Realningu Japaneseru

[toblix]

So, after Capcom fucked everyone up the ass by not releasing the next Ace Prosecutor game or whatever it's called in English, I've decided to learn Japanese. I know some of you are ahead of me (for the time being), so some questions:

1. What is it called, the language of scribbles they use in those games?
   
2. What is the best way of learning to decipher them?
   

[pabosher]

Kanji

I dont know.

[Kolzig]

The written language consists of kanji, hiragana and katakana.

Romaji is for suckers like me.

[Roderick]

See, I knew there was a reason I started learning this stuff last January. Nostradamus can kiss my ass.

Oh, what Kolzig says. Do not learn romaji. You might feel it's a good way to start out, but it's laughably useless.

Step 1: Learn hiragana & katakana (shouldn't take more than a week each if you're ambitious)

Step 2: Start learning the kanji and dig into grammar. There's tons of resources on the web for this, and Rosetta Stone is an excellent way to put down a basis if you flesh it out with other methods and studies.

[toblix]

Thanks!

So these three things you mention are different alphabets, like?

[Kolzig]

Like Rodi already wrote, first learn hiragana and katakana, these are the easiest as both have on 48 characters. So in total it's 96 characters and then you are off to a good start already.

All three are used to form sentences. Katakana is used for foreign words not of Japanese origin.

There is basically no limit to the amount of kanji characters and not even Japanese people know all of them, that's why pretty much everyone in Japan carries an electronic dictionary with them.

And yeah like Rodi said, don't learn romaji. It's pretty much useless and you'll be a sucker if you do.

[Tanukitsune]

I... learned to read Japanese from the instruction manual from Mario Paint...

I almost reached kindergarten level (?)once and then just stopped, but I can still read most hiragana and katana and remember a few basic kanji.

Rosetta Stone seems pretty expensive, has anybody tried or heard of Nihongoup.com? I was thinking of giving the free version a go to see if I can actual learn anything.

Tell me if you find anything that's affordable and works, toblix!

But I wonder... Does anybody know how much does the game story change when they localize it? Do they just translated it or do they alter the story a bit to fit the Western audience?

[Roderick]

I'd like to nuance what Kolzig wrote about the kanji a little. There are about 40,000 kanji all in all and practically no one knows them all. Whether Japanese all carry pocket dictionaries, I wouldn't know, but the comforting fact is that you don't need to know all kanji to function in society.

The Japanese government has compiled a list of about 2300 kanji that are used in society. Know these and you'll be able to read any sign, newspaper or article out there. This is functionally all you (and most Japanese themselves) need to know. 2300. That's way better than 40,000. Like, way.

I started studying in January and my aim for this year is to learn the first 1000 of that list. The rest next year. This is completely possible. The first thing I learned when I began learning Japanese is how incredibly much the brain can absorb if you're even a trifle dedicated to it. This is something that you don't learn on school, because most of the time you're not actually there to learn things, just to sit out time. This is horrible, but fortunately besides the point.

--

Katakana en hiragana are alphabets in the same way ours is, they phonetically describe syllables (ours obviously uses letters, not whole syllables). In Japanese language it's all about syllables, which is why borrowed words usually sound completely different. They've first been mangled through the system of syllables.

Kanji are a different matter, they are symbols describing whole words, or sometimes you compose multiple kanji like a goddamn Transformer to form a single whole word. It's best to take it one step at a time and start off at the beginning with Rosetta Stone or www.textfugu.com or this essential grammar site: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar. Kanji are a rabbit hole some levels deep, but if you take it step by step it can be extremely exhilirating and rewarding to find out how it all works.

[vimes]

Step 1: Learn hiragana & katakana (shouldn't take more than a week each if you're ambitious)

This is a lie!

Seriously though, I found hiraganas and katakanas to be quite difficult - nowhere near Kanji's insane level, but still - and I'm really impressed that you managed to learn and remember them in 2 weeks when it took me about 2 months to be comfortable with reading and writing hiraganas.

The good thing, though, is that grammar and syntax are way more accessible than, say, French or German ones ...

Actually, I started learning Japanese last year, but gave up on the course a month ago - nobody was taking it seriously and we made no progress for about 4 weeks - but I kind of regret it : learning on my own and without conversations is very hard and all sorts of boring.

[Roderick]

Really? When I meant learning hiragana and katakana, obviously that does not imply being able to read or even write them fluently, that's a slow process of weeks if not months. But simply recognizing the shapes and knowing which sounds belong to them takes little more than a week and the dedication to write the list down three times a day. I guarantee you'll get this shit down within a week.

Learning Japanese on your own has its drawbacks, Vimes is absolutely right. Learning a language is most efficient when you can speak and write it with other people. But why can't you strike up an online contact? I practice speaking over Skype and write e-mails to friends half in Japanese. I won't deny it's hard mustering the motivation to keep doing this every day (which is what it takes if you want to get anywhere), but at only an hour of study a day I make good progress.

[syntheticgerbil]

When you guys are done can you translate some Japanese animated shorts for me? I'll still be around with them sitting on my hard drive.

[Thompson]

When you guys are done can you translate some Japanese animated shorts for me? I'll still be around with them sitting on my hard drive.

The Idle Thumbs anime translation project! Probably going to be a while.

[toblix]

Anime?!

[Lu]

何!?

[toblix]

神聖なクソのたわごと！

[Tanukitsune]

何!?

I can't believe I can still remember what this kanji means...

[Thompson]

[syntheticgerbil]

See?! Already this project is the greatest!

[Sombre]

It's not an alphabet (or series of) of letters, moreso an alphabet of syllables, or sounds. There's no strict alphabet, or one you might be used to.

The problems you'll likely have is sentence structure.

Whereas in English, the sentence might be:

"Toblix complains in a bar, with Video Games Rodkin"

The sentence in Japanese would be:

"Toblix Bar in Video Games Rodkin with complains" (or something to that effect)

It changes what you'd be used to, which is Sentence, Verb, Object, Japanese would be Subject Object and Verb.

Especially as (From what I assume), you're already not a native English speaker (Excuse me if this is an excessively blunt observation), you might have a bit of a hard time with how convoluted with how it seems to come across.

If you try hard to learn though, it's not that bad.

[dium]

Grammar isn't too hard to get a handle of, to be honest. It is very very different from what an English speaker would be used to, but it's also very very consistent, which is more than what you can say for most languages.

I really like Japanese; I like how consistent and well structured it is, but also how (somewhat paradoxically) much it allows you to omit things and allow context to do the work for you. For example, very often you are allowed to completely omit the subject of a sentence. This occasionally creates situations where in casual conversation every sentence consists of just different conjugations of single words.

Kanji is sort of the wrench in anyone's plans to learn Japanese, unfortunately. You have to learn them, it's part of basic literacy. But there is no really good way to approach it, to be honest. And looking up Kanji is such a huge pain compared to looking up words in any other alphabet... unless you have a dictionary that lets you draw it, which I do not.

I can't speak to how quickly it will take to learn: I believe that it can be done quickly with the right amount of dedication, but it took me a very long time to know as much as I do. Also, living in Japan.

[toblix]

Especially as (From what I assume), you're already not a native English speaker (Excuse me if this is an excessively blunt observation), you might have a bit of a hard time with how convoluted with how it seems to come across.

Why are this?

[Erkki]

The sentence in Japanese would be:

"Toblix Bar in Video Games Rodkin with complains" (or something to that effect)

It changes what you'd be used to, which is Sentence, Verb, Object, Japanese would be Subject Object and Verb.

So it's like Reverse Polish Notation ? Now I'm getting interested.

[James]

Especially as (From what I assume), you're already not a native English speaker (Excuse me if this is an excessively blunt observation), you might have a bit of a hard time with how convoluted with how it seems to come across.

One could propose a counter-argument that non-native English speakers have already learnt one foreign language, probably with more aptitude than most English-speakers learn any foreign languages (certainly better than I've managed, anyway), and have therefore had more practice at working outside of their home tongue. I imagine it's significantly harder to learn Japanese than to move between European languages, but at least the language centres of the brain have been better exercised.

This is all pure speculation, of course, and it probably depends much more on the individual than their nationality, anyway.

[Roderick]

I think the reasoning is that most Japanese learning on the web takes place on English sources. I think for most of us it's no big problem at all, since English is (at least for me and I assume for most of us) so ingrained in our system that it takes no additional processing power in the language region. There's no 'extra step' there as opposed to a native English speaker.

The reverse polish notation thing is interesting. There is definitely something like that going on in Japanese language, though if I understand it correctly (still learning!), it's a little more chaotic than that. As long as the verb comes at the end of a sentence, it doesn't seem to matter what order all the other parts come in. Though, yes, the particles indicate what position the nouns, adjectives and verbs have in a sentence. As long as they're there, one is able to figure out what it all means.

I find it extremely compelling, it's like a challenging puzzle. Learning Japanese is way better than sudoku.

[dium]

Once you start embedding verbs and questions into sentences thinking of it in terms of reverse polish notation will really start to mess you up.