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Japanese Language and Culture Club
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  Home | Blog | Forum | Members | ImagesWelcome to the Japanese Language and Culture Club Whether you're here because you have a question, are interested in Japan and it's language, or just wanting to chat. Feel free to browse around. Intro はじめに The Japanese language (にほんご 【日本語】) is the language spoken in Japan. It was originally only a spoken language until monks from China came over to Japan, and thus the Kanji (かんじ 【漢字】 Chinese characters / Hanzi) were adpoted. Today, somewhere around 3,000 of these Chinese characters are used in everyday Japanese. They're broken up into categories essentially, the General Use Characters or 常用漢字, Characters used for Names or 人名用漢字, and then characters outside of these groups usually containing characters used for food names, like 天麩羅 (Tempura), 餃子 (Gyoza), etc. The Japanese also make use of characters called 仮名 (Kana), which are broken up into two groups called the 平仮名 (Hiragana/ひらがな) and 片仮名 (Katakana/カタカナ). Unlike the Kanji, these characters are simple derivitives used phonetically (Kanji are used ideographically, and some have multiple readings for a single character). Japan has blessed us all with huge amounts of media, from news, TV dramas, and anime （アニメ）, to novels, websites and manga （漫画）. And with all this media, it's no wonder so many people want to learn Japanese. It's a great language to learn. If the media isn't enough to drive you to learn the language, or at least learn a bit about the Japanese culture, then perhaps the food will. Sushi （寿司）, Tempura （天麩羅）, Gohan （御飯）, and more. Japan is also known for drinking a lot of Green Tea （緑茶）, and things like Ramune （ラムネ） are also some of the things you'll find in Japan. Language Resources So, if you're ready to learn, or are already learning Japanese, perhaps some of these resources will help. The Japanese Language and Culture Club - This club is great for talking about your language learning goals, new discoveries you've uncovered, or even which manga you're reading this week. You can ask questions, and our forums is a great place to talk about specific things like how to learn Kanji. Dictionaries (辞書) - Dictionaries are great resources for discovering what words mean. There are several options when choosing a dictionary, but I think these will best serve you. 1. WWWJDIC - The best online Japanese-English dictionary you can find. It's an open source dictionary that, not only contains hundreds of thousands of entries, but it also contains set expressions, names or people and places, and has many features for looking up words and kanji. 2. Yahoo辞書 - This dictionary is another one of the better ones. You can search two of the largest 国語辞典 (Japanese Language Dictionaries), the 大辞林 and the 大辞泉. As well as having a great multilingual dictionary with tons and tons of example sentences, it also has a synonym dictionary. 3. Goo辞書 and Infoseek辞書- These two dictionaries are essentially the same in contents, and only differ in minor features. They both use the 大辞林 for their 国語辞典 (Japanese Language Dictionary). And, the multilingual dictionaries have quite a few simpler example sentences, so these are good to start with if you're not yet familiar with longer constructs of Japanese. 4. Saiga-jp, Kanji Dictionary - This is a Kanji dictionary containing some 3,000 character with voice recordings and some listed compounds, and usage examples. (Thanks hikky) Grammar (文法) - Japanese grammar is simple, logical, and easy to learn. Especially when you're using the right sources. While I would only recommend studying grammar that you absolutely need (such as the functions of particles, and basic Japanese word order), you can use Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese to get you started. He teaches you to understand grammar from Japanese so that you may learn to understand Japanese, not so much on actually using it (which comes natural with lots of reading and listening). Learning Japanese (日本語の勉強) - If you don't know about AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com, then head on over there and read up. It covers all sorts of things on becoming natively fluent in speaking, reading, writing, and listening. As well as sharing lots of info on how one can go about immersing themselves in Japanese and becoming fluent by having fun. Not to mention, there's tons of links to many many resources for learning, among which is Anki. For more resources, such as media recommendations and such, head on over to our forum. Thanks for visiting, and welcome! Top ^ Club Affiliates Japan Lovers MAL Member Socializing Club   Please vote in this poll for whether or not you would like member cards for this club. http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=95727 Club Members
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