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Learning Japanese

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Heatherdu

New Member
Hi! I am looking for suggestions on methods for learning Japanese. My 9 year old son's big plans for life right now are to learn Japanese and finish school so that he can one day move to Japan and work for Pokemon/Nintendo. So I thought it would be great to foster this interest in Japanese. It might come in handy if say someday he wins a trip to Worlds and it is held in Tokyo. :biggrin: Really, any language skill is beneficial and it is terrific that his love of Pokemon spreads beyond the cards. But I have no idea where to start. If you or someone you know has used a product and can recommend it, I would appreciate it. It can be dvd, book, podcast, website, anything.

Thanks!
 
Starting andrew off young is the best idea. Kids are like sponges....they can absorb this stuff a lot easier than if he waits to learn the language. Take a look on amazon.com and see if there is anything decent available on there. I imagine you can find some language books for pretty cheap on there.
 
Ik this popular program or cdrom for a computer. A kid from school showed it to me in the library. It was called rosetta stone I think im not 100% on that. Idk just google it. It can teach over like 25 languages!
 
Rosetta Stone is an excellent program for teaching foreign languages. I've taken Spanish for over a year with it and it has helped a lot.
 
I go to Animé Conventions and listen to J Pop and watch a lot of subtitled work, I pick up and recognize words here and there, anyway it takes time to learn more and more words. I learned basic Korean at a young age, and I always associated words with other words. And just picked some of it up I guess.

 
Do you live in a heavily populated area? If you are I'm sure there's a school or program somewhere nearby. Probably should look in the yellow pages.
 
I have herd, Rosetta stone does wonders for students wanting to learn a new language. I myself, will need to learn to speak Japanese or at least some basic Japanese dialect because I plan on going to Japan this summer.:fighting:
 
yoshi1001 said:
Do you live in a heavily populated area? If you are I'm sure there's a school or program somewhere nearby. Probably should look in the yellow pages.
Click to expand...

Yes, we live near the Ohio State University but so far I have been unable to find any classes either there or at the local community centers that teach Japanese. A few Spanish language courses but no Japanese. It may just be the time of year as everyone is busy with the holidays and finals and not much extracurricular. Plus many of the evening classes are offered pretty late for an elementary student though if I find one I may just take it myself and then try to teach my boys what I pick up from class.

Our library has quite a few books and audio cds so I reserved a bunch of those. We can test drive them so to speak and if we find one that he really likes then I can buy it. They did not have Rosetta Stone though but I appreciate the suggestion and will look for it again.

'Mom - thanks for the websites! I found two of those yesterday and will add the rest to my bookmarks. I really like the printed lessons and kid-friendly vocabulary.

Thanks to all of you for the help! :thumb:
 
An esay way is to immerse then as much as you can with japanese culture and the language. Just simple exposure to the language can be very beneficial.

My parents taught me spanish that way when I was very young. I also tried japanese in high school, and found it a lot harder to learn japanese as an 18 year old already adjusted to my environment for so long rather than being young and reading, listening to spanish radio, spanish tv and such.

if you can find children's programming in japanese, that'd be huge.
 
Subtitled anime isn't hard to get hold of, and he might still be young enough for "immersion" to work. There are also children's song tapes (like this: Amazon) which seem to be the sort of thing people use when bringing up a billingual child. Your choices will probably depend on how the child learns, fitting it around him.

If you're going to try various methods, I'd think it best to review them yourself at first. He might get discouraged otherwise. There are a lot of different ways of learning languages, and some of them don't seem to be very compatible at all.

NHK, the public tv broadcasting network (its more like BBC than PBS) can be watched outside of Japan. I haven't quite figured out how, though.

hth, MG
 
Yep, well my Dad works for a Japanese Computer company. A few years back, they gave a course on Japanese, and my father attended.

They gave out a book accompanied with some tapes, I've started reading them about a week ago, and I listen to the CDs every once in a while. It was called "Japanese for Busy People".

It's a pretty good course, and it teaches you to read the Kanji along with the speaking.
 
Rosetta Stone is excellent for learning Japanese.

However, it doesn't teach much in the way of Japanese Grammer. For that, I'd recomend Genki!.
 
Heatherdu--
The Genki textbook is pretty good, but it doesn't offer many examples, so I'm not sure it's good for the younger crowd. I also hate to think what it would be like teaching characters to a 9-year-old out of Genki.

Hirigana and Katakana are the two initial sets of characters a student needs to learn (NOT Kanji), and I know that there are books designed specifically to teach those character sets to children.

I would not jump in to an adult level program or text book, because Japanese can seem overwhelming, even though it's not really that difficult.
 
I have not used it myself, but I hear Rosetta Stone is excellent for any language and of course Japanese. Thats what I would recomend. Of course you could always learn Japanese from watching Ninja Warrior on G4!:thumb:
 
What I've heard about Rosetta Stone is that it's very, very, very fast-paced.
If the kid is 9, I just don't see any reason to rush things. Especially if Rosetta Stone (like Genki) will be referring to English grammar that he hasn't learned yet (thereby making the references null).
 
9 out of 10 otaku agree! Fansubbed Japanese anime is the best way to learn Japanese!
And they'd be wrong. I'm also disappointed that people suggested that seriously already. =(
 
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