Japanese Self-Instruction

I would love to learn Japanese, but unfortunately am not currently able to take a course. Fortunately, I'm pretty good at self-study. So, I'm looking for resources and recommendations (particularly books) for learning Japanese. I'm primarily interested in being able to read Japanese, but eventually would like to be able to hold a conversation. Thanks for the help!

The Japanese for Busy People series is excellent. Get the kana version (that teaches reading & writing) and spend a LOT of time drilling yourself on those forms before moving on to actually learning the language. And then don't cheat yourself by reading Japanese in romanji (english characters). You may want to start with something like "Beginner's Kana Workbook" to learn the hiragana and katakana that are imperative for reading & writing, even before you move on to kanji.

Good luck! The language is a lot of fun.

Thanks for the response Strider66, I'll see if I can find them. And you're totally right about learning the kana and trying not to "cheat" with the romanji.

I like this book too: http://www.librarything.nl/work/330714/book/36182475

Excellent, thank you for the suggestion, mene.

I'm curious about the warnings against romaji; is this because it makes one "lazy" in learning to read the kana?

That has been my assumption--it makes learning the kana (and maybe even kanji) more difficult in the long run. Which makes sense to me. :-)

I have nearly completed the Pimsleur Japanese audio set number 3, which is as high it goes, and I am very satisfied with how much I have learned and retained. I just started learning to write hiragana, which makes a lot more sense to me now since I have a good working vocabulary. I have heard more people are using Rosetta Stone now, but there are a lot of places online where you can buy Pimsleur for way below retail.

The forums at how-to-learn-any-language.com are very useful. People describe their experience with a wide variety of self-instructional material including Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Assimil and others. Also, there links to sites specifically for self-learners such as All Japanese All the Time and various podcasts.

I hope this helps.

Thank you both for your input! I've actually been listening to Pimsleur courses during my commute. My local library has several sets, so I didn't even have to buy it. I've been pretty happy with them so far.

I'd recommend Baron's Mastering Japanese series over Pimsleur, or at the very least using Pimsleur along with a textbook that has a strong emphasis on grammar. Pimsleur is great for learning phrases by rote but decidedly less so for learning the individual functions of all those syllables you're repeating. And that can cause problems once you start trying to put sentences together yourself instead of responding with preset phrases.

Baron's, on the other hand, is based on the Jorden textbooks and will really work you on sentence transformation, conjugations, and politeness levels. Its weakness lies in Jorden's inexplicable decision to use one of the most counterintuitive romanization systems in existence instead of hiragana, but if listening/speaking practice is what you're after, it's one of the best.

I haven't heard of the Baron's series, I'll have to look into it. Never fear--Pimsleur isn't the only thing that I'm using right now. I've pretty much mastered visual recognition of all the kana, now I'm learning to actually write them. I'm using the Japanese for Busy People Kana Workbook for that. I found An Introduction to Modern Japanese at the university library which more or less focuses on reading skills--which is really what I'm interested in at the moment. I haven't really dug into it yet since I'm still mastering my kana, but soon!

It would probably help if I spelled the name of the product correctly--that would be Barron's with two R's. (It also sometimes turns up claiming to be authored by the Foreign Service Language Institute, although it's still the Jorden textbook.)

Japanese for Busy People was the first text I used to learn Japanese and in my opinion one of the best (although the content, like Barron's, is a bit outdated).

And for what it's worth, I managed to get both Barron's Japanese and Korean series through my local library, so that might be an option for you as well if you'd like to check them out.

You can go http://smart.fm/ . There's plenty of language words for you to learn.

Thank you again to everyone!

Hum, my favourite Japanese language manuals are the 'Minna no Nihongo' series.
But you do have to buy a kanji manual, since Minna does not cover kanji...

I've seen several people mention the Minna no Nihongo series now; I'll definitely need to see if I can track down some copies. Thanks!

Phoenix, please write me,

i jiumped from the usual college jpse to graduate work and into grsduate school because of the self-stufdy i devised

rdg

Yeah... I want to learn too. Unfortunately for me, I won't be able to buy books to learn. I'm looking for websites, even anime with English subtitles. I've already learned quite a lot... like Sayonara {ok, well everyone knows that one} or Daijobu {or however you spell it}. I would also like to learn how to read and write, because now, I'm just focusing on speaking.

Even after studying Japanese for two semesters at the University of Hawaii and living in Japan for one year I couldn't understand the spoken language. My pronunciation was pretty good because I memorized a lot of Japanese pop songs and tried to imitate the announcers on NHK TV especially the weather forecast since the vocabulary of the other news was too difficult. What really helped was a set of 25 children's stories that included sound recordings. I learned all the stories which included a lot of expressions used in daily life. In my neighborhood there happened to be a lot of children so I would call them together and tell them the stories. After doing this for 6 months my ability to speak and understand Japanese made a great leap forward.

keigu -
Do you mind sharing some of your strategy here? I went from getting a 4.0 in Japanese in college always being number one in my class to graduate school in chemistry where I wasn't able to use any of my Japanese. Now that that is all over I'm back to Japanese in a self-study mode. I had lost it all I realized (yes, it was still at the back of my head but still rusty) and after about 8 months I've surpassed what I knew before but I'm still building. What do you do for your self-study?

stephaniepx2015 -
Try the website www.renshuu.org for Japanese study. It's a great reference! But you will need to know how to read at least hiragana and katakana. Try websites like www.realkana.com for flash games where you can learn how to read. It's really not that difficult to learn and it'll really put you on track for learning Japanese!

I should state what my self-study includes as it tries to cover all the basics of a language.

For reading:
I read Japanese novels and study the grammar patterns and vocab. It's not about understanding everything, just being able to understand things via context as we do in English when we realize there is a word we don't know.

For writing:
I keep up (or try) a Japanese language blog on lang-8.com, a great resource for any learner of any language. You write your blog entry and then a native speaker corrects it for you. I also do children's kanji workbooks to go back and build up my bases and to make sure I really know all the onyomi and kunyomi. Plus, it makes me write my kanji by hand instead of just relying on the computer to tell me what the kanji is.

For speaking:
I've been back to Japan since which was nice and then I'll Skype with my Jpn friends. But this is the one that I don't get to practice as much.

For listening:
I'm always listening to Japanese music. I listen to a lot of rap and then I listen to a band I love, Yuzu.

Join www.iknow.jp! It's like Rosetta Stone, only without the huge pricetag and it covers so much!

23> Yeah, ikonw/smart.fm used to be free. They lost me when they took all the list I put a lot of hard work into and wouldn't let me access them anymore.

Whatever... maybe it's "even better" now.
But why is it that www.busuu.com can still provide free excellent language assistance (just not in Japanese)?**

** sarcasm

I liked japanese the manga way as a reference guide while learning Japanese, and the best way (I think) to aqcuire the vocab is through practice, so sites like readthekanji.com are useful. Oh, and www.alc.co.jp has a rather good Japanese- English English-Japanese translator.

Thank you for all of the continued suggestions! Another site that I've found that has been very helpful is Kanji Alive from the University of Chicago.

I've went back to Tokyo to study japanese in a school and this time we used 語学留学生のための日本語, or if you preffer: "Gogaku ryuugakusei no tameno nihongo", for grammar and vocabulary. I'd say it's pretty good but sometimes keeps it very simple while it could go a little further.

For kanji, we used "Nihongo Challenge (Kanji)", which is published in Japan, but worth ordering from there (it's sold around 1200yen over there, so don't buy the 40$ ones some crackpots are trying to sell online...