Here’s a fun idea.
I’ve added this page to address any of your questions, comments, and suggestions. Basically, just add a comment with your thoughts and I’ll collect them here for others to read. I’ll also try to answer your questions as best as I can. I’m not looking for any topic in particular so your comment can be about anything but be nice!
To: taekim.japanese AT gmail.com
Date: Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 9:55 PMSubject: Your Japanese Website
Hey, my name’s Aaron, I traverse the guidetojapanese.org website, forums, and stuff. This fall, I am studying abroad at a university in the Chiba area (神田外語大学 website: http://www.kandagaigo.ac.jp/kuis/). Just thought I should let you know that amongst the information they’ve sent me, they I noticed that they recommend your guide as a good resource. Congrats, you have universities promoting you!
Hi Tae,
I’m the author of two pieces of Macintosh shareware for learning Japanese writing, iKana and iKanji. I found your blog via Google and noticed you talk about the Japanese language and have a Mac. If you would be interested in evaluating and perhaps writing a short review for either product I’d be happy to give you free copies.
Hope to hear from you,
Rory
Hi Rory,
Thanks for the offer, but I have an admittedly biased opinion against flashcard programs and memorization without context.
Please read this:
http://www.guidetojapanese.org.....amwebsite/
If you want to hear my thoughts on how to create a better product, please feel free to email me at taekim.japanese AT gmail.com
Hey Tae, I found your website some time back and have been actively reading your blogs and reading your Japanese study guide (for lack of a better word). I honestly can’t thank you enough. I’m currently in Japanese here at college, and honestly it’s a real drag. It may be due to the fact I lived there for a while in life as a military brat. But the classes are going so slow. Right now the class uses masu form of verbs (why?! I’d rather them teach us the root, and show us conjugations and how we can get the masu form if we need it. But I digress) We haven’t done any real conjugation outside of masu (sigh) and the teacher is slow to even teach gana. So for me, it feels like I’m in a 10 mph lane.
Fortunately for my sanity, I’ve been teaching myself past what I already knew. I’ll be the first to say, I learn better if I have some kind of worksheet or something to show me what I did wrong vs did right. Which is why I love your website. When it comes to state of being for both verbs and nouns, I found your site to be much help. Even moreso than the current books I’m using. I’ve gone ahead and started using Heisig’s remember the kanji. I’ve seen you post on Reviewing the Kanji website a few times, wondering about Heisig. Honestly I felt exactly how you did in regards to it not really teaching you anything. From my own experience, I think RTK1 is completely worthless if you’re not going to continue your Japanese afterward. As for myself, I do RTK along side grammar. What I notice now, is sure I know how to write it and know what it means. But can’t read it, that’s perfectly ok. While doing grammar the kanji I recognize, the stories get replaced by the readings I pickup from your site. So for instance 「元気」 from RTK, I knew how to write both of them, but didn’t know their on yomi and kun yomi readings. But after viewing Japanese news sites, your site and just various Japanese language oriented site, I quickly learned how it’s read in context. The made up stories for both characters were replaced with context and reading knowledge. So with that I see how RTK is suppose to work. I haven’t continued with RTK2 or RTK3, because I find this method much more helpful. I can read quite a bit of kanji intensive material.
Anyways, I must thank you for the grammar study guide, conjugation was something I felt was more important than say learning JUST the masu form of verbs. It also helped in making sense of what is being taught in class (granted, I’m rarely paying attention, I’m too busy teaching myself with my own methods.) The combination of a good J->J dictionary, Anki, Rikaichan / perapera kun, and your site and other like it. The language seems to just “fall in place” if you will, versus learning it in a class room, where it feels like I’m trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
Hopefully after I get Japanese down, I’ll hop over and teach myself Korean. I’ve shown your site to a few classmates, some who aren’t even taking Japanese, and many of them have jumped on teaching themselves. I have the assistant Japanese instructor looking at your site from time to time. Hopefully whenever she takes over the courses, she’ll apply some of your methods to her teaching. Hopefully the masu form gets a swift kick, I honestly believe that starting with that form makes Japanese much more harder than it really is.
Bleh this was quite a bit of writing, sorry haha
Thanks Kalani for the great feedback! If you feel that the class isn’t helping you, you should just continue with your self studies and look for more 1 on 1 tutoring. I’m glad you decided to try RTK for yourself and found what works for you. But I think you’re breaking his rules of not learning the readings until you’re completely finished. Ah well, who cares right?
Hey Tae Kim!
Koichi from Tofugu.com,
I’ve looked all over for a contact email / page on this blog. Would you be able to contact me so we can talk? I have a couple questions, if you’ve got a few minutes
Email is koichi@tofugu.com
Thanks!
Here’s my email: taekim.japanese AT gmail.com
Hi Tae Kim,
I’m sure you’ve gotten your fair share of these requests and I read your feelings about not creating just “another” flashcard website, but I was wondering if you could take a look at my website? It’s partly a quiz driven site, but I hope to make it more than that over time.
Thanks for your time,
Nate
Ok, where is it?
Oops. Thought it would show up in the URL portion of the comment for you (^ ^)
One thing to keep in mind is that the site is connected to the net by a DSL line that is really, really unpredictable. Sometimes it’s decent and other times it’s sloooow. Once I get a job here in Japan, I’ll set up a server here. The connection appears to be much more reliable.
http://www.japanified.com
My next big move will be to come up with user generated content of some sort (and perhaps to make it a more cheerful site), but that probably won’t happen for a few months in all honesty.
hmm… I guess my main question is, “How do you intend to help people learning Japanese with your site?”
I am simply trying to put together a simple interface where you can study for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. If that wasn’t apparent, then I certainly haven’t presented the material well.
The menu is on the left side and easily accessible. You can browse through the different kanji according to the level and, more importantly, you can use the quiz to test your knowledge. Again, at the moment the functionality is pretty limited, but over time I hope to expand on it.
Hello!
I came across your website for learning Japanese, and thought you might be interested in a couple of videos that are insanely useful for learning Japanese. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....annel_page – this video is fantastic for learning to count the DAYS OF A MONTH. Counting the days of a month are quite difficult to remember, but this video makes it super simple.
ALSO, for Japanese grammar, there is the “~te form” of a verb. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....annel_page – this is the video for learning the ~te form of a verb and i think it will be really useful for your website. ~te form is used for many different reasons (which you probably know), but this video makes it easy to remember, and the explanation is in the side bar.
These videos helped me, and have helped heaps of others remember these parts of Japanese. Hope you enjoy them and find them helpful enough to feature on your website!
Zavier
Dear Tae.
I have never found another online resource that is as helpful as your guide to Japanese.
Thankyou for taking the time to put that together.
By the way, I find Japanese TV infuriating. I hate seeing the same damn celebs sitting around chatting.
I have been following your blog and making use of your grammar guide for some time. Both your blog posts and your guide are really helpful and straight-forward. Thank you so much for your hard work and contributions to online Japanese study materials.
It seems like a while back you had posted in your blog about writing a Japanese textbook. Forgive me if I missed something, but you haven’t seemed to be speaking much about it lately. Are you still writing it? I hope so, because I think it would be very helpful for us learners out here.
I’m still working on it and have completed the first couple chapters. It’s going to a take a lot more time before I can get it up to something I can share with the rest of the world. It’s a lot of work!
That’s great to hear! In that case, keep up the good work.
Hi,
I was looking at your blog and I thought you might like to include some lessons/notes (with audio) every now and then for your readers. You could use ‘MLN Player’ like I do here in my blog:
http://mlnlanguages.blogspot.com/
I made the FREE program (MLN Player) to allow language lessons/notes with audio to be embedded in any web site or blog (just like embedding a youtube video). I have used it to show how your lessons/notes could look in your blog. You can see it here:
http://www.mylanguagenotebook......sons/notes
I just thought you might want to use MLN Player to show your lessons/notes in guidetojapanese.org. It’s totally FREE and very easy to make lessons with. You can embed any of the lessons already on the MLN site, or make your own.
You just have to double click on a sentence to hear it and there are built-in ways of testing yourself, like hiding/showing translations.
Also, if you want a link to some Japanese lessons, my friend made these ones (with MLN Player
http://www.mylanguagenotebook......anese.aspx
Anyway, if you want any more info, please let me know.
Best of luck with your blog.
All the best,
Jim Morrison
I just wanted to let you know that as a very passionate student of Japanese language and culture who studies intensely every day, I find your website and blog fascinating and highly informative. I’ve thought about becoming a high school Japanese teacher someday, and I hope that one day I can inspire beginners like you have. Keep it coming, thanks for all the hard work!
I just wanted to suggest a great app for iPhone / iPod touch that might benefit your readers. It’s called Zen Nihongo and has all the vocabulary for JLPT as well as all the kanji for JLPT. The training method is basically built on the supermemo method.
http://www.snowsaru.com/zennihongo
Hey, have you considered working on an iPhone or an iPad app? I’ve been hoping that someday a Japanese grammar guide of some kind will show up in the app store but I don’t know if one ever will. All I can say is that being able to go through your grammar guide on an iPad (using a native app) would be awesome! An iPhone app would be cool too, but the iPad version would really shine (inline audio/illustrations). I’ve been considering writing my own (I’m an Apple Developer) but it would be a lot of work to put together a guide that would only end up being a half as useful (or less) as what yours is. Let me know if you’re interested, I would love to work on something like that (plus, it would be a great way for you to earn some money for all of the hard work you’ve already done).
I’m not adverse to the idea but I’m not sure what advantage an app would have over the existing website.
I agree, it doesn’t seem like it would offer a significant advantage. On the other hand, there are users who might be checking the app store for Japanese resources and may not even consider searching the internet for a grammar guide (albeit an obvious place to look), especially when you use your phone as your primary browsing device. Consider the popularity (and quantity) of dictionaries, kana flash cards and Japanese vocabulary flash card apps in the app store. These programs offer nothing more than what could be found elsewhere on the internet, but the experience is customized to the platform. In addition, there are tens (if not hundreds) of applications that merely duplicate the functionality of a website (i.e. they are customized RSS readers) with maybe a little added functionality. But thousands of users download these applications because they provide a custom experience. It’s nice to be able to study/review/read something on your mobile device even when you don’t have internet access. This is why I think an app would be awesome. Granted, if I were writing such an app I would not want to merely create a static (albeit up-datable) version of an existing website. I would want to offer something new and add to the experience.
I’d like to see two things.
1. A donation button so everyone can give appreciation for your efforts in the form of monetary contribution.
2. A PDF version of the new book.
A donation button is there already not for me personally but for other efforts to improve the site and an ebook has been my goal for a long time, just haven’t been able to get there.
Hello,
Can you please tell me the meaning of ending things in りゃ?
Watching anime and Japanese TV shows it appears as if they use it all the time and yet I can’t find what it means anywhere.
そりゃ is a contraction of それは I guess, but what about verbs ending in りゃ? It’s like I’m hearing わかりゃ、すりゃ etc. Not sure it’s actually りゃ, might be mishearing.
Any insight would be appreciated.
わかりゃ、すりゃ is mostly likely a contraction of the conditional: ば.
In this case わかれば and すれば though I can’t tell you for sure without more context.