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SOS for Learning Japanese by VN Method


zomkung

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So far, I have done Tae Kim Grammar and 500 Heisig Kanji (still going on).

I found out that, When I try reading easy VN for first gulp, I don't understand most(90%) of the words which give highly tedious throughout my journey, and become pretty annoy for look up at the definition in each words. I'm not sure if people who are in this method were confront the situation same as me? how you crushed it? Let's share your knowledge!

And another thing, Is it okay to seeing a whole translation in machine translators while reading pure Japanese?(May spoil a whole sentence) so that, I can enjoy the VN while learning Japanese.

One more question, When I encountered new words, Usually I wrote down in papers and tried to memorize it. Still, these are too much and I'm not sure that I have to write it all or just read it with determining ( like try to catch up some contradiction and words in sentences ). 

 

 

Edited by zomkung
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I bulldozed through it. I did flashcards on the side but I learned most of my vocabulary by looking up words over and over until it clicked. Selectively choose which ones to focus on. Glance on the complicated ones just to get the gist (or save them in anki for later) and focus on basic looking everyday words. It's going to be HELL the first several hours of gameplay. I remember having to constantly look up most of the words in a sentence to being able to read 40~ lines without needing a dictionary (within maybe 10+ hours of doing the method). If that gets tedious vary your methods for learning the vocab. Maybe watch a video or do pictographs.

The VN method is hardest in the beginning so do your best to get out of the hump. After I finished my 1st VN, which took me a year, I knew as much as half of level 2 JLPT (around 600 kanjis maybe).

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Looking up words is how you learn them. You have to start somewhere, of course it will be difficult at first - but there's not much you can do about that other than just push through. Either you will be learning word after word from textbook texts, or you will be learning a word after word from VNs - it doesn't really make much difference in the end, other than the former being a bit easier but potentially boring (and price-y), and the later being harder, but more fun.

Just take it slow and slowly build up your vocabulary, it will only get easier the further you get. At least with VNs you have the advantage of text-hooking, making dictionary checks nearly instantaneous.

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I remember being so exhausted when I jumped into text hooking jp vns that I could only last for an hour at a time. Powering through is a real option, and things will definitely get easier with time as your vocabulary expands.

With that said, if you really hate it, there are other ways of getting vocabulary - I've heard people use anki decks of 3000 core japanese words, which might be helpful if you hate what you're doing right now enough. I can't give you anything specific, but you should be able to find something with enough research.

All in all, don't be too discouraged if it's hard right now - it's normal, and you'll be learning a lot.

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There's no point in stuffing kanji into your brain, I see it as a waste of time.

You know, when you're learning a new language and find a word you don't know about, you use a dictionary... at least in my generation, but what do I know? I'm an old geezer anyway.

It's far better to start with the syllabaries and basic grammar, in order to accustom yourself to they way Japanese sentences are presented, and to identify the glue that ties all words together -hiragana is far more common than kanji in volume and some words are comprised completely of hiragana, like prepositions and so.

And maybe it's just me but after being exposed to dozens of anime and VNs you learn basic vocabulary, some expressions and even accents. With VNs though the bad thing is that you'll mostly be exposed to girl's talk, and Japanese varies considerably depending on who speaks it.

Then again, about kanji, there are certain ways of identifying them when searching for their meaning (in dictionaries, most likely). Another good idea is make a list of the more common words and create your own quick reference dictionary for regular use, maybe in a notebook. I warn, however, that drawing kanji takes some guts, for me is easy for some reason (well I started getting acquainted with kanji at 16 or so, but never did serious study).

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17 minutes ago, Okarin said:

There's no point in stuffing kanji into your brain, I see it as a waste of time.

You know, when you're learning a new language and find a word you don't know about, you use a dictionary... at least in my generation, but what do I know? I'm an old geezer anyway.

It's far better to start with the syllabaries and basic grammar, in order to accustom yourself to they way Japanese sentences are presented, and to identify the glue that ties all words together -hiragana is far more common than kanji in volume and some words are comprised completely of hiragana, like prepositions and so.

And maybe it's just me but after being exposed to dozens of anime and VNs you learn basic vocabulary, some expressions and even accents. With VNs though the bad thing is that you'll mostly be exposed to girl's talk, and Japanese varies considerably depending on who speaks it.

Then again, about kanji, there are certain ways of identifying them when searching for their meaning (in dictionaries, most likely). Another good idea is make a list of the more common words and create your own quick reference dictionary for regular use, maybe in a notebook. I warn, however, that drawing kanji takes some guts, for me is easy for some reason (well I started getting acquainted with kanji at 16 or so, but never did serious study).

I'm not sure if you actually understood more than half of the first post in this thread.

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15 minutes ago, Zakamutt said:

I'm not sure if you actually understood more than half of the first post in this thread.

I focused on the point that he didn't understand about 90% of the words, and it really baffled me.

Anyway I don't think my points are so terribly wrong.

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14 hours ago, zomkung said:

So far, I have done Tae Kim Grammar and 500 Heisig Kanji (still going on).

I found out that, When I try reading easy VN for first gulp, I don't understand most(90%) of the words which give highly tedious throughout my journey, and become pretty annoy for look up at the definition in each words. I'm not sure if people who are in this method were confront the situation same as me? how you crushed it? Let's share your knowledge!

 

 

 

 

same here. we pretty much learned the same amount of japanese too (hiragana, katakana, 550+ kanji and some vocab).  i tried to read (had a quick look) at Love Revenge and gave up after an hour or so. even if you understand every word and/or use a dictionary, every sentence feels like a small puzzle you have to stitch together in the right order.

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1 minute ago, SabiHakuhei said:

same here. we pretty much learned the same amount of japanese too (hiragana, katakana, 550+ kanji and some vocab).  i tried to read (had a quick look) at Love Revenge and gave up after an hour or so. even if you understand every word and/or use a dictionary, every sentence feels like a small puzzle you have to stitch together in the right order.

Of course, that would be similar to facing a native, C1-level English text with A1 level. Fearsome.

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14 hours ago, zomkung said:

So far, I have done Tae Kim Grammar and 500 Heisig Kanji (still going on).

I found out that, When I try reading easy VN for first gulp, I don't understand most(90%) of the words which give highly tedious throughout my journey, and become pretty annoy for look up at the definition in each words. I'm not sure if people who are in this method were confront the situation same as me? how you crushed it? Let's share your knowledge!

That's normal

In my case I just kept on looking for the definition of a certain word over and over. Repetition is the key. I know it's tiring but learning is done by doing the same thing again and again.

Narration tends to be difficult to read. I suggest just getting the gist/thought of the narration at first and focus more on the dialogue, which is a lot easier to understand because of voices.

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2 hours ago, melo4496 said:

That's normal

In my case I just kept on looking for the definition of a certain word over and over. Repetition is the key. I know it's tiring but learning is done by doing the same thing again and again.

Narration tends to be difficult to read. I suggest just getting the gist/thought of the narration at first and focus more on the dialogue, which is a lot easier to understand because of voices.

This is actually very good advice. Don't tire yourself out with trying to understand 100% of the text, down to every word and every nuance. Just pay attention to the words being used and work with what you understand. Vocabulary is always the biggest obstacle, if only because of the sheer amount of it - but if you keep at it, eventually you'll just be able to read things without having to translate them in your head, whether you understand every single word or not.

Axanael can be a bit difficult at times, but if you just power through the short but possibly confusing beginning with narration, you'll get a VN that's almost entirely composed of nothing but voiced lines. You can just treat it like watching an anime, with the advantage of being able to see the original 'subtitles' all the time, with the ability to look up the words you don't know easily.

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Thanks for your guys advice.

 

And another thing, Is it okay to seeing a whole translation in machine translator while reading pure Japanese?(May spoil a whole sentence) so that, I can enjoy the VN while learning Japanese.

Edited by zomkung
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50 minutes ago, zomkung said:

Thanks for your guys advice.

 

And another thing, Is it okay to seeing a whole translation in virtual machine while reading pure Japanese?(May spoil a whole sentence) so that, I can enjoy the VN while learning Japanese.

I would say no. as most of the time the translation is pure garbage and even more puzzling than the original Japanese line. 

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Use something like jisho.org instead.  You can put in a whole line and it will make highly accurate guesses as to what all the kanji romanize to.  (Just be sure you know what's a proper name, it can't recognize those at all.)  Definitely don't even try Google Translate, it doesn't do that thing anymore that it used to do where it would highlight part of the source sentence when you hover over parts of the translation anymore (I guess cause that's not how it works anymore).

Edited by Nandemonai
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3 hours ago, zomkung said:

And another thing, Is it okay to seeing a whole translation in virtual machine while reading pure Japanese?(May spoil a whole sentence) so that, I can enjoy the VN while learning Japanese.

I'm not certain what this sentence even means (virtual machine?), but I'll take a stab anyway.  JParser or MeCab, as implemented in Translation Aggregator, are extremely useful for processing each word quickly enough to understand simple sentences.  JParser also tries to interpret grammar, which can be helpful too.  Machine translators can be useful for untangling complex sentences or for skimming text that you don't want to devote effort to actually reading.  Even nowadays I still use ATLAS to skim boring food discussions, for example.

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6 hours ago, zomkung said:

And another thing, Is it okay to seeing a whole translation in machine translator while reading pure Japanese?(May spoil a whole sentence) so that, I can enjoy the VN while learning Japanese.

I wouldn't recommend it, all you'd end up doing is creating some bad habits for yourself and relying on translation that isn't even guaranteed to be correct, let alone read good. You should make your goal clear - do you want to read VNs in Japanese, or do you want to translate them (in your head or with tools) and read them in English? Do you want to learn the language, or do you just want to somewhat understand it enough to make sense of it through different means?

If you're indeed trying to learn the language, machine translation should be out of the question, even if it might seem tempting and easy. When put to good use, the previously mentioned Mecab/JParser is a much more reliable and flexible tool. It will help you with the words you don't know, but it should also allow you to eventually think about the sentences in Japanese, instead of just going the extra unnecessary step and translating everything in your head. It will take a long time and it certainly will take more effort than relying on machine TL, but it's way more worth it in the long run if you're at all serious about learning Japanese in the first place. Once you get the vocab, you can just skim the text as is, even if you don't know a word here and there - relying on machine TL even at such a late stage would just set you back.

Also just quickly on the topic of internet dictionaries, the Weblio ja-en dictionary is a great resource that's not often mentioned, perhaps for it being primarily a Japanese page. Despite that, it will often give you much more specific and natural results- it might be more useful for translation than anything else, but it is a reat reference point if you can't find something in jisho/tangorin, or the translation there just isn't satisfactory.

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31 minutes ago, Vokoca said:

I wouldn't recommend it, all you'd end up doing is creating some bad habits for yourself and relying on translation that isn't even guaranteed to be correct, let alone read good. You should make your goal clear - do you want to read VNs in Japanese, or do you want to translate them (in your head or with tools) and read them in English? Do you want to learn the language, or do you just want to somewhat understand it enough to make sense of it through different means?

If you're indeed trying to learn the language, machine translation should be out of the question, even if it might seem tempting and easy. When put to good use, the previously mentioned Mecab/JParser is a much more reliable and flexible tool. It will help you with the words you don't know, but it should also allow you to eventually think about the sentences in Japanese, instead of just going the extra unnecessary step and translating everything in your head. It will take a long time and it certainly will take more effort than relying on machine TL, but it's way more worth it in the long run if you're at all serious about learning Japanese in the first place. Once you get the vocab, you can just skim the text as is, even if you don't know a word here and there - relying on machine TL even at such a late stage would just set you back.

Also just quickly on the topic of internet dictionaries, the Weblio ja-en dictionary is a great resource that's not often mentioned, perhaps for it being primarily a Japanese page. Despite that, it will often give you much more specific and natural results- it might be more useful for translation than anything else, but it is a reat reference point if you can't find something in jisho/tangorin, or the translation there just isn't satisfactory.

That's a great advice, also good resource from Weblio.

Anyway, which one is better between Rikaisama and TA? Also, Do I need to let the machine highlights the particles (like は、よ、に、の) or just plain sentences?

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49 minutes ago, zomkung said:

That's a great advice, also good resource from Weblio.

Anyway, which one is better between Rikaisama and TA? Also, Do I need to let the machine highlights the particles (like は、よ、に、の) or just plain sentences?

It just depends on what you want to use them with - TA is obviously more convenient with VNs and other non-browser based text as it automatically parses anything in your clipboard, but for browsing the web Rikai-kun/Rikai-sama is faster. TA also has the advantage of showing you the entire sentence parsed and relatively reliably split into separate parts via color coding, whereas Rikai-kun/Rikai-sama only shows you one word at a time. Both TA and Rikai-sama are very customisable, so there shouldn't really be much of a difference between their usefulness in terms of dictionaries as such, as you can edit these yourself for both of them.

It's up to you what you want to have highlighted, but at first it'll probably be much easier if you have the particles highlighted so they are easy to tell apart from the rest of the sentence, so you get used to how the sentence structure works and learn to naturally recognise them yourself.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi folks, I have one more question.

When I encountered new words, Usually I wrote down in papers and tried to memorize it. Still, these are too much and I'm not sure that I have to write it all or just read it with determining ( like try to catch up some contradiction and words in sentences ). 

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59 minutes ago, zomkung said:

Hi folks, I have one more question.

When I encountered new words, Usually I wrote down in papers and tried to memorize it. Still, these are too much and I'm not sure that I have to write it all or just read it with determining ( like try to catch up some contradiction and words in sentences ). 

You should guess the meaning based on the context. However, you can set up some kind of softwares (eg: Greenshot) to take a screentshot of the current VN window then automatically save it as an image (with a single hotkey). Take screenshot whenever you found a new word, and after a reading session, look them up & write down in a flash card program.

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