皆さん、こんにちは！大太郎です。
Hello, everyone! This is Daniel.
These resources are intended to be used as supplementary material to help you through your first steps in the Japanese Language. Specifically, it is tailored to Valentyna Hadley's JAPN 101 class at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. My goal is the profive useful information that supplements the Genki I Textbook material and Professor Hadley's lectures.
Please don't hesitate to reach out to me for help and clarification! You can email me at dnoon2@unl.edu to ask questions or provide feedback.
Ideology
When creating these materials, I want first and foremost to provide something that you will use. But I also want to cover some things that might be uncomfortable or confusing at first so that you will get a richer, more complete picture of Japanese. The big idea that I want to convey is that Japanese is an entirely different kind of language than English, and so we need to look at it through a different lens. I'm sure a lot of people will be here primarily for review and flash cards, so I'll try to keep deep-dives sectioned off from the core class content.
Resources Right off the Bat
Before we start, I want to recommend a few super helpful resources that are free and easy to use:
- Jisho.org - A free and easy-to-use online Japanese-English dictionary. You can search using kana, roumaji, or kanji, and the results include words, expressions, kanji, names, and more! It's a very comprehensive lookup tool.
- Tae-Kim's Guide to Japanese - A fairly complete guide to Japanese Grammar, and a great place to look up topics that you need better explained. I base a lot of how I approach the language off of this source.
Up Next
The very first thing I'll be doing is introducing hiragana. It is absolutely critical to learn hiragana when you are learning Japanese. Roumaji is a flawed system that introduces uncertainty and complexity to the very simple phonetic system that Japanese has. So, let's get started learning hiragana!