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by AutoModerator
3 comments
I finally decided to take the plunge and make a serious effort to learn Japanese. Google brought me here, and the wealth of information in the wiki and posts has been very helpful in getting me prepared, so thanks very much to everyone involved! Almost too much info really–textbooks and websites and apps, oh my!–but Genki was a very common recommendation for starting with, and Amazon had some pretty nice discounts going, so I went with that. Discounts also helped me choose between the various suggested follow-ups: Tobira. And finally, I got both Look and Learn and Kodansha for kanji work.
I did download Anki as well (never heard of it myself, but people seem to love it), but I’m going to be starting with homemade kana flash cards on blank index cards, since I’m very much a learn-by-doer. Also, my English handwriting is crap, so maybe lots of careful practice on Japanese characters will have a bleed-over effect.
Japanese and English being completely different in every way will certainly make this interesting. My first thought was that would make it especially difficult, but then I can also see that making it easier, provided I resist trying to find or manufacture equivalents in English structure/pronunciation/whatever and keep Japanese entirely in its own mental bubble. Have other people found this to be the case?
Couple other questions:
1) Genki has 12 lessons in the first book and 11 in the second. Each lesson seems pretty loaded with content, so it doesn’t look like one lesson per day is the intent. Is there a suggested breakdown of the material into daily study sessions?
2) Looking at the intro to kanji in Genki lesson 3 and the beginning of KLL, there seems to be much overlap (bonus of both having the same authors and publisher?) with only a few differences. Once I get there in Genki, is it safe to simply assimilate the few extra KLL kanji as I go? (Kodansha hasn’t arrived yet, so I don’t know what will be involved there.)
Does anyone have experience studying as a teenager at Kudan? We’ll be going for the summer course and was hoping to get some insider tips!
An artist I follow released a new video the other day and it prominently features the character “ム” and I’ve been wondering if it has any special significance in Japanese culture, tradition, etc.. I’ve done a bit of searching and not really found anything to grasp onto.
Here’s the video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5_0NPftdlY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5_0NPftdlY)
Though if it’s not that, I was thinking maybe it’s just that 無 like in 無問題、and 無い appears a lot in the song? Maybe no one but the artist can know for sure, but I was just curious if there was something obvious.