So you want to teach yourself Japanese? Part One
90% of my fluency went up in smoke.
One of my 2019 goals is to re-learn all that Japanese fluency that I lost. I'm pretty much starting from scratch, so if you're also interested in teaching yourself Japanese, I invite you to come along on this journey with me.
GENKI: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese, 2nd Edition
GENKI: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese, Workbook
JapanesePod101 and their Youtube Channel
Memrise.com - Japanese
DuoLingo App - Japanese
Essential Japanese - but ONLY for the audio CD
I also have a variety of handouts, practice sheets, and some flash cards from my old university class. I will strive to provide links to those resources as I'm able to locate them!
げんきですね〜
I found this fun graphic (which was HUGE so I broke it down into smaller parts to fit on my blog) from Language Nerds and while I don't believe that anyone can become truly fluent in just three months - it does break down the best way to start learning a language from scratch!
Since we're tackling Japanese, apparently one of the hardest languages to learn, it's even more important that we start incorporating how to write a word while we learn how to speak it and use it in a sentence.
Let's start with some simple Japanese phrases:
おはようございます ohayou gozaimasu– Good Morning
こんにちは konnichiwa – Hello / Good afternoon!
ありがとうございます arigatou gozaimasu– Thank You
すみません sumimasen– Excuse Me, I’m Sorry, Thank you
こんばんは konbanwa - Good evening
ごめんなさい gomen nasai - I'm Sorry
Next lesson, we'll start practicing hiragana!
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It's great you learnt a foreign language. I think that's one of the best experiences in life. Especially Japanese! My best friend took 3 years of Japanese classes and I, 3 years of Chinese mandarin. He always argues that Chinese is harderthan Japanese and I always insist that Japanese is harder than Chinese and that therefore he's more brave than me. LOL!
ReplyDeleteI definitely think Chinese would be WAYY harder - Japanese has a finite set of sounds that exist in the language, but Chinese has all that tonal stuff going on, where if you say the same word just slightly different it becomes a totally different word.
DeleteThough writing Japanese might be harder because that's three different integrated "alphabets" to master.
I think you're right about the writing. And yes the 5 tones in Chinese can be confusing when you speak.
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