I hope you didn't start with ぱぴぷぺぽ!

 

[Resilient]

The only problem is when you start chalking that stuff up as "study time". It isn't.

Well said and all that needs to be said. If you were in HS, would you classify reading your Eng text in a video game as study time? Actually I imagine people like that exist.......bad example.

From now on when people ask what they should study first, we can now give them the optimal study order for katakana and hiragana based on their frequency in EDICT.

You'll have to click through to find out the actual optimized study order. I hope you didn't start with ぱぴぷぺぽ!

i'm 100% certain that is some elite level trolling. sad that few ppl in there are calling the OP out for how utterly...[redacted] that is.

Looking at the mood of the thread, I'm not quite sure if I should do this, but I feel like there's some people it could help so here goes.

just curious, have you gone for any JLPT? if so which have you passed?

 

[Alanae]

The only problem is when you start chalking that stuff up as "study time". It isn't. Supplementing your 1-2 hours of study time per day (or 30 minutes, or whatever you do) with a few hours spent playing games or reading novels in Japanese when you would otherwise have been playing/reading them in English is enormously beneficial. On the flip side, spending two hours bungling through a game in Japanese, chalking that up as "study accomplished", and spending the rest of the day playing video games in English is much less so.

Also, unless your goals consist solely of playing VNs with a text-hooker for training wheels and never removing them, I would strongly advise against relying on one. The time that you spend looking things up and working to recall them from memory is what strengthens your ability to remember words. If you just scroll your mouse over each line of text and count that as reading Japanese you're deluding yourself. That's why I keep Rikaikun disabled unless I'm just trying to get some information from a webpage in a limited amount of time, like at work or something. If I'm doing leisure stuff in my leisure time I look that shit up in my denshi jisho and add it to a study list.

Edit to add: That's not to say that there is no value at all in doing these things, just that your returns are not going to be nearly as good as they could be when tied in with actual study. At the same time, if someone is happy with what they're accomplishing and the rate at which they are accomplishing it, nobody else has the authority to say that what they are doing is wrong for them personally.

The idea would be to try and not going back to playing games in English, but instead to try and replace as many of them with japanese variants as you can (I abandoned my eu psn account because of this).
you'll still be studying, but you'll be doing it as you come across things when you're reading (eg. you come across a grammar structure you don't know yet and thus read up on it in a dictionary/guide before you go on with playing).
In my experience it's easier to remember them by studying them that way.

While that might seem likely to happen, you'll still be learning the words through exposure (as opposed to spending more time on less
words, you'll be spending less time on more words. I don't know which one is the most efficient however, but I feel like the latter has the advantage of being a lot more bearable and letting you read more.) and after reading through a bunch of them you'll find yourself relying on the hooker much less than before.
Even with training wheels, eventually you'll find out you can take them off and still be able to cycle fine.
Eventually you won't really need it anymore, aside from tackling the occasional works that throw a lot of obscure words at you.

just curious, have you gone for any JLPT? if so which have you passed?

I took the sample test on their site a while back on a whim. The only mistake I made was in a question about scholarships and entry requirements because I hadn't actually come across a bunch of the key words in that text yet .
It's not very high priority for me because I won't actually be needing it for anything anytime soon, but I'll probably try taking the real this year if it's held on a day that would be convenient for me.
The test has a pretty low passing threshold and I've improved a lot since then so I don't think passing it would be any problem.
(before people start calling doubt, I know some people that passed the test without going out of their way studying for it and simply just reading, so I know its possible.)

 

[Resilient]

N1?

feel like we have this discussion every few pages. Wanna study hard and diligently? Do X. Wanna chill and go slow? Do Y. They both work and they both have different outcomes and take you to a different level. Just depends on your goal and what level you want to be in over, say, 1 year.

 

[Alanae]

N1?

yes

Also you're much more likely to see words in the correct context if you read more realistic stuff like newspapers and magazines. Anyway, I find it pretty damn enjoyable to read newspapers and magazines and listen to radio so...

I'd say that generally, reading/listening to things you're interested in is a good idea, I'm not saying you should only ever be reading fiction.

I'm pretty sure even expert has said that if you want to learn through games, manga, anime, whatever, and that's all you want to do with the language, that's fine.

For those who want to speak Japanese or use it a lot in our lives, especially at a professional level, that kind of study isn't the most efficient. Sure, it is a method, and if it is the method that stops you from becoming burnt out, that's fine. If you can handle a more rigorous study, though, do it. Doing those things for fun while using the language can only help, but more intensive study means more progress.

Once you've built up a sizable pool of passive vocab and you can recognize and understand how the language works, that that's left to do is to convert the passive to active vocab and learning how to sound natural.
This is something you can learn through conversing with fluent speakers that are willing to correct mistakes you'll make.

In any case, as I said before, learning to read well will give you a good foothold for learning to speak and write later on.

 

[Porcile]

Ultimately it always comes down to justifying playing games and reading manga as valuable use of your time, which it isn't in any context. One day someone will post "can I learn Japanese from reading Zeami plays and Basho poems?" and we'll all be like wtf heretic.

 

[Beckx]

hey all

hoping someone can help me with a stupid beginning study question that's been bothering me.

what are the rules for when nouns can "stack" together vs. when they need の?

for example: you can have 練習試合 (a practice game) or 連続二塁打 (consecutive doubles) but per Genki I a Japanese professor should be 日本語の先生 and a green sweater is 緑のセーター.

is there a rule that governs when you use の to link nouns and when you stack them?

 

[Deleted member 17706]

I'll continue to disagree that manga and games aren't a good way to learn the language. It obviously depends on the context, but you can learn a ton of vocabulary and sentence structures this way.

Hell, I would argue that the reason people in the Nordic countries speak such damn good English is primarily because of how much English media they consume.

Of course you should do a lot of proper studying at the same time, but I highly doubt I would be where I am now in terms of proficiency if I hadn't spent a lot of time playing games, reading manga, magazines, and novels, or watching Japanese TV.

 

[Kansoku]

I see it like playing an instrument. Sure you can practice with scales and whatnot, but it's much more fun to pick a song you like and try to play it. You might not gain a lot from it, theory wise, but still it helps a lot.

 

[RangerBAD]

I'll continue to disagree that manga and games aren't a good way to learn the language. It obviously depends on the context, but you can learn a ton of vocabulary and sentence structures this way.

Hell, I would argue that the main reason people in the Nordic countries speak such damn good English is primarily because of how much English media they consume.

Of course you should do a lot of proper studying at the same time, but I highly doubt I would be where I am now in terms of proficiency if I hadn't spent a lot of time playing games, reading manga, magazines, and novels, or watching Japanese TV.

Kanji is the biggest wall though, but eventually you get enough kanji and vocab to figure stuff out. At least with English its phonetic and that makes learning words a bit easier. The hard part of English is grammar.

I wish those people who did Japanese subs for anime were more up to date though. I need to transition from English subs to Japanese ones. Considering that my Japanese is improved from over a year ago.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

Kanji is the biggest wall though, but eventually you get enough kanji and vocab to figure stuff out. At least with English its phonetic and that makes learning words a bit easier. The hard part of English is grammar.

I wish those people who did Japanese subs for anime were more up to date though. I need to transition from English subs to Japanese ones. Considering that my Japanese is improved from over a year ago.

I learned a boatload of Kanji from video games, manga, and books, etc.

I would sit with an electronic dictionary and search by radical (early 2000s, I didn't have a device with touch screen input) for each Kanji I didn't recognize, or couldn't remember how to read, and then write each one of them down along with the piece of vocabulary it was a part of and how it was read.

Obviously it was easier when there was already Furigana, but that was rarely the case. In fact, I think without Manga, I never would have properly learned about the fun Japanese practice of utilizing Furigana not to necessarily inform how a Kanji is traditionally read, but to attach specific meaning to a phonetic sound.

An example that easily comes to mind is from Hokuto no Ken where the word 宿敵（しゅくてき = longtime enemy） had the Furigana of とも, which usually means "friend." The author wanted the character to say "friend," but have the additional meaning of "rival" behind his words, perhaps indicating a friendship that was born out of rivalry.

Another example of how this is frequently used is in translated novels. I've encountered it particularly often in Japanese translations of western fantasy novels. For example, in the Song of Ice and Fire books, the latest translation of the Night's Watch is "冥夜の守人." I assume that the Kanji would typically be read as "めいやのもりびと," but it only ever appears in the text as such:

〈冥夜の守人〉（ナイツ・ウォッチ）

With the Katakana in parentheses being rendered in Furigana next to the word. It's kind of an in-text translation to attach meaning to the Katakana proper noun.

 

[RangerBAD]

Well, I meant without a dictionary. Heh.

On the subject, I pre-ordered SO5 and I don't have a dictionary to use (and physically it would be hard to look things up for me). Probably stupid of me unless jisho.org works right on the PS4.

Yeah, I've noticed that mangaka use the furigana to do puns and basically not give you the right reading. They'll do the furigana in katakana too.

 

[muteki]

I've thought about SO5 but don't think it is a good candidate for me as the dialogue looks like it auto-advances. I'd be interested to know if it doesn't though. I just don't have the speed to keep up if I can't advance at my own pace and look up something every now and then. It is hard to tell exactly if they are pushing buttons or not in the streams, and maybe there is a setting somewhere.

Gravity Daze has dialogue boxes that don't auto advance and that works out great, I hope P5 is the same.

 

[RangerBAD]

I've thought about SO5 but don't think it is a good candidate for me as the dialogue looks like it auto-advances. I'd be interested to know if it doesn't though. I just don't have the speed to keep up if I can't advance at my own pace and look up something every now and then. It is hard to tell exactly if they are pushing buttons or not in the streams, and maybe there is a setting somewhere.

Gravity Daze has dialogue boxes that don't auto advance and that works out great, I hope P5 is the same.

Yup, it's probably a bad choice, but I wanted to play it. My expectations are set low on if I'll understand the story.

 

[Lord Ghirahim]

In fact, I think without Manga, I never would have properly learned about the fun Japanese practice of utilizing Furigana not to necessarily inform how a Kanji is traditionally read, but to attach specific meaning to a phonetic sound.

An example that easily comes to mind is from Hokuto no Ken where the word 宿敵（しゅくてき = longtime enemy） had the Furigana of とも, which usually means "friend." The author wanted the character to say "friend," but have the additional meaning of "rival" behind his words, perhaps indicating a friendship that was born out of rivalry.

Another example of how this is frequently used is in translated novels. I've encountered it particularly often in Japanese translations of western fantasy novels. For example, in the Song of Ice and Fire books, the latest translation of the Night's Watch is "冥夜の守人." I assume that the Kanji would typically be read as "めいやのもりびと," but it only ever appears in the text as such:

〈冥夜の守人〉（ナイツ・ウォッチ）

With the Katakana in parentheses being rendered in Furigana next to the word. It's kind of an in-text translation to attach meaning to the Katakana proper noun.

https://youtu.be/2POqovvfpHw?t=4m2s

 

[Gacha-pin]

懐かしい。たしか正確には「強敵と書いて友と読む m9( ・`ω ・´)」だよ。

最後にジャンプ（子供向け漫画雑誌）を手に取ったのがいつだか思い出せないくらい昔の話なので記憶が確かじゃないけど、ジャンプでは漢字には全部フリガナが振られていると思う。
自分の小さい時を思い出してみると、字を読んだり語彙を習得するのに漫画が一番の教材になっていたと思う。

Spoiler

あの頃の漫画は今のと比べて数十倍面白かったし

.

TVゲームについてはその頃はまだ漢字が使われてなかったし、今のゲームに比べてテキスト量は少ないし。。。