Hello, I'm Angie, and I'm trying to learn Japanese, but it's hard to read. Any tips?
Hi Angie!
For starters, like Luka said, you should start with hiragana and katakana first. I would suggest getting either a textbook like "Minna no Nihongo" or "Genki", they are great because they have their own series so you could start from the beginner level then move on to the next one. They also have vocab and grammar exercises and Japanese conversation samples.
However if you're only learning hiragana and katakana right now, just look them up online and save some money. Daily practice is really important, you should review them everyday and maybe start writing them down or use flashcards. There are also phone apps that may help you. You can also grab one of those children books, they usually only have basic hiragana, katakana, and maybe some kanji. Good luck!
Hey Angie,
First of all, take time to learn the kana (hiragana/katakana) you should be able to read them within two weeks. If you can read them, learning japanese itself will be simpler.
You MUST study and practice regularly, try to learn 5 to 10 kanjis a day.
I personally love the bookseries ''Minna no Nihongo'' because they're totally in japanese and it forces you to practice harder.
You can also use websites like www.memrise.com and italki ofc.
Hope it helps !
Hey to put it simple, I would say first you need to be able to play around with the two of the three writing systems. Which are Hiragana and Katagana. As for Kanji, if really depends on how much vocabularies you come across in your everyday-Japanese learning. For some of the vocabularies you might be able to speak in Romanji or write down in H or K. But all these wordings that you are learning are mostly somehow leading to certain Kanjis. Like if you put おねがい which means please!. But you can also put in in Kanji if you know how to put お願い so you can tell from here that 願い=ねがい so you learn a new kanji 願. And this is how you learn Japanese Vocabularies. And also you can put efforts on studying the grammars which makes the sentences you make even more perfect. Hope this would help you. Good luck.
If you're already done with learning the basic hiragana, katakana and kanji, and want to focus on reading and expanding your knowledge of kanji, I recommend getting a japanese literature book. Just one book, a student one would be better for beginners. Focus on that one book, and try to understand phrase by phrase while going back and forth with a dictionary. This helps to open your mind up to a whole new world of kanji and with just one book, you'll be able to learn a lot. Finding the book, however can be hard. If you have Kinokuniya in your country, they would sell a lot of japanese books, especially some suited for learners. I recommend getting the "Read Real Japanese" series that have write-ups and short stories written by japanese contemperary writers. These books also have both English and Japanese text side by side so you won't necessarily need a dictionary when reading.
Hi Angie,
I've been studying Japanese for 3 years off and on. I began with this book. It makes learning katakana and hiragana soooooo easy. Once you know how to read in Japanese you'll start to hate seeing romanji.
がんばってください (do your best/good luck!)
