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!

There are websites out there that list people looking for conversational practice. You can find a person willing to speak with you in Japanese and in exchange can teach them a little English.

I found the Teach Yourself series to be pretty good for self study, I've used Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone for other languages, they seem okay as well.

Thanks for your suggestions, brianjungwi. I've always wondered about the Rosetta Stone products; it seem like I see their advertisements everywhere.

When you say that you want to be able to read Japanese, do you mean you want to master the kanji characters? There are close to 2000 characters that are used as the base list for most publications. For many English speakers it is kanji that holds up progression in learning Japanese, because a lot of time has to be spent on characters. They can be fun, and learning them is interesting, but they are time consuming for most learners.

Japanese also has two simpler scripts which are similar to an alphabet. These take very little time to learn, and there are plenty of resources for these (book and on-line). Unfortunately, you never find anything written only in script, unless it has been written for a non Japanese speaker, or for the under fives.

A mix of characters and script is the norm.

On the other hand, pronunciation is not a big problem. The scripts are phonetic and are great for note taking and marking the pronunciation of characters. Many texts for beginners decide to use 'romaji' (English) notation for words. With only a few simple rules you can usually pronounce anything in script or romaji. Japanese does not have tones, but it does have a large number of homophones. These are easy to distinguish with characters.

So, what is your goal? There are some books that teach characters in order of frequency of use. Others teach them in character groups, or topic groups. There are ones that start with simplest characters. I think it would help to know where you want to go with this, and what you want to achieve.

I'm sure I have some of my materials listed here on LT. I could check my real shelves for ones that might help you.

Thank you for your response, bookhobbyjapan.

Yes, eventually, I would like to master kanji, but I know that's going to take some time, effort, and practice. So, for now, I'm working on learning my kana (and am trying to avoid things written only with romaji).

A great online tool that I've found to help me learn the characters is http://www.realkana.com/ which allows you to build your own "flashcard" deck in up to seven different fonts. Once I get the characters down, I'll hopefully be able to start putting them together into words. Already I'm looking at signs and being able to recognize bits and pieces, which is encouraging.

So, when I've mastered my kana, I'm planning to start in on my vocabulary and grammar, including conversational Japanese, and to begin learning kanji. Like I said, I'm primarily interested in being able to read in Japanese, but would like to be able to listen and understand and maybe even speak without making too much of a fool of myself. And then there's always writing, too. Thanks again!

Actually, I had the opposite experience from what bookshobbyjapan described above. There was a steep learning curve for my first 100 or so kanji, and then after that reading was a breeze compared to building oral proficiency.

Kanji are visual, so once you have a working knowledge of their components you can make informed guesses as to the meanings of unfamiliar characters much more easily than guessing the meanings of unfamiliar English words (without any knowledge of Latin or Greek roots). You can also build comprehension in kanji recognition and grammatical forms is through self-study. Speaking, on the other hand, is much trickier, because much of it is situational.

In fact, being able to read Japanese might actually aid your speaking ability, because kana allow authors to accurately phonetically transcribe dialect and vernacular speech, which isn't true of English.

Thanks for sharing Trismegistus!

Sure the jôyô kanji are just under 2000, but you will need more than that to read a work of literature + you need to be able to read and understand the words that they form when put together. Learning to read Japanese takes years. So you need to be prepared for some frustration in the process. That said, when you do succeed you will find that it is worth the hard work.

Of course you need to learn the kana first. For learning kanji you can use flashcards and what not, but really, you need to start reading some simple texts as soon as possible. Reading is much more effective than looking at flashcards. However, you need to have a basic grasp of some grammar before you can do that.

For teaching yourself Japanese I would recommend Minna no nihongo series. Gives a good overview of basic Japanese grammar, and it concentrates on a few points for each lesson. It is great for beginners.

Also, go have a look at www.smart.fm which is a good tool for learning languages.

Thanks for posting, danielbeattie. I do realize that I have a long path in front of me, but I'm looking forward to it and have been enjoying it so far. I've gotten pretty good at recognizing my kana and so now that I'm more or less comfortable with it I feel like I can start tackling textbooks and grammars. I still need to work on my handwriting, though. Right now, I've got my hands on An Introduction to Modern Japanese since it was available at the library but I'll look into Minna no nihongo as you suggest--I've seen it mentioned a few other places as well. I've also been listening to Pimsleur courses on my commute which helps a bit with pronunciation and just getting a feel of what Japanese sounds like.

You could also check www.japanesepod101.com. They do some free podcasts that are quite useful. They also have materials that you have to pay for, but is you just download the podcasts it is free.

Excellent, thank you!

A piece of software that I find really helpful for studying kanji is Kingkanji by gakusoft.
It's an electronic flashcard system that works on a variety of operating systems including windows mobile and gives you feedback when you practice writing if you have a touch screen device. You can create your own lessons based on whatever book you're using but also comes with readymade lessons for several popular textbooks.

I hadn't come across that before, yomisugi, thanks. It looks very interesting--and they even offer a 30-day free trial! (http://www.gakusoft.com/kingkanji.htm) I'll have to dig around for my old Palm and try it out.

Few people can become really fluent readers gradually adding characters. If you, like me, have a lousy rote memory, soon afer you get started with Chinese characters, you need to try to find a couple months to learn a couple thousand. Then you will not need to spend too much time in dictionaries and can read enough to make kanji yours forever (until you become senile at any rate). I recommend making your own cards using a thick pen and, as you test yourself, separating those cards into 3-6 stacks each with characters probably recallable after various time periods, for good recall depends on properly timed reinforcement. I jumped from taking a few university courses to a graduate school majoring in Japanese (though I would drop out to write a book) by such self-study.

You might check out "Absolute Beginner's Guide to Hiragana" for a painless introduction to the written language. Traditionally, people learn Hiragana first, and then move on to Katakana and Kanji.