Post by Kelly on May 31, 2008 22:37:47 GMT -5
Intro to language learning:
They say learning a language is "a life-long process," meaning there's no official, set point when you can officially say you've learned it. If you think about it, we're all still learning English, too.
Learning a language is divided into four categories: Speaking, listening, reading, and writing. If you take a language at Prospect, you'll notice our teachers try to cover all four aspects through different activities or assessments. The four categories are organized like this:
Listening | Speaking
Reading   | Writing
The top row being the aspects that don't involve paper or knowledge of the writing system of the language. The right column are the parts where you can control the content (i.e. only using words/structures you know), whereas you can't control the content when listening or reading.
This course will directly cover listening, reading, and writing. You'll have to practice speaking on your own.
A blog entry about learning Japanese that I found somewhat interesting: (not required reading for the course) [ link ]
Intro to Japanese Writing Systems: (vocab words in red)
Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. They each have specific purposes and may not necessarily be interchangeable. Writing in this course will focus mostly on hiragana. We will be using a book called Easy Kana Workbook by Rita Lampkin and Osamu Hoshino. I will be scanning the pages from the book and providing links to them. Because it is a workbook, you may wish to print the pages in order to trace the symbols and write directly in the spaces provided.
Kanji are pictographic symbols that originated from the Chinese writing system. They are also used in Korean as hanja. In Japanese, kanji usually have two different readings: a Japanese reading (or "kun-yomi") and a Chinese reading (or "on-yomi"). Sometimes they have more than one Japanese reading or more than one Chinese reading or both. This makes them much more difficult to learn. There are about 2,000 kanji designated as standard kanji necessary for reading, even though there are actually many more. These are known as the "Jouyou" kanji, and are the ones taught in Japanese schools.
Furigana are small hiragana or katakana characters that are placed next to kanji to indicate their reading in the specific situation. These are often used in manga (mostly in shounen and shoujo manga), and are also commonly used on more difficult kanji in children's literature.
Romanization is the act of changing Japanese to a close approximation in Roman characters, or the letters we're used to using. In Japanese, this is known as Rōmaji (pronounced Row-mah-jee), or
ローマ字 (Remember to turn Japanese encoding on if you can't read this properly). There are many systems of Romanization. If you read manga a lot, you've probably encountered at least a few of them before. If you're interested in learning about different Rōmaji systems, I recommend going here.
More about Japanese Writing:
Pages 2-4, 93 (Opening in new tab/window recommended)
Nihongo Resources Hiragana (first four sections only)
NR Katakana (first section only)
Japanese Pronunciation:
Japanese pronunciation is very constant. Symbols are almost always pronounced the same way (the only exceptions are the particles "wa" and "e."), unlike in English. The main differences from English are the vowels and the letter R:
A - pronounced "ah" as in "father"
I - pronounced "ee" as in "eat"
U - pronounced "oo" as in "pool"
E - pronounced "eh" as in "bet"
O - pronounced "oh" as in "open"
R - "The Japanese r is a flap-r, made by flicking the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (area behind the upper teeth). This sound very closely resembles the 'r' in the British English pronunciation of 'very.' To speakers of American English, it often sounds like a d, but there are two main differences: (1) the Japanese r is shorter than d; and (2) in the production of r, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the alveolar ridge, whereas in the production of d, it is the area of the tongue immediately behind the tip that makes contact against the upper teeth." (from Beginning Japanese, Part 1 by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin)
If you're having trouble finding your alveolar ridge:
Speaking/listening to Japanese will likely be one of the most difficult things to learn while in the US. We have a rather noticeable deficit of native Japanese speakers, compared to Japan itself. This makes learning correct pronunciation difficult. We'll try to fill that void with anime, podcasts, and J-Music.
If you have any questions, recommendations, comments, or problems downloading anything, please post below.
They say learning a language is "a life-long process," meaning there's no official, set point when you can officially say you've learned it. If you think about it, we're all still learning English, too.
Learning a language is divided into four categories: Speaking, listening, reading, and writing. If you take a language at Prospect, you'll notice our teachers try to cover all four aspects through different activities or assessments. The four categories are organized like this:
Listening | Speaking
Reading   | Writing
The top row being the aspects that don't involve paper or knowledge of the writing system of the language. The right column are the parts where you can control the content (i.e. only using words/structures you know), whereas you can't control the content when listening or reading.
This course will directly cover listening, reading, and writing. You'll have to practice speaking on your own.
A blog entry about learning Japanese that I found somewhat interesting: (not required reading for the course) [ link ]
Intro to Japanese Writing Systems: (vocab words in red)
Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. They each have specific purposes and may not necessarily be interchangeable. Writing in this course will focus mostly on hiragana. We will be using a book called Easy Kana Workbook by Rita Lampkin and Osamu Hoshino. I will be scanning the pages from the book and providing links to them. Because it is a workbook, you may wish to print the pages in order to trace the symbols and write directly in the spaces provided.
Kanji are pictographic symbols that originated from the Chinese writing system. They are also used in Korean as hanja. In Japanese, kanji usually have two different readings: a Japanese reading (or "kun-yomi") and a Chinese reading (or "on-yomi"). Sometimes they have more than one Japanese reading or more than one Chinese reading or both. This makes them much more difficult to learn. There are about 2,000 kanji designated as standard kanji necessary for reading, even though there are actually many more. These are known as the "Jouyou" kanji, and are the ones taught in Japanese schools.
Furigana are small hiragana or katakana characters that are placed next to kanji to indicate their reading in the specific situation. These are often used in manga (mostly in shounen and shoujo manga), and are also commonly used on more difficult kanji in children's literature.
Romanization is the act of changing Japanese to a close approximation in Roman characters, or the letters we're used to using. In Japanese, this is known as Rōmaji (pronounced Row-mah-jee), or
ローマ字 (Remember to turn Japanese encoding on if you can't read this properly). There are many systems of Romanization. If you read manga a lot, you've probably encountered at least a few of them before. If you're interested in learning about different Rōmaji systems, I recommend going here.
More about Japanese Writing:
Pages 2-4, 93 (Opening in new tab/window recommended)
Nihongo Resources Hiragana (first four sections only)
NR Katakana (first section only)
Japanese Pronunciation:
Japanese pronunciation is very constant. Symbols are almost always pronounced the same way (the only exceptions are the particles "wa" and "e."), unlike in English. The main differences from English are the vowels and the letter R:
A - pronounced "ah" as in "father"
I - pronounced "ee" as in "eat"
U - pronounced "oo" as in "pool"
E - pronounced "eh" as in "bet"
O - pronounced "oh" as in "open"
R - "The Japanese r is a flap-r, made by flicking the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (area behind the upper teeth). This sound very closely resembles the 'r' in the British English pronunciation of 'very.' To speakers of American English, it often sounds like a d, but there are two main differences: (1) the Japanese r is shorter than d; and (2) in the production of r, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the alveolar ridge, whereas in the production of d, it is the area of the tongue immediately behind the tip that makes contact against the upper teeth." (from Beginning Japanese, Part 1 by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin)
If you're having trouble finding your alveolar ridge:
Speaking/listening to Japanese will likely be one of the most difficult things to learn while in the US. We have a rather noticeable deficit of native Japanese speakers, compared to Japan itself. This makes learning correct pronunciation difficult. We'll try to fill that void with anime, podcasts, and J-Music.
If you have any questions, recommendations, comments, or problems downloading anything, please post below.