How Long do you think it takes??
 

How long do you guys think it takes before someone can study Japanese in Japanese?? Like with monolingual dictionaries and stuff like that

I guess it depends on you. For me to be able to do it with English, it took me years. Still now sometimes with a monolingual dictionary I feel not certain and use the English-Italian dictionary.
I noticed though that Japanese in a certaing way is easier. I can already read a Japanese book faster than I could read an English book after the same amount of time of study (lol still 1/2 hours per page ;) ). Kanji help much more than reading all words written in our alphabet. A kanji which suggests the meaning of the word helps much more than hoping to find a word in English which sound like a word in my language.

Yeah I feel that Kanji would help alot, is Italian your first language??

i've been teaching myself for 10 years.
And I still don't feel comfortable enough to post in the Japanese section.

I think my neighbours even heard how hard I laughed at that one.

Theres no way you can be studying for 10 years and not be able to speak!!!!

Lies lies lies.

Yup, born and raised in Italy.

Umm yeahhh ten years and you still can't speak Japanese? Something's wrong bud.

but anyone else??

Although I'm far from fluent - probably a grade four - my current textbooks are written primarily in Japanese, albeit mostly katakana and hiragana with little Kanji. It's taken me about seven months I'd say to get this far. I know about 200 kanji but it's not really enough to study Japanese in Japanese.

Kayci - is it just that you don't feel confident or is it that your ability isn't enough to cope at the level of the other speakers in that section of the forum? I hope it's okay asking, I'm just curious.

I think once you know basic grammar and sentence structure your pretty much set.
Of course if you already have a good vocabulary then that's also a bonus.

For me it was about 4 - 5 months in that I attempted to use Japanese only (I didn't do it much but I tried when I could)
I've been studying now for a total of roughly 7 months.

Computers make the job of studying monolingual a lot easier too.
I have a paper dictionary with furigana in it for kanji that I can't read yet but when i have a computer nearby i don't really use it, just because looking up kanji is faster on a dictionary website.

Basicly whenever you feel comfortable reading Japanese only, you could start to try monolingual study, although it will be difficult to start with.

For example do you feel comfortable reading this:
盗む Dictionary Link
to figure out what the verb 盗む【ぬすむ】 means?

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Now although this wasn't really part of your question i feel as though I should explain why you can start at such an early stage, since even at an early stage of learning it's easy (for me atleast) if you just break it down.

If your not interested in reading my explanation just skip it :p

For example if we take the first entry of 盗む Dictionary Link:
(1)他人の物をひそかに自分のものにする。とる。

I already know the words 物, ひそかに, 自分, する, とる (とる alone makes this verb quite obvious)
I don't know 他人 so I just have to look that up as well, although I do know the kanji 人 so I can take a guess it's going to be to do with a person, and the rest is just basic grammar, の, に etc.

So I'm not training to be a translator or anything so i don't care if my translations are spot on, as long as I understand the true meaning, so my translation based on the basic grammar and words I know would be something like:
(他人)'s thing, secretly, one's own thing. とる = to take
(don't ask me to tranlsate にする here, like i said above, i get it's meaning just dunno how to translate it)

so lets look up 他人:
他人 Dictionary Link

the entry I found easiest was (3)見ず知らずの人。親しくない人。
my shady translation once again was: person of strange. not close person.
So i came to the conclusion it meant stranger/person you don't know.

so basicly: 他人の物をひそかに自分のものにする。とる。 - to secretly take another persons belonging's (in other words steal)

yay! we just looked up a word using a monolingual dictionary and only basic grammar! :p

Of course studying grammar in only Japanese could require more knowelege of the language first but it's still doable I think.

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Sorry for the long post, not all of it was exactly what you asked for but hopefully it will help you understand why i think monolingual learning should be done as early on as possible, or to word it differently, why I think it doesn't take long at all to be able to study monolingual :)

No.
speaking is fine. VERBALLY.
Still can't read or write well. For ten years, and reading and writing at a 2nd/3rd grade level...its sad.

Verbally, I could be okay, but I'm not confident enough in my writing skills. Not at all.

You should practice! Especially in the Japanese Chat thread, there are plenty of people that will correct you, and you will learn alot from it.

Too afraid to. I use mixi, one on one, in messages, so that only one person can correct me, and not have others possibly laugh

Nobody's going to laugh at you for mistakes? We all have to learn somehow, and the thread will be better for you, so multiple people can throw bits of information on the table, you know?

I understand, but I still feel better one on one with natives on mixi...

And I would agree.
:)

This guy is one of the ones that you should try to ignore. But again no one will laugh, except for Alan maybe...he'll laugh just cause I said no one will laugh...but again ignore him

Maybe I will in my own time, however. I know people may laugh. Making mistakes for people to see embarrasses me greatly, and I need to grow out of that.

you will learn from your mistakes and get better from them

That is true, but I rather it be one person directly seeing instead of many.

but if it was to more than one person it will be better bc you will get each one of them opinion about your japanese skills and that will also help you get better ^^

i can understand that. I am learning japanese and i would not want to show my blunders to the world. It would be awesome if i knew a Japanese person who could help me along, or even a pen pal. Alas, i must settle for my friend Angelo, a fellow student and my tutor.

But that's the thing, you can't depend on a student? It'd be alot better for you if it were multiple native speakers? And no one's going to laugh at yall, everyone starts somewhere and it's always the beginning.

It depends largely on what you mean by "it." When I arrived in Japan, I had a very cursory understanding of enough grammatical elements that as long as I had vocabulary, I could communicate. I found, however, I had spent so much time on grammatical structure that I didn't know enough words to actually plug in. I would say after no more than two or three months I knew vocabulary for most of my daily tasks.

I can now have a rather rambling conversation in Japanese for hours with no real issue. Sometimes I need to ask for the other person to slow down or give synonyms or examples of words I don't yet know, but it rarely causes the conversation to stop. I even understand about 80% or 90% of complex legal transactions. Just last night I played translator between a new arrival and SoftBank (cell phone provider), he wanted an iPhone like I have. Each time a term of the contract was explained to me, I had to turn around and explain it to him.

So for me, I would say "it" being "functional" or even more than functional would be, er, maybe six months of constant, daily exposure. Since I only really studied grammar before moving to Japan, I have nothing to offer in the way of studying Japanese while not using it, at all times, every day.

Reading wise, I would say has been much longer. I only recently became comfortable enough with my acquisition of kanji to start reading popular manga. Light novels are probably going to be my next step, assuming they have furagana. Right now, I know about 240 kanji (elementary school first and second grade kanji) completely with on yomi, kuni yomi and ei (english) yomi, as well as how to properly write them. There are probably at least fifty or so random other kanji I can recognise in some way, but cannot write yet. I've been studying kanji for four hours every week day between classes, but I do feel my acquisition is not as quick as I would like.

Still, its my comfort zone...so...maybe soon I'll surpass it.

yea i understand about the comfort zone thingy. it just takes time ^^ dont give up and do your best.

But I don't live in Japan, which means I don't hear everyone speaking Japanese everyday, which makes your scenario completely different lol I really wish I could move to Japan for a summer or a school year for that matter. But my point is learning to actually speak Japanese and hear it and understand it that way will probably be alot harder for me than it was you, just because you were constantly hearing it.

Absolutely. I took ten years of French, but fifty minutes every other day of the regular school year with no studying beyond what would get a good grade accomplished only one thing: I can still read it. I cannot speak it, I can barely understand it when listening to it, and don't ask me to write any compositions in it!

(Incidentally, English teacher mode: on. Every day is two words, everyday means common, i.e. "that's so everyday." Good difference to know, since everyday is a great word when used within its actual definition :) ).

Again, absolutely. I know my language acquisition will always be faster than my students' acquisition of English. I can't look at my TV or my refrigerator or pass a neighbor on the walk without being forced to use Japanese. That's why as hard as I try, for some students, my instruction of English will have no more impact than my French teachers had on me. Some students, of course, will indeed be impacted, and that is why I do this.

(A lot is also two words).

Well, that's a good point, but I'm slightly confused on how this helps? *headscratch*
And thanks for the everyday thing :) I never knew that.

The basic moral you should take away from my rather long diatribe is that immersion is the best way to learn a language, so you should maximise the possibility of Japanese language use.

If your area has a Japanese association, that might be a good place to start. Go to Japanese events, find Japanese restaurants actually run by Japanese families, go to Japanese supermarkets. Force yourself to engage in conversations where Japanese is a necessity. Reading functions the same way. To learn first grade kanji, I spent time with the art club at my junior high school and while the students drew or painted, I created kanji squares, and then posted them all over my bedroom walls. They were the first things I saw when I woke up, and the last things I saw when I went to sleep. I learned them pretty quickly.

Ahh, I see, and I do try my best to completely immerse in Japanese;however, living in the US it's a hard thing to do :\ I've been looking for somewhere like maybe a church or something that has a Japanese service and things like that. And doing my best to find Japanese people at school, I'm afraid the Japanese community is not very large where I live.

euy, i need HELP. i am tryin to read japanese, but i'm having trouble to distinguish when the word ended, which one would be particle and so on. i can read kana just fine and if i really want to usually i can figure out the kanji, but gosh, just to figure out which is the word, particle ...... e.g with english (and other language that use alphabet) the space separate each word, so easy for me to learn english cuz i know what to plug into the dictionary. but with japanese not using space i just guess what to plug into the dictionary :confused: . HELLP.... any tips? i just wish i know someone who understand japanese to help me read...... any tips would be appreciated :D private message me or email me ......

You can discuss as long as you want, but the fact remains: if you are ashamed of your mistakes you will get no where.
I studied French for 3 years and Spanish for 1, but due to the fact that Spanish is very similar to Italian (my native language) I can have a med-level conversation in Spanish.

If I were ashamed I would have had to use none of those languages (back then I knew English in a very low school level) in my 4 years at a hotel reception job. Instead I tried to speak the more I could and had people speak to me freely...good for the hotel's name having someone who can speak more lnaguages and very good for the customers. Back then I knew very few words of Japanese learnt from video games and grammar was way above my knowledge. Yet I even tried to speak to 2 Japanese girls who knew only Japanese. I still remember it...I see them coming towards me early in the morning and I thought they were coming down from the room (which I knew there was only one of them sleeping in it, thus paying for 1). I tried to ask them in English, Italian, French and Spanish if they both slept in the bedroom. I gathered my courage and uttered the following phrase talking to the hotel customer (my face alone was saying how sorry I was for what I was saying...not knowing if it was offensive or not): あなたの部屋一人。。。ここに二人. I felt so bad, but they must have understood because she showed me the entrance door and her friend saying in Japanese (I guess) she just got in from outside. I remember when a customer asked me where the restaurant was and I told him we didn't have an inside one and gave him direction to a very good one only 2-300 meters away. His look was unique, he couldn't believe I was making fun of him. Only after a little bit of talking (well, him asking me again and again) I figured out what he said was not restaurant, but rest room. Not to mention that poor Australian guy to whom I asked "pardom me, can you say it again" at his check-in, when he just told me "good day mate".

But my English and Spanish got much better by not being ashamed and trying. My last year there at the hotel a south Amrican customer asked me if I was Spanish coz mu grammar was so good :) As per English I have been living in the USA for 8 years now and it got much better. Still I make a ton of errors...but if I were ashamed the only result would be shutting up all the time ;)

The simple answer is after a lot of practice, determination and effort.

I don't talk japanese, but with only 2 years of english I could do It already.

English is way easier to learn compared to other languages.

To someone who grew up speaking the language, yes. But not in general

Sorry, but I do not agree. English has no conjugation, no agreement amongst nouns/adverbs/adjectives, not many different levels of polite speech...and so on. It creates much confusion to understand that a phrase in Italian like "she knows who I am" in English is translated as "you know who I am" and the same for Spanish where they use the third person for you. In French can be even more confusing since they might say "yous" as in the plural of you, but they mean you as in singular person. In Italian and Spanish the gender of nouns can be understood by the final vowel of the word (watch out, coz it is not that simple, way too many exceptions in the way), while in French either you know it or you don't (even here the final for the female is not always there). Spanish amongst the three languages I guess I can say is the one with the more regular conjugation, but in French and above all Italian you will face so many irregularity that will drive you crazy.
As a native speaker of a latin language I found English much easier to learn than French, Dutch, Turkish or Japanese itslef (Dutch and Turkish gave up almost immediately). One of the main problems in English can be the presence of phrasal verbs, which are not of immediate understanding for foreigners and of course the fact that reading/writing English is much more difficult than other languages (too many exceptions). I was told, I don't have personal experience with those, that German and Russian are even harder than latin originated languages.
On the contrary I see many American people who have big problems in trying to learn latin languages.

Pfftttt. Latin natives learning english. Maybe. Not all think its easy.

And I've seen Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, and other people from other countries complain about how English is more difficult than it seems. There is no EASIEST language for the general population, nor is there any HARDEST. Different people feel differently about different languages.

You are getting confused between perceived relative language conplexity and absolute language complexity. To say English's writing system is on the same level of complexity as Chinese/Japanese would be foolish, the reverse is true in terms of grammar.