Sunday, December 12, 2010

The Japanese

So I said that I would post my plan on how I'm going to learn Japanese and here it is, it may not be the most popular plan with some people but I've picked my pony and I'm going to stick with it.

Step one, the first thing I am doing is going through Remembering the Kanji. It's a system to simply help you remember all 2000 shapes of Kanji. I have multiple resources to help me do this that can double up to help me later. This step is just the very first and on it's own it's pretty worthless, what it does however is gets me to the point where I can start to recognize the different Kanji and then ascribe meanings to them later. This leads us to...

Step two, where I go through the book 2001 Kanji Odyssey: Essential Japanese Kanji. This book takes each Kanji and uses it in multiple sentences. It lists the translation as well as the reading for the Kanji, and since most Kanji have multiple readings this allows me to learn what those readings are and how to recognize what they will be if I see the Kanji in a sentence. It will also help to teach me vocabulary and grammar.

Step three, will pretty much be done in conjunction with step two. I will be going through Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar. This book also gives sentences and there translations, so I will gain more vocabulary as well as of course Grammar.

From this point I will have a good solid basis to find literature, manga, shows, and anime and start to transcribe and translate them, using them as sentences to learn more vocabulary and grammar from. Since One Piece is one of my favorite animes and is simple on concepts I will probably start with that, but something else could easily catch my eye. All the while I will be practicing speech from any anime or source I can find, and I know of at least two conversational Japanese clubs that meet in my city so I will join up with them to start getting the grasp of speaking the language and producing sentences.

So that is my game plan, we will see how well it works, I first need to get through the 2000+ Kanji from RtK. at this point I am 110 Kanji in and should be adding more everyday, wish me luck.

4 comments:

  1. It might be a challenge at first, but the opportunities of being fluent in another language are invaluable. Good Luck!

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  2. Planning your stuff sure is the best way to suceed!

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  3. It's more usual to do grammar, then hiragana, then kanji. I must admit though I knew some Chinese characters first and it helped.

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