It’s OK, though. It’s one of the most difficult languages in the world for Westerners to learn. I get frustrated too.

Yes, it is great to have a long dialogue to practice comprehension but I was expecting some practical tips. How does hearing that ‘kanji are difficult’ and ‘ I don’t teach kanji to people until they are ready’ or look at the kanji on the stations ‘ help me (a non Japan resident)? As for the fact that a language has to be understood in the context of a culture any sensitive language learner will know that: it applies to any language!

It is no use telling us we do not have the advantage of natives because we are, well, …foreigners[why else would we learn Japanese as a foreign language?]!

I find that after finally arriving at the top of the beginner level there is a gap - a big gap - until the advanced level is reached. This is true for a lot of foreign languages but in Japanese the gap is huge. Mainly because one becomes totally dependent upon the natives teaching you and they seem to teach you what they want to teach you and not what you want to learn. You can study for years and still not get a single word of an anime dialogue or a soap meant for the general public in Japan.

I would have expected the Japanese, of all people, to be able to come up with a method for making the learning more EFFICIENT- through looking at how the language hangs together, the frequency of the expressions/vocabulary (if I have been taught the most common expressions why do they not come up in soaps and everyday news? ) and translating it into a METHOD to beat all methods! Remember Peter’s Swiss Army Knife expressions for the very beginner? Well why can’t we have the same skeleton key approach once we get to more sofisticated subjects?

JPOD101, you are the best around and I am sorry to have to come out with some frustrated words but you asked for feedback. Let us have some more practical advice from now on.

Mikuji

PS: Maybe there is a hidden agend here. Is learning Japanese supposed to be hard work so that the faint hearted can be kept out of interacting with the natives? Sometimes I wonder…Any sensitive student of the Italian langauge will know that a touch of paranoia is in my culture..

as for the person who transcribed all of that, his name is noriyuki and you’ll be hearing from him more in the next few months. it’s a quite a task, so thank you for noticing!!!

To throw in my two cents’ worth: everybody has a different learning style, so perhaps there’s little point arguing over whether physically practicing writing Kanji is a waste of time or not. Personally, I enjoy it. It can be almost meditative. But also, I find it helps me enormously in recognising differences in kanji that look similar to my brain. When I first started, I thought 乗る and 来る looked similar, and I confused 験、険、検 - until I tried to write them.

The book “Let’s Learn Kanji” by J.Y. Mitamura and Y.K. Mitamura was extremely helpful, I found. It has an approach of introducing radicals and components, including their meanings where there is one, and even how the components can sometimes help you guess the pronunciation. Now when I look at new kanji I can break it into parts, instead of seeing a mess of lines that mean nothing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamanote

As a former teacher, I will say this: the more modalities you use to learn something, the better you learn it. Writing kanji is a kinesthetic activity, which helps to form traces in the brain. So, writing, speaking and hearing are all important modalities for learning. The kanji that I drew in a class I once took are the kanji I remember the most. We wrote 後、曜、前, etc.

ありがとうございました　Yanoせんせい！

sorry maxiewawa, but I think you’re on a diferent wavelength.