日本語ができますか?

I thought I'd compile a little list here of the different tools I've used - or even some that I've made - for learning Japanese over the years. I'll list websites with links, books with ISBNs and links to Amazon, and I will link you to apps and crap I've compiled for learning Japanese. - I won't be finished this post today because I have a fat happy exam to take tomorrow, but I'd like to get it started at least. Expect it to be finished over the weekend :3

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Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese - This is pretty much all of the essential daily use grammar, explained in English, along with examples for usage. The ONLY fault I can make for Tae Kim's guide is that I'd like more examples for some of the grammar, along with more pragmatics in some of his explanations. Like, when would you use A over B, that kind of thing. I can't really even call it out on those "faults" because as an online textbook and quick reference guide, it's incredibly thorough and concise. It also features a great forum where you can ask questions about Japanese, or just sift through other people's questions and answers. My favourite and most-oft visited forum link is this: Guide to Japanese Transition Words. A totally exhaustive list of the Japanese Conjunction Junction song to help your spoken and written language flow better.

Ah, but you might have noticed that that list is ENTIRELY in Japanese, and uses a lot of kanji! What to do if you can't read it? Rather than the tedious copy and paste dance, I really recommend getting the Firefox Extension Rikaichan. This addon has really increased my reading speed - I can basically understand almost any Japanese text with this addon, and it really does help you learn the reading for kanji you don't know. My recommendation for using Rikaichan is to go to a Japanese blog or newssite you're interested in, and use your mouse to hover over the words and kanji you don't know, and read the full sentence, and translate. Then go back and do it again, this time just reading it in Japanese, using Rikaichan to help you with the readings. Then make a THIRD pass over the sentence, and see if you can read, in Japanese, without assistance. It really will help you improve.

The other "secret" (which isn't really a secret at all) that I use to remember Kanji is that I know what most of the radicals represent! About.com's Guide to Japanese Kanji Radicals and Alan Miller's Guide to Japanese Kanji Radicals are great resources to get you started. So, kanji like 機械 aren't just a mess of lines to me anymore. I see tree, thread, thread, spear, person for the first one, and tree, spear, grass for the second one. I think it's really important to try to understand kanji the same way we understand how a word is formed. If yuo cna raed tihs tahn I tnhik yuo cna laren knaji. It's not just a "picture," it's a sum of its parts, just like words are in the roman alphabet. Being able to understand the parts, and making some conjectures to how they are related to the meaning of the kanji, is completely essential. So 機械 is kikai, meaning machine. It's formed of two kanji, the first meaning mechanism (in both the technical sense and the abstract sense, like, mechanism as a machine, and chance/opportunity being a a mechanism of fate) and the second means contraption. With the parts, tree, threads, spear, and person, you can visualize "mechanism" - tree, because wood would have been the prime material for simple machines like a mill or cart in the old days, threads to represent fine details and connecting parts (or connected to fate if you know the Japanese saying about the red thread), spear gives the sense of something practical and useful, and also imparts the notion that it is something that is weilded by man, who is also represented within the kanji, and machines are what have made man what he is today. The second one is similar in its construction, and can be broken down in much the same way. It seems complicated perhaps at first, but after you get acclimated to the radicals the same way you are acclimated to roman letters and latin roots, it gets easier and easier to remember how to write kanji and also what they mean. The last caveat I have to offer is that you don't need to PERFECTLY understand the radicals. Maybe the radical for grass really looks like a picket fence to you. If you can consistently remember it as the "picket fence" radical, and can logically include that image when you're breaking it down into its parts and attributing the meaning to the sum of those parts, it really doesn't matter WHAT you think the radical is, as long as you can consistently remember it and what it means to you and how that meaning relates to the word.

I should also mention that doing this does help you read kanji as well, because often the reading of the kanji is based on just one or two radicals. Let me give you an example: 効 絞 郊 狡 校 佼 - these kanji all have a different meaning, and yet they all share the same on-yomi reading of "kou" (though the last three have a second on-yomi option, probably from the older go'on yomi reading, of kyou, but they don't deviate from these two options. It's 95% of the time, in a kanji-compound word, only ever going to be read as "kou" or "kyou") and they all have this character, comprised of two radicals, in common: 交 - which is also read "kou." This makes reading Japanese a lot easier than it might seem at first blush. Look for these patterns when you study Japanese. If you notice a relatively simple kanji, and see it being repeated as a part of a more detailed kanji, it could be the key to unlocking the reading of a lot of different kanji compound words.

TO BE CONTINUED...