7 replies to this topic

[kurt91]

Figured I'd ask around about these, and maybe somebody could point me in the right direction...

 

I'm taking a first-year Japanese class at college, and we're currently learning the alphabet. (Hiragana, I think) We're going to have a quiz soon on the first twenty letters, having to convert hiragana into their English sounds like "ka" and "ko", and I've been having a really difficult time memorizing them.

 

Does anybody know a site online or something with anything similar to flash-cards, where I can see a symbol and try to put in the appropriate English letters?

 

Crap, math class is starting. Gotta go.

[Saffith]

This looks about right: http://realkana.com/study/

[kurt91]

Thanks, that site is perfect! It even breaks it down into each letter set so I can study at the same rate as the class is progressing.

 

I don't think I'll be able to ace the quiz tomorrow, but I've already gotten a bunch down, and this should make the rest a lot easier! Now I just wish I had thought of asking at the beginning of class.

[Anthus]

This is semi-relevant, but I work at a Japanese store, and see, and hear Japanese spoken all day. I'm no expert, and don't know very much, at all, but I've been told, and am noticing that it is much easier to learn the spoken part of the language, and their writing system in turn, is easily one of the most difficult to learn effectively.

[Russ]

Well... yes and no. I feel like their basic alphabets, hiragana and katakana, are far easier than ours. This character makes this sound. Always. No crazy spelling rules, no "Well if you follow this letter with an e, this g becomes silent" or any nonsense like English has. But the kanji... those are a bit of a pain to learn. And by a bit I mean a massive, horrible pain.

[kurt91]

Well, like I said, I wasn't going to do very well on the quiz. Considering that we were going over about 20 different letters, and I only had time to really memorize 5 of them...

 

Still, being able to fully memorize five of them in a single study session was really useful. The teacher's going to let me make up the quiz, so if I just keep up the pace and learn five more each day, I should be able to ace the quiz by the end of the week. Study over the weekends, and I should be able to catch up eventually.

 

Since some of you guys seem to know the language to some extent, can I ask something? I've seen some untranslated manga, and there didn't appear to be spaces between words. How do you know when one word ends and another begins in those kinds of situations? I've noticed that there's a tiny circle that seems to be essentially a period to mark the end of each sentence, but individual words all seem to run together.

[Russ]

Since some of you guys seem to know the language to some extent, can I ask something? I've seen some untranslated manga, and there didn't appear to be spaces between words. How do you know when one word ends and another begins in those kinds of situations? I've noticed that there's a tiny circle that seems to be essentially a period to mark the end of each sentence, but individual words all seem to run together.

You don't, exactly. This is why the language has to use kanji, to an extent. Since each kanji is a word (well, not exactly, some words use two and verbs often have conjugations written in hiragana but for the purposes of explanation let's go with the simplest case), you don't really need spaces since you know that the different characters are different words.

[Saffith]

On older computer systems and game consoles, kanji often aren't used for technical reasons - limited video memory, 8-bit character encoding, maybe low resolution. In those cases, you'll generally see spaces between words, because an undifferentiated mass of kana is very difficult to read.