Hi, this is the first IRC Japanese lesson at #JapaneseLessons over irc.rizon.net. 
This has been done thanks to #LearnJapanese. Please visit us there or come to the new forum http://invision.nihongosensei.org

This lesson has been given by kekekekeke on 2005 December the 6th 9pm EST.

Well basically, I set this room up with the idea that a lot of us want to learn japanese 
but just don't have the proper direction and its an ENORMOUSLY DIFFICULT language

But I think some competence can be gained without sacrificing money and perhaps even a satisfactory level of speaking and reading without ever having live instruction.

So, without further blah blah blah; I’m going to just talk about some basics and tell the story 
of how I began learning Japanese and where I am today. So you’re probably thinking, 
who the hell are you and are you qualified? Well, I’m nobody really, and no I’m not very qualified :P 
But I do know the basics very very well and have gotten there after about 3 years of studying, 
sometimes intense. I feel I can save you a lot of pain learning Japanese in ridiculously hard ways.

There is no right way to learn Japanese. The way children in Japan do, it is somewhat an evil  method to make foreigners follow. They start by force-feeding their kids kanji etc... every year, until  they puke it back up.
Kanji are Chinese characters in case you didn’t know.

The Japanese language system is composed of 3 sets of characters:
Hiragana and Katakana, known collectively as kana and then the fearful Kanji.

A Japanese adult can read about an average of about 2 thousands kanji.
By the 6th grade, you’re expected to master near a thousand, I believed.

The bot Peace`maker in the #learnjapanese room can assist you in learning them.
To learn the Kana, I’d suggest www.kicl.info and www.lrnj.com
There are video games (RPG actually) that will help you.
In order to fully utilize them, you'll need a list of the hiragana/katakana characters.
First practice on your own and then try the games and switch it up.
It’s not an easy feat and is basically the biggest hurdle for beginners and it’s not even necessary 
to know them to get a foothold in Japanese because thankfully there have been many linguists 
around who "romanized" the Japanese language into what is known as Roumaji (Romaji).
A Google search on Hepburn Roumaji will give you all the history you want to know about that.

divstar just sent me a link for a site where you can practice the hiragana
http://www.japanese-name-translation.com/site/hiragana_symbols.html#05

The videos I will ask you to download from me also go through the hiragana as well; 
splitting them into edible chunks over the 20-something episodes
The videos will be an excellent supplement because you'll hear native pronunciations
and you can just replay and practice them until satisfied.
The reading and writing of Japanese is so ridiculous
Just do your best and try not to be disappointed.

After you master the Kana, which will probably take 1-3 months depending on your commitment,
you've basically got the most mundane part of learning writing/reading out of the way.
Because the kanji do actually having meaning to them, whereas the Kana have lost meaning 
over the years. So basically, learning the kanji you can connect them to ideas for recognition.
But the Kana need to be straight-up memorized. So I’d suggest tackling the hiragana first.
Unless you have plans to go to Japan soon, in which case, I’d suggest the katakana.
The difference between the two is quite simply that the katakana is used for "loan words" and the 
hiragana is used for native Japanese words. A lot of menus etc. in Japan have katakana. 
So it’s better for travelers to know if they care about eating that is :)

The nice thing about learning katakana is that after you can read the symbols, you can basically pronounce these funny looking things and more than 90% of the time. It will be like saying an 
English word because the majority of loanwords are English. So once you master katakana, you  open up the doors to a world of vocabulary you already know. It’s pretty damn useful I must say.
So, English speakers have that nice advantage when learning the language that others may not.
But Chinese have the biggest advantage when learning Japanese because they already know 
how to write and know the meanings of the kanji that’s huge :)

Wish I was Chinese sometimes when I try to study this damn stuff.
Some meanings have been disturbed over time but the majority remain similar.
The barrier for Chinese learners becomes learning the ON and KUN readings.
Which all foreigners must do eventually :(

It’s kind of crazy that kanji characters can have multiple readings.
But they do to simply sum up how kanji works:
If two kanji are next to each other, they generally represent a compound.
And you read the compound by using the ON readings of the individual kanji 
and combining them to form a word. That’s in general.
The KUN readings in general, are for when the kanji is sitting alone in a sentence.
So I’ve kind of briefed you on the three written languages.

ON and KUN again are basically just how you read a kanji when you see it in a sentence, if the 
kanji is in a compound you use the ON reading, if the kanji is solo, then use the KUN reading. 
ON readings are derived from the original Chinese reading of the word when they imported the 
characters from china in 5th century AD. The KUN readings are based from natural Japanese.
So in a written Japanese sentence you will have Kanji, hiragana, and katakana all combined
for one beautiful linguistic disaster of a written language. 
This is the primary reason people fail in learning Japanese, in my opinion.

The written language, in its complexity, naturally discourages one from any kind of long term 
commitment. I mean just knowing that Japanese people get 10 years of school and hardcore drilling 
to learn these things and then your Japanese teacher expects you to kind of pick it up 
over 2-4 years is unfortunate. So... the way I learned Japanese was by avoiding the kanji as long as 
possible until it was necessary to learn them, haha but don’t do that :)

Okay, that’s my 30 minute talk on the written language now to the oral language.

------------------------------------   [ Japanese pronunciation is fairly simple ] ------------------------------------ 

There're a few tricky letters for English speakers but for the most part it’s something we can grasp. 
Obviously I can’t teach you these trick ones, but the video does an EXCELLENT job of helping you 
with those. also the videos will provide you with an awesome model for pronouncing.

Just to jump back to writing for a second, b0b0 brought up an excellent tool for learning kanji, its in 
my fserve, its called "remembering the kanji" by Heiseg. It teaches you to make mneumonics and 
works very well for some students, but kanji isn’t something I’d worry about if I was a beginners.

Well unfortunately, even though pronunciation can be mastered, it is hard for English speakers to 
"sound" Japanese. This is because Japanese uses rhythm that is syllable timed.
So you give each syllable the exact same length.  In English, we accent our syllables to make them louder, longer, or clearer than unaccented syllables.  In Japanese, accent only has to do with changes in pitch. The languages are very different sounding as you all know.

          wa ta kushi wa is the English pronunciation of one form of "I"
          In Japanese it’s more like wa ta ku shi wa

Japanese is like a melody composed of quarter notes.
When you string them together, it sounds like a machine gun, which can be a little monotonous.
As English speakers, we sound sloppy to the Japanese ear if we try to pronounce things with 
English rhythm. So it’s an important thing to recognize when beginning Japanese.
Another feature of Japanese is Pitches. Luckily there are only two pitches, high and low.
But they become important to differentiate between words spelled the same. For instance, 

          Hashi can mean chopsticks or bridge.
          But each meaning has a different pitch.
          One is "high>low" the other is "low>high" 

and so a Japanese listener can tell the difference. It really isn’t that difficult to pick up as an 
English speaker. We kind of get it naturally just hearing the word spoken once or twice without 
even thinking of what the hell is a pitch. Don’t stress how you can pick up the difference in pitch. 
Just know it exists and you’re using it every time you speak Japanese, even if you don’t realize it.

I figure I’ll do an hour then open for questions my hands need the break :)
Okay time for basic grammar!!! yay!!!
Oh by the way, I encourage all of you to tear up my fserve and DL every little thing you can find.
I have a ton of stuff and everything is useful but at the end of the lesson I’m going to present a 
kind of outline for what I think is the best way to approach learning Japanese.

Where’s my damn apple guys? I’m starving here
divstar gave me a bentou box
thx divstar, the rest of you suck :P

A bentou box is basically a lunch box that is available in convenience stores in 
Japan (called Konbini) cheap and non-nutritious but taste good.
Obento is same as bentou the (o) makes it extra polite.

-------------------------------------------------------   [ Okay Grammar! ] -------------------------------------------------------

English sentences are generally arranged SVO ( Subject Verb Object )
Japanese is SOV. That means, well we are screwed
Koreans have the major advantage of also having an SOV language. 
So they don’t need to think too much when learning Japanese.
Chinese is SVO, for anyone who can pronounce that crap hehe :P its not crap, I love china too!!

Here is an example of the SVO, SOV jumble.

          Today is Friday = Today Friday is
          Guess which one is English and which is Japanese :P

          kekekekeke ran to school = kekekekeke to school ran

Sucks huh, gotta learn to think backwards.
Yoda from Star Wars, I believe spoke Japanese natively.

Japanese has something called "particles"
They are used to show a words relationship to other words in the sentence 
or to give a word a particular meaning or nuance.

The most common particles are "ga, wa, o, e, to, ni, ka..."
and there are many more, each week we'll try to dive into this stuff.
Particles are the primary roadblock to learning grammar,
because in English we use a totally different system of prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. 
Don’t worry about what those means :P

In Japanese particles go AFTER the word it modifies.
This is very important, now here are some examples:

          top of the desk
          tsukue no ue = "(the) desk of top"
          tsukue = desk
          ue = top
          no = particle that signifies possession
          another translation would be the desk's top

          kekekekeke no hon
          hon = book
          kekekekeke's book

          tashi no enpitsu
          tashi's pencil
          guess what enpitsu means :P

That’s just one particle and there is a dictionary full of them.
But I’d say grammar is not the biggest challenge for us English speakers.
Kanji and then sounding like a fluent Japanese person are most difficult.

I'm going to try to cover all the points of beginner grammar that i think are especially complex
as the weeks go on but using the video and textbook that comes with the video as a supplement 
will help. Then of course, other things in my fserve teach grammar too.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So that concludes the class for tonight, next time we'll jump right into a ton of grammar.
Before I voice you all, I just wanna give my proposed outline:

 ______________
 ||  Homework  ||
--------------------------

1. Try the first chapter of the textbook and watch the first episode of the video
    as a minimum for next week prep.

2. Try about 5 hiragana too.

3. Learn tnpitsu means :P

That’s just one particle and there is a dictionary full of them.
But I’d say grammar is not the biggest challenge for us English speakers.
Kanji and then sounding like a fluent Japanese person are most difficult.

I'm going to try to cover all the points of beginner grammar that i think are especially complex
as the weeks go on but using the video and textbook that comes with the video as a supplement 
will help. Then of course, other things in my fserve teach grammar too.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So that concludes the class for tonight, next time we'll jump right into a ton of grammar.
Before I voice you all, I just wanna give my proposed outline:

 ______________
 ||  Homework  ||
--------------------------

1. Try the first chapter of the textbook and watch the first episode of the video
    as a minimum for next week prep.

2. Try about 5 hiragana too.

3. Learn the strokes from the website posted before.
3. Learn pronunciation from the video.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I’ll be here to supplement and answer questions and focus on the tougher grammar points.
I want to guide you all so you’re all as excited about learning Japanese as I am.
It’s a great (stupidly complex) language coming from a wonderful culture.  ^_^

Student list :
~~~~~~~~~~
kowai`
ryo-ohki
autark
b0b0
Backalley
Cron-Flyback
DADASSDASH
divStar
ehhhhh
Fizzy
ichigo
Kazekage
KusatteruRingo
Neko-Musume
NuMbAA
ogopogo
Progeny
snailturkey
Tarage
tashi
Trout
Vanilla_icemarle
X10A
Xien

Thank you guys!!! Do your homework!! See you next weeeeek!!    ~~kekekekeke

Editors – Candrodor, Vincent-MX
This is Version 3.0

Vincent-MX Bonus vocabulary:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

doumo arigatou				= Thank you very much 
arigatou gozaimasu 			= Thank you (polite)
doumo arigatou gozaimasu		= Thank you very much (polite)
arigatou 				= Thank you
dou itashimashite			= Your welcome
suki					= liking, fondness, love.

ohayou					= Good morning
konbanwa				= Good evening
oyasumi				= Good night
sayonara				= Good-bye (more like farewell)

omg a super long word:  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
rakkaedanikaerazuhakyoufutatabiterasazu     = (exp) fallen blossom doesn't return to the branch, 
					                 a broken mirror can not be made to shine, 
                                                                             what’s done is done, 
                                                                             there’s no use crying over spilled milk.

=======================================================================
This 1st lesson by kekekekeke was re-edited by      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~    Vincent-MX  V3.0  
=======================================================================

This Document is BEST view in wordpad instead of Microsoft Word ^_^;