Japanese porn sounds like chicks getting murdered by samurai with tourettes.
Zing.
Before moving on to kanji though, just trying to get a feel for the general grammar and sentence structure might be a good idea. I suck at grammar, but it's still possible to pick up, to
"feel" that "oh, it should probably be like this here". Of course, being able to read but not having any idea of what any of the words actually mean is pretty useless, which is where a normal textbook actually becomes a good thing. Since a short text is often followed by a glossary list of words mentioned and their translations.
I don't really have any good examples of books that are both fun to read and easy to learn from but when starting out, I found this book and it's sequel pretty helpful:
Genki - An Integrated Course in Elementary JapaneseIn the back of the book, related to chapter 4 and onwards, they start teaching you kanji. Stroke order, ways to read & pronounce them, as well as a few words that can be made with it.
I've seen people say there are better books out there, but I can at least speak from experience regarding this one, even if it was quite a while since I paged through it.
Biggest shock for me though wasn't so much the wall of kanji everywhere (though it can be oh so intimidating) but the super big difference between the way of talking I had gotten used to in things like games & anime versus real life things like news reports, radio & TV shows etc etc. The textbook Japanese feels much closer to the "I am reading from a script"-feel of anime/games, where things are pronounced and spoken at least moderately clearly, whereas the real talk, like you'd expect is all over the place. People mumbling, talking way too fast and generally just not being a good textbook example is hard to get used too
And as for general practice, might I suggest something some kind of "bishoujo"-game. You know, the adventure/visual novel fare. Granted, there's lots and lots of text in there, but in most titles you are only fed chunks of it at a time and some games, mostly PC games or newer games on DVD, have loads upon loads of spoken dialogue. So not only do you get to read a lot, you also get someone to say what actually is written in the text box. Also, since the game doesn't continue until you're pressed the right key/performed an action, you have all the time in the world to look up words or take notes.
Also, depending on the game, the usage of kanji doesn't have to be too bad, and as I said they might act out the sentence for you*, though rare there might even be furigana available (like subtitles for kanji) and the text itself often seem to use a pretty big font which makes for easier reading.
And of course, most big titles have non-erotic versions available. Rule of tumb - PC? Porn. Console? Not porn. Except for the PC-FX
Then things like ToHeart 2 X-rated happens, where the original PS2 release was "clean" but when ported to PC later on they actually added teh pr0n - hence the name.
But then again, the PC versions are much easier to...acquire**...
* Unless you, the main character, is speaking. Then there will be no voice over.
Edit:
** There is actually no need to go pirate if you just want to test them out as some games also offers trial versions (体験版 taikenban) up for download.
Quick example,
Yoakena.
Topic: Learning Japanese (Read 894 times)
