Do Japanese letters work as full words AND separate letters?
I don't understand this.
Japanese letters obviously stand for full words, but I still encounter these four-letter names that are spelt with four Japanese letters.
For example, Tidus from FFX is named "Tida" in the Japanese version, and in that version his name was spelt with four Japanese letters.
Do they have both types, or what?
It's because Japanese does not have letters. Rather, it's a syllabary alphabet, and its sounds are indicated by various symbols. Additionally, it has two sets of the alphabet.
Hirigana, which is for the native Japanese words
Katakana, which is for foreign words like an American's name
Both sets of the alphabet are pronounced the same - they simply have difering symbols in order to indicate whether or not they are native words.
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Names can also be made up of kanji, and the kanji in the name tends to give it further meaning as each kanji have their own different meaning. The same applies to regular words, the kanji that makes it up has a deeper meaning with regards to the word.
You're forgetting Kanji, where every symbol does stand for a certain word/thought. They have three character systems in total.
Edit: Void beat me to it.
Oh, forgot Kanji
Kanji is more likely to be why it seemed confusing.
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Thanks, everyone.
By the way, do you know of any good sites that teaches Japanese in a user-friendly way?
I'd like it if they showed some basic "letters" and gave examples on general phrases and stuff, and then you could go on from there.
Hmm, I'm not sure of any free websites, but there is a program that I found to be useful when learning French on my own. It's called "Rosetta Stone".
More likely than not, they have one that teaches Japanese. If you have no qualms in using .torrents, I suppose it's free. Otherwise, it's likely to be around 100+ dollars.
Not that I am advocating the use of .torrent files, of course...
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Learning a language by reading an online manual would probably be the hardest way to do it. It's so much easier in a classroom environment where you can hear, as well as see, the words you're learning.
I hear good things about the pimsleur method? xD
It's really just more practical to take a course on it, if at all possible. I would have an incredibly difficult time trying to learn something like a foreign language though a computer...
It's easy to learn Hiragana and Katakana on one's own, though. I'm sure there are plenty of sites that list them. =O
Yes. If you're gonna be a pirate about it, get as many programs as you can.Originally Posted by rubah
-Pimsleur is an audio series that goes over essential words and phrases, and it's quite effective at having you learn those sentences and even how to make them yourself. If you do take this method, just remember to pause the audio when it asks you questions, otherwise the answer will be spoken before you figure it out yourself--destroying the learning process.
-Rosetta, which I haven't tried yet, is the most popular language learning program overall. There is a Japanese course. I imagine it would also focus on learning the writings and all that kind of stuff, which Pimsleur does not do.
If you have iTunes or a similar podcast aggregator, there's a nearly-daily podcast called 'JapanesePod101'. It's been going on for over a year now, so there's a lot of material there. Each podcast is in a different category though, so you can filter through the 'beginner, advanced' etc courses. When I went to Japan last year, I downloaded their 'Survival Phrases' series, and it was quite useful. There are other Learn Japanese podcasts on there, but this one seems the most professional. And podcasts are mostly legal and free.
Good luck.
Not bad, but it won't teach you to read or spell the words. Also, the Japanese lessons in particular can be a bit confusing when they keep varying the pronunciation of what I believe to be "sukoshi" (a little) and others: The speaker keeps on chaning his or her mind as to whether they're gonna pronounce the "u" and the "i". Okay, so I realise the word would be written in kana anyway, so anything goes for pronunciation, plus I realise that romanisation is frowned upon by some people (not me, I condone the idea of bridging gaps between language you stupid otaku assholes, go jerk off to some Battlizerless sentai), which is why they'll say that "there is no 'u' or 'i' in that word".
I say you should definitely give the Pimsleur method a shot, but make sure to try and read up on the romanisation and transliteration methods, as it'll make remembering some of the words one HELL of a lot easier.
There are 3 ways to write in Japanese: Hiragana, which is a phonetic alphabet; Katakana, which is a phonetic alphabet used to spell foreign words; and Kanji, which uses different characters for different words. Hehe, I've always wanted to use semicolons like that.
This is pretty much exactly it in a nutshell. However, Kanji has an additional use.
Seeing as a single Kanji character has a whole meaning of its own, there will be more than one way to pronounce it. For this reason, Kanji does get used to "customise" your surname: The "Nana" in "Nanahara" (Battle Royale character) was written using the kanji for "seven". Also, anyone who ever completed the first Zelda game on the NES will have seen that Shigeru Miyamoto's name was incorrectly transliterated as "Shigeru Miyahon". I'm assuming that the kanji for "moto" can also be "hon".
If you ever learn Japanese, you'll be able to do this with your own surname so long as you transliterate it into Japanese first; my surname, Ammundsen, could be "Amundosen", "Amunzen", "Anmundosen" and so forth when written in kana... so I could potentially use the kana for "A", the kanji for "mu" (if there is one anyway; mu means "void"), the kana for "n" and then either the kanji for "zen" (is that even a Japanese word?) or the kana for "do-se-n".
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