8 ms·

This doesn't seem to be a good resource to learn the language as a beginner. For example Prof Victor Mair is against teaching Chinese characters to beginners:

This doesn't seem to be a good resource to learn the language as a beginner. For example Prof Victor Mair is against teaching Chinese characters to beginners: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 pay little or no attention to memorizing characters (I would have been content with actively mastering 25 or so very high frequency characters and passively recognizing at most a hundred or so high frequency characters during the first year) focus on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, particles, morphology, syntax, idioms, patterns, constructions, sentence structure, rhythm, prosody, and so forth — real language, not the script

TheRealPomax 10y ago
This book is not for people who want to stay a beginner for a year, this is for people who want to learn the language at the same pace as a typical university student: you get a few weeks to learn hiragana and katakana, then the romaji is taken away. After a year, you'll already know anywhere between 1000 common kanji and the full jouyou set. I wrote this book based on that need. So step 1: learn hiragana, because after the introductory chapter you're not getting romanised Japanese anymore. However, because it's not a writing course, all kanji have furigana so that you can read every sentence. This book is not going to calmly and gently lead you through the Japanese grammar, it's meant as a proper "you need this book for a year at most, after that you should already know everything that we cover". Perhaps not to the degree that you can duplicate the book, or in a way that makes you remember all the technical terms, but all the constructions and how they use them: this is the pace you run through learning Japanese at first year university level.
- beevai142 10y ago
  Mair's argument is that it is a waste of effort to spend time on learning the characters, in the first stages of learning the language. They are more easily learnt systematically somewhat later on, when you know the corresponding words to which you can anchor them. Note that the people advocating for this are university language professors and teachers, who are claiming they have data backing up the claim.
  - TheRealPomax 10y ago
    Right, my counter to that is that's great if you want to leisurely learn Japanese, but also not very relevant for the type of course this book supports. These typically start you on kanji pretty much in week 3, in conjunction with the word lists that support the kanji you're learning every week (and constantly use throughout that week and subsequent ones), specifically because of the argument raised: learning kanji without the words they're in, and even if that, without using those words, is ridiculous.
    - beevai142 10y ago
      The argument above applies specifically to university courses, and was made by someone who is familiar with teaching such courses. So I don't think you can just discount it with handwaving, especially as there are claims about better success rates.
      - TheRealPomax 10y ago
        I'm not discounting anything, but different people want, or need, different courses. My book is geared specifically towards people who are to enthusiastically committed to learning Japanese, and want more information about the language they're paying money for to learn, with some assumptions about what that means: they, like me, and like many of my fellow students at the time, but not like everyone, want to learn Japanese properly, without hand holding because some grammar or some orthography is deemed too hard. We'll see whether that's the case as we learn, not as an assumption baked into the course. Of course that method doesn't work for everyone, but for me, and for many others, but again not for everyone, getting kanji early was exciting, motivating, and awesome. I would have been angry at a promise of a better approach without kanji for half a year as a paying student. So that's the book you get here, too: I am not making assumptions on how slowly you want material, this is a grammar for supplementing your course work, or deep diving if that's what you want to do. And if the Japanese used in the book is too much, too soon: it's a free book, find one you feel fits you better. But we're better off with a spectrum of works: rather than every book following the best methodology, we need all those methodologies, and then people who go hard, fast, can pick the hard, fast books, and people who don't can pick the slower, "better success rate" approaches and do well with those instead. And another comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516, expands on that a bit more.
- redthrow 10y ago
  I'm sorry but I think the book is getting priorities wrong when the learner's goal is to learn practical Japanese. Also I think some example sentences in the book would sound awkward to native speakers. (e.g. "今日自転車で帰り中で転んでしまいました", "もっと安いのありましょうか", "お箸の使い方に慣れてない人に難しいです" (this may be a typo), "きれいじゃないで、明るい部屋です", etc.) I think this girl gives better advice on how to learn Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GonYTz0txKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GonYTz0txKI
  - TheRealPomax 10y ago
    Then it should please you to know that is not the goal of the book. This is a grammar (a type of educational book), not a "Learn Japanese" course book, and is to supplement courses (institutional or personal) in Japanese, to act as reference and deep-dive material =) As for odd sounding sentences: nice! let me know about them on the github repo. Link's in the side nav as the github icon, but the direct link is https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues
- Karrot_Kream 10y ago
  Pomax, I met you in an IRC channel years ago (2005 I believe), used a very early rendition of your book to teach myself Japanese (it was just a Japanese grammar dictionary at the time, written in DocBook), and promptly ended up become one of the many teenage anime fansubbers of the era. I made so many good memories fansubbing anime and made so many friends who I still cherish today, that I thank you for the amazing introduction to this language that I still relish to this day. Thank you so much for your hard work!
wila 10y ago
Japanese is very different from Chinese, as such the recommendation you are quoting is not making much sense.
- redthrow 10y ago
  The first link is about both Japanese and Chinese. I think Mair's advice of not focusing on the script is valid. Look at Kanamoji-kai for example (if you can read Japanese): http://kanamozi.org/ http://kanamozi.org/
  - new299 10y ago
    He's mostly talking about Kanji from what I can tell. Learning Hiragana is probably a big different. It takes about a weekend and helps with pronunciation. Everybody is different, but I found it useful to at least know about...
    - redthrow 10y ago
      I agree, I'd recommend learners to learn kana because you can learn it in a few weeks (as opposed to many years for kanji, and even after that many years, people - including natives - don't remember them very well). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg
    - Ezhik 10y ago
      With kana there's really no better way to do it than just writing it. Like a certain Japanese guide puts it, "write it 100 times and drink some beer".
resoluteteeth 10y ago
Even if research has shown advantages to waiting to teach the writing system, this approach has become extremely unpopular, to say the least. There are only one or two places still using the textbook "Japanese: The Spoken Language," and all other modern textbooks teach the writing system from the beginning. Even textbooks that used to use romanized Japanese for fairly logical pragmatic reasons, like "Japanese for Busy People," which is aimed specifically at busy adults who are trying to learn the spoken language in the least amount of time/effort, have been rewritten to eliminate romanized Japanese! Many people studying Japanese go so far as to consider the presence of romanized Japanese, even in combination with normal written Japanese, a black mark against a book, a viewpoint which I think is a bit extreme. Additionally, even if there is a benefit to early spoken fluency, it's going to really annoy students when after two years they suddenly have to start learning the writing system from the very beginning. With this approach, students wouldn't be able to use any modern instructional or reference materials for 2-3 years. Basically, they wouldn't be able to study on their own at all. Also, from the standpoint of practical language instruction, since many students drop out of Japanese classes the second they're asked to learn hiragana (much less katakana and kanji), it is much more efficient for all parties involved to have this occur earlier in the process. Many people studying Japanese as a foreign language actually also 1) find it very discouraging to discover that they can't read words they know because they haven't been taught the characters, and 2) find it very difficult to parse romanized Japanese since it is harder to tell where words end and distinguish particles/verb endings from nouns and verb stems. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 > The problem was that all of my language teachers insisted that I memorize hundreds of characters right from the very start. For every person who is mad that that they were made to learn kanji from the beginning, there is another who thinks their Japanese ability was permanently impaired by not being taught kanji early enough (I have met plenty of the latter). Regardless of the method, there are people who are going to object to it.
Grue3 10y ago
You will never remember, or "passively recognize" any characters, (especially low-frequency ones) unless you specifically focus on remembering them. Also, at least 75% of words meanings become trivial once you learn what their corresponding characters mean. Or you can spend all your time getting all those similarly-sounding kanji compounds mixed up in your head because you can only write them in hiragana.
T-R 10y ago
> pay little or no attention to memorizing characters I'm not usually one to speak bluntly, but, at least for Japanese, speaking from a lot of experience, this is flat out the wrong approach. Older books like the romanzied "Japanese for Busy People" took this approach. I started with this book, it felt easy at the time, but it was immensely impractical - you don't build up enough of a base to learn from any other material. It's completely useless. After over a year, in a formal setting, I ultimately decided to just completely start over. Currently Japanese courses mostly just focus on Hiragana and Katakana, since material for children usually has pronunciation guides over the kanji anyway. This is workable, but it just gives you no leverage where you could have some - you end up memorizing a thousand indiviaul words, some of which maybe kind of sound similar in parts, when you could instead learn a dozen charcters, and know that they share root words. Phoenetic approaches work for children who are in a situation where they can memorize from immersion with native speakers, and have additional clues like context and intonation to emphasize root words, to pick up new vocabulary. When I started studying Chinese, we instead went with a "radicals-first" approach, and after just a short time of that, my Japanese vocabulary exploded - I could suddenly pick out all the seafood on a menu, and I started asking people mid-conversation "oh, does that use these characters?", and I could understand what it meant without them having to struggle to translate to English: Heart+Electric+Map - it's probably an electrocardiogram, especially if we're talking about hospitals. If you haven't learned the kanji, you don't even know if you can make that association from the sounds, much less how to ask that question. That's how you get to fluency, by building up a foundation that lets you learn without active study. You can't get there by avoiding the basis of word composition in the language. Apologies if my frustration with characters-last approaches came through a little strong - they wasted a lot of my time.
- redthrow 10y ago
  Mair's point is that "building up a foundation" means learning the language not the script. > characters-last approaches I think it's more accurate to call what Mair's advocating a "language-first-characters-later-if-necessary" approach. Here's what Mair said about Chinese classes: It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25. If the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarin—strictly romanized, mind you. But there are exceedingly few teachers who are enlightened enough to teach it that way. http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-how-to-argue-for-foreign-language-instruction/ http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-h...

TheRealPomax 10y ago

This book is not for people who want to stay a beginner for a year, this is for people who want to learn the language at the same pace as a typical university student: you get a few weeks to learn hiragana and katakana, then the romaji is taken away. After a year, you'll already know anywhere between 1000 common kanji and the full jouyou set. I wrote this book based on that need. So step 1: learn hiragana, because after the introductory chapter you're not getting romanised Japanese anymore. However, because it's not a writing course, all kanji have furigana so that you can read every sentence. This book is not going to calmly and gently lead you through the Japanese grammar, it's meant as a proper "you need this book for a year at most, after that you should already know everything that we cover". Perhaps not to the degree that you can duplicate the book, or in a way that makes you remember all the technical terms, but all the constructions and how they use them: this is the pace you run through learning Japanese at first year university level.

beevai142 10y ago
Mair's argument is that it is a waste of effort to spend time on learning the characters, in the first stages of learning the language. They are more easily learnt systematically somewhat later on, when you know the corresponding words to which you can anchor them. Note that the people advocating for this are university language professors and teachers, who are claiming they have data backing up the claim.
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Right, my counter to that is that's great if you want to leisurely learn Japanese, but also not very relevant for the type of course this book supports. These typically start you on kanji pretty much in week 3, in conjunction with the word lists that support the kanji you're learning every week (and constantly use throughout that week and subsequent ones), specifically because of the argument raised: learning kanji without the words they're in, and even if that, without using those words, is ridiculous.
  - beevai142 10y ago
    The argument above applies specifically to university courses, and was made by someone who is familiar with teaching such courses. So I don't think you can just discount it with handwaving, especially as there are claims about better success rates.
    - TheRealPomax 10y ago
      I'm not discounting anything, but different people want, or need, different courses. My book is geared specifically towards people who are to enthusiastically committed to learning Japanese, and want more information about the language they're paying money for to learn, with some assumptions about what that means: they, like me, and like many of my fellow students at the time, but not like everyone, want to learn Japanese properly, without hand holding because some grammar or some orthography is deemed too hard. We'll see whether that's the case as we learn, not as an assumption baked into the course. Of course that method doesn't work for everyone, but for me, and for many others, but again not for everyone, getting kanji early was exciting, motivating, and awesome. I would have been angry at a promise of a better approach without kanji for half a year as a paying student. So that's the book you get here, too: I am not making assumptions on how slowly you want material, this is a grammar for supplementing your course work, or deep diving if that's what you want to do. And if the Japanese used in the book is too much, too soon: it's a free book, find one you feel fits you better. But we're better off with a spectrum of works: rather than every book following the best methodology, we need all those methodologies, and then people who go hard, fast, can pick the hard, fast books, and people who don't can pick the slower, "better success rate" approaches and do well with those instead. And another comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516, expands on that a bit more.
redthrow 10y ago
I'm sorry but I think the book is getting priorities wrong when the learner's goal is to learn practical Japanese. Also I think some example sentences in the book would sound awkward to native speakers. (e.g. "今日自転車で帰り中で転んでしまいました", "もっと安いのありましょうか", "お箸の使い方に慣れてない人に難しいです" (this may be a typo), "きれいじゃないで、明るい部屋です", etc.) I think this girl gives better advice on how to learn Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GonYTz0txKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GonYTz0txKI
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Then it should please you to know that is not the goal of the book. This is a grammar (a type of educational book), not a "Learn Japanese" course book, and is to supplement courses (institutional or personal) in Japanese, to act as reference and deep-dive material =) As for odd sounding sentences: nice! let me know about them on the github repo. Link's in the side nav as the github icon, but the direct link is https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues
Karrot_Kream 10y ago
Pomax, I met you in an IRC channel years ago (2005 I believe), used a very early rendition of your book to teach myself Japanese (it was just a Japanese grammar dictionary at the time, written in DocBook), and promptly ended up become one of the many teenage anime fansubbers of the era. I made so many good memories fansubbing anime and made so many friends who I still cherish today, that I thank you for the amazing introduction to this language that I still relish to this day. Thank you so much for your hard work!

wila 10y ago

Japanese is very different from Chinese, as such the recommendation you are quoting is not making much sense.

redthrow 10y ago
The first link is about both Japanese and Chinese. I think Mair's advice of not focusing on the script is valid. Look at Kanamoji-kai for example (if you can read Japanese): http://kanamozi.org/ http://kanamozi.org/
- new299 10y ago
  He's mostly talking about Kanji from what I can tell. Learning Hiragana is probably a big different. It takes about a weekend and helps with pronunciation. Everybody is different, but I found it useful to at least know about...
  - redthrow 10y ago
    I agree, I'd recommend learners to learn kana because you can learn it in a few weeks (as opposed to many years for kanji, and even after that many years, people - including natives - don't remember them very well). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg
  - Ezhik 10y ago
    With kana there's really no better way to do it than just writing it. Like a certain Japanese guide puts it, "write it 100 times and drink some beer".

resoluteteeth 10y ago

Even if research has shown advantages to waiting to teach the writing system, this approach has become extremely unpopular, to say the least. There are only one or two places still using the textbook "Japanese: The Spoken Language," and all other modern textbooks teach the writing system from the beginning. Even textbooks that used to use romanized Japanese for fairly logical pragmatic reasons, like "Japanese for Busy People," which is aimed specifically at busy adults who are trying to learn the spoken language in the least amount of time/effort, have been rewritten to eliminate romanized Japanese! Many people studying Japanese go so far as to consider the presence of romanized Japanese, even in combination with normal written Japanese, a black mark against a book, a viewpoint which I think is a bit extreme. Additionally, even if there is a benefit to early spoken fluency, it's going to really annoy students when after two years they suddenly have to start learning the writing system from the very beginning. With this approach, students wouldn't be able to use any modern instructional or reference materials for 2-3 years. Basically, they wouldn't be able to study on their own at all. Also, from the standpoint of practical language instruction, since many students drop out of Japanese classes the second they're asked to learn hiragana (much less katakana and kanji), it is much more efficient for all parties involved to have this occur earlier in the process. Many people studying Japanese as a foreign language actually also 1) find it very discouraging to discover that they can't read words they know because they haven't been taught the characters, and 2) find it very difficult to parse romanized Japanese since it is harder to tell where words end and distinguish particles/verb endings from nouns and verb stems. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 > The problem was that all of my language teachers insisted that I memorize hundreds of characters right from the very start. For every person who is mad that that they were made to learn kanji from the beginning, there is another who thinks their Japanese ability was permanently impaired by not being taught kanji early enough (I have met plenty of the latter). Regardless of the method, there are people who are going to object to it.

Grue3 10y ago

You will never remember, or "passively recognize" any characters, (especially low-frequency ones) unless you specifically focus on remembering them. Also, at least 75% of words meanings become trivial once you learn what their corresponding characters mean. Or you can spend all your time getting all those similarly-sounding kanji compounds mixed up in your head because you can only write them in hiragana.

T-R 10y ago

> pay little or no attention to memorizing characters I'm not usually one to speak bluntly, but, at least for Japanese, speaking from a lot of experience, this is flat out the wrong approach. Older books like the romanzied "Japanese for Busy People" took this approach. I started with this book, it felt easy at the time, but it was immensely impractical - you don't build up enough of a base to learn from any other material. It's completely useless. After over a year, in a formal setting, I ultimately decided to just completely start over. Currently Japanese courses mostly just focus on Hiragana and Katakana, since material for children usually has pronunciation guides over the kanji anyway. This is workable, but it just gives you no leverage where you could have some - you end up memorizing a thousand indiviaul words, some of which maybe kind of sound similar in parts, when you could instead learn a dozen charcters, and know that they share root words. Phoenetic approaches work for children who are in a situation where they can memorize from immersion with native speakers, and have additional clues like context and intonation to emphasize root words, to pick up new vocabulary. When I started studying Chinese, we instead went with a "radicals-first" approach, and after just a short time of that, my Japanese vocabulary exploded - I could suddenly pick out all the seafood on a menu, and I started asking people mid-conversation "oh, does that use these characters?", and I could understand what it meant without them having to struggle to translate to English: Heart+Electric+Map - it's probably an electrocardiogram, especially if we're talking about hospitals. If you haven't learned the kanji, you don't even know if you can make that association from the sounds, much less how to ask that question. That's how you get to fluency, by building up a foundation that lets you learn without active study. You can't get there by avoiding the basis of word composition in the language. Apologies if my frustration with characters-last approaches came through a little strong - they wasted a lot of my time.

redthrow 10y ago
Mair's point is that "building up a foundation" means learning the language not the script. > characters-last approaches I think it's more accurate to call what Mair's advocating a "language-first-characters-later-if-necessary" approach. Here's what Mair said about Chinese classes: It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25. If the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarin—strictly romanized, mind you. But there are exceedingly few teachers who are enlightened enough to teach it that way. http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-how-to-argue-for-foreign-language-instruction/ http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-h...