In 2002 I went to work in Japan and learn Japanese. I have learned a lot about the Japanese language and culture, and about living and working in Japan. If you want to do this too, then I hope you will find this information useful.
The Canon Wordtank IDC-310 is a brilliant little electronic dictionary. The main function is to translate English to Japanese and vice versa. You can also look up kanji based on reading, radical or stroke count, and look up words based on any component kanji.
Most Japanese electronic dictionaries are generally available only in Japan. There are some companies that sell them overseas. If you are learning Japanese, especially if you live in Japan, I highly recommend carrying one with you all the time. They range from simple word-lookup dictionaries to full language translation units with kanji lookup and handwriting recognition. They are all more or less useful, but make sure you get one that’s right for your level.
I think this is the best method available for learning kanji, but it’s not for everyone.
This first volume teaches you how to recognize, write and understand the meanings of over 2000 kanji. It seems to be succeeding so far for me, though I am only up to about 400 or so. The idea is that you learn all the characters using this book, and then Volume II helps you learn readings (pronunciations) and some words containing the characters.
If you are learning kanji using James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji books, these study cards are invaluable. Heisig recommends a specific method of studying and reviewing the kanji. The method uses cards to allow you to quickly review the meanings and readings of each kanji. He has created a set of pre-printed kanji cards to save you having to write out all 2000 cards yourself.
I have found these a great help in my kanji study; when I am learning new kanji I carry around a hundred of the cards with me. This way I can review a few kanji during any spare moments.
This book is a really interesting exploration into the origins of the 2000 most common kanji in Japanese. It gives a lot of information about where each kanji comes from — like most writing systems, the characters were once pictures, and this book shows where they came from and how they came to be as they are now.
Continue reading “Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters” »
These books are simple and logical, with good English explanations of the points covered in each lesson. The language used is appropriate for business people, so may be less appropriate for you, depending on what you want to learn Japanese for. The kana versions are far superior to the romaji versions. You have to learn kana anyway, and it’s not hard, so why not start from the beginning? Volume 1 uses hardly any kanji, but volume II introduces a dozen or so with each lesson. Useful for recognition, but you’ll need a proper kanji book to learn them properly.
Continue reading “Japanese for Busy People (kana version)” »
This excellent book is great value. The kanji (Chinese characters) used in Japanese seem impossible to learn at first (there are thousands of them), but this book gives a glimpse of where they came from and how they can be learned. Spend a few hours reading this book, and you will be able to recognise and know the meaning of a couple of hundred kanji. It shows how fascinating the kanji are, and whets your appetite for the far more detailed (and long) method in “Remembering the Kanji”.
The first task is to learn the two phonetic syllabaries used in Japanese. Each has 46 basic symbols (plus a few extras). They’re not too hard to learn — I learned the hiragana in about a week by rote memorization. But then I bought this book and learned the katakana in about one hour!
AJALT are the people who publish the Japanese for Busy People books, so if you like those books you might want to investigate their Japanese language classes. After some investigation, I have heard that their classes are good but are geared more toward executive learners. This means that the class size is small and the lessons are provided in smaller doses with less homework.
I investigated quite a few Japanese language classes in Tokyo. I heard some recommendations for the Japanese Language Institute (Nichibei Kawai Gakuin) in Yotsuya. I heard that this school is very good for conversation and quite reasonable for the price. However, apparently the workload is heavy and if you get behind in class, there is no remedial help to get you back on track.