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Learning Japanese Through Yakyu

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Learning Japanese Through Yakyu
I'm currently a high school senior in the U.S., looking forward to going to college for sports broadcast and management (I may be going to Syracuse, the top journalism program in the nation, hopefully.), and I've become very interested in Japanese baseball and culture over the past few years.

Because my school does not offer courses in Japanese and I don't have the time nor the money to travel half an hour to go to Japanese classes, I have started to study the basics of the language at Japanese-Online and other sites. I was wondering if there were any good sites for learning Japanese for free, especially sports related terms (although I want to learn the construction of the language).

Also, are there newspapers with transliterated Japanese words (Japanese words in English characters) that I can practice my skills with? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Comments
Re: Learning Japanese Through Yakyu
[ Author: bouton-kun | Posted: Dec 12, 2003 9:43 PM ]

What you describe is what I am doing right now. I am afraid there is no easy way of learning Japanese.

Take a look at the threads in the news forum, topic: "Uehara to negotiate along side an agent." CFiJ gives some great tips. What's more, I am taking the Nihongo Nouryoku tests (Japanese ability tests). That would be a good start.

There are preparational books for these tests available via the Internet, and you can pretty much study on your own. But if you think you can do this quickly and on the side, you might just as well forget about it. It ain't a walk in the park.
Re: Learning Japanese Through Yakyu
[ Author: niibu_yaa | Posted: Dec 18, 2003 12:58 PM | FSH Fan ]

The best way to learn Japanese is to move to Japan and study there. Since you don't have any money or enough time to drive an hour for classes, I imagine that this is not practical advise.

The first thing one should do when learning Japanese is learn Katakana and Hiragana. This, I feel, is one of the more important steps to learning Japanese.

One thing I can not stress more is to stay away from a series of books called "Japanese For Busy People." Even though it is more difficult, I'd also suggest that you stay away from a text that uses romanized letters for Japanese words. What do I mean? In many, what I feel are inferior texts, you will find Japanese words written in a combination of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Alongside of this you will find them also written in Romanised letters. These types of texts I would try to stay away from. The reason being is two fold: First, it allows you to be lazy. Secondly, at the very least, Katakana and Hiragana makes word pronunciation much simpler. Not to mention it's a little faster to write using those once you get it down. If you are unsure what I mean by "Romanised letters," you are reading them now.

I'd also recommend, as soon as you get writting and reading Katakana and Hiragana down, you should go out and get a Kanji dictionary and start working on stroke patterns. Kodansha makes an excellant and fairly inexpensive one I can recomend.

A series of books I can recommend for starting off would be the "Minna no nihongo" series. After you start getting pretty profiecent with Japanese, try reading manga, watching movies and Japanese TV drama's, and listening to baseball broadasts or other sports on the net. These things should all help.

Best of Luck.
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This is a site about Pro Yakyu (Japanese Baseball), not about who the next player to go over to MLB is. It's a community of Pro Yakyu fans who have come together to share their knowledge and opinions with the world. It's a place to follow teams and individuals playing baseball in Japan (and Asia), and to learn about Japanese (and Asian) culture through baseball.

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