Practice writing sentences

Hello

I was wondering, since I'm quite new to the language, if anyone knows any tips on how to start off ? now, I've got a grammar book and all I need now (I think) is to put it into practice and expand my Japanese vocabulary.

does anyone have any tips on how to do this? online dictionaries etc? Home-pages, where I can practice writing simple sentences? anything would be great

Thanks.

That's quite a loaded question to be honest.

Personally I'd suggest taking a class. If that's not an option, then I would suggest at least buying a textbook.

The reason being is that you need to build both your grammar knowledge and vocabulary. Even now I find myself struggling at times to say what I want to say because of one of two issues:

1. I don't know the words to say what I want to say

2. I don't know the grammar structures to say what I want to say.

This is a problem I have with a lot of websites etc, you aren't always going to know the words they're using, and you may not have covered the grammar points they're using either.

So if you buy a textbook, and use your other books for reference, you can do the exercises in the book and be assured that you'll be covering things you have the knowledge to complete.

Once you've built up some vocabulary, then you can branch out to other sources to learn extra grammar and such.

I simply feel that the beginning of study is very important. You don't want to confuse yourself by attempting too much, or the mistakes you make could be very difficult to undo.

Remove "DOT" and replace with a period to unlike link to website!

brighthub "dot" com/education/languages/articles/51577.aspx

en "dot" wikipedia "dot" org/wiki/Japanese_particles

en "dot" wikipedia "dot" org/wiki/Japanese_verbs

Sorry about the links, but because I don't have very many posts I can't post complete links yet, so they're chopped, just replace "dot" with a period.............

They are great sites for learning though, trust me!

A lot of information on there so take it slow, keep it basic, and have fun!

Also, I heard someone recommending looking up Japanese Children Books to help with the reading and learning of basic sentences.....

And listen to Angel's words which are wise.............don't get ahead of yourself.

Take it slow, and have fun!

Good Luck!

I've been self-studying Japanese for a year now and I'm more than satisfied with my progress so far.
What things I'd recomend after a year of learning:
1. First of everthing, learn the kana (Hiragana and Katakana). Be sure to spend at least a couple of weeks to make sure you remember them. You can find free aids for your cellphone.
2. Start the excellent downloadable japanese lessons w/audio from NHK. Listen (and read) each lesson several times before advancing to the next one. www nhk.or.jp/lesson. Hear them until you can understand everything what's been said, it's full of everyday sentences. JapanesePod101 is good also but it's audio is not as good (at least the first lessons) and there's no follow up history that get you hooked.
3. Study grammar. Then try to understand the grammar in the sentences you are learning. Wikipedia is good, but short. You can complete with www timwerx.net/home/index.htm, which I like specially the verbs part for it's lenght. It's fully in romaji, though.
Just keep in mind that (like in english) some sencences just are the way they are. They are fixed ones, period, there's nothing to understand there.
4. Start slowly but stubbornly to learn the kanji. Again, there's tons of free cellphone aids for this. I'd recommend learning them in two stages, first the meanings, then the pronunciations (no more than 3/4 per kanji, or you'll get tired of your progress). To give you an idea, I have so far learnt ~500 kanji meanings (~ of the official 2200 for reading the newspaper), but only ~300 pronounciations.
For memorizing them, I'd recommend this site www kanji.koohii.com, related to the famous book "Remembering the Kanji" from James W. Heisig (It's better if you buy it).
They have good stories that help put them in your head.
The one thing I don't agree with is the order for learning them, I first learnt kanjis from grade 1 and 2 and some grade 3 (first's years of japanese primary school), as they are the more frequently used. I don't know if I did good or not in doing so, but It served my needs, now I felt the need to change and I'm doing their regular order.
Excellent on-line dictionary: tangorin.com. You can search kanjis by its parts.

Two things I'd like to say that few to none introductory courses say and I've learnt the hard way.
Kanjis are characters, not words, imagine you cannot make a language with only 2200 words. So, many many words need 2, 3 or more kanjis to be written. Even so, you need to add okurigana to a kanji to make it a word. Most of the kanjis are nouns, verbs or adjectives and the sentence auxiliaries are almost always wirtten in hiragana.

Also, many times the kana written after the kanji is part of the pronunciation of the kanji. It confused me in the beggining that I belived that the furigana over a kanji meant it's full pronunciation, it was not before I started learning kanji's pronunciation that it became clear that the hiragana after the kanji was also part of it. In fact, many times, that's how you know which kanji pronunciation it's been used.

I would start with learning the Kana, you can use Romaji until you are good with Kana. another thing you could do is learn the pronouns (I, you, he, she, ect.) Then learn the word です (desu - to be). Once you have learned all of this you can start saying things about yourself.

私はmatthewです。
watashi ha matthew desu.
I am matthew

from there you should start being able to do things such as introduce yourself.

konnichiwa
watashi ha matthew desu.

from there just study grammar and vocabulary, and you will soon see the results.

I hope this helps, also for studying, I would recommend the site www.Lang-8.com