Introduction and a few questions

For what it's worth, here's an introduction of myself as I am new here. I'm 19 living in Ohio, I studied Japanese a year or so ago and had learned Katakana, Hiragana and a very small amount of Kanji. I recently started back up learning and I am refreshing my study of Katana and Hiragana. After that I plan to learn as much Kanji as I can. I am going to go to college not this year but next school year. Unfortunately I won't be able to take Japanese classes until my sophomore year but I hope to possibly minor in it. I really don't have a major reason as to why I want to learn it, I just think it would be nice to know a foreign language, I do watch a decent amount of anime and it would be nice to try watching it in Japanese. I also have a collection of famicom and Japanese nintendo 64 games which would be great to play if I could understand them. Here's a few question I have:

1. I'm not expecting much but it would help with motivation, are there any occupations or careers that Japanese is required for? Something that having a minor in Japanese would help me with?

2. What language reference/learning books are suggested? I never really trust most of the books I come across as I feel they are either out dated, too formal, or simply inaccurate.

3. I bought the Spirited Away manga books and I'm trying to translate them just for practice. One thing I can't quite understand is how to tell when one word stops and another starts. For example the first line in this book is もうすぐだよ- which I believe translates to: mousogudayoo. But how do I know where each word is?

Thanks for any help.

You're one of a growing number of people I see recently who seem to confuse learning the characters used to write Japanese with learning the Japanese language itself. Learning the kana syllabaries is great preparation for learning Japanese, but there is little to no benefit or point to trying to learn a bunch of kanji without also learning the language at the same time. Get some proper textbooks and associated materials and work from those.

"Translating" at this stage of the game is an exercise in frustration and self-delusion. In order to translate something, you have to understand it. To understand it, you have to know it. To know it you have to have learned it.

What you're attempting is "decoding" and is guaranteed to drive you nuts and discourage you. Put that project aside until you've actually learned some Japanese language first and not just some Japanese characters.

I would hope that you would approach learning the language without developing the horrible habit of translating everything. Think about it: in order to translate it, you have to understand it. If you understand it, why bother translating it?

Mike Cash said:

You're one of a growing number of people I see recently who seem to confuse learning the characters used to write Japanese with learning the Japanese language itself. Learning the kana syllabaries is great preparation for learning Japanese, but there is little to no benefit or point to trying to learn a bunch of kanji without also learning the language at the same time. Get some proper textbooks and associated materials and work from those.

"Translating" at this stage of the game is an exercise in frustration and self-delusion. In order to translate something, you have to understand it. To understand it, you have to know it. To know it you have to have learned it.

What you're attempting is "decoding" and is guaranteed to drive you nuts and discourage you. Put that project aside until you've actually learned some Japanese language first and not just some Japanese characters.

I would hope that you would approach learning the language without developing the horrible habit of translating everything. Think about it: in order to translate it, you have to understand it. If you understand it, why bother translating it?

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I don't expect to learn Japanese by learning Kanji, I just expect to gain a better understanding and a small amount of vocabulary along with it. My understanding is that it is necessary to learn some kanji at some point so why not? And if not then what is a better option? Also I don't expect to learn much from translating. I feel as if it could be good practice and exercise, I doubt I'll learn much language and no I won't understand much but won't it be good practice to understand how to read?

No, because what you are doing can't be called "reading" either. It is attempting to decode something and driving yourself nuts in the process. The lack of spaces between words is part of the problem. Another part is that verbs (and adjectives) are typically conjugated into many forms, only one of which appears in the dictionary. Then there are the particles, each of which can serve several different functions and have different meanings depending on the usage and context and can be extremely hard to intuit without having learned them first. Then there are double particles. Then there are all sorts of nonstandard slang and colloquialisms and elisions to trip you up....and manga are typically loaded to the brim with those.

I know it seems like a good idea, and it is one we have all had and tried at some point when starting out. Go ahead and give it a whirl if you must. Just don't get discouraged and beat yourself up when you find you make no progress at it and give it up. It actually takes a fairly good bit of learning the language before you're ready to tackle any any material created for native speakers.

Kanji are best learned in context concurrent with learning the language rather than as a separate study on their own. They were sort of a square-peg-in-a-round-hole solution to the problem of creating a writing system, as Chinese and Japanese are quite different languages. You can go ahead and learn them if you want, but it isn't going to prove quite the leg up you may think it will without concurrently learning the language. Get some comprehensive learning materials that cover all this in a sound pedagogical manner instead of hamstringing yourself by attempting to reinvent the Japanese learning wheel like practically every other misguided teenager who ever thought it would be cool to watch anime without subtitles.

I do agree that it's more less just decoding. I just figured reading was more understandable term but if you must decoding is fine.

1) I would say the only jobs that require Japanese are those jobs that are in Japan, and even then they may not require it. However, it can be a useful secondary skill in some cases, particularly if you end up working for an American branch of a Japanese company, or a company that just does lots of business with Japan.

2) Genki is suggested a lot. I liked the dictionaries of Japanese grammar as well.

3) I agree with Mike that this is something best left for later. You'll need to know the words before you can separate them with any sort of ease and accuracy. I can easily see that it's a sentence saying that something is going to happen soon, and comprises もう (adverb meaning "more"), すぐ (adverb meaning "soon"), だ (copula), and よ (sentence-final particle showing opinion or something the speaker expects the listener doesn't know), but that's because I know those words, what they mean, and the grammar that has them stuck together. If you don't have that background, see Mike's points above.

The lack of good, interesting, level-appropriate practice reading materials for beginners is a common lament that goes waaaay back.

Another problem with just looking stuff up is that you can end up spending a lot of your time looking up words that will prove to be of little or no use to you as they just don't come up that often. Poor use of time and brain power.

This online shop is useful for obtaining Japanese learning materials - White Rabbit Express Shop Home page They have a number of Japanese Graded Readers for about $30 each (a little set with five booklets and a CD)- it's expensive, but pretty much the only useful reader I've seen for people at my (beginners) level. They repeat grammar, kanji & vocab throughout and become increasingly more complex. If you're an absolute beginner start at Level 0, otherwise, as long as you've learnt the 1st half of Minna no Nihongo, you can probably start at level 1.

Thanks for the help, I guess until I can find level-appropriate reading material I will stay away from it. Also, concerning kanji, is there any problem in learning it? I figure by the large amount of kanji that exist it is worth getting started on common easier kanji now. I like using flash cards so should I make my own or do you recommend buying real Kanji flash cards like on the whiterabbit website Yakultcat mentioned? Also I'm not sure what to learn, which is my main concern, because there are brush type, pen type, text type versions of all kanjis, some have older variant forms. Then there is 'On' and 'Kun' reading, then of course translating those to english. So I'm not quite sure what all to learn. I'll probably still study a little kanji even if it's not recommended, but if it's not what IS the next recommended step after learning kana? I do have flash cards I made for the particles which I studied awhile back, knowing some of those has come in handy with forming sentences with what little vocab I know.

Also, thanks Yakultcat for the website recommendation, I'm definitely going to take a look around it for reading materials and whatever else I find useful.

Watching "Jigoku Shōjo"....