[elldoubleyew]

I started studying Japanese in 2020 with 「みんなの日本語」(Minna no Nihongo). The book is entirely in Japanese and only assumes that you can read hiragana/katakana and have access to a dictionary for JP -> your native language. The book also includes an audio CD of each of the lessons to practice listening comprehension.

I used the two books, audio CDs, and an excellent YouTube channel called "Nihongoal" that provides supplementary lessons to each chapter in English.

In 2 years of daily study I have a better command of Japanese than I did in Chinese, my college major... Admittedly the Chinese study has helped me immensely with Kanji.

When you study Japanese in Japanese you are constantly reinforcing prior knowledge while acquiring new concepts. Minna no Nihongo does an excellent job of pacing these concepts in a way that is powerful but not overwhelming to a foreigner learning the language.

I guess I am just a bit apprehensive to teaching Japanese in English because of how much efficiency you loose in that concept reinforcement. If you want to learn words and phrases this approach might work, but if you want to actually speak the language I feel that its going to take a lot longer.

[ziddoap]

>I started studying Japanese [...] assumes that you can read hiragana/katakana

Can you explain how this works? This sounds like you were familiar with Japanese, not "started studying".

>When you study Japanese in Japanese

I've heard this before (with other languages, as well) but just can't wrap my head around it. The only example I can think of is full immersion (e.g. moving to Japan or wherever you're learning the language) and being surrounded by it 24/7, where context clues sort of boot-strap you into learning more. But how does this work without full immersion?

[elldoubleyew]

1. Hiragana/katakana can be learned in a week or two using flash cards and spaced repetition. It can be mastered through reading Japanese text for a few months to the point where you stop thinking about it. You don't need a $77 book to learn this, its just brute force memorization. I didn't know any other Japanese going in besides this.

2. Full immersion while ideal is impractical for most people interested in studying this language. You can still give yourself full immersion while learning anywhere in the world by using Japanese learning resources and limiting your English use to the minimum necessary (dictionary lookups, explanations for particularly troublesome concepts).

By the end of MNN 1 going into MNN 2 I swapped from a JP -> EN dictionary to a JP only dictionary. If I didn't understand a word from context in the book I would look it up in the dictionary, if I didn't know a word in the definition I would look that up and so on until I understood using only Japanese.

[ziddoap]

>I didn't know any other Japanese going in __besides this__.

I think that's where I was hung up. It makes total sense to first start with learning hiragana/katakana with whatever preferred method, then move onto something like the book you suggested. Rather than just starting with the book you suggested. And, I'm sure that point is obvious to many and why you left it out. But, as someone who only knows one language, it wasn't as obvious to me.

Thanks for the tips!

[elldoubleyew]

Sure!

One more note that you may or may not be aware of:

Culture and language are closely intertwined, they drive each other, and Japanese is certainly no exception to this.

Japanese isn't spoken as literally or certainly as English is, especially to strangers. They use this system called "Keigo" which you'll find translated as "politeness" but that doesn't really completely encompass the idea. It is just a way of speaking in certain situations that covers your bases. Japanese is a language that is often stereotyped as needing to say a lot to say a little and this is often true.

Its useful to try and learn this intuitively. Hear and see it used often to the point that you just know the idea being communicated. Its difficult to translate many of these concepts to English because of how outside of our cultural sphere they often are (which is why I believe trying to teach them in English from the beginning is a fools errand, they must be learned contextually).

[dymk]

One can learn the kana in a few weeks to a month, depending on how diligently one studies. It's akin to learning a new alphabet (although with quite a few more characters), but it's almost fully phonetic. Know the sounds the mora make, and you can (basically) pronounce the word, and certainly be able to look up the meaning in a dictionary. It's the first step to learning the written language without actually knowing what anything means, and lets you bootstrap Kanji learning as well.

Learning Japanese through immersion doesn't necessarily mean getting thrown in the deep end watching TV, reading newspapers, etc. A just-starting beginner would understand none of that.

This other key to language acquisition is comprehensible input, meaning you're just barely pushing the boundaries of what you're reading / hearing. Adult learners have decades of context to lean on from their native language, and so a good language learning resource will leverage that knowledge as well. みんなの日本語 starts with the very basics and builds from there. Same with Pimsleur (for the spoken language) which contains minimal English.

[ziddoap]

I guess I'm just getting hung up on "started learning", which comes a few weeks or month after already learning all of the characters. It sounds like the OP is suggesting to learn hiragana/katakana first, then continue with their recommended book.

Which makes total sense! And the OP probably left it out because that's the sensible thing to do. But as someone who only speaks one language, I was a bit confused on where I would actually start.

[dymk]

I was in your shoes a year ago! I'm reading at about an N4 level now, and have some very basic speaking ability.

It's daunting, but many people have done it. The key for me was having lots of different resources to learn from. I've found that everything teaches things a little bit differently, and everything skips something that another resource doesn't. Some explanations make more sense than others for certain facets. And of course, the repetition is good (and required).

I'd recommend:

- Write down your goals for what you want to do. Do you want to converse with other Japanese speakers? Write the language? Do you want to read Japanese? Be able to visit the country and communicate? Watch anime without subs/dubs? How you answer these questions will shape the resources you focus your time on. To build a regular habit of studying, you want to feel you're making steady progress towards a goal that you're passionate about.

- Learn hiragana/katakana. You'll not be able to make progress without this. I used a combination of this YouTube video [1] along with the "Japanese!" hiragana/katakana iOS app.

- If you want to read the language, start studying a Kanji deck.

- If you want to speak/listen in JP, start an audio course such an Pimsleur.

- Make your way through Minna no nihongo and/or Genki I.

- Google around for Japanese graded readers for beginners, to practice reading "real" content that has been synthetically simplified.

- Start reading community posts in Japanese language learning communities, and see what resources are being shared around and how people are studying. You'll naturally find a good fit, eventually.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p9Il_j0zjc&t=18s

[cthalupa]

> Can you explain how this works? This sounds like you were familiar with Japanese, not "started studying".

An important piece of context here (for anyone not versed in Japanese) is there there's effectively two sets of characters you need to learn, kana and kanji. The former is sort of an introductory requirement if you plan on learning, and the latter is something that takes most people years.

Kana is (for all intents and purposes you care about as a beginning language learner) split into two sets - hiragana and katakana. These are phonographic and cover specific mora (similar to a vowel), and both cover the same sounds. The corresponding hiragana and katakana often look similar, e.g. (ni) に and ニ, some are identical in both such as (he) へ, some are totally different such as (tsu) つ and ツ.

There's not that many of them, and you can probably learn them over the course of a week if you study diligently. Hiragana is the more important of the two to learn, and katakana is used somewhat similarly to how we would use italics or bold, for sound effects, for foreign loanwords, and similar.

Kanji is the other set of characters, and it's one of the tougher aspects of learning Japanese. ~800 kanji make up the 90th percentile of usage, but then you need another 1300ish to get to the 99th percentile, plus any domain specific ones. To further complicate things, there are multiple "readings" for quite a few kanji. Most kanji are imported Chinese hanzi, and many retain the original (or something close to) Chinese meaning as one of the readings, and a Japanese-specific one for another. The Japanese specific ones will often have hiragana attached.

All kanji can be written in kana. It's not generally done in practice for a variety of reasons - there are plenty of kanji that have the same pronunciation, it takes up more space, it's slower, etc. If I write out "Please buy some sake" (さけ) in hiragana, you won't know if I'm referring to the drink (酒) or the fish (鮭) without further context. Content aimed at people up through high school will frequently have furigana - the kana used for the kanji in question - above kanji, as will most content that uses rarer or domain-specific kanji in a situation where you can't expect the person to be familiar with it.

But when it come to writing beginner textbooks, they can keep things pretty focused, provide enough context, etc., to make it pretty feasible. There's lots of great electronic dictionaries now, so you can pretty easily look words up if you know the kana, etc.

>But how does this work without full immersion?

I think you might be overthinking it a bit - you need to do a little up front before you start working on vocab/grammar/comprehension/etc., but after that it's really just look at word -> look it up if you don't understand it -> figure out the sentence via context and dictionary results -> internalize -> repeat.

Cliff notes: Learning the kana, specifically hiragana, is basically pre-work to start learning Japanese in this sort of situation. I don't know if it's the right approach for everyone - some people might care more about learning some conversational basics before they go on a trip, or just generally need more immediate progress to stay motivated, but it is a method that is constantly self-reinforcing and likely works quite well for the people that can handle that sort of approach.

[timr]

Also learned from MNN. It's worth pointing out that there are companion books that explain the grammar points in English (also many other languages - different books for different languages). Here's a link to eBay for the companion book for the first volume in English (couldn't find it on amazon, for whatever reason):

https://www.ebay.com/itm/ha0793-Minna-no-Nihongo-1-English-T...

The grammar note books are invaluable...MNN can be a little challenging if you don't think like a Japanese person, or have a native teacher to help decipher the content. But they're also dangerous, because you can spend too much time in them at the expense of the actual textbook (I know this from direct experience).

MNN is not my favorite (I recommend Genki for native English speakers), but I agree 100% with OP about learning Japanese from an English-language book. It is a waste of time. Learn hiragana and katakana (you can do this in a couple weeks) and dive into full grammatical immersion. There is no other way.

[toto444]

If you like material that teaches Japanese in Japanese you might like this website : https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html . It uses emoji to introduce new words, uses them over and over in simple short stories to reinforce them and let you guess the grammar from the context.

(Disclaimer : it's mine :-) )

[elldoubleyew]

I looked through the first 4 pages and its cute! I think this could certainly be helpful to someone getting their feet wet with really studying the language.

One of the reasons I tend to hold MNN as gospel is the way that it doesn't treat you like a child. The conversations are very realistic to what you would hear in modern spoken Japanese, with Keigo and all of the clunkiness that comes with it from lesson 1.

I noticed your disclaimer: "Despite being in the form of stories the Japanese used is beginner Japanese and may not reflect the way native speakers would express themselves. "

If its not used by native speakers, why learn it this way? Maybe they could understand you if you spoke like this, but you would be unlikely to understand them without the need to speak to you as if you were 4 years old.

[toto444]

You forgot the second part of this disclaimer is : "As the vocabulary and grammar expands it becomes closer to native speech.".

> If its not used by native speakers, why learn it this way?

Starting with small simplified building block and then refining them is pretty much what every textbook of every discipline out there does isn't it?

(Not saying MNN does not do what you claim. I know it is really good but have never used it )

[bovermyer]

How would you get a grasp of grammar rules, though? And things like counting-words (e.g., "-kai")?

And how do you know if your understanding of a given sentence is correct?

[elldoubleyew]

Grammar rules start by learning verb conjugations, these can be learned through tables, although there are some exceptions you will have to learn individually. This is an excellent free tool for practicing those (not mine, just something I've used): https://baileysnyder.com/jconj/

For structural grammar there are a lot of different routes to go about this, MNN teaches these pretty well in my opinion. I tried using bunpro (https://bunpro.jp) with mixed results but I know some people who swear by it.

As for knowing if your understanding of a sentence is correct, if I have doubts at my level I assume that I am likely incorrect. I typically google the part of the sentence that I am unsure about and either look at images or posts that use it in different contexts. Reverso context is also useful for this (https://context.reverso.net/translation/)

[drshapeless]

Does knowing Chinese helps when learning Japanese? My Chinese is already quite good, and I am looking for another Asian language to learn.

[elldoubleyew]

Only with Kanji. Many share the same meaning, and onyomi reading often sounds a little bit like modern mandarin, but the kunyomi readings are exclusively Japanese and you'll have to memorize those separately (Wanikani was helpful for me in this).

For grammar you are out of luck. Japanese is a much more grammar heavy language than Chinese, typically much more complex.

[Freak_NL]

For written Japanese, a lot (for the kanji). For spoken Japanese, it helps with the words that were borrowed from Chinese — and this is a lot, perhaps 50%. But pronunciation is, obviously, recognizable, but differing. For such words (those that consist of characters that are pronounced using the so called on-yomi reading), you're likely to pick on the sound conversion from Chinese to Japanese and vice versa, and at that point make educated guesses to the meaning of those words. That leaves pure Japanese readings of words of course (which includes almost all verbs excluding the nouns that are verbified by suffixing with an inflection of suru), but it helps in the basis.

[crumpled]

Knowing Chinese Kanji gives a lot of insight into Japanese Kanji, which is borrowed from Chinese. Some of the meanings are exactly the same

[BlargMcLarg]

This is the same reason a lot of alternative JP learning resources recommend against traditional resources (sometimes even native textbooks, tangibly related) and favor sheer immersion instead. It's the same way many non-English speakers learned English as kids before their schools even start teaching them English. Formal education can still fill in the gaps where necessary or cover areas not usually covered in daily life, but it tends to work better as a supplement rather than the bulk of learning.

I too am against it in general, and given the sheer volume of vocabulary and little quirks required to understand Japanese, you'd probably do yourself a massive disservice waiting to dive in any longer than necessary.

[elric]

Is it still in print? The usual book stores all seem to be out.

[timr]

Yes. You can get it on amazon, or at Kinokuniya, if you have one near you. It's also ubiquitous in Japan.

There are also PDFs of it floating around the internet...