Welcome!

Welcome! I’m from Sydney, here. =)

Where have you visited in particular? And where are you planning to go in May?

You’re not going to find any native speakers here, unfortunately. Maybe try HiNative. https://hinative.com/

My tip: remember that each verb refers to an actual action that people do in the real world. It’s too easy to get stuck just staring at the words on the screen, which gives you nothing concrete to anchor the meaning to.

What I mean is, don’t fall into the trap of just going “Well, 走る means ‘run’, and I know what ‘run’ means”. Actually think of the act of running when you learn it. Eliminate the English middleman, as it were.

Um. Mostly, I think. It kinda seems a little bit odd to do it with いくら, but with other question words it’s fine, though the usage is a bit different. You could say, for example, こういち　は　だれ　ですか (Who is Kouichi), which’d mean “please tell me about Kouichi”. Or you could say だれ　が　こういち　ですか, which’d mean “which person in that group of people standing over there is Kouchi?”. Like I said, though, it doesn’t really work so much with いくら.

“Whatever’s in front of が is the subject” is basically another way of saying “が marks the subject” or “が is the subject marker”. Basically, all particles in Japanese are post-positions – they modify the word that comes before them. Particles define the function a word plays in a sentence – so long as you keep the same particles with the same words, you can rearrange the sentence all you like and still retain the same meaning (though if things start getting too jumbled, it starts getting a little difficult for a listener keep track of what’s going on).

No. これ, それ and あれ refer to things, not people. If you want to say “Whose father is that”, you’d need to say あの　ひと　は　だれ　の　おとうさん　ですか (whose father is that person?).

That’s not really about the の particle, mind. =)

I think the trick is to focus on learning vocab rather than just kanji. The issue with just focusing on kanji, is that you just get the kun’yomi and on’yomi thrown at you with nothing at all to anchor it to. It’s like, hey, the on’yomi for this character is しょう, but that’s also the on’yomi for dozens of other characters.

When you focus on vocab instead, you learn the readings in the context of actual words which have actual meaning. As a result, you tend to memorise the readings for the kanji as you go as a natural result. Once you’ve got a bit of vocab under your belt, you can start to intuit the readings for words you’ve never seen before – and sometimes even for kanji you’ve never seen before.

Let me give you an example. Let’s go… 小学校. If you learnt this as individual kanji, the last two are fairly easy – it’s a multi-character word, you can infer that it’s most likely going to be on’yomi, and the last two have only one on’yomi each, がく and こう, respectively. (Well, 校 can also be read as きょう, but you’ll basically never see that.) When you stick them together, there’s a slight tweak in pronunciation – it becomes がっこう (because がくこう is hard to say – you’ll often see this happening with readings that end with a う-sound). 小 also has only one on’yomi, しょう, but it tends to use its kun’yomi in all sorts of weird ways – fortunately this is not one of those ways. So we read this word as しょうがっこう.

That took me an entire paragraph to describe. So now let’s try a vocab-first approach: 小学校 is pronounced しょうがっこう – it means “elementary school”. One sentence and it’s done. At the same time, however, you’ve also been exposed to the knowledge that　小 = しょう, 学 = がっ and 校 = こう. Enounter more words like that, and it’ll sink in more.

So later you learn, say, that 彼女 is read as かのじょ. Some more readings. And later in your trawling around the internet, you come across a word you’ve never seen before: 少女 (ok, maybe you HAVE seen it before, but I’m describing an example, so work with me here =P ). You know from 小学校 that 少 = しょう, and from 彼女 that 女 = じょ, so a fair guess would be to stick those together and go with しょうじょ – and you’d be absolutely correct.

I mean, it’s not a foolproof method – when you come across one of the many exceptions, this method may fail you. That said, when you’ve learnt a lot of vocab, you’ll be able to spot the exceptions as well. For example if you learnt 子犬 is read as こいぬ (and means “puppy”), then come across 子猫, you’re more likely to guess こねこ (which is correct) than, say, すびょう (which is not).

tl;dr version: learn vocab, don’t stress too much about kanji in a vacuum.

Welcome!

So envious you were there just last week. My last visit was about six and a half years ago – though I’m just starting the planning stages for a trip with my university club which is tentatively intended to be early next year. I’m hoping for February.

So, where’d you go in particular? Take any photos? =)