Language Course 1

[Dardallion]

Konnichiha, eikokujindesu. Nihongo no seitodesu. Watashi no pasocon ni hiragana to katakana to kanji ga alimasuga, Unilang ni hiragana to katana to kanji de kiite mo iideha alimasen. Tetsudatte kudasai?
Doumo aligatou gozaimasu.

Eilrahc

[Rounin]

http://home.comcast.net/~kagamix2/xp-co ... tting.html
http://www.declan-software.com/japanese_ime/

[Varislintu]

Hey there, I have a question.

According to the set of book+casettes that I have been studying with lately, the hard "g" sometimes turns into a soft "ng" in Japanese (even if it is still written as a "g" in romanized text).

I was just wondering, is there any rule as to when this happens? Does the same word always carry the same pronounciation of "g", or can it change if combined with other words? Is this a dialectal thing, or part of the official pronounciation of Japanese? If it's dialectal or slang or something, what are the chances that this course from the 80's is still up to date with it's "g"s?

Thanks !

[BobMaster0]

Hey there, I have a question.

According to the set of book+casettes that I have been studying with lately, the hard "g" sometimes turns into a soft "ng" in Japanese (even if it is still written as a "g" in romanized text).

I was just wondering, is there any rule as to when this happens? Does the same word always carry the same pronounciation of "g", or can it change if combined with other words? Is this a dialectal thing, or part of the official pronounciation of Japanese? If it's dialectal or slang or something, what are the chances that this course from the 80's is still up to date with it's "g"s?

Thanks !

Personally, I wouldn't worry about that at all. While some sound changes like that occur, there's no reason to learn rules (at and early stage) because they won't apply everywhere and it's not going to be worth your time (with the g at least). The times it changes are all natural changes that are going to happen anyway when you speak at a normal speed. So, it's no really an issue. The same goes for the n->m and n->ng changes.

[Rounin]

Thinking of the ん as "n" might actually be misleading in itself, since it (apparently) used to be a variant form of "mu". Thus, you'll hear it being pronounced as "m" a lot between bilabial sounds like b, m and p, but I've also heard it on other occasions, ie. 会話三 as "kaiwa sam". In other cases, the ん can almost disappear and turn into a nazalisation of the previous vowel, as in けんいち, "kẽichi" and 雰囲気, "fũiki".

The g to ng shiftan safely be disregarded - It's nice to be aware of it, but using it doesn't make you sound more authentic. What's much more important are the silent i's and u's, which you can find in-between a lot of unvoiced consonants.

[Varislintu not logged in]

Thanks Bobmaster and Rounin, that is very relieving to hear ! Maybe I'll just skip trying to memorize the changes, then, at least for the timebeing.

[magyar chunsa]

i hope this is the right place to ask this. my Japanese coworker sent me this email, and obviously he thinks I'm more advanced in Japanese than I am. I only studied it for one year. So could someone translate this for me?

Jikan hyo o ookurishimasu. Senjitsu wa tanjobi card wo domo arigato. (his birthday was last week and we all sent him a card). Nihongo de kaite kurete itanode totemo uresikatta desu. Anata wa ryohono no yomi kaki ga dekite Nihon ni yuki Eigo no sensei ni wa taihen mui te iru to omoimasu. (something about going to Japan to be an English teacher?).

[Rounin]

I'm only slightly drunk, so I'm pretty sure this is correct:

I'll send you the time-table. Thanks for the birthday card the other day. Since you were kind enough to write in Japanese, I was very happy. You know both reading and writing, and I think that if you go to Japan, you'll be very suited to be an English teacher.

[magyar chunsa]

doomo!! ^_^

[Axystos]

Just looking for confirmation:

Is it true that 青 means both "blue" and "green"?

[Kubi]

Just looking for confirmation:

Is it true that 青 means both "blue" and "green"?

That's a question that can't be answered easily.

The problem is that in different cultures the continuous spectrum of electromagnetic waves is divided into different colours in different ways. That means, the Japanese "aoi" is used for some things, that we would generally call "blue", and for others, that we'd call "green" - but not for all of those. And if you think of e.g. turquoise, you'll see that there is no clear-cut dividing line between both - some people also disagree about certain colour shades wether they're blue or green.

You have the same problem with the Welsh "glas" which also covers a different part of the speactrum than any single one of "our" colours.

So the simple answer is "yes", but the problem behind is quite complex

[Axystos]

Yes, I once read something in a book that the Welsh divide the spectrum differently, and I assumed that 青 would be a similar case when I saw the translation in the dictionary, but I just wanted to make sure.

Thanks Kubi!

[Axystos]

I was wondering if the learners of Japanese (or at least that part that also learns the kanji) would want to explain how they learn or have learned kanji? I'm asking this because I've noticed that I seem to forget a lot of kanji more quickly than I'd forget words from another language that uses words consisting of letters of an alphabet.

Thanks!

[Gon-no-suke]

A very late answer for Axytost, and it is more of an opinion anyway. My advice is to avoid spending time on studying a lot of kanji and their inherent meanings. Single kanji are in my opinion not an important part when reading Japanese, what is important is vocabulary - which will mostly be words that happen to be written as combinations of two or more kanji.

As for me, I know enough kanji that I seldome se one that I've never seen before nowadays. However, I often come across words that I don't know the meaning of. In some cases, you can guess the meaning from the kanji used but you still need to look it up and learn the word as a unit.

Of course, studying kanji is very interesting, and I've came down that road myself, but most japanese are not putting much emphasis on the meaning of individual kanji (except for some 漢字ヲタク who aims for 漢字検定一級).

Enough bitching, I have to give some concrete advice as well. I would start with learning the stroke-order for writing the simplest kanji - don't worry about their meaning because they are not that common anyway. You can then use this knowledge for counting strokes in complex kanji which is important for looking up words later. Also learn to recognise the radicals for the same reason.

Concentrate on increasing your vocabulary. Learn to recognise the word from looking at the kana and kanji.

I have to admit that although I can read Japanese without problems, I am bad at writing kanji myself. But this doesn't stop me from working in Japanese and writing reports in Japanese since you use a computer to enter kanji anyway. If you have to write by hand, type it in first and then copy those parts you don't remember.

Sorry for the long rant. To finish of I'd like to recommend A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar to any beginners out there. I teaches Japanese grammar in a much more logical (and useful) order than any books I have read, so give it a try.

Good luck!

[IkimashoZ]

Sorry for the long rant. To finish of I'd like to recommend A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar to any beginners out there. I teaches Japanese grammar in a much more logical (and useful) order than any books I have read, so give it a try.

That website is amazing. The links it contains are invaluable. She missed popjisyo though. I was disappointed by that one. I will definitely be using ALC though.

[Axystos]

Thanks Gon-no-suke! Also for the link you provided.

[Skurai]

Sweet lessons Daniel, I have noticed that your lessons usually are good.
I heard on the zbb that you were going to continue these lessons, Is that true?

[Rounin]

I try to make sure to learn to differentiate the individual components of each character by sound and meaning: The radical, the sound part, and all the components that make it up. That way, one can make up little mnemonics to remember how to write it, or if one's really lucky, the sound part will rhyme with or otherwise resemble the reading of the character as a whole.

[Aleco]

Sorry for the long rant. To finish of I'd like to recommend A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar to any beginners out there. I teaches Japanese grammar in a much more logical (and useful) order than any books I have read, so give it a try.

That website is amazing. The links it contains are invaluable. She missed popjisyo though. I was disappointed by that one. I will definitely be using ALC though.

But I can't see the Kanji characters, and I can't figure out how to pronounce them

[Kubi]

I try to make sure to learn to differentiate the individual components of each character by sound and meaning: The radical, the sound part, and all the components that make it up. That way, one can make up little mnemonics to remember how to write it,

There's a book using that approach. I'll have to check the title and author (I think it's something like "an easy guid to remembering Japanese characters" or so), but it explains how the characters are composed and proposes little mnemonic phrases to remember them.