A Japanese language guide for analytical thinkers

by mbrubeck • 17 years ago

82 28 17 years ago

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

This is the reference I wish I had when I was learning Japanese. I tend to learn natural languages a lot like I learn programming languages: I get a lot faster at learning once someone explains the underlying rules and how they combine and interact.

keyist• 17 years ago

Thanks mbrubeck, great reference.

I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Step-Innovative-Approach-Spea... as another excellent resource. Written by an engineer for engineers, with detailed flow charts for the various conjugation rules and other aspects of the grammar.

The book lists the various common sentence structures then teaches you how to expand the various fragments to construct more complex sentences. Somewhat similar to learning via a CFG and deriving a parse tree. if you want to absolutely nail your Japanese grammar, this is a solid logical way to go about it.

Book's biggest drawback is that it is rather dry. You will need to complement it with a book that focuses on vocabulary, idioms, and colloquialisms so that you don't sound like a robot.

altxwally• 17 years ago

The best books I've read regarding learning japaenese are 'Making Sense of Japanese Grammar'. I recommend it a lot. http://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Japanese-Grammar-Paper/dp...

If it weren't for that book I would have never understood why there are so many exceptions with verbs regarding the whole intransitive and transitive thing.

rwmj• 17 years ago

I once got some way through writing a program which turned OCaml variants into Japanese sentences. So you'd write something along the lines of:

`IsIn (`Noun "neko", `Noun "uchi")

(except usually far more complex) and it would generate the Japanese sentence, working out is "neko" is animate or not and so how to translate `IsIn correctly.

caffeine• 17 years ago

Brilliant! Where was this all my life?

I only wish he would deconstruct Kanji and the resulting combinatorial explosion in the same way...

mullr3• 17 years ago

Use this: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Ch...

And this: http://kanji.koohii.com/

The problem becomes tractable, and maybe even a little friendly.

Fwiw, the explosion isn't really combinatorial. It'd better if it was, because at least that would be predictable. No, it's best though of as entirely irregular combinations of a medium-sized number of components. But the aforementioned resources help you deal with it.

brianobush5• 17 years ago

I can't upvote this enough. I went from 200-300 Kanji characters that I acquired painfully to now 2053 Kanji characters using RTK in about four months. I use Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) to do reviews, but the Kanji koohii site is awesome for stories and has a nice active forum. I keep track of my progress here: http://kd7yhr.blogspot.com/

bemmu• 17 years ago

This always seems to come up whenever Japanese is mentioned. Just to balance this, RTK is not for everyone, personally I am having more luck with repeating kanji while seeing them in context in written material.

rgrieselhuber5• 17 years ago

Reminds me of Japanese: The Spoken Language, which is what I used to learn Japanese. It's quite challenging at first but I can't think of a better way for an adult to learn the language well.

brianobush5• 17 years ago

I am going to knock this because I used it. Problem: the written part of Japanese. You read this book and learn how to talk a bit, take a plane to Japan, then bam - surrounded by the visually amazing, but daunting Kanji. The Jorden school of thought totally disregards the written and focuses on the spoken. That is fine, but the wrong path to real Japanese fluency. The best way to start learning Japanese is to get into the writing system (hiragana), Kanji (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji), grammar and start reading real Japanese. がんばって！

rgrieselhuber5• 17 years ago

This is a long-standing debate. :-)

I do agree that people who use this approach are behind others in reading / writing performance. Indeed, it took me awhile to catch up. But fortunately this is something you can pick up on your own fairly well.

On the flip side, to be brutally honest, 99% of the people (that I've met anyway) who come through programs that focus on reading / writing sound horrible when they speak. They tend to suck at grammar, their intonation is all wrong and have a very hard time creating complex sentences. It could just be the sampling that I've interacted with but I can always tell the difference immediately between a JSL student and someone who focused on reading / writing.

Why is this important? It depends on your job / life but I personally spend my most important moments interacting with people via speech, not text. I'd much rather create a strong impression in person up front. It makes all the difference.

gchucky• 17 years ago

Sorry, I gotta disagree with you. Learning Japanese using an antiquated romaji system (si vs shi, etc.) and not learning any kana or kanji won't get you very far. What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?

I saw Eleanor Jorden (writer of JSL) talk at Cornell, and a kid in the audience asked, "I opened a book and saw a bunch of squiggly lines!" To throw out a language's native written system is folly.

We used the Genki bookset in school, and it worked pretty well.

rgrieselhuber5• 17 years ago

See my other comment. I would be willing to bet that more top performers under the JSL system compared with top performers under a reading / writing focused system will end up being much more successful in careers / life in Japanese society.

Japanese people take for granted that Kanji is hard and are forgiving when Westerners aren't that great at it, but it's painfully hard to listen to someone speak with non-native intonation and poor grammar.

eas• 17 years ago

> What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?

Anyone have an idea of how difficult it would be to do an augmented reality iPhone app that would translate these signs, etc., on the fly for you? If I were traveling, I would probably buy an iPhone just for that app.

A quick Google search turned up this NYT article [1] from 2002 about the idea. Does this exist in a retail app already?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/what-s-next-poi...

joeminkie• 17 years ago

Thanks for this link.

I took ~3 years of Japanese (using Japanese for Busy People I - III) but I'm definitely not as far along as I'd like to be.

This is the best replacement for a ~$300 electronic dictionary on the iPhone I've found so far: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa... (iTunes link). As it's been said, learning to speak vs. learning to read is a whole different story.

known• 17 years ago

afaik

    japanese language = japanese culture

ersi• 17 years ago

This reminds me of my Japanese classes in high school, my/our teacher had made his own litterature for the class and we constantly played our scenarios/theater/sketches. Trained Japanese "thinking", grammar, writing, talking, interacting.. all at the same time. Landed me at "little of everything".. I wish I paid more attention now!

A Japanese language guide for analytical thinkers

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