Thread: Living Language's "Ultimate Japanese: Basic-Intermediat

If anyone is looking for a good book to learn japanese I suggest you take a look at Living Language's "Ultimate Japanese: Basic-Intermediate" as well as Living Language's English-japanese Japanese-English dictionary.

Ultimate japanese is the equivalent of a 2 year college course in Japanese, and will get you well founded(from what I've seen so far) in Grammar, the Kana, as well as get you started on the Kanji(you learn 147 in the book).

Each chapter has a long list of vocabulary, a dialogue, and excersises as well as the manditory lesson itself some chapters have a paragraph or more, written in kana and kanji(only what youve been taught to thatb point) for reading practice!

Anyways, I've had this book for a long time, and out of all of my language books, it seems to be the friendliest... although, I *did* just begin actually learning from it, and am not following the course as it is layed out(im focusing on memorizing the kana[hiragana and katakana] and being able to write them and recognize them,; before I begin anything but the basic grammar and vocabulary.)

Good luck!

--Plastic-Saint
(( Lets show those Mandarin Chinese people whos who...I mean, c'mon we have giant robots, hot cartoon chics, and the best religion on the entire planet(Shinto)!! ^_^ ))

only 147 kanji...that's all you'd learn in 2 years of college?

while i imagine that your book's quite good for grammar, vocab, etc...you should probably start learning the kanji asap...b/c the japanese themselves use kanji much more often than they do writing out kana...especially in books, mags, etc... there's something like an approved list of 2,000 or so...plus an extra couple hundred that are used in names, and other things...

For learning the kanji, I recommend the excellent "Remembering the Kanji Vol. 1" by James W. Heisig it's quite good, and you can learn all of the meanings of the kanji in a few months if you devote time everyday to it...of course it doesn't have any info on pronunciation...but it does teach you what everything means...it's quite an interesting book...there are supposedly more in the series, but i haven't seen them...

As for me...i'm studying chinese, and i only need to memorize something like 3-5,000 汉字...

I heard, where is about 200 keys in kanjis, so if you know them, you can "guess" meaning of even unknown kanjis? Is it true?

I don't know about Kanji, but at least with Chinese there are 214 different radicals that combine to make new characters...how often you can guess the meaning I don't know...I think it's usally more of a oh, i see how these two together mean this, not really a these two together must mean this...and as far as pronunciation...difficult to predict...

Take these for example
日 - sun / day- ri
月 - moon / month - yue

if you put them together
明
any ideas?

if you guessed "bright" (ming) you'd be correct...

if you know the radical for water, you can usually guess that the new character has something to do with water...

if you take these two
人 person - ren (in the radical form)
门 gate - men
you get: 们 which is used to make pronouns plural...(men)

so the basic answer is...sometimes...maybe...if you know the word, before and you know a similar character you maybe could guess at what the new one is...

For example, I knew the word "hua" meant flower.
I also knew that 艹 as a radical meant something with grass
and I knew 化 was pronounced "hua" but didn't mean flower.
so when I saw 花 i guessed that it meant flower and I was right...but I find instances like this to be an exception rather than the rule...it also helped that I saw it in context...ie at a flower shop and with the character 鲜 xian which I knew meant fresh...

鲜 - xian (fresh) comes from these two characters:
鱼 - fish - yu
羊 - sheep - yang

Why a fish and a sheep together mean fresh I don't know...something to do with hunting and eating i suppose...i probably wouldn't guess that together they'd mean fresh though...

I see... But at least radicals helps to memorize kanjis for sure...it`s easy to remember what "bright=sun+moon", rather then "small box+big box"

right, the radicals do indeed help you remember...I don't know if it would even be possible to remember 5000 unrelated symbol looking things for words...maybe, but it'd be very difficult and time consuming.

Of course you do get things like this:
using this "青" you can make lots of different combinations.

all are pronounced "qing" but with different tones.


青
清
请
情
晴
鲭
蜻

they mean, in order: green or blue, clear, to invite, feeling/emotion, nice weather, mackeral, and dragonfly.

the last two combine 青 with 鱼 (fish) and 虫 (insect)
鲭
蜻

and then there are these which use 青 but are pronounced "jing" with different tones


精
静
靖
睛
菁
腈
靓
婧
鼱


and they mean energy/excellent,still/quiet/calm,pacify/quiet,eye, leek flower, Nitrile, makeup, ?, ?

I couldn't find the last two 婧鼱

... although they combine 女(nv - woman) and 鼠 (shu - mouse) with 青...so...

and then theres:


靛 dian - indigo


which combines 青 with 定 (ding - used in "yiding" - certainly)

To say that it can get confusing sometimes is definitely an understatement...

By the way, it`s strange what green and blue have same sign
But, at least, Japanese don`t have diffirent tones

Yeah chinese can be very strange like that sometimes...

Of course with Japanese the same character can and usually does have at least 2 readings sometimes even 3 or 4...the Japanese reading, and the
Chinese reading which is the Japanese pronunciation of the way the Chinese pronounced it when they imported the character or something...

Whereas in Chinese it's almost always 1 character = 1 sound...

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That keeps happening to this fourm.