EDIT: I removed the "word breakdowns" in this and future lessons (which will result in some inconsistencies with other things that I and the replies say) as they felt odd and might result in misspellings of words with similar characters. If this makes it too difficult to understand, let me know and I'll help.


Eniitan :
ZeroTails :
xxAriaxx :
Mynamescox44 :
Zlinqx :
m0ssb3rg935 :
EX Palen :
sevencube3 :
deggle :
Jygin :
A user of this :
Frodlex :

Gonna post this lesson that I just typed up, but frankly I'm sure the guy above me (Linkums) would be able to teach you far more from his video there so feel free to give it a look.

_________________________________________________________

Alright, so time for the first lesson I suppose. To those who have experience in Japanese already: bear with us. We'll be covering this from the most basic and up.

We'll be working on simple and practical words for at least a few weeks, then we'll transition into learning to read, type, and for some of us, write, Hiragana and Katakana, and eventually Kanji.

Remember that this will take quite some time, so don't think any of us will be fluent in a matter of months. And since I've never helped anyone study another language or even studied one myself, I'm not sure how to pace this, so if you guys feel that this is going too slowly or too quickly, let me know and I'll try to adjust it until we reach the most comfortable rate that we can all agree on.

Finally, I'll make the first video and Mp3 file as soon as I finish this post, but it will probably take a day or so to upload due to data speed restrictions on my end.


First word list:
•こんにちは ー Konnichiha (between morning and evening. More on this later)
Hello

•さようならー Sayounara
Goodbye (Technically. More on this in a much later lesson)

•はい ー Hai
Yes.

•いいえ ー Iie (that's iie not Lie)
No

•おやすみ ー Oyasumi
Goodnight


That's it for now. Let me know here or in a message when you think that you have all of these down (many of you probably already know these anyway) and I'll get some more up. As I said earlier, the video and audio file will be up probably tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday. Bear with me please.


Let me know what you think of the methods I used for breakdowns this time. Was the example word for each sound too much, or was it helpful?

_________________________________________

Linkums : Thanks.

No problems so far. I always had trouble with the word for "No" because it always sounded like "yeah", so that helps. Me: "Uh... okay. Hi means yes and yeah means no. ...... ???"

EDIT: typo fix - so, not fo

Eirinn : I already know most of these words! Easy XD

This is gonna be fun, helps to remind me to well remember how to spell the words really.

Well, the breakdown will do little to help me, and coupled with the fact I'm a quick learner when it comes to languages I think I have no say about the pace or methods, if everyone else can keep up then so can I.

It will be fun to listen to the audio. Learning a language using a language I don't use regularly sounds like a challenge, but I'll try my best.

Eirinn : Arigato, Eirinn-chan. <3

Konnichiwa, my friends!

Are we off to a good start? Hai ^^

Any problems so far? Iie

I guess that's all for now. Sayounara and Oyasume

( And that just about sums up my entire Japanese repertoire XD )

Konnichiwah!

Arigato Eirinn-sensei!

Sayounara!

(I knew like one of these but I know how to say teacher and thank you lmao)

I've been learning Japanese from Genki and other resources I've downloaded online. As for the problem with practicing conversational skills through chat, lexilogos is your friend. It has an online japanese keyboard where you type the romaji and gives you the Japanese counterpart, whether it be hiragana, katakana or Kanji.

Here's their page for hiragana: http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/hiragana.htm

Of course you can also just click the characters at the bottom of the typing area, but that's gonna take a long time. Might as well type in kanji and let lexilogos do the automatic conversion.

Linkums : I'm not gonna lie I liked like from what I saw already you wearing the hat lol....it was funny, but that's good because you can't take a teacher seriously if he or she is not in it. XD

EDIT: I used an incorrect term in this post and some later ones as well. I said "familiars" but the correct term would have been "informal" or "plain".



To everyone: From now on, you will only be summoned once per lesson. I'll make sure to upload the videos and audio prior to posting here so that you won't be spammed with so many notifications. Bear with me this time, please.



Here it is at last: the video. :3 If you want a download link to the Mp3 file, let me know here or in a message and I'll upload and link you to it. After today the Mp3 will always be linked here along with the video and the written lesson in one post, but you guys had to wait long enough for this as it is.


Before I go any farther, let me say that I resized the video from it's native 1080p to 720p to save us all on data expenses and to reduce upload time. At one point I had it down to 1.8MB instead of 70+ which was awesome, but the quality was...yikes. lol I tried several, but this was the lowest I wanted to go without knowing how well it would work for you guys. The final product (at 720p) ended up 29MB. I also resized the audio.

IF the quality bothers any of you, please let me know and I'll fix it next time.

Summon time.

https://youtu.be/p5FWe7QwBiI


Eniitan : Yeah, even though Romaji is essentially just a learner's tool, it goes a long way toward helping us retain the words.

ZeroTails-chan : Un! Though technically you mixed an honorific with a familiar...I think. lol I should shut up since Idk. IF I'm right though, you'd want to address a Sensei "Arigatōgozaimas***a Sensei". Buuuut you get bonus points for knowing arigato anyway, and especially for calling me sensei. :3 Also I totally used a translator for that so if I said it wrong, blame them. xD
(Censor thought I swore. Lol)


xxAriaxx : Video is live, if you want to see it.


Mynamescox44 : Un! Impressive knowledge of the language for a new student of it. You must have a good teacher. xD Not that I can really be called a teacher though, since we're technically learning together... I'll flatter myself if I want to though!


Zlinqx : Can you confirm that so far these words are all familiars? I hope not, but it seems that way to me.


m0ssb3rg935 : Eeyup. Lol It does sound like yeah. That actually helped me remember it more easily.


EX Palen : Hopefully it still helps. You're definitely fluent in English so I'm guessing it'll be fairly easy...maybe.


sevencube3 : Video is up if you want to see it.


deggle : Video is live.


Jygin : *repeats last two summon messages*


A user of this : Eirinn-chan? I see how it is. I'll say something back to that!...once I learn a good comeback for it. lol


Frodlex : Video is up.

Eirinn : No way I can concentrate on the audio with such images! My mind is lost in green meadows and the only thing I can hear are the bird's chants!!!

I suggest changing to some snapshots of a desert place or basically anything where I wouldn't want to be right now. How about a school?



But yeah, on a serious note, I did like the video. Not hard to follow, but true is that the lesson was fairly easy to start. Still, I can get what you say at that pace, so I say keep it up like this and it's all fine for me.

And well, when I said the breakdown will do little to help is because I don't need such breakdown in Spanish. I haven't yet seen anything strange in Japanese pronunciation, but English is full of strange things to me. Not sure how to exactly explain this, but if anyone knows a tiny bit of Spanish or can ask someone who is studying Spanish they'll surely know what I mean.

Eirinn : Not sure if you were planning to go over this later or not, but something worth noting about Konnichiwa is that it more closely translates to good day. Using it for people in the evening or early morning would give of a very strange impression. In stead you would use Ohayou (good morning) or Konbanwa (good evening).

Also I found this a pretty helpful note about pronounciation to keep in mind early on (that also helped me once I started trying to write in hiragana). ou is pronounced as a long o (oo) and ei as a long e (ee) in other words not as they first look. Pronouncing the i in Sensei is one of the most common newbie mistakes. In actuality it's pronounced Sensee.

As for familiars not sure what you're referring to, as far as I know you can use Konnichiwa and Konbanwa for anyone assuming it's during the right time of the day. But with Ohayou you would want to use Ohayou gozamiasu to strangers or people of higher status.

Zlinqx : The Japanese protocol should have several lessons on its own, they have such a wide array of expressions and suffixes to use when you want to show respect and be polite. But well, this is the internet so allow us to learn the slang version of Japanese before moving on to protocol

The note for Konnichiwa is very accurate. I've rarely seen it in the anime, where most characters only greet each other early in the morning when first seeing each other. Plus, the anime more often shows the non-polite speech between friends, so it's not as good as a springboard as one could think.

EX Palen : Personally it's one of the things I find so interesting about the language. How parts of their culture are seemingly ingrained into it. Though that does make it even harder to learn. Iit's definitely a language you need an interest in to become decent at (though I guess that much can be said for any language to some extent).

Yeah, anime is not a very good tool for learning Japanese. It might help a little bit with hearing comprehension once you start to get better, and it's definitely better than having no exposure to the language at all but it's not ideal. Like you said the speech used is often impolite and even then, they commonly use terminology that you would never see people use in real life situations even with friends. Gives rise to bad habits when learning the language and even worse, often give people a false impression of the country in general. Still enjoyable though

Eirinn : Arigatou gozaimasu oniichan, this will help. Well forgot to say I remember how to say thank you short, and long.

Good to see people excited about the language.

I actually started learning it myself because of video games and Japanese music, and then watched anime after I'd started studying a bit. Like others have said, the talking in anime is definitely usually pretty casual and depending on what you're watching, might not be the sort of way anyone talks in real life (sometimes they make characters have weird quirks in speech). But you can pick up certain phrases if you're smart about knowing what's normal Japanese and what's wacky anime stuff. And I did find that when I was learning more complicated stuff later on (the te-form of verbs is what I have in mind), I was able to know what "sounded right" based on having heard a lot of spoken Japanese in anime, even though I didn't know why it was right.

Buuuut, yeah, definitely you'll want to double check stuff that you think you've learned from anime and not just go trying to repeat it. Like Zlinqx said, it's probably more helpful as practice once you already know some Japanese.

Linkums : That was my reason to go into Japanese too. I picked up a few things. But like 2 years ago or last year I went onto this website called Memrise. This was where I learned Japanese in the best way possible. I dunno why I even stopped and lost interest for it in the first place. From this place I learned a lot so I was like ok I will do one part. Then study my learning Japanese letters another time and how to write them down. 

The video was great! Man, I freaking butchered most of these words until I heard them. lol

I would be interested in learning Japanese. I've always wanted to, I started learning hiragana and katakana a few months ago and have been practicing, but I'd really like to enhance my understanding of the language. Right now, I only know a few words and phrases here and there, but I would really like to learn more if possible. I hope I'm not too late, and I wouldn't mind being summoned for the lessons. Thanks Eirinn. It's nice to see so many people have an interest in learning Japanese as well.

こんばんは (Konbanha, or good evening). Unless of course you aren't reading this in the evening, in which case...poop. Your fault, not mine. lol

Alright so it's been a bit longer than anticipated, but lesson two is ready. Unfortunately this lesson actually ended up being roughly five minutes since there was so much to cover.

This lesson is to teach the Hiragana used to spell the words we went over in the last lesson. Below the written version of the lesson you'll find the links to the video which contains the Hiragana characters and their Romaji spelling, and the audio. However, since these are single characters and not words, there are no phonetics in the video this time (unless you count Romaji as phonetics). The audio in this lesson will not be useful unless used in conjunction with the written lesson, but it's provided just in case. Also unless I am mistaken, the audio link will expire at some point, so just to be safe you should download it as soon as you read this if you want it.


And now, the lesson.

こ
ko

ん
n
This is a nasalized "n". It's almost more of a noise or borderline grunt than a word or letter in it's pronunciation.

に
ni
As we've seen, "i" in Romaji is pronounced ē. So this is pronounced nee, or, knee.

ち
chi
Again, i = ē. Chee.

は
ha
EDIT: Despite what I said in the video lessons up to this point (and might in later lessons. Idk, I'm editing this two years later almost. lol), は (ha) is indeed pronounced as it looks: ha. Like a laugh. However, in the words こんにちは (konnichiha) and こんばんは (konnbanha) the は is actually a particle that has essentially been permanently fused into the word, which is why it's pronounced wa. More on this particle, and others, in a later lesson.

い
i
ē.

さ
sa
The a is a short one. Sâ.

よ
yo


う
u
ü. Like the noise you make when you see a big bowl of pudding: ooh :3 ü.

な
na
As with every a in the lesson, it's a short a. Nâ

ら
ra
Again, don't let the r trick your English speaking side.

あ
a
Short a as in ah, as with the others here. â.

り
ri

が
ga

と
to
Long o. Toe. ō

え
e
As in the ending sound of the word iie. eh.





That's it for today. I'll try to get the next lesson up in a few days, but I also want to make sure you've had enough time to successfully grasp each of the characters here before bringing in more.
As I allude to somewhat in the video, I suggest taking the time to practice by repeating these again and again, or writing them on a piece of paper along with their pronunciation (or writing them and saying them aloud as you do so). Keep practicing everyday, even after you get them down. Repetition is key.

Video lesson #2
Again, the video has been resized to 720p to save on data usage.


Download link for the Mp3 file
And the audio has been reduced to 128kbps. If it's not clear enough, let me know.







EX Palen : How about a battlefield in a Chinese war? Would that be less distracting? I hope so. :3

Zlinqx : Yes, that was brought to my attention. I'll probably edit the first post later to reflect that.
As for familiars and honorifics, you used them in your reply: Ohayou vs. Ohayou Gozaimasu. At first glance honorifics and familiars seem confusing and unnecessary to an native English speaker, but after some thought I began seeing similar trends in English (American English anyway). For example I might see you and say "Hey!" or if feeling silly "Howdy" or "Hiya". But I would never look at my governor and address him so. Instead I'd probably say "Hello" or "Good evening".

Imōto : Un. Hopefully this lesson has some new stuff you can use.

A user of this : xD Well I'm glad the video helped #SaveTheWords

SacredShadow : Glad to have you joining us, man. And no, it's never too late to join in. Hopefully these lessons are helpful to you at this point despite being so basic still. If not, they should be helpful soon.

ZeroTails :
xxAriaxx :
Mynamescox44 :
m0ssb3rg935 :
sevencube3 :
Jygin :
deggle :
Frodlex :