A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar

I study Japanese in a lot of different ways. One of the things I'm doing is going through the Dictionary of Basic Grammar and adding the example sentences to anki for any points I don't know. I'm coming to the end of the this process and will probably be done with the book by the end of January. It's a great book, just a list of grammar points each with a good explanation and a lot of examples. But, if I was going to do it again, the first thing I'd do is go through the book with a black marker pen and ink out all the romaji.

Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar Picture by Hanataro

There's no real reason to be reading the book until you're familiar with hiragana and katakana (which only takes about a day). It's distracting to have the romaji there and I find my eye tends to jump to it. I know that the intermediate dictionary of Japanese grammar doesn\t have any romaji so that's not going to be a problem when I move on to that.


My tadoku reading is going ok but I hope to improve my ranking as we start to get to the end of January!

Also this site is awesome: http://language.tiu.ac.jp/ materials/jpn/index.html beginner level (or lower intermediate maybe? It's hard to know exactly what these terms mean :D) dialogues with some of terms defined in a sidebar. The great thing is that the dialogues often talk about Japanese the language itself, so it's like double learning, one for the reading the dialogue and two for the dialogues content :D And there's loads of the them. I find it easy to read through them with out needed to look anything up, it's been a great place to get example sentences.

I'm not watching any anime or reading any manga at the moment so any recommendations would be great. There's a great site here http://video.fc2.com that has links to western movies dubbed in Japanese, my internet connection is too slow to take advantage of this unfortunately.

I've been playing Final Fantasy 13 in Japanese and Valkyuria Chronicles. I've also been watching Rome dubbed in Japanese which had been fun but the Japanese is quite hard :D Useful sentences such as 天球に空いた穴だ。

The other thing I've been doing is putting a DVD or what on in the background on loop. Sometimes I'll hear a word or a phrase and I'll try to look up. If I manage to transcribe it correctly I'll get an example sentence from Smart.fm or the dictionary. Then when the DVD loops past that bit, well I understand one more piece and next time it will probably be a new phrase. I think this is one of the things AJATT talks about but I never really followed this method :D It's far better than looking up the script to the DVD as you only add words or phrases that you've managed to pick out which guarantees you'll be able to pick the same word and phrases next time round but this time you'll understand the meaning. Sometimes I can read a script and watch the relevant part of the DVD and make no match between them at all!

A self study plan for learning Japanese

This is a booklist (mostly) for learning the Japanese language.
Before embarking on this plan - learn Hiragana and Katakana. Just memorize them, it took me a day or two.




0. Learn to Speak and Understand Japanese with Pimsleur

These are languages cds - yes they're very expensive, so I suggest borrowing them from a library. They aren't the most exciting material - but they will ensure your Japanese pronunciation is correct. They also provide basic listening and speaking skills.


1. Remembering the Kanji I: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters

This book will teach you to write all the commonly used kanji. You won't know the readings but you will understand kanji and it takes a massive stumbling block out of your way. I recommend it's use in conjuction with the Reviewing the Kanji website.



2. Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar

This is an excellent book - it's grammar explanations are terse but it has a lot of example sentences. I find the best way to learn is through examples. This book also manages to cover quite a lot of grammar for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test - I've heard just over JLPT 3.


3. Smart.fm

This is a free website and a great way to bulk up vocabulary. (Here's how I use it with anki)


4. どんな時どう使う 日本語表現文型辞典

The slow move to Japanese only text. This book contains the most important parts of the Japanese grammar. If you're interested in the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (aka the JLPT )- well this book contains all the grammar points tested, for all four levels. It has explanations in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. It's a reference not a text book but if understood, this book will help unlock most Japanese.

Final notes

I think after using these resources the reader will have an excellent handle on Japanese and easily be able to tackle "Japanese in the wild" with the minimum of fuss. It also leads quite nicely into studying for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). For the JLPT the preparation books for the exam should be purchased too.

This is the meat of what I'm using to learn Japanese - though I have plenty of other books I also use. I'll save my thoughts on them for another post.) I'm currently using smart.fm and どんな時どう使う 日本語表現文型辞典 - as well other textbooks, manga and normal Japanese books to study.

I'd like to hear other people's lists and suggestions. I think I'm missing something like Kanji Odyssey - that would help in guessing the readings of new words. (Though I've had some luck guessing word readings just from large amounts of exposure to words via smart.fm)