Hi all, so I’m starting Japanese classes at my university in August. It’s still a ways away, but I wanted to know if it would be helpful to do a little studying before classes start? I know how to have very very basic conversations, a lot of random words, and a little bit of grammar rules, but I have no idea about hiragana, katakana and kanji.
If I do start studying now, what would you recommend using, as I have a full workload of classes and work and I’m also studying for the GRE.
Thanks!
5 comments
If you can do nothing else; I’d at least learn hiragana and katakana. There are TONS of apps out there for those two things.
But I’d think anything you can do to get ahead will just make it easier on you once you are in the class
can’t hurt. learning the kana will be a big help. also just tool related stuff like trying a bunch of dictionaries, installing an IME on your laptop and phone so you can type in japanese, little things like that can be done in advance. if on iphone, i highly recommend midori. if on android, i install the google handwriting keyboard and japanese keyboard pack, and it lets me draw kana and kanji as input into any field, it’s good practice and way easier to look things up.
Ask the professor what textbook they are using and go ahead and use that
look at the syllabus and see what you can get ahead on
it’ll make studying later much less time consuming
How much you want to pre-study should depend on your goals at university. If you want to major or minor in Japanese and have time (and energy) to dedicate to self-study, you can probably study the course materials for the first year course and take a placement test to skip ahead to the second year.
If you don’t have a lot of time or energy and you just want to pre-study to make classes easier, the suggestions from Painter3016 and eruciform are good: study the kana and get Japanese language input setup on your phone and computer ahead of time.
If you only intend to study kana (hiragana and katakana) and have no plans to try and use it before next fall, then you might not want to start studying until the beginning of summer at the latest. If you learn kana now, but don’t either use it or regularly review it, you may forget much of it by the time classes start.
Seconding (or more-ing by now) the recommendations to learn kana. Hiragana and katakana are often the biggest hurdles I’ve seen beginners encounter in a school setting, and when I was a beginner myself I struggled with them, too. Picking up all our even most of them before your class starts will help a great deal.