Katakana (カタカナ), which looks like アカサタ.
Kanji (漢字), which looks like 亜加薩太.
Learning kana (hiragana and katakana) shouldn't take very long. I recommend Heisig's Remembering the Hiragana and Heisig's Remembering the Katakana. Practice a few times, try pronouncing the kana on a page of Japanese, and move on. You'll master it once you start using it for real.
-Kanji is a massive topic, and it takes Japanese people their whole lives. I highly recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. You don't have to read the whole book because kanji is also best learned by actively using it, but his introduction and learning methods are very approachable. He trains you to recognize radicals, which is invaluable when they can be so subtle. Compare 牛 and 午, 鳥 and 烏, and 蠧 and 蠢 to see what I mean.
+Kanji is a massive topic, and it takes Japanese people their whole lives to learn. I highly recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. You don't have to read the whole book because kanji is also best learned by actively using it, but his introduction and learning methods are very approachable. He trains you to recognize radicals, which is invaluable when they can be so subtle. Compare 牛 and 午, 鳥 and 烏, and 蠧 and 蠢 to see what I mean.
Start reading and listening to raw Japanese as soon as possible. You will read very, very, very slowly with a high degree of doubt that you are understanding anything correctly at all, but your progress and confidence will snowball over time. The 80/20 rule absolutely applies to Japanese, meaning if you learn 20% of Japanese, you will be 80% fluent! This is why you shouldn't spend too long learning kanji in isolation. You are better off studying the 20% of kanji you encounter 80% of the time!
-For the snowball effect of the 80/20 rule to work, the best things to translate are things that you want to read. This is obviously also a lot more fun than reading textbooks.
+For the snowball effect to work, the best things to translate are things that you want to read. This is obviously also a lot more fun than reading textbooks.
I think the best place to start is material you already know from context anyway. So go to Japanese websites or change the interface on some software you are very familiar with and try to read the buttons. Japanese Yahoo or Japanese Wikipedia is a safe choice. ログイン is log in, 戻る is go back, 画像 is image, etc. You can also start sounding out 外来語 (loanwords), which are usually written in カタカナ. ニュース "nyuusu" is news.
Jump into real books and song lyrics and TV as soon as you can, though!
@@ -88,7 +88,7 @@Children learn Japanese very differently from foreigners, especially since they already know Japanese - they only need to improve their vocabulary and learn kanji. Unlike in English where children must learn to spell and pronounce difficult words, Japanese words in kana are never difficult to pronounce nor have silent letters.
-Children's media is written only in kana. Since Japanese has many homophones and no spaces, a children's book is actually more difficult for beginners to read than an adult's book. imagineifyouwerenewtoenglishandhadtoreadawholeericcarlebooklikethis. With kanji, it's still hard, but at least you can tell where words begin and end and use a dictionary!
+Children's media is written only in kana. Since Japanese has many homophones and no spaces, a children's book is actually more difficult for beginners to read than an adult's book. imagineifyouwerenewtoenglishandhadtoreadawholeericcarlebooklikethis. With kanji, it's still hard, but at least you can tell where words begin and end and use a dictionary!
This means beginners need that magic balance of both kanji and simple grammar. Manga and webcomics written for teenagers are a reasonable place to start.