I guess I can ask here: Guidance from the Vets to the many forumites learning Nihongo

[koku]

*I put nihongo because Japanese woudln't fit :p *

For someone studying/taking Japanese here in college or highschool, what are some things you think they should really focus on?

Some things that most people here totally forget to even consider(or just plain don't realize) to practice.

What do you think were some of the hardest things to do? What are some habits/hazards to watch out for while someone studies here?

What are some things you learned now that should you have known about back in highschool or college, you would have done or prepared for differently?

So if you can, use some of your foresight skills and knowledge to perhaps guide me and others in the same scnerio closer to the direction we should be heading. Thanks if you have the time to respond.

Fluency as a goal, through your trial and errors, what has seemed to benefit you the most?

*no worries, everything will be taken in with faith and merit*

[Kaji]

Learn kanji. As you learn what the characters mean, you start figuring out logical combinations and figuring out words before you encounter them, and it also makes it easier to learn new words as you see them.

Regarding how to learn kanji, be sure to learn how to break the characters up into radicals. Practicing using a kanji dictionary or the radical lookup in NJStar is a great way to practice this. This helps establish a basis for grouping characters as well as helping you be able to look them up (e.g. many characters for the various body parts have a radical that looks like the character for "moon" on the left side of the character). Once you've got a handle on radicals, work on learning stroke order. Your characters will look better when you write them, and it's another means of helping you to remember how to write the words.

As for readings, Chinese readings are generally used for compounds, Japanese readings are generally used on their own. Every once in a while there's an exception (koibito, kyuu ni, etc.), but it's a good starting place when trying to figure out new words.

[Henjin]

Before that, learn all the kana. That should be one of your very first goals. It's obvious, I know, but you will get nowhere w/ romaji, and I've seen many lazy people who try to get by w/ romaji.

[Varia]

Surprisingly enough, some people forget to actually put Japanese to use. Get some Japanese friends. No Japanese in you area? Great! That means you can make email friends! Don't know how to find them? http://www.japan-guide.com Now you do.

The biggest thing I did was to try my best to emulate how people spoke. Not necessarily pronunciation, but just how Japanese people use Japanese. I don't know how many times I've noted to myself how I hadn't known how a word or something was used. Do this as early as possible so you can get a good base in Japanese early on. I see so many people who started learning Japanese in really crappy ways, and although they have advanced to high levels of Japanese, their Japanese overall remains on a level that can never reach fluency.

How do you want to speak Japanese? Old people will be the most willing to help you, and will probably talk to you for hours on end, but then you'll end up talking like an old person. What person would want to learn how to talk like an old person? I want to speak like kids my age, so that's who I talk to. Teenagers. But their tolerance level isn't very high, so you'll probably need a higher command of Japanese before you can make friends with them. Of course you could always talk with them in English, but that's not going to improve your Japanese, now is it? Find people that would like to make friends with people from other countries, but would like to do so in Japanese.

Some pointers, I guess.
________
Mb100 (http://www.mercedes-wiki.com/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_MB100)

[mediocre]

There are very many tools out there:

There are more Kanji learning tools/methods out there than most people know what todo with. Alot of internet stuff, alot of books at the bookstore.

Basic conversation stuff, you can goto mininova and download the abundance of audio and video learning japanese material there (pimsleur is good, but it's target audience is the travelling businessperson if that matters to you).

After you have a basic listening comprehension, you can look into shows aimed at children. I figure children's anime would be far easier to find on the internet than sesame street or something of that sort.

As for reading, there of course are newspapers, magazines, websites, comic books, etc etc all out there. Even tools like rikaiXL for firefox to help you out with that kanji you didn't learn or just cant remember at that moment.


Of course, none of these tools will help you with your spoken japanese: you will need to find an actual japanese person for that.

[BigJDiesel20]

Here is a site to Practice recalling your Hiragana

http://www.patrick-brennan.com/javascript/kana_test_001.html

Here is a site to Practice recalling your Katakana

http://www.patrick-brennan.com/javascript/kana_test_002.html

Hope you like it

I found them a long time ago buy acident