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The thoughts, reviews and analysis of Comedy, Romance, Drama and Slice of Life Anime of a College Student

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Japanese Language and Kanji – How Exactly do you Learn Them?

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Artist: 長塩

Artist: 長塩

Throughout my 3 years of teaching myself Japanese, I have learned quite a lot. To me, the grammar and vocabulary was not the difficult part since I am used to the subject-object-word sentence structure from studying Latin in High School. So far, I can understand most of what they are saying providing that I have a Japanese-English dictionary by my side.

For most people, the Kanji or rather Chinese Characters tends to be the hardest part of the Japanese language since it uses logographic characters (in addition to Kana) opposed to the traditional roman characters. People might be asking: why do we need it when we have ひらがな and カタカナ? I will answer that question along with sharing strategies I currently use to understand them.
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Is Learning Japanese Really that Easy? It Depends…

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Artist: ハシブト

Artist: ハシブト

It has been nearly three years since I began teaching myself Japanese. Sure, it’s not an easy process as it took a good amount of effort, practice to start understanding. So far, I can understand a good amount with a dictionary.

Just the last past week, a post by 10bit has caught my attention as he thinks that learning Japanese is a lot easier than everyone thinks. However, I have mixed feelings about his post not because he didn’t really list any starting points, but for the fact that not everyone will have the same experience.
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Newcomer’s Guide to Importing and Using Japanese Games as Practice (Updated!)

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Last year, I shared my experiences on how I use video games as a supplement to practice my Japanese skills. When I was looking at Overlord-G’s guide on Yuri and it got me thinking, it’s probably a good idea to make a Newcomer’s guide on how to use Japanese language video games to practice Japanese. I have wanted to write a more detailed guide for a while. Since importing games got easier in the past years, why not?

This guide is more suited for people who are at an Intermediate or Advanced Japanese level. For people who are beginning to learn the language, you should probably hold off until you know both polite and casual speech.

Update: If you need help with using video games for self-study or want to help others, there is now a discussion forum dedicated for it along with an up to date guide.
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Experience of Using Japanese Video Games as Practice

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Artist: miyama-zero

As you may know from my review of the Playstation Vita, I actually use video games as a way to practice what I have learned besides studying the textbook, memorizing new vocabulary and writing sentences. While the readings are great in the textbook as they show how the grammar is being used for a particular lesson, it can get a bit cheesy at times as it’s usually consists of people talking about school life and such. For that reason, I decided to play some video games in raw Japanese and I had a pretty good experience from it.
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A Year of Self-Studying Japanese – Some Experiences

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It’s almost a year since I started teaching myself Japanese and I think it would be best to share some of my experiences in certain aspects. Obviously, learning a second language takes a lot of commitment and it’s not easy like buying Rosetta Stone (which is a big waste of money) and expecting instant gratification. It took a lot of effort since it’s learning by doing.

On the surface, Asian languages tend to be difficult since most of them use logograms, also known as Chinese Characters along with different grammar rules. With practice and constant studying, it’s just like learning any other language, except it takes a bit more time to have a basic understanding

Aside from that, here are some observations I had after one year of studying.
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Journey of Self-Studying Japanese – Study Strategies and Technology

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Since it’s been about 8 months since I started Learning Japanese, I want to touch on some of the strategies and resources I used to practice and retain what I have learned. This includes a mix of traditional practice and technology to help me out. (Image Source)
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Journey of Self-Studying Japanese – Casual (Short) Forms

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Despite finishing the grammar in the first book, I have to admit that I fell behind because I played too much Idolmaster 2 instead of studying Japanese. Since the spring semester started about three weeks ago, I’m playing catch up and hopefully I can cover lost ground. Either way, this self-study progress will only focus on the short/casual forms.
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Journey of Self-Studying Japanese – Tackling Verb and Adjective Conjugations

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From last time, I shared my first hand experiences of self-studying the Japanese Language last month. Another month passed by and I have learned quite a lot, most namely one of the intimidating aspects of the language, verb and adjective conjugations.

Note: This post uses the ruby HTML5 tag to view the Furigana for any Kanji used. If you use Firefox, install this extension. This is not necessary in Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer.
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Experiences of Self-Learning Japanese: First Observations

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Up until now, I have only spoken English mainly because somehow in my childhood, I decided not to attend Chinese school. Sadly, being monolingual is painful because now I have become interested in playing The Idolmaster, which is only in Japanese. Not only that, I wanted to prepare myself for the future since knowing another language looks better on the résumé opposed to just English.

Since I have motivated myself to self-study the Japanese language, I memorized all the Kana along with two lessons (currently on the 3rd) in one month. Through my experiences, I found the beginning rather easy to grasp. Thus, I share my experiences thus far. (Image Source)

Note: This post uses the ruby HTML5 tag to view the Furigana for any Kanji used. If you use Firefox, install this extension. This is not necessary in Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer.
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