Where to Start!

[jazzbeans]

Hello!


So, I started officially learning Japanese in October. I could already read hiragana and katakana and so I'm working on kanji.

I write to two Japanese penpals via e-mail (I recommend this so much, they're great). They help me with my studies a lot.

But, as I was reading through a Japanese Grammar book (recommended to me here, THANK YOU it's really good!), I realised that I wasn't really structually learning anything. I just learn as I go, but I want to focus on something, I just don't know what!

So, I wondered if anyone could tell me a good starting point. Should I learn basic sentences first, particles, verbs, words in general, or something else?

I'd appreciate the help!


Many thanks.

[Jake_Lucas]

I would say that if you want to focus on something for a while, really focus on the kanji, Even if you don't learn readings at least learn the stroke orders for each one from a book like "Remembering the kanji" by james heisig, and definatly focus on things like particles until you have a nice solid understanding of them.

That way even if you don't know a word you will be able to make a good assumption on it's role in a sentence.

Perhaps you could also work through Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide here http://www.guidetojapanese.org/ if you haven't looked at it already ofcourse.

[Javizy]

You'll definitely at least want to try Heisig, since you could very well know the meaning, writing, and on/kun reading of every jouyou character within a year. Quite a nice little bit of knowledge to acquire if you want to go far with Japanese.

Heisig's book introduces a simple mnemonic system which makes remembering characters very easy and effective. Most people finish the book in about 6 months, knowing how to write, from memory, 2042 characters. If you stick to the ridiculously lax requirements of the JLPT, you'll be lucky to know the 1000 required for JLPT1 4-5 years down the line.

From there, you can either create a sentence for each reading of each character by yourself, or you can use the conveniently available Ultimate Japanese deck with Anki, which has done it all for you. Anki also comes with a ready-made Heisig deck, which you'll want to use in conjunction with the book from the beginning.



Each card contains one reading for one character (the onyomi of 紛 in the picture). It is incredibly easy to remember them with this method, as well as the words in the sentences. Here, I'm using Rikaichan (the little blue box with the reading/definition) to make looking up additional words even easier (you just hover over them).

I stuck with Jpod in the beginning, but you might want to look into other set course style textbooks if you need to. To start with, you'll just want to learn about the main word classes and their various conjugations, as well as particle usage. This should take about as long as Heisig, and will prep you up nicely to understand the Ultimate Japanese sentences.

Whatever you use to structure your learning, Seiichi Makino's grammar dictionaries are an invaluable resource for self-study. You can look up any grammar point you want to learn or review at any time, in more detail and with more comparisons to other points than I have seen anywhere else. Good luck whatever you decide to use.