Japanese Vocabulary

I'm studying Japanese in college.

SO FAR, I'm actually pretty good with grammar. Writing and reading aren't too difficult for me either.

Vocabulary is what kills me. Our textbooks are useless when it comes to vocabulary. It gives the oddest words, some of which I don't even care to know yet. The book has taught words for "earthquake", "train crash", "dead-end" and "appointment", but still hasn't taught useful words such as "dog", "mother", "dinner" etc etc

So, I want to know if the otaku on EoFF know of any good sites or books that have useful vocabulary lists.

I'm constantly confusing my roommate. He gets frustrated when I can't tell him something simple like I'll be going to dinner with my family, but then I surprise him with strange statements about how I was riding my bicycle before it broke down at the intersection near the front of the library. :|

Oh and if you have some crazy way to learn things like this, tell me! I'm stuck with flashcards that have different colored words on them. It gets boring after a while, and I really forget that stuff pretty easily.

my french teacher was the same way. One of the last verbs we learned in the first year was "to be".

How did rubahs learn french

And dont you dare say "immersion"

I practiced the numbers by playing ff2! I'd get into a battle and start using the select/cancel trick and count in french how many times I'd selected so I'd level up one spell every battle xDDD

and it was high school, so we would all practice by speaking it to one another.

Listened to radio.fr quite a bit

and study abroad 8D

Look for Nakama 1. This is the text book I'm using for my college Japanese. Just be careful cause if you can't read Hiragana the book is difficult to read. I'm currently working on a midterm paper that involves me writing out a schedule for myself that includes past tense and adverbs.

I really enjoy the book cause it forces you to learn the writing style and grammar and much of the starting lessons are practical as opposed to memorizing exotic and weird phrases. If you get the book set, it comes with discs and and workbook that will help you out as well.

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Originally Posted by rubah

I practiced the numbers by playing ff2! I'd get into a battle and start using the select/cancel trick and count in french how many times I'd selected so I'd level up one spell every battle xDDD

and it was high school, so we would all practice by speaking it to one another.

Listened to radio.fr quite a bit

and study abroad 8D

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Wow, I did something similar with Final Fantasy 1, but with Japanese instead.

You should totally help me with French. I'm studying independently right now because a friend of mine is from France.

Anyway, one way I tried to improve my Japanese vocabulary before, or at least practice it, was play Final Fantasy 1 with a kana chart and a dictionary on-hand. It really helped with kana a lot more than vocab, and it's not like you could fit saving a princess or going back in time in a normal conversation. But it might be pretty fun practice anyway!

When I studied Japanese briefly at university, we used the Genki series of textbooks. The website also has a 'self-study' page with a vocab section that might help you out.

I'm jealous of you that you found grammar easy. Vocabulary was relatively easy for me given that I could recognise most of the kanji I encountered since I'm Chinese and all. I already knew what most kanji meant just by looking at it, I just had to remember how it was pronounced, and sometimes even that was similar to Chinese (like 'hospital' and 'library')/

inu 犬

It looks like big [dai] 大 but with a slash that goes DOWN on the top right
Also I don't care what you say 狗 is dog.
ka-san - 母 [actually this isn't how you write ka-san but it was the first thing that came to mind when I thought of mother]
I dunno what dinner is...

oh 夕食Yūshoku

朝食 Chōshoku breakfast

Gohan - ご飯

デスね?

I wrote a guide to traveling to Japan in my blog, and part eight includes a list of Japanese language sites: here.

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Originally Posted by ShlupQuack

I wrote a guide to traveling to Japan in my blog, and part eight includes a list of Japanese language sites: here.

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Man all of the phonetics is driving me crazy. I know these are geared toward white america, not otaku animu fags, but still...

Anyway useful!