Re: Possible to learn a language by yourself?
WALL OF TEXT
First of all, my main focus for learning Japanese is in reading, not speaking (or even writing :O), so my resources focus mostly on learning how to read while the other aspects are lower priority. Additionally, I intentionally committed myself to a slow track so that I wouldn't burn myself out trying to learn too quickly (whilst saving money
).
I first started by memorizing hiragana and katakana. If you don't have those, you can't really do much in the reading department... Next, I used wanikani, which has a substantial beginner's amount of kanji for free that is presented in a far more engaging fashion than looking at a dictionary.
At the same time, I found that looking up translations for any J-Pop that falls into my library and spending 10 minutes to actively read the romaji and the translation line by line helped a lot with associating words between the languages. Once you're able to read hiragana at least, you can start looking at the kanji lyrics as well and trying to connect all three written forms. I find myself much more interested in reading lyrics than, say, trying to read a newspaper :/ (which really does sound like it will work though). Additionally, you don't really need any inspiration to keep going at this, because music just falls into your lap anyway regardless of whether you're studying Japanese or not
. Additionally, for songs I really like (i.e. want to learn the lyrics and sing them), I either write them down or into my iPhone in Japanese. I'm sure you've heard about how physically copying notes down and such helps with memory and whatnot. Do note that it takes like half an hour for a song when you're a beginner, though -_-.
After gaining some more confidence ("I know 30 super-basic Kanji now! Yay!"), you can try to surf the internet and look up RAW mangas in conjunction with the english scanslations. I used To-Love Ru Darkness, myself, for this. Unfortunately, I'm stuck on a 1366x768px laptop with no external monitor, so this quickly fell out of favor for me
. It's pretty hard to find RAWs though. You should probably grab Web of Trust just in case.
However, just knowing Kanji isn't enough! Grammar is important, too! For a while, I didn't focus on grammar at all, I just kind of absorbed it from the above methods. What that resulted in was a passive understanding of basic Japanese sentences, but beyond that I usually got confused as to "so, did character X just die because a depressed fox with a sword stabbed him, or was X depressed because the fox stabbed his friend with a sword before the fox died of its wounds, or some other permutation..." The two sources I've found really helpful are
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and Tae Kim's guide, which is a free iPhone app. The first is one of the only sources I've bookmarked that I visit with any frequency (it has a ton of examples for each topic), while the latter is really dense... but it's mobile! It's great for when you're waiting for something IRL but you can't connect to the internet b/c you're in a basement -_-.
And then the most recent step was picking up a project, i.e. Rune's Pharmacy
, which of course accounts for 80% of my present knowledge. I'm a project-centered individual, so I knew that I could keep my inspiration going as long as I still had work to do on it. As I said, I intentionally paced myself as a turtle, so it's been about 4 years since I first started learning Hiragana and started translating Rune's Pharmacy.
For me, watching anime wasn't a conscious effort to learn Japanese by the way. I'm not an auditory learner, so I actually didn't get too much out of it except for a subconscious foundation of some sort. It does help for learning a lot of anime-type colloquialisms, especially conventional translations for phrases that don't translate easily to English, as well as culture (which doesn't sound like it should be related to language, but it is). The main issue, as it is with any language, is that you can't parse what foreigners say in realtime unless you already know a substantial amount of what they're saying, so I regard anime as a learning tool as a later step in the learning process.
Hope this helps for whoever reads it!