About

This is the Shingo Japanese Trainer, a growing suite of web-apps to help you learn various aspects of the language (especially on the reading side of things). It's free to use, and is aimed at people of many levels of experience (including none!), although it's currently best suited to new or former students.

It was born in 2008 when, years after my Japanese course, an attempt to properly read some actual Japanese gave me much difficulty with the characters- both showing me I'd got very rusty at the Kana characters from lack of practice, and reminding me that it's terribly impractical to try to read Japanese without knowing the Kanji characters- having to look them all up each time gets terribly slow. It soon struck me that properly learning even just some of the basic, more common ones would make a great improvement, and what I was doing wasn't helping me do that as it didn't stick.

As I had some experience with making "drill" type programs that I'd found very effective, and was starting a new website at the time, I figured I could make myself that sort of program as a web-app, mostly covering the Kana and Kanji characters. And if I was doing that, maybe other people'd find it useful too.

The data for the Kana part was fairly straight-forward, and I realised that I could use Jim Breem's huge free "Kanjidic" project* (as compiled and cited by experts) for the Kanji data, so there wouldn't be a chicken+egg, or "blind leading the blind" problem there as I wouldn't be supplying the answers for it.

(*-data used under the terms of their licence)

It is ready to use, depending what's of use to you. The Kana trainer is there and working (it could conceivably be fine-tuned or added-to), and although the Kanji trainer is currently available in prototype/preview form only (having been delayed for some time by design decisions being considered whilst I worked on other parts of Shingo and the rest of the site), rather more of that should be coming next- probably quite soon. What's more, as it's a work in progress, even more additions and improvements are planned for the future, so further types of trainer are likely in time, besides reading characters. Watch out for announcements.

Conversely, it's important to remember, if you have no previous knowledge of Japanese, that Shingo doesn't teach you all aspects of Japanese- not as in "not all characters" or "not all words", but for instance it is unlikely to ever teach you much of idiomatic use of Japanese (eg phrases etc), or things like sentence structure, or more than a little about spoken Japanese. So if you want to be able to properly use Japanese rather than just learning a few cool snippets (not that that's bad if that's what you want!), you should also be looking into a Japanese course or a book etc- and Shingo will still be able to speed up your learning in the topics it does cover, for free.

This "Info" page

This page has most of the detailed information about the app, all collected into one place, and linked from by different parts of the app. Because there is a lot to see here, it is designed to highlight the topics relevant to the parts you reached the page from, to prevent you getting lost. EG, if you come here from the Kana trainer pages, it will clearly highlight the section on Kana, although you will still be able to see the other sections if you want to.

As there is a great deal to write about, and I'm not always very good at finding a good way to word things, this page is absolutely a work-in-progress.

Kana

Kana are 2 sets (yes 2, more on that shortly) of characters used in Japanese for writing with, in addition to the much larger set of characters known as "Kanji". They're rather like our western alphabet(s), except they represent whole syllables ("ta","ki","mo" etc) so the sets are technically "syllabaries". Also like our alphabet, and unlike Kanji, individual Kana don't have any inherent meaning. Even where there's individual Kana that happen to spell whole words (some of those are strictly "particles" not words), those Kana themselves don't have the meaning of the words in question, any more than the letter "I"s in "picnic" mean "me" in English. They're just how the words are spelt!

Although most Japanese words are written at least partly with Kanji, most also have some Kana (eg for verb endings, adjectives, etc), and some are written entirely with Kana- especially the very important class of words known as "particles" (ok it's not entirely clear whether they actually count as words, but they certainly count as important). In some cases words that can be spelt with a certain Kanji use Kana spelling instead, if the Kanji isn't expected to be known by the reader. In other cases the kanji is annotated with the Kana spelling- a bit like subtitles!

Different Sets

One thing that might seem confusing about Kana is that there's two sets of them, known as "Hiragana" and "Katakana", but again we're actually already familiar with that sort of thing in English- our alphabet also has two sets of characters, also each with different versions of the exact same letters, pronounced exactly the same way. Capital letters and small letters, or upper-case and lower-case if you prefer. In English we use each type in certain contexts, eg IF WE WRITE LIKE THIS IT'S A BIT LIKE SHOUTING, but we still expect names and sentences to start with a capital letter.

Which set of kana to use where is based on quite different rules to that, so you really can't consider them to be equivalents, but there's not too much to take in anyway. Hiragana, the rather more fluid and curly set of Kana, are used for writing particles and other common grammatical(????) parts of sentences. They're also used for spelling out/replacing Kanji in words, and writing things like verb endings. Most native Japanese text is written with them.

Katakana, which tend to be rather sharp, bold or angular, are generally for describing the sounds of things, and this is why they tend to be used for writing "gairaigo", or loanwords, although they can also be used for things like describing sound effects and such. The Japanese use of loanwords is startlingly common, most of them tend to be from English words, but also words from numerous other European languages, plus a lot of Chinese (however most Chinese loanwords were taken in ancient times and those are not written with Katakana). Don't expect them to be obviously intelligible even when they're from English, as the Japanese tend to mangle words to suit them better. "Pasokon" for "Personal Computer" is an obvious example. Still, outside of technical materials (which would tend to use even more loanwords) you'll probably see much more Hiragana than Katakana.

Arrangement, dakuten, and yoon?

Like our alphabet (again), the Kana have a standard ordering. But rather than being given in a list, they're normally presented in a special table or grid, known as the "Gojuon". You don't need to memorise the Gojuon ordering in order to read Japanese, but familiarity with the Kana tables is rather helpful with learning the Kana themselves.

In the tables (at least the way they're usually shown in the West- the Japanese normally show them sideways relative to us due to their normal reading direction, but Shingo uses the Western orientation due to ours), each row has syllables starting with a particular consonant, and each column has them ending with a particular vowel. There's a few slight exceptions to this, such as the "n/m" character that has no vowel, and 4 or 5 characters with subtly different consonant parts to the rest of their rows. But overall the table is pretty regular.

This also helps with learning a further 5 rows of characters (per set), which are essentially identical to some of the other rows of the Gojuon, except with little marks by them known as "dakuten" and "handakuten", which change the consonant used slightly: k- sounds become (hard) g- sounds, t- sounds become d- sounds, etc. Dakuten look like ", whereas Handakuten are little circles and are only used with the h- row characters (which get turned into p- sounds). All of these combinations are shown in Shingo's Kana table page.

There's a vaguely similar concept in the combined characters known as "yoon", which involve one of a set of kana, paired with a small version of one of an even smaller set (-ya, yu, or yo for normal yoon). Shingo doesn't currently teach these for technical reasons, but there's really not much to learn about them anyway. The sound for the yoon is roughly that of the two kana run together, eg ri+yu gives "ryu", shi+ya gives "sha", the full list is easily found, eg at Wikipedia. There's also a few other unusual combinations of characters only really used for modern loanwords, for syllables not native to Japanese. I'm not at all clear if these count as "yoon" but they look similar enough and can generally be figured out too.

Romaji and Pronunciation

To do!

Kanji

This refers to the very large set of characters the Japanese borrowed centuries ago from Chinese (where they are called "Hanji" or "Khanjie" etc) for writing words and parts of words etc. Whereas Kana represent sounds for spelling with, Kanji represent concepts and things. Kanji can be either replaced by or annotated with the Hiragana characters that spell them, where the text is for (or by) children or the Kanji in question are unusual, or for various other reasons. In most Japanese text however, you will see Kanji used quite a lot, so it's a good idea to learn at least a few of the most common ones.

Yes, that's much what is on the front page re Kanji, too. A proper info section will be produced when a more complete Kanji trainer than the current prototype is ready, until then it'd be a touch superfluous.

The most pressing thing for that is an important administrative tool for managing the vast amount of data involved. Obviously that's a program I want to get right. Otherwise, the kanji trainer program shouldn't be so significantly different to the prototype, other than working with very many lessons instead of just one.

Lessons

There's different types of lesson, not just different types of subject matter.

So far there are two of these- the first would be the intro lesson, for material you've never seen, have forgotten, or are otherwise unsure of. These have very few items (about 5-7 is the normal range) and show a little "cheat-sheet" display for a while at the beginning of the lesson. It's ok to use this if you don't know the answers, that's what it's there for! A short while into each lesson, it disappears again anyway, and you're expected to finish that lesson without.

As intro lessons have so few items they tend not to take very long, and they're not meant to be hard either, merely a way of easing the material into your head. You can of course do an intro lesson multiple times (preferably with a bit of a break between each one), but you're likely to see diminishing returns from them.

The next step up is the standard lesson- each one of these covers the material from 2 or 3 other intro lessons, and is meant to be more of a challenge to do. By the same token, they are more effective for getting the subject matter into your head, particularly into longer-term memory. Because they're harder, you don't have to answer each question quite as many times as in the intro lesson, so they're not quite as long as you might suppose, but they are somewhat.

Unless you already know the material, there's little point trying to do a standard-lesson before you've got through each of the corresponding intro-lessons at least once. If you try a standard lesson on the same day as any of its intro lessons, try to leave about quarter of an hour rest before starting the standard lesson maybe. If it's hard, try anyway. If you do terribly, well go back to doing a couple more intro lessons, especially for what you had most trouble with.

These 2 types of lesson may not be enough for some people, so there are other types being planned too, watch out for some of them relatively soon!

Hints and Tips

A few suggestions...

• Where there's a cheat sheet, don't be afraid of it! Use it if you're unsure, it's ok. Ideally, for each question, you should probably try to see if you can work out the answer on your own before looking. But if you can't, then look at it. It's what it's there for!
• You don't have to sit there and study the cheat sheet in detail whilst it's there, although casually looking over the whole thing whilst you look for the answer is probably helpful for getting it into your mind a bit.
• In the intro lessons for the Kana, note that almost every lesson covers exactly one row of the Kana table (the "gojuon"), and that when the cheat-sheet is shown, it is in exactly the same order. Remembering this fact can help you remember what's what a bit better. Note the only intro lessons this doesn't apply to, are for the 3 incomplete rows (Ys, Ws, and n/m), and even that is strictly speaking, in order (just not in a way that helps so much).
• Not sure what the answer is when there's no cheat-sheet? Don't fret, don't sit there nervously biting your nails in terror, just give it your best shot, or if you have no idea, just guess. The world won't end just because you get a question wrong, mistakes are part of the lesson. Do try to pay attention when it tells you what the answer was though, huh?
• Don't sit down one day and say "Right! I'm gonna learn everything today!" and try to get through all the lessons in one sitting. Odds are that if you do actually manage to learn them all, you'll be very upset when you've forgotten most of them the next day. Take it at a reasonable pace. And take breaks between lessons too!
• Even after you've completed a lesson perfectly, don't forget to do it again in future (eg in a couple days time, or a week or two)- if you don't use it, you lose it!
• In case you missed the warning elsewhere, note that even if you complete all the lessons currently in Shingo, and all the lessons in all the trainers that are planned, that alone still doesn't mean you "know Japanese" as such, unless you're also learning from some other source. It greatly helps you to learn what it covers, but some important things it doesn't cover yet, and some it never will. If you also have lessons or some other material, it can speed you along nicely, and if you don't, well at least it's a step in the right direction until you do, maybe it'll help you decide if it's worth it.