Yes and no. For the most part, Japanese people are blown away if a foreigner can say "Hello" in Japanese (unless they're Brazilian). However, I've often cringed at the sound of young otaku who quote expressions they've learned from anime. It's the exaggerated intonation, it think.

Trying to learn through "immersion" by using things such as anime and manga are certainly helpful, but you may still want to find a course book that works for you. Many people swear by those "Genki" books. I use Minna no Nihongo, but it's best used with a tutor and not for self study.

If you're a patient person, I would also recommend Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji." I unfortunately only made it halfway through this course, but the stuff I studied certainly helped. Thing is, though, it's difficult to study Japanese while studying from this book.

Also, Jack Halpern has released an iPhone app called "Japanese Sensei" which is pretty decent. I think it's about $16 so it's a little pricy as apps go, but certainly a good study aid.

P.S. I second ajatt as a good resource.

This.

Learning to speak in different ways with different groups of people is very easy, once you're comfortable speaking a language. Unfortunately, being slavish about social niceties does not make it easier to become fluent.

Side point:

In regards to Remembering the Kanji: it maybe different for different people, but

As far as the social aspects of Japanese go, Japanese has social dialects, and you need to learn them. I felt that there were three traps to avoid: 1) "Bed" Japanese. A lot of foreign men picked up Japanese from their girlfriends, learning women's informal speech. 2) "Manga" Japanese. Too crude. 3) "Embassy" Japanese. A lot of Japanese thought that proper Japanese for foreigners was formal and stilted, to the extent that they would tell you that regular speech was incorrect.

As for textbooks, I found that the best were books intended to teach English to Japanese. The English was sometimes funny, but the Japanese was impeccable.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

This is an incredible thought. It blows my mind even! I think I'll take a look into this.

An interesting idea, but a problem is that all the grammar explanations will be in japanese.

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"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." -- Bruce Lee

Oh, yes. Besides, they will be about English grammar.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Hey, since you seem to be enjoying the Hikaru no Go manga, you should put the words you look up into an Anki deck (a free software for the PC: http://ankisrs.net/) and review them again later.

They also have an application for the iPhone but it cost money. It syncs with the decks you create on the computer, so I find it worth the price since it allows me to review my decks anywhere.

I used anki when I learned the kana a couple years ago. I don't have my own computer right now though so I can't install any software and I don't have a smart phone so phone apps are out.

Edit: About Bill's suggestion. I saw a similar suggestion on another forum. It's basically suggesting to read through a website about Japanese grammer that's written entirely in Japanese after getting past the basics of he language. I don't know how helpful it is but if you can do it I guess your Japanese would be pretty good (at least reading would be).

I recommend the book as well.

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My personal go blog. Covering tournaments, tsumegos, and interesting games http://unlimitedgo.blogspot.com

The thing about learning Japanese is that many people will give you stupid advice or tell you stupid things like 'don't listen to the Japanese they speak in anime'. By all accounts it is still Japanese and it will help your vocab and listening ALOT.

From my point of view, differentiating between formal and informal japanese is rather unimportant for the beginner. I consider it a language finesse which should actually come rather naturally through proper immersion and study. Don't get text books that are boring and dry, use living japanese to learn. Don't concern yourself with the difference between da desu and all the other funky stuff which will soon (if you're studying like me www.ajatt.com), come naturally to you.

In the beginning it's all about learning the writing system basics and basic sentence structures and vocab. I will mention www.ajatt.com again because it's hands down the best website to help you with learning Japanese in existence.

Keep at it consistently bro. GL.

I started learning japanese 5 years ago, then stopped after a year because of busy schedule.
If anyone wants to learn japanese in a fun way, I'd recommend this site http://www.yesjapan.com/learn_japanese/pages/tour/
The site is not always updated, but it is still enjoyable. You can also check out their free videos

Download and install Anki. Use it every day for a year.

I would also highly recommend the Japanese Stack Exchange. It's built on the same engine (and by the same team) as Stack Overflow which you may be familiar with. It follows a pretty strict Q&A format, and they're not very tolerant of open-ended discussion, but if you have something you can phrase as a specific question it is almost guaranteed a very good answer (something like 98% answer rate).

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The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain, and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again; but less, and less, and less!

I know I'm kind of bringing this thread back from the dead- I hope that replying to a thread that's two months dormant isn't considered rude here. I did want to toss my two cents in here though.

First off, it really is important that you not _emulate_ anime speech when speaking Japanese, if you don;t understand the implications of that speech. It's not just a matter of levels of formality. If you are a beginner at Japanese that's going to be pretty obvious to a native speaker of Japanese, and they'll likely forgive you for using plain speech rather than teinei (every-day polite) speech. I guess you know the old saw about the dog who speaks- it's not that he speaks well, it is that he speaks at all. So if you bust out some garbled Japanese you learned from anime you will likely just get a pat on the head, if the only problem with it is that it is too informal.

The problem is that anime characters often use language that is _really_ rude. In the worst case you might pick up the idea, from certain anime series, that it is OK to refer to other people as "kisama." If you actually do that you are not going to get a pat on the head, even if the Japanese person you're talking to realizes that you don't know any better. Just like a Japanese person who introduced himself to your grandmother by saying "Hey, how you doing, you [word that is pretty much the least acceptable word in American English, but is more widely used in British English]?" would cast a pall over the room even if everyone there understood that he didn't know any better. The difference is that you will hear language that rude in a mainstream show for Japanese teenagers, or kids, even, because rudeness in Japanese is more contextual than obscenity in English- it's fine to depict it .

Even if you know that kisama is verboten, you might pick up the idea that it is OK to call people "omae," for instance. You won't see anyone in HnG calling anyone "kisama," but _everyone_ is "omae" to Shindou. That's still pretty rude.

On the other hand, I think it's fine to pick up Japanese from anime, as long as it isn't your only source. I learned Japanese mainly by listening and reading, and a lot of what I listened to was anime. But I also got a couple of textbooks, meant to cover two years of intensive University Japanese. I didn't use them the way I think I was supposed to though- I read the first year's worth in about 2 weeks, skipping all exercises, and not worrying about learning the vocabulary from lists. Then I watched a couple of hundred hours of Japanese TV, and reread it even faster, and read through the second year text in a couple of weeks. I was simultaneously reading some parallel texts.

I took a couple of years of intensive Chinese in University, which was longer ago for me than I want to admit. My Chinese is pretty abysmal- that's partially because of disuse, but I was never able to just pick up a Chinese novel and read it, or just watch a movie in Chinese. But within a couple of years of starting to learn Japanese I was able to read contemporary novels and watch Japanese dramas without subs, and without missing all that much.

I might have spent more time on the Japanese than I did on the Chinese (or maybe not- I had Chinese Chinese professors who assigned an insane amount of drudge homework, so I really did spend a lot of time on Chinese when I was in school.) But the Japanese never felt like drudgery, since I never pushed too hard on any one thing (and also because I didn't have a Chinese guy shouting "dui bu dui?" at me, and spitting on me, every few minutes...)- if I had a hard time understanding a point of grammar I skipped it, and it generally turned out that a while later I had come to understand it without knowing when I had. The only thing I ever really studied was vocabulary, and I didn't do that until I already had a strong core vocabulary of a few thousand words- enough for most situations, but not enough to read literary novels from the early Shouwa period, say. Well, I still have problems with Souseki, to be honest.

I think it is really counter-productive to "study" a language. You want, I think, to treat the whole thing very lightly. Read through the text very quickly, get what you can get from doing that now. Watch some Japanese TV, and try to hear things you noticed in the text. Go back to the text for answers occasionally, and seek out more advanced texts (which are hard to find, since 99 out of 100 people who start learning Japanese never get past the two intensive semester level, which is maybe 15 kyuu in Go nomenclature, if we are being generous. There is a huge market for beginner books, but very little market for more advanced books, outside of Japan) when you can't find explanations for what you are hearing in the basic texts. And have some faith- what seems mysterious today will seem obvious in a while, even if you don't try to figure it out.

EDIT: BTW, most texts are also likely to lead you astray here. They tend to introduce the word "anata" as if it were equivalent to the English "You." If you take that literally, as most students of Japanese do for a while, the result is going to be very unfortunate. The texts should hang a sign on that word: "Be very careful about using the word 'anata'." But they don't, generally, and that is really worse than 95% of what you might pick up from anime.

In my opinion, you should not care about the specific form you use. You are expected to make mistakes as a foreigner. As you practice speaking with people more, your mistakes will become fewer naturally.

My personal strategy is this:
1.) Get a really good grasp on how grammar works.
2.) Once step 1 is done, vocab, vocab, vocab! Memorize as many vocabulary words as possible.
3.) Throughout steps 1 and 2, practice speaking, writing, and reading as much as possible.

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be immersed

I warmly recommend Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide.
It does a good job at making you approach the language in a 'Japanese way', as opposed to trying to map your English to equivalent Japanese constructs.
It gave me more than any of the printed books I tried (including Genki) and I have a feeling it will appeal to other go players as well. Plus it's free.

Well, I'd agree that if you are a complete beginner at Japanese you're probably fine using the dictionary forms- I actually kind of strongly disagree with the way some approaches teach Japanese, where they teach teinei forms (i.e. renyoukei+masu for verbs, etc.) first. This has the advantage that people are speaking reasonably polite Japanese from the beginning, and it is probably the right thing to do if you are trying to teach businessmen to stumble through a few greetings before reverting to English on a business trip. But it's the wrong way to learn if you intend to learn Japanese well, IMHO.

My point was that the problem with anime Japanese isn't just that it's in an informal register. Some of it is really rude. If you're still at the head-patting stage of learning Japanese people will forgive you for speaking informally. They might not forgive you if you speak insultingly. Even if they know you don't know better, it will color their perception of you. Learning Japanese from anime is fine, as long as you have enough context to know what bits are weird. You have to have that though, or you'll wind up calling everyone "omae," and that's really not acceptable, even if you're a beginner. Or you'll start calling yourself "uchi" because you recently watched an anime that featured a rough girl from Oosaka. That's not, at least, insulting, but it will make a very strange impression on whoever you're talking to, particularly if you're male.



That's not a bad strategy, I think, if you modify it a bit. The thing is that trying to do 1.) before you start on 2.) and 3.) is hopeless. It's the equivalent of "Getting Strong at Go in Secret." Unless you actually need to use Japanese in your day-to-day life I'd advise you to learn to understand and read Japanese first. You'll naturally do that if you spend most of your free time watching Japanese media, and reading Japanese books. I wouldn't bother studying grammar (except for the very basics, of course) until you have questions that you can't answer for yourself. You can learn Japanese pretty well without studying, but you can't learn Japanese pretty well just by studying.

Study is important though- one sentence from a book can clear up a serious misunderstanding that you've had for a long time. Here's a good example that I wish I could give credit for, but I have forgotten who proposed it: What does the Japanese word "hotondo" mean? If you learn Japanese purely by listening you might think, for a long time, that it means something like "most." But it actually means something like "almost all." That's a pretty big difference in meaning, but it's one that will take you a long time to narrow down on your own, just through listening. It's really useful to have someone point that out, but it is most efficient if it is pointed out at a point where you already mostly understand sentences with the word "hotondo" in them.

You can't learn much about Japanese by simply studying Japanese grammar. You can't learn Japanese by exclusively studying grammar. You could learn Japanese without ever studying grammar, but that would be inefficient. So my advice is to learn Japanese by listening to an enormous amount of Japanese very attentively, and studying grammar when you wind up with questions you can't answer easily just by listening a little more. I'm tempted to think that there is a go-learning strategy like this, but I'm not a good enough go player to say much about that.

Edit: I guess what I am suggesting, shades of Fairbairn's recent epiphany, is that you take a holistic approach to learning Japanese. I am not crazy about the word "holistic" though, as it reminds me of all the damned hippies I was raised by who couldn't manage to get much done . Perhaps this is a prejudice I should get over.

I will try not to get emotional in my response as I have in the past, but it offends me when you word things like this, particularly since you likely know nothing of my Japanese ability, or how fast I learned it. Have you ever taken the JLPT?

Admittedly, though, I studied Japanese quite a bit while I was actually living in Japan, too, so that likely means that the method that I wrote was actually slightly different in practice.

Anyway, I believe that people can learn in many different ways. I was merely explaining what worked for me.

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be immersed