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Today, I decided eventually to join Textfugu :-)
My name is Susanne and I’m from Switzerland. About one year ago I decided to learn Japanese as an intellectual challenge and of course some other reasons. In Japanese culture I got interested while I was reading Vagabond. The story about this middle aged ronin fascinated me completely even though probably quite a lot of it is fictional. The about 30 volumes I read in a couple of days…
In about 2-3 years I plan to stay in Japan for a couple of months.I started teaching myself Hiragana and Katakana. Moreover I got all the Japanese learning books at the local library. Most of them I didn’t like, too many Kroentschies (Kanjis)… At first they looked like written gibberish to me and in the meantime they don’t discourage me anymore. That’s kind of helpful.
Sometimes to learn words it’s even easier to have them written in Kanji I found out.In the meantime I have an introductory learning book from Pons, learning Japanese in 4 weeks – well that didn’t work for me though ;-)
I’m still gnawing at lesson 3 of 10.
For the speaking and writing part I have a tandem partner which I meet about once a week since October. It’s not just language exchange, though… we have lot’s of fun, too.During the last 5 months I was reading almost daily the blog entries of Thomas Köhler, who walked from Kap Soya to Kap Sata, the 2900 km through Japan from north to south
http://www.japanfenster.ch/japantrip/ja/
There are tons of wonderful and interesting pictures of his trip, making me want to go there instantly ;-)
Ok, I didn’t read the blog in Japanese. The German part he was writing himself and though was available in the evening (over here). German is the language I learnt at school, Swiss German is my native language. Furthermore I know some English, I had to learn French for 6 years (never used it though) and little Spanish.
But Japanese is so totally different. Now, I can understand, why Japanese people often write funny word orders, skipping words and using even funnier words doing so, to an extent I eventually won’t understand. Now, I’m going to learn this way of thinking…Well, I hope that Textfugu will give me some different ideas and helping me understand this language, learning the words and the Kroentschies.
Kroentschies is my German spelling of crunchies – they definitely do crunch my mind ;-)Btw, is there a search function available for this forum?
Thanks
SusanneWelcome! I actually saw that blog recently, which is kind of a coincidence. I don’t really remember how I found it, though. Good luck in getting to Japan yourself.
There is a search function, but it’s a little hidden – if anyone knows a better way of getting to it, do let me know. =)
1. In the top-right corner, click “Account” then “Profile”
2. In the sidebar on the page that loads, click “Topics” or “Replies” (depending on how you want the results to be returned)
3. On that page, there should be a table showing a list of topics. Right above the table, on the right-hand side, there’s a search box. =DHi Susannem
Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. :) Thanks for the blog link. Sounds like fun!
Good luck with all of your studies!
CassandraHi Susanne, welcome to TextFugu! Looks like you’ve already got quite an impressive language learning résumé, so I’m sure learning Japanese will be easy-peasy for you. Regardless, good luck with your studies!
Hi Susanne! I am glad Kanji don’t discourage you any more – I totally agree that sometimes, they can even make learning vocabulary easier! And if you learn the radicals first, the Kanji themselves are often not too hard to learn! You can do it! :) Always awesome to meet someone who loves manga – I’ll be checking out Vagabond – and thanks for the link to Mr. Kohler’s blog, it sounds amazing! Nice to meet you. :)
Thanks for all those hi and welcome mails – nice to meet you too! :-)
@Joel
Thanks for explaining me your way you find things. Eventually, I found in the Forum How-To in the last reply the Google-solution:
Just add “site:textfugu.com/bb/ ” to your search words (http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/forum-how-to/#post-22951)@Cassandra
Well, I found the blog of Thomas just a couple of days before he started. There was a portait of his journey at our local newspapers.@hashi
Well, to have to learn French was annoying. At least it was helpful for English and Spanish.
At the moment, I’m trying to study Japanese words, but they are so not connectable to something I’d knew of, thus I’m having quite a hard time. So I’m experimenting with Anki to find a way, to remember those words (more easily).
Maybe I’ll find here some more ideas, I couldn’t think of.@sunnie1
Well, at first it looked like Greek to me ;-)
Since most Kanjis aren’t self-explaining, which means, I have to learn first, how to make them kind of self-explaining, there is the same problem, as described above :-I.
At the moment, I’m doing this eye focussing exercises. Some sheets have letters or numbers on them. SInce Kanjis are kind of compact, I just combined both, learning Kanjis and doing exercises at the same time. I arranged some sheets, like Kanjis, the Kanas I never can remember and one has even Yotsubato pictures on it :)
At the end of January, when my tandem partner will be back from Japan, I’ll geht my first volume of Yotsubato in Japanese. I’m planning to translate it :)I’m glad I’ve joined…
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