Learning to read in Japanese

500-1000 words a month is feasible if you're studying intensively. That's less than an hour of flash cards a day, and then the rest of the time you put words in your deck.

>Haruki Murakami
Go away!

Go read "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," then come tell me that.

>If she couldn't pick that up during intense study, what chance would you have to learn it to such a degree as to genuinely enjoy literature?
>It feels like we can only ever learn it well enough to "get by" when living there.
Stop spreading your stupid factoids! Japanese is a very logical and simple language grammar-wise. The only hindrance is its script and the rest( honorifics, different lexicon depending in your social rank) is no big deal, and is oftentimes blown out of proportion by monoglots like you.

You can't learn any language outside of context, bonehead, language isn't just blindly memorizing words.

>implying I don't hear more Japanese than English on a daily basis

The only people I have ever met who spoke Japanese well enough to read serious literature and not just shitty light novels, have lived in Japan for an extended period of time.

And again: I'm not talking about the grammar. I'm worried about nuance.
Assuming you've "learned" Japanese: Do you get the jokes of high-brow Japanese comedy? Like, you actually laugh at them?
Do you "get" rakugo?

I'm not trying to mock you, by the way. I genuinely want to know.
Because 95% of the info out there is either by "English teachers" or by people with anime reasons.

There used to be come financial incentive with the hope that they rebounded from the 90s, but at this point it'd only be worth it if:

* You plan on living there
* You plan on consuming Japanese media for the foreseeable future (weeb or otherwise)
* You're interested in the linguistic aspects (which, to be fair, are unique compared to most other languages)

About 2 years I guess.

anything japanese that's worthwhile to read has already been translated into english. i was bored and started learning japanese a few years ago and stopped after i learned hiragana & katakana plus a bit of kanji. i switched to french because i figured if i'm going to put that much time into something it'd be better spent learning something i can actually use almost every day. plus in canada there is french writing on everything you buy so it's easier to immerse yourself.

but to answer your question it takes the average person about 2 years to become really fluent. that's if you're studying for at least hours a day on top of taking time to immerse yourself with other people or try and pick up on words/phrases from tv without subs.

at least 2 hours/day**

2 - 3 years with a couple of textbooks like Genki I and II and some other intermediate Japanese text. You won't be able to read anything before 1945 since they revised the language after the war. The more contemporary the novel the easier it will probably be. Even if you don't like Murakami you should be able to read him with an intermediate level understanding of the language.

>2 years
>really fluent
No. Fluency isn't all about years, and, if possible in just 2 years, you'd have to be immersed from the get-go living in Japan, ignoring English as much as you can. Let alone that fluency is relative.

>since they revised the language after the war
How? What's been changed specifically?

>anything japanese that's worthwhile to read has already been translated into english.
Books maybe. Plenty of quality untranslated porn games, though.

If you don't enjoy the process of looking up words in the dictionary you'll never learn japanese

There was a lot more kanji before then, now there's only around 2000 (ironically I think the number is something like 1945) required to read publications such as newspapers. So there's more kana now. Also the language itself has loosened up. Even gender-based language has changed a bit so you can get younger girls talking of themselves using referents for younger males.

An educated Japanese person will know 3,000+ kanji. The jouyou list isn't as comprehensive as you think it is.

Less use of kanji. Used to use different kanji for the same verbs/nouns which carried very small nuances unknown to the common man. Some authors continue doing it but it's dying out fast.

I didn't say that.

Yeah the jouyou list is the equivalent of a high school graduate, which is why I say its required for publications like newspapers. The main point though is that pre-war Japanese is a lot harder than post-war and not really necessary to read unless you're a specialist.

It should be obvious that you should study the history and culture alongside the language. There are plenty of books available.

What prevents me from memorizing unknown kanzi all while reading, thus expanding my vocab even further to read books more comfortably afterwards? It's just like reading classics in English while looking up outdated words and expressions.

bumpy little bump

Just go to /djt/ on /jp/ or /int/

The general consensus is to learn hiragana and katakana, start reading tae kim or some other textbook like genki, start going through a core deck on anki, and start reading and add words you don't know to a 'mining' deck. Isolated kanji study (going through the joyou list, for instance) isn't very popular and really only makes sense after you know a lot of japanese already.

Did I ask how to learn Japanese? For some reason I can't remember doing it.

No one gives a fuck what you asked.

That's what I call edgy.

Depends on how dedicated you are

I know like 2,500 kanji by now and can't read shit. What kind of vocabulary have I been learning?

You were supposed to memorize words within their context, not kanjis as separate entities, mook.

>Hiragana and Katakana are probably easy, should take only a couple hours to learn.

>mfw when been trying to learn hiragana for a week but can't memorize it
>probably will never be able to learn japanese

sucks to be a brainlet.

That's not the problem. When I take a random Japanese text, 60% of the kanji I've never seen before.

>accademic

Go browse /a/ and /jp/ -- you can't learn Japanese. Maybe you will be able to read LNs. But no, you will not be able to read something like Genji which is difficult even for natives (I don't even think the original is legible for anyone besides scholars).

Just learn a meme language like Anglo Saxon. It'll take you a year or two (less if you know something like German) and you'll at least seem like a different kind of loser when you start speaking it half-broken.

HOW DO I LEARN NORSK?

Nowhere near enough. That's only 730 hours in two years.

By studying. What exactly is the reason you have to ask? Just get a beginner manual with good-quality audio, a grammar, and a dictionary, and start learning.

Not believing you. Try to come up with a more believable crap next time.

What is there not to believe? At least Anglo Saxon is a meme language that is related to one you know. Get your memes straight.

You're so pathetic whereas I'm destined to be fluent in Japanese in the next 8 years or so which invariably entails lots of fun with Japanese qts. You just keep whining. You're doing all right so far for a loser.

5/5 cringe, kid.

Normiee REEEE

bump

4 years of dedicated study at the absolute minimum, and you'll realistically have considerable difficulty if they aren't spent living in Japan.

>I always feel like I'd get more reward from my effort by learning Latin or French.
You're correct.

Because unlike in even 17th century English you'll probably be looking up several words per sentence instead of one per paragraph, and looking up kanji takes longer than looking up English words. It's possible but expect glacially slow reading.

Just write the words down and look them up later densetsu

Ebooks have the facility of clicking a word to see the translation.

That's actually a game-changer. I never even thought about that.

Took me around three years before I could enjoy a novel without too much back and forth with a dictionary. That said, the lit authors you aspire to read will be out of reach for a further few years of study - literary Japanese is like a whole new language.

Authors who focus on dialogue will be easiest to read. Short story collections by Higashino Keigo would be a pretty good place to start your journey.

>if you can't
>you can't
>you
>can't

t. brainlet fears

EXACTLY!

>faggots: 0
>this user: 1

It just can't be that each book contains different vocab for the same word. Sooner or later I should get there, even if literary Japanese is different.

4-8 years

pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

What does Chinese have to do with Japanese?

I've been studying for at least 2 hours a day for a year and a half.I still use the dictionary extensily and miss a lot of words in anime.Wasting it on sound of music though.

I've been studying English for 5 years, and I still have to look up words regularly when reading books. What a surprise.

It's all the same to a westerner

I wonder, do the Japanese read classics in translation or can they actually read classical Japanese?

No, it's not. Chinese and Japanese are completely different, the latter being way more logical and easier.

>the latter being way more logical and easier.
WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY AMERICAN PIG???

Yeah, words like apoptosis,congius,coprolalia and apotheosis, right?Are you jelly it took me 1 year and a half to be functional in japanese?

What authors of XIX and XX centuries wrote in modern Japanese?

I've been studying English for 24 years and I still have to look up words regularly when reading books.

>t. brainlet

Has anyone read Snow Country? It's a novella but really stuck with me. Here's the synopsis:

Snow Country is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha that takes place in the remote hot spring (onsen) town of Yuzawa. (Kawabata did not mention the name of the town in his novel.)

The hot springs in that region were home to inns, visited by men traveling alone and in groups, where paid female companionship had become a staple of the economy. The geisha of the hot springs enjoyed nothing like the social status of their more artistically trained sisters in Kyoto and Tokyo, and were usually little more than prostitutes whose brief careers inevitably ended in a downward spiral.

The liaison between the geisha, Komako, and the male protagonist, Shimamura, a wealthy loner and self-appointed expert on Western ballet, is thus doomed to failure. The nature of that failure and the parts played by others form the theme of the book.

As his most potent symbol of this "counter-Western modernity", the rural geisha, Komako, embodies Kawabata's conception of traditional Japanese beauty by taking Western influence and subverting it to traditional Japanese forms. Having no teacher available, she hones her technique on the traditional samisen instrument by untraditionally relying on sheet music and radio broadcasts. Her lover, Shimamura, comments that, “the publishing gentleman would be happy if he knew he had a real geisha—not just an ordinary amateur—practicing from his scores way off here in the mountains.”

On his way to the town, Shimamura is fascinated with a girl he sees on the train: Yoko, who is caring for a sick man traveling with her. He wants to see more of her, even though he is with Komako during his stay. Already a married man, it doesn't faze him that he is thinking about Yoko while being public with Komako

Thanks for this list mate

I have, I'd rate it 2/5.
I appreciated the plot and the what it tried to say, but the writing felt too stilted to me. So maybe it was translated poorly? (Though that would be shocking considered who translated it)
Perhaps I will return to it years later and it will somehow be better.

bump

>make a thread last week about starting a German reading group
>archived with litrally 0 replies, not even a shit post

>reddit-tier OP about how to into japanese
>80 replies

kek
fucking weebs

Probably something like 4-5 years. And with this number I'm assuming that you're of average mental quality and that you will learn at least 3 times a week. Of course I could give you some very misleading number that is build on perfectionism, like assuming that you will have quality practice sessions every single day consistently for years to come, but this would just fuck up your learning mentality.

That seems really strange to me. The fact that you refer to yourself, say "I", in different ways depending on gender and formality is one of the first things I learned. boku, ore, watashi etc.

Japanese doesn't have genders. It has feminine and masculine styles of speech.

If she learned masculine speech patterns and didn't realize that they were masculine then she's just a dumbass.

>light novels are suitable for N2
You can read キノの旅 at the N4 level.

I didn't see your thread about a German reading group. I'd participate.

Because GERMan is a subhuman speak.

Really depends on how good your memory is.

>Books maybe.
Not really. The bread and butter classics are all translated, sure, but even mainstream authors (I know offhand that Mishima is one, and I'm not certain but I believe there is untranslated Dazai too) do not have completely translated bibliographies. As for modern authors it's rare to find more than 1-2 translated works even from authors with more than a dozen books.

Well it would just be me and you then I think.
I wanted to make a group for reading a German classic so the group would be upper intermediate level.

Get duolingo or some shit. A week or two should be sufficient for anyone if you actually stick with it.
Especially if all you're trying to learn is hiragana which has an obvious visual pattern for a lot of the symbols.
Katakana is pretty simple too.
Kanji is mostly memorization which becomes easier if you see it used to form simple but familiar words.

You could always learn both.