Talk:Japanese/Table of Contents

Would you believe that I was just looking over my old Japanese textbook from college the other night ? Yookoso .. maybe you've seen it. Anyway I am very excited to have this project started here. The world really needs open content language textbooks ! --Karl Wick

Hello. I'm a native speaker of Japanese. Native speakers are not necessarily the best teacher, but I'll see if I can help something. :) Tomos 02:46, 14 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated Tomos !! - Karl Wick

Stevertigo speaks japanese too. He has japanese in his sig and contributes to the japanese wikipedia.LittleDan 18:20, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Right, his sig looks kinda like a name of a superhero or a buddhist monk. :-) Tomos 19:50, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

How to enter characters
Is there somewhere that I can download Japanese fonts so I can read the Hiragana and Katakana on my screen ? (This box uses Mac OS 9). --Karl Wick


 * Would this help you? Japman 16:03, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I think the book needs more Japanese characters. I.e. besides the romaji it needs at least the hiragana and katakana. But I haven't figured out how to type them yet... Maybe someone can give me some hints/links. I'm using the latest KDE on a Gentoo Linux system. Oh, and I'm happy to help the project with my very limited knowledge of Japanese. Guaka 19:49, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * See this grc.techtalk.linux newsgroup post (if the link doesn't work, tell me and I'll repost the information) -- Emperorbma 00:08, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Number of links on Japanese character entry: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/japanese.html#links_japancomp


 * This page has instructions specific to Gentoo included: http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/jpninpt.html
 * More on Gentoo: http://home.no.net/david/i18n.php


 * Specific to KDE: http://katzbrown.com/shiritsu/unix%20help/japanese%20on%20kde/
 * Greyweather 04:51, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Focus of the book
I would like to see some agreements on what this book is for in a bit more specific terms. Maybe not right now, but sooner or later, it should be clear.


 * Do we want to include a lot of modern Japanese for travel, daily conversation? Many idioms, potentially some slangs, etc.?
 * Do we want to offer a good book for someone who is seriously interested in business Japanese ?
 * Do we want to offer a good book for someone who would study Japanese history, literature, and/or language, so that we would want to emphasize historical backgrounds, old forms of writing, etc, and less about speaking or conversations? Do we possibly explain the language in linguistics' terms, and include some comparative perspective?
 * Do we want to make the book useful for a typical university, so that we would want to develop more specific lesson-plans, exercises, etc. for each class? Or is this more of a well-organized reference?
 * Do we assume the readers are native speakers of English? Or do we also expect some other people, who cannot get a Japanese textbook writtein in their own native languages? (Then we might use less culture-specific references, use simpler English, etc.)

Tomos 21:57, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * I personally see it as a lesson on the language and how to speak/write it. The Everyday Phrases section covers business and travel.  History covers the history aspect.  The rest is a lesson on Japanese and how to speak/write it.  The basics are covered here, and the more advanced concepts are covered in the Advanced Topics section.  The basic section should cover enough to speak and write, but probably should only cover enough for a 4 kyuu　(4級) on the JLPT (日本語能力試験), if even that...  The advanced section can focus on the JLPT and more advanced language structures and could eventually even cover up to 1 kyuu (1級). -- Emperorbma 03:09, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * sounds good to me :) Tomos 07:05, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * At the moment it seems the Japanese Wikibook is still in the early stages. I don't see any actual "Lessons" (1, 2, 3, 4, etc) listed yet. Is anyone qualified to write such lessons? Tomos has asked some very good questions. I hope as the level of Japanese increases, those topics can be covered, in Japanese, such as travel, history, business, etc. Mkn 23:54, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * At the moment, it seems our goal has become to allow the student to pass the JLPT. We could probably enrich this with additional material later, but at the moment, that is our goal. Again I say we should put our policies and goals on the Japanese/Contributor's Guide page.

Japanese Slang and curses
I think it would be best if Japanese slang and curse words were reserved for a seperate wikibook. Sound like a good idea? Greyweather 14:05, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I agree slang and curse words are not appropriate for a standard Japanese wikibook. Maybe a Casual Japanese wikibook could be made, having connection to popular culture such as music, animation, etc where such language is used. Mkn 23:54, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Splash
Tomodachi, we now have a splash graphic page. Enjoy. -- Emperorbma 03:49, 19 Dec 2003 (UTC)

ensuing discussion moved to Talk:Japanese Bignose 02 Mar 2004

Romanization style
Which romanization method are we going to use in this course? Kunrei or Hepburn? For what I've seen, different lessons use different romanization methods, which may confuse the readers. I vote for Hepburn because it's closer to Western languages and especially English, and this being a guide to Japanese for gaijin, Hepburn will seem more natural. Sabbut 09:55, 19 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Well, since people seemed to have been replacing the Kunrei-Shiki that I have entered in, I guess the everyone has already decided on Hepburn, so I guess we will use Hepburn... I have attempted to change all of the Kunrei I entered in back to Hepburn, but I probably missed a few... -- Emperorbma 16:08, 19 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Having had a quick look through the book, I have 2 points:

1. romanization is not constant accross pages. 2. the links to following pages should be at the bottom.

Otherwise looking good!


 * We should vote and decide on the romanization style to adopt on the Talk:Japanese/Basic Japanese sounds page. That is the page that will set the standard for the rest of the document. I cast my vote for Hepburn, because pronunciation is most important, and the kana will be nect to the romaji anyway. GoodStuff 14:47, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Just a comment, so far everyone I've seen comment on this have gone for Hepburn. I'll assume hepburn then, until someone complains. If this comment is left undisturbed for a week, I'll delete the discussions concerning which romanization to use, and state that our policy has become hepburn. We should use the "contributer's guide" page as our standard. GoodStuff 06:37, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Answer to focus of this book
This is my answer to what the focus of this book should be. Am I correct in the understanding that this book is supposed to be a language textbook for modern-day Japanese? If so, I have a couple suggestions.

1 Focus on the language. The whole culture section, Japanese history, anything that is not directly related to the language should be removed. I have no problems in learning about culture, etc. in the context of learning the language. However, whole separate sections on Japanese culture or whatnot should be moved to Wikipedia under the appropriate section. They don't belong here.

2 Romaji is not Japanese As an extension of focusing on the languge, there is currently way too much material on romaji. Learning about different systems of romaji is of absolutely no use in learning Japanese because romaji is NOT Japanese. Go over just enough so that people can learn to type and even then, throw it into a miscellaneous section or something to clearly indicate that _nobody_ in Japan uses romaji to communicate.

3 Language (especially Japanese) is for the dedicated You don't want to attract lazy people by using romaji letting them get away with never having to learn kana or kanji. If someone is too lazy to learn at least hiragana (I mean c'mon), he/she is doomed to fail in learning Japanese anyway. In the meantime, we can cater to those who are actually dedicated enough to at least learn the _alphabet_. The same goes for people who are too lazy to install japanese display.

-- Taekk 14:05, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

'''Criticism noted. Reply in sections:'''

1. I agree. Perhaps we should have History of Japan and Culture of Japan Wikibooks instead?

2. Romaji is not Japanese at all, I agree... (I should have really written a note to say that Romaji is not "real 日本語")  On the other hand, it is a useful tool for beginners to become accustomed to the idea of Kana characters if used along side them in the beginners stage. This book is as I envision it will only use Romaji/Kana for the 4級 level... The advanced sections will cover the higher level topics and will be SOLELY in Kana and Kanji beyond 3級.

3. Admittedly so, however if we keep the lazy people away, will this book have as much utility as a basic language guide so someone can start off and see if they wish to continue? Will it have the utility for the businessman who only needs some basic Japanese to converse with a client?

In order to learn a new script, you must first have lessons that use both the basic transition script (Romanization) and the native script (Kana) so that someone can get the "feel" of what the syllables sound like. After they "gain their sea legs", you can stick them on the real boat in the typhoon and see if they float.

Finally, I am not admittedly the best tutor on this topic. First, since I am only a Junior contributor, but secondly since I am not "officially versed in the language" (i.e. JLPT). This does not stop me from being able to make useful contributions, and therefore we should not exclude someone from being able to make contributions just because they are learning how to use the script properly, although we should quite certainly use pure Kana scripts in the Middle School or higher level lessons.

If Push should come to Shove, perhaps we should write "Romaji: a primer to Japanese Scripts". But seriously do we need to make Kindergarden level Kanji lessons, when even 日本人 are learning their Kana, written in ALL Kana? :P

ADDENDUM This can also open the can of worms that we should split all Language wikibooks into Basic, Intermediate and Advanced levels... That is also a possibility we can consider.

-- Emperorbma 07:17, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

1. If you have the time to write one, I'll read it. Though, I don't know if you can make a wikibook out of Japanese culture.

2. I'm not against using romaji to teach hiragana and sure you can throw some romaji in at the very beginning if you must. However, we must forego romaji when it becomes more of a crutch than training wheels. And seriously, how hard is it to learn hiragana? I think one or two lessons is more than enough for the reader to get the hang of it. In this respect, I think all this talk about kunrei/hepburn, blah, blah is just silly and moot. It really belongs in the appendix.

3. I don't see how teaching hiragana first won't help starters see if they want to continue. I think it's worse for the reader to invest all her time getting used to reading romaji only to find out later that she was learning the wrong thing.

Wikibooks is a free textbook project and if my idea of "textbook" is correct, than our only goal should be to teach real modern-day Japanese in the most accurate, complete, and easiest way possible. If you want to write another wikibook called "Easy business Japanese" or "Handy Japanese phrasebook" then be my guest.

4. I don't think a separate primer for romaji is necessary. Like I said, you can just throw it in a miscellaneous section. I also don't feel it's necessary to make Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced into separate wikibooks. You can just split it up inside one book.

--Taekk 13:07, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I was just voicing my reasons for the way that I have contributed. If you think it will work better without the Romaji or the Splash page (and everyone else agrees) then by all means do so. I would be happy to see the Wikibook rewritten if it is more effective at teaching the lessons. As I have said before, I am not anything close to a qualified educator on any topic, most especially a foreign language. I only have a reluctance to abandon what has not demonstrably been shown to be broken.

Yes, the Romaji is overused a quite bit... but you are dealing with mostly 外人 people who have never seen a Kana in their life. You have already covered most of my concerns with regard to this, but I would add that not everyone uses Windows... and some other Operating Systems don't make it easy to install the input method and font. As a result, you may have some people unable to read it even if they wanted to provide a reasonably decent effort. A useful solution would be a section on "how to install Japanese fonts and input". We should never abandon people because they don't know how to do something...

We agree that the only the first few basic lessons should touch on Romaji to teach the sound of Kana, so you have no arguement there. I would merely state that since we have not even reached the advanced lessons yet I didn't notice that I overdid it quite a bit.

As you see, I am not trying to stop you from fixing the problems, I was only voicing my hesitation to abandon the status quo completely. Frankly, I would like to hear some other views since you and I are the only two who have made comments. Meanwhile, if you feel that these changes must be made, this is a wiki... please feel free to make them. In fact, I think we both practically agree that it is quite unprofessional as I had written it. (That is why Verbs was totally rewritten as a matter of fact...)

*shrug* eh, that's what you get from a 外人, I suppose. :P

ADDENDUM: I can go off on tangents.... I trimmed quite a bit of redundant points.

-- Emperorbma 02:52, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Cool, you can sign me on. Since I work the regular salary-man hours, I usually don't get home until at least 8:00pm so not much time to work on this but... Oh, and for the record, I am not Japanese either. 日本語入力チェックです. テスト、テスト. 本日は晴天なり --Taekk 15:23, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

One more comment from a 外人... I have a couple of Japanese books, one for a beginners level and the other one for an intermediate level. The former one uses kanji, hiragana and romaji in all the Japanese text, and the latter one uses kanji with its corresponding kana and no romaji. I agree with that way of teaching Japanese, and of course it's importante to tell beginners to start forgetting about the Roman alphabet ^^ Sabbut 16:09, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Re: Romaji. My inclination, too, would be to avoid romaji where possible. The problem is, we can't use furigana, which is a better way of helping learners read unfamiliar kanji. As far as kana go, I think romanisation is probably unhelpful (I agree that the scope of the book shouldn't be 'Intro to Japanese', but a full language course, and this being the case, people using all but the early chapters will have to learn kana), but when it comes to kanji, they might be a necessary evil until furigana-display is possible...

Can I also suggest that wherever possible we try to avoid translating 'X は ... ' to 'as for X...' ? (Or at least of making a habit of it...) Although it conveys the general topic-markeriness of は, 'as for' is a bad translation for the simple reason that we almost never say 'as for' in English. Tremolo 03:30, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * I would concur... outside the lesson for particles that should be unnneeded. (P.S. Where else besides the は lesson did you notice that?) -- Emperorbma 21:44, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * As for this comment about as for, IMHO it's a standard part of Japanese English. ;) Personally, i just adapted to it. No culture owns the English language. And as we all know from Bladerunner, sooner or later japlish will evolve. ;) Boud 15:34, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

romaji vs kana, kanji discussion

i put a link to kdrill: IMHO this is excellent software for learning kanji and it seems to satisfy the free software (as in free speech) definition.

IMHO, in the spirit of the GFDL, we should encourage people to use GNU GPL (or other free software) for learning kanji (and kana of course, but that's quickly over and done with). This gets around the problem of whether this is easy or not: provide the software and it becomes easy.

In fact, my broader vision for wikipedia and wikibooks is that virtually all pages with any slightly technical content (maths, physics, language learning) should be accompanied with external links to GNU GPL or other free software. GFDL came from GPL. i often fail to do this simply because i'm not (yet) aware of where GPL or other free software is available. Boud 15:34, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Kanji drawing tips
OK, time to seed the ground again... I think we could consider having some basic kanji drawing lessons that show the (most commonly accepted) basic rules for drawing kanji, such as "left to right, top to bottom" and "if boxed, outside first then inside (unless the box opens to the right)". -- EmperorBMA|&#35441;&#12377; 02:56, 22 May 2004 (UTC)


 * I've started a unified Chinese/Japanese/Korean orthography textbook at CJK. The textbook will illustrate the principles common to all three systems, so the "left to right, top to bottom" rule would certainly be included. Please contribute / comment! -- Ran 16:09, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Printed sources
I found something interesting at a used bookstore today. It's a copy of Reading Japanese by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin. It provides a solid start on not only learning to read kana and (425) kanji, but writing them as well. What is most useful to us though, is the following:

Copyright is claimed until December 31, 1990. Thereafter all portions of this work covered by this copyright will be in the public domain.

Is it then safe for me to copy the contents to Wikisource, or do I need to contact the publisher (Yale University) first to be sure?


 * It's fine to copy it. If it's public domain, we can use it. GoodStuff 10:43, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Something missing: Dialogues...
This Wikibook seems to be coming along nicely. There's just one gaping hole: There aren't any dialogues yet. Without dialogues, we've got a phrasebook. Unfortunately I don't know enough Japanese to contribute a dialogue.

I have an idea that making the dialogues the main entrance point to the study of Japanese would be an effective teaching technique. You first learn the basics (hiragana, katakana, basic kanji concepts). Then you dive into conversations which have links to grammar notes, vocabulary, and maybe even cultural notes. I think it's important to keep the conversations in Hiragana/katakana, maybe progressing to using more and more kanji as they are learned.

I think a discussion of the structure of the material might be interesting.
 * It makes sense to group vocabulary into related groups, like they are now.
 * Dialogues would rather benefit from being divided into lessons, getting progressively more complicated.
 * Grammar is an interesting one. Do we make grammar into groups, or lessons? Do we make it run parallel to the Dialogues?

How should we approach the learning of kanji?

Some food for thought. GoodStuff 10:59, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * I hope you don't mind that I reverted this page to bring back your commentary, GoodStuff. I feel that this commentary is very important and shouldn't be removed yet :)


 * I've also noticed that dialogues are missing, it's really an important aspect to a language book. At the moment this wikibook is just like reference material without any real lessons being offered.


 * I think there's too much information about the writing scripts in this wikibook, which is covered already in wikipedia articles. However, as this is a book for studying a foreign language, I think there should be allowance for romaji inclusion. Otherwise we might be pushing away readers who are true beginners to the language. JLPT 4 allows romaji, JLPT 3 to JLPT 1 uses only Japanese.


 * As for grammar and particles, I believe it should be explained briefly when first introduced in a lesson so the reader has an understanding and feel for the language. There's already a grammar reference list at . But most pages here needs to be made more clear for ease of reading.


 * On kanji, it should be introduced according to JLPT kanji. We have JLPT Level 4 Kanji which is good for a print out. Although other websites provide a better resource to study kanji. Also, there's a wikibook on East Asian orthography at CJK which will be useful for readers to understand how kanji is written. &mdash; Mkn 10:45, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * I do not mind at all! No one responded to my comments, and this discussion page is already cluttered. I did not want to contribute to the clutter.


 * I must say I disagree with the current "Japanese writing system" page layout. The page is somewhat overspecialized, and as a summary, it is not clear enough. It uses far too much jargon as well. I edited it somewhat.


 * Okay, dropped the page from menu, added  which should introduce our chosen romaji style. Again, I vote for Hepburn aka Hebon-shiki. Feel free to edit my (terrible) introduction to the sounds of the Japanese language. The sounds and mora concepts so introduced gives us a nice platform to explain the writing system from. This is that I've attempted to do with my slight editing of the Japanese/Japanese writing system page. We can't throw newbies into the deep end on that page, even if there are great references for Kana and Kanji. See my comments at the writing system discussion page. GoodStuff 16:32, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Layout and Focus
I think one of the main things needed right now is a better overall layout. If someone who wishes to learn japanese comes to the main page of the Japanese wikibook, they're not going to know where to start. "What, do I just read top-to-bottom?"

Having sections seperated up into grammar, vocabulary lists, and such is useful if you know what you're looking for, but if you're trying to learn the language, it needs to be more structured.

I think a neat approach would be to have sequentially numbered vocabulary lists, with the more useful vocab in the earlier lists. At the top of each grammar/usage lesson, we could specify which vocabulary lists are going to be used in the dialogues and with the examples in the lesson. Finally, you bundle a certain amount of vocabulary and grammar into a 'chapter' (where nothing from a later chapter is used within, all of the vocab in the grammars are contained in the vocab lists or have already been learned, and where it makes sense to be learning all of that as one unit). It would also be useful (though I'm not quite sure what the capability of the wiki books software is) to have quizzes at the end of each chapter, quizzing on everything contained within. It would also be nice to have the chapters planned out a couple in advance, similar to how the Korean wikibook does it: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Korean

It would also give the book discrete units in which you could only put romaji within the first 3 lessons, or something like that. So, it's very obvious where one should and shouldn't use romaji. The list of chapters should probably be the main focus of the book, following just after the intro and such. After the list of chapters could be an index of grammars and vocab and such.

Also, on a different topic, it might not be possible to use furigana in the wikibook as it is, but it'd be nice to have a very strict standard to express furigana, so that when converting to print or to another format, a preprocessor of some sort could very easily convert all of the kana to furigana. Something simple like the word in kanji followed by the word in kana in parenthesis would do. --Xepo 19:21, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I took an hour or so and wrote up what I think would be decent for the first few chapters and intro. I didn't want to just modify the main page, as I'm still relatively new here, but take a look at this, see whacha think, feel free to post it as the main page. It's a pretty rough outline, but I think it's fairly well though-out: JapaneseTable_of_ContentsTest

--Xepo 20:29, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Um, I don't mean to intrude, but the Table of Contents is totally off right now. To get to many sub pages, I have to jump into certain pages and use internal "next" or "previous" links to get to the pages that I refer to rather often.


 * I'm sorry Xepo, that's my fault I guess. I was editing the TOC list. Which pages in particular are troublesome? (d'ah, forgot to sign... also I'll try to add links back to TOC in the subpages if that helps) &mdash; Mkn 02:19, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Eheh, sorry, it wasn't Xepo, it was me, an unregistered user. It looks awesome now, though, thanks!  This is undoubtedly one of the best resources on the web for learning language thanks to you guys and your dedication.

Great new layout! Still, dialogues would be nice. GoodStuff 09:07, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yea, the new TOC looks a lot better, btw. Good job. I think it could still use a bit of direction, but that'll come as the book progresses. --Xepo 05:21, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In the interests of better communication...
Hi. I think we have a serious problem here. In Wikipedia people don't need to communicate as much to fix a spelling mistake, or to add content, because each page is well defined and about a specific topic.

Here however, I think we have the additional problem of the organization and layout of the Wikibooks. I suggest therefore that we start a mailinglist and/or IRC chatroom to discuss the issues of this wikibook. I feel the discussion page is inadequate. I made the effort to start such a mailinglist. Here's the link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/japanese_wiki/ Take note that my nick on Yahoo is BraineX and not GoodStuff. GoodStuff 08:35, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)