What is "essential" to learning Japanese ??

This post displays a list. I'll go through and create what works for me.

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=480

Dictionaries Dictionaries and more Dictionaries...

I love dictionaries. From what I understand, the Japanese do to. There is a Kanji dictionary in almost every house. Then there are the specialties..

But when it comes to language learning its pretty obvious, but this is a real world tool which is functional outside of academia. Living in a multi-language world mandates this.

I have tree input methods on my computer, covering latin, cyrillic and Japanese scripts - and use all three regularly. On the road, or plane, an online source, or the heavy book shelf is not always available, so there needs to be a good local source.

For words and phrases I've fallen for the new Dictionary in OS-X Leopard. Used a variety of tools in the past, but this has been quick and fairly good of late. The only problem is that by default you don't get very much and its very easy to sweep it off to the side for ever.

The solution is its dictionary expansion. David Tse did a great writeup on expanding Dict App as a resource.

The other local tool I get to often is JEDict. Also expandable, but created with Japanese in specific in mind. Runs on practically every Mac OS version - from MacOS 8.1 (Release in 1997!) through 10.6 !

Have fun with quick reference!

Full exposure yields quick refresher.

Just a weeklong trip through Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto with non-speakers of Japanese forced me into a position to translate, and quickly remember what I thought was long forgotten.

Living an 11 hour flight from Japan limits exposure. At times like this you really begin to appreciate the potential benefits of learning the language "in country" - a luxury I have never had.

Whatever the country... whatever the language... if you are there - take advantage - breathe it, live it.

Visual recognition

A visual excercise which gives us some insights into cultural history of Japan and the route from Edo to Kyoto can also serve lessons in character recognition for students of the language.

What passes through our mind when we see an unkown character?  Perhaps a possible approach is not what can we remember about it, but what questions can we ask as we view it, and will the answers to these questions provide understanding and a chance to recall the character later.

Once we have a basis for breaking down the characters, we can start to ask questions and provide our own answers and stories for comprehension.

The concepts outlined by Heisig allow for just that - a clear breakdown of the majority of characters, but more importanly, the rules for training oneself to continue and be able to "remember" and later "recollect" nearly all characters.

Visual recognition is amazing.

Pro-textbook - anti-textbook

Japanese is the fourth language for me by count, and the second to learn (at least partially) through formal and other education. The first two were learned "in context" - no textbooks, no vocabulary lists aside from those we're pressured into for the SATs.

If we're not "in context" - in country, surrounded by language, there is no chance for success without a textbook and some sort of guide. The view I've formulated is that you really need at least two sets of textbooks, by different authors, presenting the information from their perspective points of view. A grammar reference appropriate for the level is a must.

With Japanese this gets more complicated than the romance or cyrillic scripts, but my view is that you will need two sets of character study books, plus a good reference.

For some of these the web is a great resource. Going through the online Japanese language resources you will no doubt come accross the names Jim Breen and Tae Kim.

Jim Breen is responsible for the foundation upon which the bulk of online Japanese learning tools are based. Tae Kim is known for what is considered on the of the best online Japanese grammar premieres. It is excellent as a second resource or for those that studied in the past and need a good review.

Whatever your primary texts may be (possibly mandaded by instructors), the main thing that I would recommend is to avoid working with a textbook which is "romaji" based. While Eleanor Jorden's Japanese The Spoken Language is an excellent grammer book and moves fast with dialogues (I've studied from all three volumes), its use of romaji as a crutch made it difficult to get into taking notes in Japanese. This is a great text, but should be a second/supplemental text for this reason.

More on my favorite texts later.

ESL / JSL / x#L ?

Second+ Language aquisition - whether based on a need due to residence, work, education or just a hobby or ambition is joy for some, pain for others.

My exposure of Japanese began in 1981 as a child lugged along during my family's exodus from eastern europe to north america. A six year interlude into Spanish dettered me from the unestablished goal but served to strengthen multilingual flexibility. It wasn't until 1990 that a consious effort was made and a realization that "the journey begins here" allowed me the chance to actually touch the language in a university course.

The years go on. On and off - and on an off... and finally on - hoping that my resolve to obtain a certain (?) literacy level in Japanese is not thrown off course by life's events.

There is just too much in the infospace now. Too much to sort through, too many distractions. Reflecting on GTD and other ideas, this virtual location is a reference foremost for myself.

While my focus is on Japanese, I feel that the mindset and techniques in language aquisition are similar if not the same, regardless of the base and target language. Let this life long journey bring more joy than pain.

with kind regards