After living such a long time with a skewed, mystical view of the ‘Orient,’ I found it hard to shake that stereotype after coming to Japan.

Now that I can understand what people around me are saying, I’ve realized that, like many Americans back home, they actually have very little interesting to say.

Kinda kills some of the excitement of learning the language. It hasn’t stopped me from studying Japanese or living in Japan - but it does lead me to chuckle sometimes.

It seems that a lot of the words in J-pop aren’t necessarily the ones I hear people using, so I was really wondering if listening to songs aids with fluency, or if they are enjoyable (to some) but not that useful for teaching. Opinions?

It’s been a constant learning experience. For me, it’s been about finding the most efficient manner to learn Japanese. In the process, I’ve found out so much about languages, learning, memory, motivation, techniques, etc that can be applied to many areas of life. If anything, I learned do not be afraid to try something new to see if it works for you. DO NOT take a “this is the only way” mentality either. Some people just react differently to learning methods than others. I find that as long as your methods are diverse, the weaknesses in one method is covered by the strengths of others.

For success, I’ll be honest - Karaoke. I love it. I love going to a karaoke bar, hitting a song just right and hearing the crowd go nuts. Well, now I’m doing Japanese songs. I’m not “memorizing” them and pretending to read. No, I MUST read the darn screen in order to sing it. The more I get into the sentence method, the more I’m able to read Karaoke. I will add, I’m not learning Japanese from Karaoke. I find that singing Japanese is fun, and I can sing more if I learn more Japanese. Heck, I’m even considering “mining” songs so I got a bit more understanding of what I’m singing. In case you’re wondering (Yuzu - Harukaze, Ken Hirai - Kimi no Sukina Toko, Crazy Ken Band - Tiger and Dragon, Fukuyama - Tokyo Ni Mo Attanda, “one more time, one more chance”), yeah not much, but I can hit it.

For what I wished I had up front: pre-made sentence packs. Yeah, many advocate making your own, but I disagree. So long as you study the sentences prior to putting them in an SRS, add in appropriate definitions (J-E then J-J later) and notes, you’ve put in the leg work. However, with the pre-made packs, I was putting in more sentences. I procrastinated when I had to type them in manually. Besides, it was RevTK (a group effort website, no doubt) that got me through RTK. Therefore, a sentence pack getting me through Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar and Kanji.Odyssey.2001 I’m not going to ignore for a nobler but less efficient ideal. Plus, that’s just to get the basics down. You’ll move on to your own sentences in time.

Ok, longer than I thought. Keep up the great works.

Anyway, I can switch back to Spanish at boot-time without any pain. But I try not to do so.

I want to put a JP OS on my computer but I am unsure how to do it. I thinkg I remember reading a post about it here but I was unable to find it through searching, so if anyone has any helpful advice that would be great.

Where can I get a JP OS? torrents?
Do I need a special keyboard? Or can I just label my current one once I get the OS installed and find out what keys are what.

And then I have a general JP computer typing question. How can someone type japanese fast? Like I said I use the IME pad and when I type out the words in kana then hit tab it pops out a kanji and then a list of other possible kanji, it almost never displays the kanji I want, so I’m just wondering how someone can be typing japanese at 70 words/min, or does it just take practice? or are their keyboards different?

thanks
dan

I tought I might write a program the generates random numbers, and make the Text-to-Speech software in my computer to read them aloud for me. It would spare me the cumbersome task of writing the numbers in the page, but unfortunately I’d have to write the Number to Words translation software myself. I wonder if there is something like that already done?

Now for a strange question. And this kind of relates to this post in that it is a small success story. I started watching the Tiger and Dragon series. I’ve watched the first episode and most of the prequel episode. My Japanese has gotten good enough over the last 7 months that I can understand and/or get the gist of most of the scenes. The latter being the case most of the time but….

I watched the prequel up to a point (the part after Toraji is rescued in the woods and is explaining why he yelled out, “Kaa-chaaan!!”) anyway, there was a moment while watching that scene where my mind stopped trying to get it and just - got it. I found myself spontaneously laughing at what was being said as if I was watching a comedy in English. This was an exciting point in the Japanese process.

After that moment I stopped watching. I decided to stop watching Tiger and Dragon. The reason being is that I think the show is great so far and I want to watch the rest of the series after my Japanese is at native or near-native level. Does anyone think this is strange?

My original intention was to break down Tiger and Dragon sentence by sentence and put them in the SRS, but I fear doing this will kill the enjoyment that I could possibly get if I wait and watch it after I’ve gained greater fluency.

So my final question is, does anyone have any recommendations for shows or movies that might have similar type language that I can break down and put into the SRS?

Following up on what Alec said, one thing I did to help me was use TTS (I used this website — it’s not the best, but it’s free) and had my wife randomly type numbers into the box. I’d listen and write what I heard, then check it with my wife. Helped a *lot*.

My name is Jair Trejo, I’m a native Spanish speaker from Mexico City, and when I started learning Japanese I wondered whether I could apply the same method I used to learn English. The problem is, there was no method: after finishing elementary school, where they taught me the very basics of English, I started reading fan-fiction, books, web sites (He, in those days you could only very seldomly find websites in a language different than English), watching American TV shows, movies, etc. In about two years of ’self-study’ (it didn’t feel like studying at all), I attained native-like understanding, and pretty good speaking and writing abilities, almost magically. Moreover, without ever speaking a word of English for like, three years, when I needed it my pronunciation was native-like… so input before output really works wonders!

Anyway, when I read this site, I discovered a very nice systematization of what I did during that two years. And I’m convinced it is a systematization that will considerably reduce the amount of time I’ll need to attain native-like fluency in Japanese. Thank you very much for that.

By the way, お願いしてもいいですか。 ¿How did you practiced the numbers, and telling time in Japanese? I am very slow with them, and when I hear them rather than see them written it usually takes me a very long time to understand them. I suppose I could just add a bunch of them to the SRS, but I would probably just memorize them. Please share your tips!