Reading and Writing
Along with the Spoken lessons that I have discussed in detail in the above section, you really need to get your Reading and Writing skills up to speed and that is going to require kanji. For Genki 1 and II, each lesson has a corresponding Reading and Writing lesson. It is very easy to follow. First, hiragana and katakana are introduced and you really want to knock out both in a week’s time using constant practice with flashcards during any spare free time. Next up is Kanji.
One thing I learned from Kansai Gaidai during my reading and writing classes is to pay attention to the stroke order. You don’t want to draw the character. Find a quality kanji dictionary that has little numbers next to the strokes and memorize the right order. Also, pay close attention to the little checks you need to include such as when you are writing down and the line ends with an upstroke. I forgot about this during one class and the whole kanji was marked wrong with a red circle where the check point should be.
The first baby step is to memorize the writing of the character by writing the kanji character 20 times or more. It is up to you how long it takes to put the kanji into your memory. Just some friendly advice, don’t practice writing Japanese on notebook paper. Find an art supply or stationary store and buy graphic paper or use Sakubun paper that Japanese students use for essay writing. For Sakubun writing you want to start at the first box all the way to the right and write down from right to left. You get can Sakubun paper for free by going online to JOSHU Japanese Online Self-Help Utility and downloading. Also Jbox and other online stores have practice notebooks available.
Follow up your kanji writing practice with flashcards and make sure that you don’t just study the kun’yomi (Japanese Reading) and on’yomi (Sino-Japanese) readings but learn the kanji combinations. Make sure to add these combinations of kanji and hiragana and multiple kanji on your flashcards.
Now all this work is meaningless unless you study that kanji you have just learned in context. You really need to work through the reading sections to see how to apply and read kanji in a sentence. It is not enough to just write out one kanji a hundred times and spend all Saturday afternoon going over flashcards. Do the reading and answer the questions that follow to see if you are getting it. Otherwise you will just forget what you have just tried to learn.
A very useful supplement to Kanji learning is to take up Shodo (Japanese calligraphy.) A beginner’s set is easily affordable. Then find a Japanese teacher or friends to help you get started. One of the problems is that Japanese people are so used to texting and typing online that handwriting skills suffer. Shodo is a great way to develop good handwriting.
Useful Kanji Books
I was having a hard time memorizing kanji and nothing I was doing seemed to work. Certain kanji started to look similar and I couldn’t tell them apart until I headed to Umeda Station and went inside Books Kinokuniya and bought the very useful A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall. This book uses simple and sometimes funny mnemonics to help you remember. The best part of the book is that it follows the way Japanese schoolchildren learn because it begins with First Grade through Sixth Grade and beyond. By the time you have finished working through A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters, you will have mastered all the Jouyou kanji needed to be able to read a newspaper and a book. As determined by the Japanese Ministry of Education this will be about 1945. Although in 2010, the Japanese Ministry of Education changed that number to 2,136. It takes the average Japanese person about 12-years to do this. I just read an excellent article by Amy Chavez where she talks about learning the Jouyou kanji in 3-years through constant effort and using most of her free time engaged in kanji study.
Next, you want a good kanji dictionary such as The Learners Japanese Kanji Dictionary by Mark Spahn and Wolfgang Hadamitzky. Another excellent one is The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary by Jack Halpern. I would look for a dictionary that includes as many kanji combinations as possible because this will aid in reading. What you are looking for in a kanji dictionary is the one that works for you. You want to be able to pick up the dictionary and quickly look up a kanji without feeling bogged down and getting frustrated.
Japanese high school students hate this next dictionary and I am only including it here for the crazy extreme hardcore advanced students. Every high school student naturally takes Japanese and at that level the classics are studied such as The Tale of Genji, The Tale of Heike, the early SF Taketori Monogatari, as well as earlier histories of Japan such as the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters,) and the Nihon Shoki (The Chronicles of Japan.) To read any of these in the original text and not a modern interpretation, you will need a dictionary of Classical Japanese called a Kogo Jiten. This is vital for any historical text analysis. It can be tricky to use and few are going to want to tackle it but it does open the door to the ancient world and you will need it to make sense of early Japanese.
As much as I love to endorse A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters, it doesn’t contain stroke order. That is why I supplement it with Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn’s Kanji & Kana: A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System that has easy to follow stroke order for each kanji. Just look for the number and write the line, following the direction. Plus, Kanji and Kani has an additional 284 Jinmei-you Kanji that isn’t in A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. That brings the kanji total to 2284. You do need both books because you want stroke order, more kanji, and the other book for mnemonics.
Japanese Language Dictionaries.
Way back in 1995, when I first started learning, I bought Martin’s Concise Japanese Dictionary by Samuel E. Martin, mainly because it was easy to use and follows a Western approach. This dictionary has English to Japanese and Japanese to English. The English section is familiar because entries are listed A to Z. However, it falls short in the Japanese section due to the fact the entries are in romaji with the kanji and kana next to it. You really want to focus on hiragana and katakana and lose every book written in romaji. This will help you later on.
At Kansai Gaidai, my good friend Kenzo recommended Sanseido’s Daily Concise Japanese-English Dictionary and I rushed out to Books Kinokuniya to get one. This follows the Japanese alphabet and has so many useful entries that it became my constant go to dictionary. The Martin sat on my bookshelf untouched. Granted, all the Japanese textbooks that I have mentioned contain glossaries but sometimes I wanted a different English translation or further insight or I just couldn’t find the word I was looking for in the glossary so I would use Sanseido’s. Now, I realize that some folks reading this are not in Japan and may be wondering how to buy these books and for those living in the US, I suggest Books Kinokuniya USA website. If you are searching for a Japanese book like the Sanseido dictionary then you want to enable your computer keyboard for Japanese writing because if you use English in the search box then books in English will come out and you won’t find what you are looking for.
Grammar Dictionaries
Ok, now you have one or more Kanji dictionaries, a word dictionary, so what else do you need? A grammar dictionary is a very useful supplement to lessons because it offers detailed entries that may be missing from your textbook. I highly recommend all beginners pick up A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. It is chocked full of useful knowledge such as word order and each entry has detail descriptions, grammatical diagrams, where to place the word in a sentence, lots of good sample sentences and much needed notes. Although the entries are in romaji, the notes and diagrams put this book way beyond Martin’s.
Next would be A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese by the same authors. I recommend using this book after finished all 23 lessons in Genki I and II.
After that is A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar, again by the same authors and you want to start this one after studying through all 15 lessons in Intermediate Japanese.
Supplemental Books
Here are a few books that I have used throughout the years to supplement my learning from textbooks. Hopefully they will entertain and educate you as they did for me. Some of these books may be out of print so I recommend Abebooks.com or your favorite online used bookstore. Another way to obtain these books is to visit your local used bookstore and find the language section. I find many Japanese books that a lot of people haven’t heard of this way. If you live in the Tampa area then take a trip to Haslam’s Book Store in Downtown St Pete on Central at 2025 Central. The owner’s son works there and he is a big fan of Japanese culture. We talk about Japanese movies when I go there. Your local public library is another useful place to visit for picking up Japanese language learning books.
1.) Essential Japanese Grammar by Everett F. Bleiler. This is basically a lighter version of A Dictionary of Basic Japanese with a general survey of Japanese grammar and key points on constructing a Japanese sentence. It does contain a handy guide to particles and when to use which particle and why.
2.) Common Japanese Phrases by Sanseido and translated by John Brennan. This is another great book for beginners in the Power Japanese series. It contains numerous examples of phrases with details about how and when to use these phrases. This should not be a short cut to putting together your own sentences but how to use language for a variety of occasions. Even if Common Japanese Phrases doesn’t work for you, you should have one phrase book.
3.) Japanese Beyond Words: How To Walk and Talk Like A Native Speaker by Andrew Horvat. This is a useful guide to avoid sounding too much like all your learning is from a textbook. Robin Williams was mocking the textbook approach in Good Morning Vietnam when he was teaching Vietnamese students and instructing them to not say “I would like to buy some cheese and some butter.” Horvat takes a common sense approach to language study and shares keen insights into Japanese culture from hard earned experiences. No Japanese is taught but this book will come in handy in using Japanese in Japan.
4.) Japanese in Action by Jack Seward. The one slang book every student should own by an outrageous writer who is laugh out loud funny. Seward shares bad words that we all pretend that we don’t want to learn but really do want to learn. He offers a comprehensive guide to Japanese fluency that does contain useful Japanese vocabulary that won’t appear in textbooks anytime soon. Seward tells funny stories about his time in Japan. He shows you the steps you need to take to become fluent such as can you speak in Japanese on the phone to order a pizza so that the native speaker can understand your pronunciation without any problems? Highly valuable book.
5.) Japanese Core Words and Phrases: Things You Can’t Find in a Dictionary by Kakuko Shoji. Sometimes you will find yourself struggling to understand a particular sentence and you find that if you merely translate each word and look them up in your Japanese dictionary that you are no closer to understanding. That is when you need this book to make sense out of what appears senseless.
6.) Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You by Jay Rubin. Like Japanese Core Words, this book will help you understand. This is a necessary step into thinking in Japanese and a move away from sounding like you are parroting phrases memorized from a textbook.
7.) Basic Connections: Making Your Japanese Flow by Kakuko Shoji. At some point in studying you want your Japanese to seem natural and you don’t want your ideas to be bogged down. This book will help you reach that flow so you will be expressing yourself clearly.
8.) How To Sound Intelligent In Japanese: A Vocabulary Builder by Charles De Wolf. Ok so you have a Japanese girlfriend or wife that you can speak in simple sentences with or you are living with a host family and you can speak to them using everyday Japanese. However, you meet your Professor at college and are unable to go beyond simple phrases. What to do? This is where How To Sound Intelligent In Japanese will get you to the point that you can discuss politics, humanities, science, technology, legal terms, business, and much more. Learn to communicate with everyone from school children to college professors and you will have better confidence in Japanese.
9.) Japanese Particle Workbook by Taeko Kamiya. My friend and fellow student at Kansai Gaidai, Jay Allen, pointed out something useful to me as we were walking around the campus. He said the three hardest things for anyone learning Japanese are kanji, katakana words, and particles. He is right. I struggled through Level 2 trying to come up with when to use the right particle and why. Fortunately, you don’t have to. The Japanese Particle Workbook is a handy guide that takes 60 particles and shows their 188 functions in grammar. You will have few particle worries after finishing this book.
10.) Read Real Japanese Edited by Micahel Emmerich and Janet Ashby. As Zack Davisson of Japanreviewed.com and countless Amazon reviews pointed out in his review of this book on Amazon, you may be wondering how to make that scary transition from manga to reading an actual book. Read Real Japanese is actually 2 separate books. Michael Emmerich edited the Fiction book and Janet Ashbly edited the Essays. Both books come with CDs with a native Japanese speaker reading the text at native speed. One side has the Japanese text in kanji, hiragana and katakana and the other side has the English translation. There is a glossary in the book, as well as, grammatical notes. What I like about these books is that you don’t need to bring any other books with you, every word is translated in the glossary. These books will help you take that next stepping stone away from manga and towards reading Japanese books.
11.) Nihongo Keigo Training by Koneko Hiroyuki. Japanese is all about politeness levels and at the business level when you speak to someone in the company above you, you will need the highest level of politeness and that is keigo. This book comes with a CD and is an insightful tool for anyone wanting to work in Japan or any Japanese company. You don’t want to use the slang you learned from your buddies or the female speech you picked up from your girlfriend and embarrasses yourself in front of the CEO during a big meeting. A lot of guys try learning from their Japanese girlfriends and develop female speech and if you are male then you really don’t want to do this. You want to be able to carry on a conversation with your superiors using respectful language and Nihongo Keigo Training is a great starting point. I ordered my copy from Whiterabbitjapan.com a company that ships from Japan to the US at a reasonable price. For Advanced students this book is key.
Magazines
1) Mangajin. Back in the early 90’s, I found a small anime store in Clearwater that has long since gone out of business. However, I happen to be browsing inside at all the Ranma ½ posters and spotted a cool magazine called Mangajin that featured how to learn Japanese through comics. It also contained interesting articles on Japanese pop culture, essays from English teachers living in Japan, and the best guide in magazine format for learning Japanese slang. At the end of each issue was a full vocabulary list and I would use that list to supplement my textbook vocabulary. The magazine is long out of print, however, Amazon.com does have the book Mangajin’s Basic Japanese Through Comics by Ashizawa Kazuko that is currently available and takes a similar approach. It may contain the manga used in Mangajin magazine.
2) Nihongo Journal. This is the one magazine that I wish was still available in print. Each issue came with a CD with a native speaker speaking at native speed that was from NHK news. Nihongo Journal offered practical tips on how to pass the JLPT and included practice exam questions and a listening comprehension section on the audio CD. It had articles in Japanese with a full vocabulary list and I would use those lists in addition to the lists from Mangajin and my textbook. This was the most useful magazine out there for learning Japanese. If you can find back issues, buy them up.
3) Hiragana Times. Sadly this is the only current magazine still in print and you can pick up a copy cheaply from Jbox. Hiragana Times is a great magazine for improving your reading skills. Articles appear in Japanese with English translations below. This is a fun way to keep up with current events and pop culture. I only wish it would come with a CD. That is enough reading for now. On to electronics.
No comments:
Post a Comment