And when I say that I can read I mean that I know the syllables, that is I can pronounce the words in the text. I still don’t know many words and wouldn’t know what was written even when I know how to pronounce it. It feels kind of like you’re a little kid that can read the words very slowly, but not always have a grip of what you’re actually reading.

I’ve always been interested in language and recently gained an interest in linguistics as well. However I’m not that good when it comes to languages, sure I can read, write and speak English fluently, but for example I took French classes for four years and can barely say even a single sentence now. Besides English and Swedish I can read and understand spoken Norwegian as well as Danish (unless the speaker has a heavy dialect). I now wish that I had taken classes in German instead of French when I was in school, since I think I would have more use for German due to my interest in WWII history. But nevertheless I still have an interest in languages, and that is of key importance when you want to learn a new language. You need to be passionate about it and you need to devote a lot of time to it.

Tools for learning Japanese

This article is not intended to list good ways to learn Japanese, since I am unable to do that seeing as how I don’t know Japanese yet. But what I will do is list the different tools and sources I use right now, and then later on I intend to write more in depth articles on each of the tools I find really useful.

Course books

These first books are the course books for the Japanese courses I’m planning on taking this fall. So these are books intended for students, and I hope they will give me some good foundation to stand on.

Genki 1: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese 1 & Workbook

The main course book, and it’s packed with lessons for both speaking and reading/writing. So far I find this book to work quite well, it has some odd parts and it’s quite clearly primarily intended for foreign students living in Japan. With its associated workbook I think it will be a good start for learning the language even though I have to do all the classroom exercises by myself instead of with a friend for the moment.

Easy Kana Workbook

Or Easy Kana Workbook: Basic Practice in Hiragana and Katakana for Japanese Language Students to give it its full title. It’s a simple “repeat what I’m writing” sort of book, and I think it will be helpful when you’re trying to write Hiragana and Katakana. It’s quite fun actually to experience again how hard it really is to learn a new writing system. So you’ll definitely need a lot of practice to be able to write kana at the same speed as you can write your latin alphabet.

A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar

It is what it says, a dictionary of basic Japanese grammar. I haven’t really looked into this book so much yet, but it is interesting to note the usage of romaji (romanization of Japanese). Genki 1 only uses romaji in the first two lessons, but being a dictionary this book isn’t written “in order” so to speak and you’ll find romaji written under every single word or sentence.

Kodansha’s Furigana: Japanese-English Dictionary

I really like this dictionary. It doesn’t use any romaji at all, but it does use furigana — which is when you write kana above the kanji, so you don’t need to know every kanji to read it — which I find to be the absolutely best solution to learn Japanese for beginners. As for the dictionary part, it’s pretty straight forward and uses sentences for setting words in context and so on.

Manga as a language help

Japanese in Mangaland: Learning the Basics

I wouldn’t recommend to use only manga when you’re learning Japanese, since the language used in manga might not be best for a beginner to learn. It can contain very much slang and doesn’t always follow the rules, even such basic as when to use katakana or hiragana. But this book has some benefits as well. The lessons aren’t as stiff as traditional course literature, it also introduces new language concepts at a different rate and always shows panels from well known manga series to illustrate the point.

Manga series

I think that using actual manga series in combination with the books mentioned above can be a nice and fun way to expand the learning. I’ve bought two books, both in furigana, that I have yet to read. I planned on ordering from Amazon.co.jp but their shipping costs were so high that it was cheaper to buy imported books here in Sweden, although that selection was clearly limited and I ended up buying Chi’s Sweet Home and NANA.

Technology is your friend

Dictionaries and translation

Books are great for learning new languages, but with all the technology around us it would be a disservice to yourself not to use it. Mac OS X comes with a Japanese dictionary, a Japanese-English dictionary and a Japanese thesaurus — which are all a great help for looking up words and so on. (I’ll write an article on the subject of Japanese on the Mac later on, because it’s a fantastic tool in itself.) And then you have Google Translate that does a fairly good job translating sentences, paragraphs and even complete websites. I should add that I only use Google Translate to translate Japanese to English and not directly to Swedish, since the translation into English is always much more accurate.

The Firefox add-on Rikaichan is another great dictionary help, just hover over a word (in kanji, hiragana or katakana) it will show a detailed list of meanings as well as the pronunciation if you hover over a kanji and the stem of the word.

Smart.fm

Smart.fm is a, as the company behinds it says, next-generation learning platform. What Smart.fm does, and does well, is to remind you when you need to study something, and it does this very intelligently. It was Smart.fm that made me learn hiragana and katakana so fast, and not just fast but also did it by building up a foundation. This service is not intended for cramming, it’s main purpose is long time learning. I think this tool will be exceptionally helpful in learning Japanese, and I intend to use the Genki 1 goals on the site along with the course book, as well as several other goals.

Human Japanese

I’ve tried quite a few iPhone apps and the only one worth commenting on at this point is Human Japanese. The best way to describe it would be to call it an interactive language book. The text is very well written, and it has a different style from most course books, but since it’s written by a single person there are some problems. I’m guessing that the person that wrote it finds grammar the more difficult part, but learning new words very easy — which results in chapters where 50 or so new words are introduced as if you learn them instantly, and at same time another entire chapter can be devoted to a specific language structure that I had absolutely no problem of grasping after a sentence or two. So this does make it a bit annoying, but all in all I find it to be a great resource. The application also features thousands of voice recordings that will help you learn pronunciation and improve listening skills, it also features games and quizzes that helps the learning of new words.

YouTube-channels

There is a rather large J-vlog community (video bloggers in/about Japan) on YouTube. I currently subscribe to 20 j-vlog channels via RSS, but I won’t list them here right now — that will be a later article I imagine. But what I do want to say is that it seems to be a truly friendly community and it’s a great way to get a glimpse at life in Tokyo in particular and Japan in general. I’ve also found that since these people talk about every day life and not classic text book Japanese they’ve introduced me to several words and sentences that are really convenient but not something that I would normally learn (at least not this early on). On a side note though, most of the j-vloggers I follow are foreigners living in Japan, and since Japanese isn’t their native language it’s important not to take after their pronunciation.

It’s in no way Chrome’s fault, which in fact is a pretty stable and good browser. But without my add-ons — like Adblock Plus, Greasemonkey and NoScript — the entire experience was so different from what I’m used to. Every page I visited was full of the most horrible flash ads, both with and without audio noise, and on sites like YouTube the comments took up more space than the video for example.

While on that subject, as I assume most people have discovered already, the comments on YouTube almost makes you lose faith in humanity if you still had any. I’m quite serious, during my Chrome test drive I watched some of the j-vlog videos I subscribe to via RSS and even the most helpful and friendly videos were full of several hundred hateful, sexist and just terrible comments.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but for some reason it did in at least a little bit. I’m so used to having comments hidden (with Greasemonkey) on sites like YouTube, and if anything this is a comment about myself. Anonymity and the mentality that leads to for example Godwin’s Law is something that shouldn’t surprise me, neither should ads do. But for some reason it did.

While writing this article I watched a clip, incidentally on YouTube, of the wonderful Stephen Fry when he was on The Graham Norton Show. Fry is a little bit better with the words than me and his thoughts on this subject sums up mine as well pretty perfectly:

I love the online world [...] but there is a downside, it literally is the downside. If you look at someone’s blog or you look at a YouTube film or something like that it’s filled with comments. People who have decided to be unutterably mean, unutterably resentful and angry and bitter and insulting and rude. That is the unwanted dead caterpillar in the otherwise lovely salad of the Internet. — Stephen Fry

Blinking lime green ads — in 2010?

Ads on the Internet are a joke to be honest, and I see no moral or otherwise problem with disabling them. Some argue that you’re robbing the website from possible revenue, but I’m not in any way going to buy stuff from ads. I’ve never clicked on a single ad since I stopped using Netscape in the mid 90’s or so. When I watch something on the TV I just skip the commercials (since I rarely watch stuff live on the TV) and when reading a magazine I don’t even glance at the ads. Sure, if I see something in the corner of my eye it will get into my subconscious and if I block the ad entirely that won’t happen — but I don’t see that as a valid point.

When I’m reading a magazine the ads are often still photos or of a minimalistic character, but on the net everything is moving, blinking, screaming or if all else fails — everything at once. This is one of the reasons I was surprised when I used Chrome, because I thought we had left most of those ads behind us. That wasn’t the case it seems like, during my rather short test drive I saw several blinking lime green “This is no joke! You’re the 457,254,567,234 visitor to this site, click here to claim your prize” or something along those lines as well as “Punch/Shoot/Hit the [something]” with some crap moving all over the screen.

I know marketing is impossible to figure out, which is why there are so many failed campaigns and oh so many laughable examples. However, when you see some of that you still go What The Fuck. It’s one thing when you are seeing these ads when you’re on an obscure website or someones blog, but when you see them on some of the largest news papers websites it’s just unbelievable. These are companies that have dealt with ads and marketing for decades if not a century.

I’m all for companies making money and selling their product, and without ads many of the websites and podcasts I view/listen to wouldn’t be available. I’m all for new methods of them trying to sell me stuff, I understand the whole capitalistic part. What I don’t understand is why we are stuck with the same concepts and ideas that were present in the 90’s. Sure, back then it was animated GIF-files and now they are using Flash, but they way they are marketing is basically unchanged. This goes more or less for all medias, as I think the commercial breaks on TVs are dying as well.

According to the Qikipedia (the QI Elves Twitter feed) “85% of the clicking on web ads is done by 8% of the people. In the past two years, the number of clicks has halved.” and “A web ad with a 0.44% click-through rate is considered a success“. This if anything goes to show just how much I think this advertisement business model needs to change, it’s outdated and not only has it a low success rate but it negatively affects the web experience for the majority of its users.

All in all I’m glad I have my add-ons, but I would be happier if I didn’t have to use them to have a decent web experience. This goes for comments as well as ads. But then again I doubt the comments bit will change, since humans have always been assholes and combined with the somewhat false sense of anonymity it goes a long way… Just wanted to vent a bit.