[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.