Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Hey Jim, I studied Japanese from scratch at uni. That had me studying abroad in a Japanese Uni, when I came back I practiced with friends and kept studying kanji and grammar. I ended up working teaching English in Japan for a year after I graduated and now I work in a Japan specialist travel agency here.

I'm still studying now (I don't think anyone ever does with a foreign language!), I recommend the "Kanzen Master" series. I would also recommend "Kanji Box" which is an online programme you can access through facebook.

Send me a PM if you have any questions.

Incidentally, as your name isn't Japanese, it would usually be written in katakana, the script for foreign names and loan words. As it's the same as mine, it looks like this:

ジェームス


(or you can make it zu at the end)

ジェームズ

Cheers,

J

Hey Jim, I have a similar story to Jim (this is going to get confusing fast, I can see). I studied Japanese for a year at a community college-type deal (this was after I had already finished regular college), then came to Japan to work and have been here since.

It's hard to say how long it took "to learn". I'm still learning! When I arrived in Japan I could have simple conversations in bars but couldn't get my electricity hooked up or read books intended for adults. A couple of years later I could do both. But I still can't WRITE more than a couple hundred kanji without cheating. You get better at what you practice, and don't at what you don't. So think about what your goals are carefully.

If I had to narrow it down to one piece of advice, it would be that the more you practice with a real person, the more you will "get" the language. The trick is finding native speakers who don't mind you using your time with them for practice. (Because, just because someone is Japanese, or any other language, that doesn't mean that they have time or inclination to teach their native language to everyone who wants to learn it.) Paying for lessons is one of the best ways of doing this because then you are guaranteed that your practice will be the FOCUS of your time together. There are Japanese teachers who teach online via Skype now; I don't know how good they are or if they are worth the money but I'm sure they are better than a CD of sample sentences.

But if this isn't an option for you, maybe there's a Japanese consulate near you that runs friendship events or something. Maybe there are exchange students in your area looking for "language exchange" partners; that's a deal where you meet up for, say, an hour, and spend the first 30 minutes speaking English and the second speaking Japanese, so you both get a chance to practice. lang-8.com is an interesting site, too; it won't help with speaking but it might be a good way to meet internet-style penpals (remembering your other thread).

Hope this helps.

Last edited by No-sword (2011-01-13 08:10:59)

I was born in Harajuku and spoke English at home and Japanese with grandparents and in the world outside the home (e.g., kindergarden) until I was 5. Then my language became Danish. I kept a very simple Japanese till I was 19. When I went to Japan to study shakuhachi, I think I went to Japanese class for 2 years part time (twice a week) then 3 x 3  month full time... and then again part time. Later I did intermediate Japanese and advanced Japanese at uni. SO much hard work! I do appreciate it a lot now tho - although I keep on forgetting now that I have not been as much in Japan the past 10 years.

Regarding names. I was 18 before I was able to spell my name right! HA! But the reason was that my father had to get out of Japan quickly (FBI came to fetch him) and I was left with a Japanese passport that had romanised my name (even the non-Japanese names)... So my horrible long full name:

Kikutsubo Galathea Mikhailovna Mizuno Day
became:
Kikutsubo Garatea Mihairofuna Mizuno (they somehow missed out my family name and Day was not included. Probably ran out of space).

I had to go to family court to change the spelling.

No-sword wrote:

Kiku, your dad was on the run from the FBI?!

Jim: I wouldn't say "so proficient" so much as "so-so proficient" It's just a case of "the more you do it, the easier it gets," as you say. When I decided I wanted to learn, I was working in a high school, and they had a bunch of sample textbooks for the subject "Kobun" (古文, classical Japanese) that companies would send them for consideration... so I borrowed one that looked readable and took it from there, gradually accumulating more books as I went. A dedicated "kogo" dictionary is one thing you need pretty early on, for example... I like Ono Susumu's dictionary from Iwanami but I think virtually any will have the info you need.

It really helps that in Japan it's easy to buy cheap paperbacks that have old texts + modern translations/commentary, for reading practice. (Iwanami Bunko's books in the "yellow" category, Kodansha's Gakujutsu Bunko, etc.) I wish there were English-language publishers who worked the same way... I think the closest we have is a Penguin edition of Beowulf in the original; everything else seems to be priced for university libraries.

(If you mean the old handwriting thing, basically the same deal... I found a book about the subject and then just started grinding.)

Interesting stuff, thank you mate. When I was teaching at a junior high I tried that, we had tonnes of those books hanging around, but I decided I would work on my standard Japanese first for the JLPT. Have you found any really old texts on shakuhachi? I imagine they would be quite interesting and a lot of the people on here would be salivating over the prospect.

Hi Kiku, sounds great. Fingers crossed you get the post you're after

Yes, Torsten is amazing and he keeps going on and on...
He will do a speech on shakuhachi this coming Wednesday in Charlottenlund, north of Copenhagen... if anyone is interested... We can take the train up together from the Central Station.