I would make a terrible professional blogger-- sorry for the gap.
We've started to learn more numbers now, and have also started to come across what seems to be becoming a common place for exceptions to occur. English is chock full of exceptions to all sorts of spelling rules ('i' before 'e'... except after 'c', and except like in 'neighbor', and except...), and grammar rules. Grammar in Japanese seems to be much more consistent so far, but spelling is starting to have a lot of exceptions.
The Japanese word for "one hundred" is hyaku. (Just like with 'ten' you can leave off the ichi (1) before it). Two hundred is ni-hyaku (ni = 2). Four hundred is yon-hyaku (yon = 4). Five is go, so five hundred is go-hyaku. The Japanese word for three is san, but three hundred is san-byaku. Six is roku but six hundred is roppyaku.
This is done, apparently, because of pronunciation or some such. There's a rule about it I'm sure, but as of yet the rule isn't apparent, so I'm just stuck memorizing.
Japanese numbers have a name for 'hundred', 'thousand' and 'ten-thousand'. In other words, 20,000 wouldn't be 'twenty-thousand', but rather 'two-tenthousand'. 200,000 would be 'twenty-tenthousand'. That's going to take some getting used to.
On a related note, I've discovered something else my brain is having trouble picking up, and that's all the skipped zeros in numbers. A number like 2,456 in Japanese would be said something like 'two-thousand, four-hundred, five-ten, six'. But 3,004 would be 'three-thousand, four' and that's it. "Well duh, Sam, that's how it's done in English too!" Which is true, but for some reason my brain has a tough time making the jump over those zeros. I'm waiting for the 'hundred' to come after 'four' but the number's just done there.
It's like my brain refuses to do any sort of short-term caching for Japanese, so I can't store the whole number at once and then convert it to numerals.
27 September 2011
08 September 2011
Listening is Hard
So for the first time as part of the homework, we were assigned some listening comprehension exercises. And despite my confidence that I had my Japanese greetings and telling time down, I had a very hard time completing it.
The first section was greetings. We were given a page of images in which one person was greeting (saying good-bye to, &c.) another, but with empty speech bubbles. A recording was played, and we had to match that speech to the appropriate image. For this one, I didn't so much have trouble understanding what was said, as guessing what was happening in each picture. There were 3 or 4 pictures that were just two people on a street waving to each other. It wasn't immediately clear if they were saying, 'hello', 'good-bye', 'how are you?', or what, so I had to listen through it 2 or 3 times and kept changing answers when a slightly better match would show up.
The second section involved listening to some people ask what time it was in other countries, and then writing down the time in English. The hardest part of this one for me is that in Japanese, the AM or PM (gozen or gogo) is said before the time, but I had to write it after the time. I don't know what this was such a challenge, but I would usually catch either the time or the AM/PM part, but not both.
The last section was copying down phone numbers. I didn't have too much trouble with this, even though the book decided to throw in some curve balls and have everyone's phone number have a different format. The example was ##-####. The first one was ###-####, followed by #-#### and ####-####. Is there no standard formatting system for phone numbers in Japan?! I'm guess the book's doing it just to challenge listening for separators (pronounced as no) better.
Practice will definitely be important for listening, but I feel like there's a certain threshold I need to reach before I can really start listening to Japanese often. At this point I'd only be able to pick up on people meeting each other for the first time, or saying what time it is so most conversations will still be beyond me. When I get to the point where I can start watching cartoons and understand a fair amount of what's going on, practice will get easier because I'll have more material available (instead of just book-related listening exercises).
On that note, anyone know any good Japanese children's shows? (Children's shows because they'll use simpler language).
The first section was greetings. We were given a page of images in which one person was greeting (saying good-bye to, &c.) another, but with empty speech bubbles. A recording was played, and we had to match that speech to the appropriate image. For this one, I didn't so much have trouble understanding what was said, as guessing what was happening in each picture. There were 3 or 4 pictures that were just two people on a street waving to each other. It wasn't immediately clear if they were saying, 'hello', 'good-bye', 'how are you?', or what, so I had to listen through it 2 or 3 times and kept changing answers when a slightly better match would show up.
The second section involved listening to some people ask what time it was in other countries, and then writing down the time in English. The hardest part of this one for me is that in Japanese, the AM or PM (gozen or gogo) is said before the time, but I had to write it after the time. I don't know what this was such a challenge, but I would usually catch either the time or the AM/PM part, but not both.
The last section was copying down phone numbers. I didn't have too much trouble with this, even though the book decided to throw in some curve balls and have everyone's phone number have a different format. The example was ##-####. The first one was ###-####, followed by #-#### and ####-####. Is there no standard formatting system for phone numbers in Japan?! I'm guess the book's doing it just to challenge listening for separators (pronounced as no) better.
Practice will definitely be important for listening, but I feel like there's a certain threshold I need to reach before I can really start listening to Japanese often. At this point I'd only be able to pick up on people meeting each other for the first time, or saying what time it is so most conversations will still be beyond me. When I get to the point where I can start watching cartoons and understand a fair amount of what's going on, practice will get easier because I'll have more material available (instead of just book-related listening exercises).
On that note, anyone know any good Japanese children's shows? (Children's shows because they'll use simpler language).
05 September 2011
A Revelation!
So I had one of those metaphorical light-bulb moments in class last Thursday, but first some background:
Japanese has essentially two types of alphabets: kana (where each symbol represents a syllable) and kanji (where each symbol represents a word or idea). When learning Japanese, the process usually starts with romanized versions of Japanese words (e.g. gakusei), moves on to the kana (がくせい), and then finally gets to kanji (学生).
Kanji is generally perceived as the most difficult as there are about 2,000 characters used widely in Japanese (there are over 4,000 in total). Kana has two syllablaries with a total of around 100 characters, and obviously the romanized versions use 26 letters and are fairly easy to read if you're starting from a language that uses the same alphabet.
On Thursday, we were writing out the sentence "I am a student of Saddleback College", and it looked ridiculously long on the board:
Watashiwa sadorubakkudaigakuno gakusei desu.
I mean, I guess it's not that much longer than the English version of the sentence, but some of those words look scary. In kana, it's slightly more manageable:
わたしはサドルバックだいがくのがくせいです。
Or on average, has about half as many characters. It does start to get difficult to quickly tell where one word starts and the other begins. Also, given that the syllables are already defined by the alphabet being used, there's a lot of very similar sounding words. However, using kanji (I'm cheating since I'm on the computer, I don't actually know these kanji yet):
私はサドルバック大学の学生です。
It's even shorter, but more importantly, I think, the particles are much more clearly separated from the words in the sentence so it's easy to read. And so that was my first, "aha" moment when I saw that it really is quicker (once you know the characters) to write in kana or kanji.
The second "aha" moment came while looking at a few vocab words. I'm going to put spaces in the word where I think the word would be separated into kanji. I don't know for sure yet, 'cus we haven't got that far:
~jin - a people (like amerika-jin is American)
gak kou - a school
dai gaku - college
gaku sei - student
jin rui gaku - anthropology
I've color coded it to help make it more obvious, but after a while it starts to become clear what the general meaning of each (probably) kanji is, based on where it's used. Gaku, for example, is something like "learning" or "education". I haven't looked it up, but I'm inferring that from the fact that it's used in school, college, and student. I happen to know that "dai" means "big", so "big education" sorta makes sense for a college.
But then since they gave us the definition of "~jin", and I've figured out the definition of "gaku", the word "jin rui gaku" should mean something like "peoples something learning/education". And anthropology is pretty much just that.
It's starting to look like kanji are about the same as those latin roots/suffixes/prefixes that make up most every English word. Which means that you can infer the meaning of words the same way, just like if you knew what "superscript" was, and knew what a "position" was, the word "superposition" is easily guessable. Which actually makes me more optimistic about being able to grasp a language that can use over 2,000 characters, seeing that there's probably significantly more than 2,000 latin fragments used in English.
Japanese has essentially two types of alphabets: kana (where each symbol represents a syllable) and kanji (where each symbol represents a word or idea). When learning Japanese, the process usually starts with romanized versions of Japanese words (e.g. gakusei), moves on to the kana (がくせい), and then finally gets to kanji (学生).
Kanji is generally perceived as the most difficult as there are about 2,000 characters used widely in Japanese (there are over 4,000 in total). Kana has two syllablaries with a total of around 100 characters, and obviously the romanized versions use 26 letters and are fairly easy to read if you're starting from a language that uses the same alphabet.
On Thursday, we were writing out the sentence "I am a student of Saddleback College", and it looked ridiculously long on the board:
Watashiwa sadorubakkudaigakuno gakusei desu.
I mean, I guess it's not that much longer than the English version of the sentence, but some of those words look scary. In kana, it's slightly more manageable:
わたしはサドルバックだいがくのがくせいです。
Or on average, has about half as many characters. It does start to get difficult to quickly tell where one word starts and the other begins. Also, given that the syllables are already defined by the alphabet being used, there's a lot of very similar sounding words. However, using kanji (I'm cheating since I'm on the computer, I don't actually know these kanji yet):
私はサドルバック大学の学生です。
It's even shorter, but more importantly, I think, the particles are much more clearly separated from the words in the sentence so it's easy to read. And so that was my first, "aha" moment when I saw that it really is quicker (once you know the characters) to write in kana or kanji.
The second "aha" moment came while looking at a few vocab words. I'm going to put spaces in the word where I think the word would be separated into kanji. I don't know for sure yet, 'cus we haven't got that far:
~jin - a people (like amerika-jin is American)
gak kou - a school
dai gaku - college
gaku sei - student
jin rui gaku - anthropology
I've color coded it to help make it more obvious, but after a while it starts to become clear what the general meaning of each (probably) kanji is, based on where it's used. Gaku, for example, is something like "learning" or "education". I haven't looked it up, but I'm inferring that from the fact that it's used in school, college, and student. I happen to know that "dai" means "big", so "big education" sorta makes sense for a college.
But then since they gave us the definition of "~jin", and I've figured out the definition of "gaku", the word "jin rui gaku" should mean something like "peoples something learning/education". And anthropology is pretty much just that.
It's starting to look like kanji are about the same as those latin roots/suffixes/prefixes that make up most every English word. Which means that you can infer the meaning of words the same way, just like if you knew what "superscript" was, and knew what a "position" was, the word "superposition" is easily guessable. Which actually makes me more optimistic about being able to grasp a language that can use over 2,000 characters, seeing that there's probably significantly more than 2,000 latin fragments used in English.
04 September 2011
The の(no) Particle
As I mentioned in the previous post, Japanese uses particles to explicitly mark different ... uh... for lack of a better term, structural words in a sentence. So for example, the topic of a sentence is followed by a 'wa' particle that says, "what you just read is the topic of this sentence!". In class this week, we also learned about the の 'no' particle, which means something like "of", but backwards. I'll just use English to demonstrate at first, and then do a Japanese example:
I の name は Sam です。(My name is Sam)
Literally, this looks something like, "As for, name of me, Sam is." Or if I wanted to talk about my friend Bill's major, I would say "Bill の major", or the "major of Bill". Get it? It's like putting 'of' in there, but reversing the words. So far I've used it sorta the same way a possessive 's might be used in English, but it works for other constructs too. For example, if I wanted to say I was a student of UCI, I would say "UCI の student".
From what I can tell, words combined with の end up as a sort of compound word that gets built into the structure of the rest of the sentence. So for example in:
わたしのせんこうはコンピューターです。(My major is Computers)
The underlined part of the sentence (My major) is a combination of two words combined with の that act as the topic (marked by は) of the sentence.
I の name は Sam です。(My name is Sam)
Literally, this looks something like, "As for, name of me, Sam is." Or if I wanted to talk about my friend Bill's major, I would say "Bill の major", or the "major of Bill". Get it? It's like putting 'of' in there, but reversing the words. So far I've used it sorta the same way a possessive 's might be used in English, but it works for other constructs too. For example, if I wanted to say I was a student of UCI, I would say "UCI の student".
From what I can tell, words combined with の end up as a sort of compound word that gets built into the structure of the rest of the sentence. So for example in:
わたしのせんこうはコンピューターです。(My major is Computers)
The underlined part of the sentence (My major) is a combination of two words combined with の that act as the topic (marked by は) of the sentence.
03 September 2011
The は (wa) Particle
We learned vocab and sentence structure for age, and nationality, and majors. And most importantly we learned about our first two Japanese particles. In English, subjects, verbs, adjectives, &c. are sort of implicitly identified by their conjugation and placement in a sentence. In Japanese, most of these sentence pieces are identified explicitly by a particle.
For example, the particle は (pronounced 'wa') is the topic marker. So if I said something like:
わたしはアメリカじんです。 (I am American)
The 'wa' particle (green) is modifying the word 'watashi' (red) which means 'me' or 'I', which indicates that the topic of the sentence is me. Also, in Japanese sentences always, always end with a verb. In fact a verb by itself is a valid sentence! But, there aren't particles to identify verbs, because they're always at the end. So the sentence above reads literally something like, "As for me, American is".
02 September 2011
Counting and Time
Alright, I've slacked off a bit on the blog, so there will be a few posts all crammed together here (I'm going to use scheduling to send 'em out once per day). Sorry about that, I'll try to update in a smoother fashion in the future.
We learned numbers:
いち - ichi (1)
に - ni (2)
さん - san (3)
よん - yon
ご - go
ろく - roku
なな - nana
はち - hachi
きゅう - kyuu
じゅう - juu (10)
The cool thing with Japanese numbers is you just add them together to get numbers above 10, none of that weird -teen, -irty stuff like English. So for 11, I just say "ten one": じゅういち, and for 21 I can just say "two ten one": にじゅういち。
We learned about the time:
いま、なんじですか (What time is it now?)
じゅうにはんです。(It's 12:30; you can see the number 12 in bold)
Though now that I try to actually write out the time, it occurs to me that I we haven't covered minutes yet, so at best I can give you the time within a half hour.
We learned numbers:
いち - ichi (1)
に - ni (2)
さん - san (3)
よん - yon
ご - go
ろく - roku
なな - nana
はち - hachi
きゅう - kyuu
じゅう - juu (10)
The cool thing with Japanese numbers is you just add them together to get numbers above 10, none of that weird -teen, -irty stuff like English. So for 11, I just say "ten one": じゅういち, and for 21 I can just say "two ten one": にじゅういち。
We learned about the time:
いま、なんじですか (What time is it now?)
じゅうにはんです。(It's 12:30; you can see the number 12 in bold)
Though now that I try to actually write out the time, it occurs to me that I we haven't covered minutes yet, so at best I can give you the time within a half hour.
24 August 2011
Day One
Yesterday was the first day of Japanese, and my excitement was not unfounded. Ito-sensei seems like a great teacher, and has a sense of humor on top of that.
We covered some very basic things like the syllables in the language and some pronunciation, and though it wasn't a big mental, stretch since I'd covered most of it myself, I did pick up some very informative tidbits:
We covered some very basic things like the syllables in the language and some pronunciation, and though it wasn't a big mental, stretch since I'd covered most of it myself, I did pick up some very informative tidbits:
- ん (n) is called the syllabic nasal. Makes sense, but it's cool to have a name for it.
- I learned the difference between voiced and voiceless consonants. This too makes sense, but I guess I hadn't really though much about it. 'k' is a voiceless consonant because its sound is made entirely without vocal chords. 'g' is the associated voiced consonant because it's the exact same sound as 'k' except you add vocal chords. Neat!
- ふ is usually written on charts as 'fu', but is actually pronounced more like 'hu'. Had no idea, but that's definitely a good thing to know.
There's a lot of nuance to pronunciation that I'll have to pick up on, but hearing Japanese more and practicing it should help with that. A lot of the sounds are somewhere between the English counterparts. ん(n), for example, from what I can tell is like an English 'n' sound but a little closer to 'm'. And 'r' is right in the middle of English 'r' and 'l'.
I got reading homework too! It's like I'm in school again or something!
22 August 2011
Learning Resources: Part One
So when I first decided to learn Japanese, the goal was to teach myself for a whole host of reasons (finances, time, pacing, &c.), and so I immediately turned to the number one resource for learning new information: Borders bookstore. And then realized I might have been too hasty, and used the Internet. =P
One of the first sites I came across that I really loved was Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide. It's beautifully laid out, complete, and accurate. I'm especially a fan of the fact that it's not a site trying to teach you as quickly as possible or just teach "survival" Japanese, but it actually goes through each bit of the language in as much order as makes sense. I've read through most of the beginner stuff on the site, but didn't really do any of the provided exercises, so very little of it stuck with me. I will definitely keep referring to there when I forget a nuance of grammar though.
I prefer to learn by understanding concepts and patterns and applying them, rather than by rote memorization (which is another reason I really liked the above site; it teaches why the sentences are structured the way they are). But there's nothing better for vocab and learning the alphabet (or syllabaries in the case of Japanese) than good ol' flash cards. And for that, I used smart.fm. However, since then smart.fm has decided to close up its doors and become a pay site, so it suddenly became a lot less useful, and not worth linking to. It took me a while to find a replacement, but I finally found Memrise. They're just starting out and the Japanese section is still labeled "beta", so expect some less-than-ideal organization and the occasional misspelled or incomplete card, but overall I really like the way it works. They are admittedly a little heavy-handed with their "garden" metaphor, but it's not a bad metaphor, and it doesn't get in the way, so I guess that's okay.
As for books, the class (that starts tomorrow!!) will be using Genki I, which from what I understand is pretty much the de facto learning tool for Japanese as far as books go. I found a book called Japanese for Busy People (the Kana version!) that I actually liked and made it a few pages into, but my laziness won out and I didn't get very far in it. Still, not a bad substitute for Genki if you're looking for something more affordable.
Class starts tomorrow! I'm struggling to keep myself from going home and starting into the workbooks ahead of time, but I guess I should wait...
One of the first sites I came across that I really loved was Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide. It's beautifully laid out, complete, and accurate. I'm especially a fan of the fact that it's not a site trying to teach you as quickly as possible or just teach "survival" Japanese, but it actually goes through each bit of the language in as much order as makes sense. I've read through most of the beginner stuff on the site, but didn't really do any of the provided exercises, so very little of it stuck with me. I will definitely keep referring to there when I forget a nuance of grammar though.
I prefer to learn by understanding concepts and patterns and applying them, rather than by rote memorization (which is another reason I really liked the above site; it teaches why the sentences are structured the way they are). But there's nothing better for vocab and learning the alphabet (or syllabaries in the case of Japanese) than good ol' flash cards. And for that, I used smart.fm. However, since then smart.fm has decided to close up its doors and become a pay site, so it suddenly became a lot less useful, and not worth linking to. It took me a while to find a replacement, but I finally found Memrise. They're just starting out and the Japanese section is still labeled "beta", so expect some less-than-ideal organization and the occasional misspelled or incomplete card, but overall I really like the way it works. They are admittedly a little heavy-handed with their "garden" metaphor, but it's not a bad metaphor, and it doesn't get in the way, so I guess that's okay.
As for books, the class (that starts tomorrow!!) will be using Genki I, which from what I understand is pretty much the de facto learning tool for Japanese as far as books go. I found a book called Japanese for Busy People (the Kana version!) that I actually liked and made it a few pages into, but my laziness won out and I didn't get very far in it. Still, not a bad substitute for Genki if you're looking for something more affordable.
Class starts tomorrow! I'm struggling to keep myself from going home and starting into the workbooks ahead of time, but I guess I should wait...
15 August 2011
I'm going to learn Japanese!
... or, at least that's the goal.
I've signed up for a Japanese class at my local (ish) community college that's starting in August, and I'm getting excited as the start of classes nears. I've spent some time over the last couple years trying to teach myself a little Japanese, but found that without someone holding a grade over my head (even a grade that doesn't matter since I'm all done with school), I lack sufficient motivation to learn.
In my quest to teach myself though, I've come across many useful resources on the Internet that have helped me along, one of which is blogs of other people learning Japanese. The beauty of these kind of blogs is that I can make "informative" posts, but simultaneously reinforce what I've learned in class by teaching it to the Readers (equally useful even if in reality I have no readers).
As with all of my blogs, any sort of comments or interaction is welcome and encouraged.
And now, a quick test to make sure Blogger can handle Japanese characters (if this doesn't work... well, that would be bad):
I've signed up for a Japanese class at my local (ish) community college that's starting in August, and I'm getting excited as the start of classes nears. I've spent some time over the last couple years trying to teach myself a little Japanese, but found that without someone holding a grade over my head (even a grade that doesn't matter since I'm all done with school), I lack sufficient motivation to learn.
In my quest to teach myself though, I've come across many useful resources on the Internet that have helped me along, one of which is blogs of other people learning Japanese. The beauty of these kind of blogs is that I can make "informative" posts, but simultaneously reinforce what I've learned in class by teaching it to the Readers (equally useful even if in reality I have no readers).
As with all of my blogs, any sort of comments or interaction is welcome and encouraged.
And now, a quick test to make sure Blogger can handle Japanese characters (if this doesn't work... well, that would be bad):
こんいちわ、日本語！
Am I allowed to use commas in Japanese? Did I use that one appropriately? I have no idea!
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