Japanese Learners' Repetition In Conversation - Jalt Publications: Fill & Download for Free

There seems to be a difference of opinion as to what the question means! As a native English speaker, my immediate reaction was that what is being asked is what Japanese think about the sort of accent foreigners use when speaking Japanese. Otherwise the question would surely have said something like “ . . . noticeable about the way Japanese learners accent Japanese words”. The question, to my mind, is talking about the accents of the learners, not the accents (or stress or tone) of the words they use.I’ve heard some foreigners who speak better Japanese than I do (from a linguistic point of view), but to my non-Japanese ears it sounds heavily accented and therefore quite unnatural. I remember meeting one guy who had worked for the British Embassy before going into the financial sector; his Japanese was very good (the British send their Embassy staff on intensive language courses), but he spoke it with a strong upper-class British accent. I can still hear it in my head and could reproduce it instantly (a pity Quora doesn’t have voice files)! What Japanese would think of it, I can’t imagine. I only know that I do get annoyed (perhaps quite unreasonably!) when I hear Japanese speaking very good English, but with a strong Japanese accent.

After 96 semester hours of college Japanese at the U of Iowa (all of my 3rd and 4th year classmates married Japanese), the summer of 1988 at Middlebury, eight years living in Japan and 6 years of marriage to a J national, I took the level 1 test cold, just out of curiosity. I passed with only 2 or 3 points to spare, so I have no idea how I'd do on the current test, 20 years and a raising a daughter in Japan later.I passed level 3 of the J History Test (written by Japanese aimed at J public school students) 7 years ago, so I can match wits with any 13-yr-old up and down the archipelago.And I'm hoping to pass the pre-1 level (準一級) Kanji Test later this year. Hopefully that will give cred to the book on 4-kanji expressions (四文字熟語) I'm now writing.

The most obvious, and immediate, thing is, get started. Grab a textbook that addresses the issue of learning kanji, make sure you have a good-quality electronic dictionary, and get some simple reading material, and start reading. Learning kanji takes time. You can refine (and completely change) your methods as you go, but don’t dawdle about seeking some perfect solution; there really isn’t one.That said, I’ll copy/expand an earlier Quora answer I gave to a similar question; this isn’t a “technique” that will make you an expert in 5 days, but it’s what worked for me:I’ll assume:You know hiragana etc well (but you almost certainly do).You also presumably already know the general pattern of Japanese writing, with word-stems using kanji (with kun-yomi reading) together with conjugations in hiragana, particles and other grammatical elements [usually] using hiragana, and “Chinese words” using [usually] pairs of kanji (on-yomi reading). These patterns make reading a lot easier, as they provide an easy way for your eye to quickly pick out the grammatical structure of a sentence, even when you don’t know all the kanji it’s using.Anway, as for kanji:Learn the structure of kanji (radical + sound part, etc). [This is where the textbook comes in.] It's much easier to deal with kanji if you understand them as an assemblage of parts (which they are). Your brain won't generally destructure a kanji you already know well—after a while, kanji recognition gets quicker and more intuitive, more like recognizing a familiar face (and generally in larger chunks than a single kanji)—but for kanji you don’t know well, or don’t know at all, being aware of structure is extremely useful, and can be a strong aid to memorization and guessing.Learn proper stroke order (it's fairly consistent and logical, so this isn't so hard). Besides making your written kanji look correct, and helping input via stroke-recognition, I think correct stroke order helps you to understand and feel the structure of kanji.Learn common radicals. There really aren't so many radicals in common use, and you don’t need to memorize them all to start with, just be aware of their role and properties and try to memorize those you come across.Try to write kanji as much as you can... writing exercises your brain in a different way than recognizing, and writing them is immensely helpful memorization and understanding/"feeling" kanji. When you see a new kanji, after looking it up in your dictionary, try to write it a few times to let it sink it. This of course can greatly slow down the process of reading, so you won’t always do it… that’s fine, just do it as often as you can.Read, lots, and lots, and lots, of Japanese reading material, as often as you can, at the highest level you can manage (hard enough to challenge you, but not hard enough to drive you to despair and make you give up). Look up unknown words as often as you can (sometimes it gets tiring), trying to guess at them first (pronunciation can often be gleaned without knowing the meaning), and only after failing, use your dictionary's handwriting recognition to enter them. Books tend to repeatedly use the same words a lot, which is immensely helpful... you may not remember a word the first, second, third, time... but... eventually, you will!Some people like to use flash-cards and the like, but personally I find it much easier to learn kanji in context: as part of real words, in a real text, with a surrounding context that’s both useful in understanding meaning and provide a sort of “hook” for your brain to latch onto for memorization (bizarrely, I’ve found I can actually remember much of the content of the book page where I first learned many words). If flash-cards are something that work for you, though, use those too.You will forget, a lot, so don't sweat it if you don't remember a kanji you know you've seen 100 times. Just keep repeating, and repeating, and reading, and reading, and eventually your brain will be beaten into submission and you'll understand... :]As for reading materials, I'm a huge fan of the Japanese bunko book format, which is quite cheap, high-quality, and handy, but if you like ebooks, you can also benefit from built-in dictionaries. Of course, choose reading material you find entertaining to keep yourself motivated; I find fiction easier to read just because it often has a lot of dialog, and dialog tends to be both grammatically a bit less dense than descriptive prose, and to use more straightforward words. If you’re in Japan, or have access to a Japanese bookstore, go there and browse; the exact level of the text in a book is something that is hard to judge without seeing it (though of course you’ll eventually get a feel for how certain authors write).Incidentally, in many cases I've found manga to be harder to read than simple prose fiction, simply because it's often far slangier, and tends to use incomplete grammar.... but for basic reading material that uses some but not a lot of kanji, and has furigana, kids manga are one of the more available resources (for whatever reason, I’ve never been able to find a lot of prose-fiction aimed at kids in bookstores). I started out reading lots of Doraemon… :]The electronic dictionary is important because it makes lookup very quick, and while learning, you’re going to be looking up a lot. For kanji, high-quality handwriting recognition (which most modern electronic dictionaries have) is generally what you want. You can also get phone/tablet apps that do similar things, but the really good ones are generally prettye expensive, and the free ones generally have nowhere near the level of polish.