[LMB] OT: AKICOTL: Japanese

[Azalais Aranxta]

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, Mark Allums wrote:

> This one's for Malfoy, or anyone who knows Japanese.

Engage your language learning centres by surrounding yourself
with undubbed media, and spend a lot of time with it.  Teach
yourself hiragana and katakana, write down every Japanese word
you know including brand names until you get those right, start
reading easy comics and children's books.  Then whatever method
you choose--college class, online tutoring, individual
instruction--you will be working with your brain's natural
learning abilities rather than against them.

If you only study Japanese at a certain time every day and don't
use it, you won't learn it as well or as fast.  Get to know
Japanese music--there's a lot more out there than bubblegum girl
singers and goth boy singers.  Pretty much most genres that we
have in modern American music exist in Japan.

(I used to go to a club where there was live rapping in Japanese,
it's really easy to do because of the language structure.)

I'm not fluent and I've deteriorated a lot in the past five
years, because my life has not lent itself to using Japanese as
much as I once did.  The key to learning any language is to
surround yourself with it.  If there are places in your town
where Japanese is spoken, go there and spend some time just
watching people and listening to them.  You can't ever really
speak Japanese unless you learn some of the body language.  One
of the reasons dubbed anime is so annoying to Japanese speakers
is that the tone and attitude behind the English lines never
matches the Japanese body language properly.

I was never completely fluent, but I had the body language down
to the point that I was continually taken for a half-Japanese
army brat when I ventured out of Tokyo.

~malfoy :)

****************************************************************
Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy)
ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness

"I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it
think we all bow down." --Christopher Morley