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Learning Japanese

  • 30-11-2005 4:18pm
    #1
    Kiith
    Moderators, Computer Games Moderators Posts: 23,199 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    ok, so im looking to learn japanese over the next year or few, but im not sure how to start going about it. basically, i want to be able to read the text on japanese games, so i dont have to wait 5 years for them to be brought to america, and their crappy voice actors.

    i've always wanted to learn it, but i havent really done much about it yet. well, thats gonna change. should i try a linguaphone tapes, or should i start straight into a class?


Comments

  • #2
    Dont be at yourself
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 10,582 ✭✭✭✭Dont be at yourself


    A lot of part-time courses will only teach conversational japanese, so that won't be of much use to you.

    Learning Katakana (see the stickies) should be step one. You can do it in a week of not-too-taxing study. That'll go a long way to help you understand text in some Japanese games. (Katakana is used to write foreign words in Japanese. These words are quite prevalent in video-games. Once you can read the katakana, you can figure out the english word easily. "eg. "botan" = "button" etc)

    You'll then need a kanji learning book (to learn the 2000+ characters you'll need to understand your typical game). This isn't mentally taxing, but is very very time consuming and will require a lot of dedication.

    The grammar is fairly simple compared to the likes of english and french, and probably could be studied by yourself. It all depends on dedication.


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