It’s called double particles – they don’t combine, they’re just performing separate functions. The に is marking 私たち as (I think) the indirect object of the sentence, while the は is marking it as the topic. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what the に is doing in that sentence, but to give another example:

ここでは友達と会います。

This basically translates as “Here is where I am meeting my friend.” The で is still marking ここ as the location, while the は also marks it as the subject.

An interesting idea – quite practical, too. I remember when I was in Japan with nothing but my phrasebook to help me decipher the options on the hotel’s coin-operated washing machine…

Yeah, I was a bit puzzled by that lesson as well – Koichi even makes a specific point of saying “トゥ isn’t used that much because it’s pronounced the same as と”‘ to which my first thought was “…so why would they have it?” Methinks Koichi might be a little confused here. It’s not until you posted this thread that I actually thought of looking for examples where it’s commonly used, so thanks for that, Jesse. =)

Ah, I didn’t see that – my mistake. Yeah, that looks wrong. It should probably be 今、ここは or 今はここで depending on whether you wanted the emphasis to be on “now” or “here”.

I don’t really know quite how Lang-8 works – are they native speakers? If they are, it feels a bit silly for me to be going “pah, what do they know?”… Do you have a link for this sentence?

It’s pronounced “tu” – it’s needed because the katakana t+u sound is pronounced “tsu”. For example, Tomorrowland, an area in the Tokyo Disneyland, it written as トゥモローランド in katakana.

As with all the small-vowel katakana combinations, it’s pronounced by replacing the vowel sound of the big one with the small one – it’s different to the kana glides. So トゥ is “to” with a “u” in place of the “o” to make “tu”, フェ, is “fu” with an “e” in place of the “u” to make “fe”, et cetera.

As well as being the topic marker, は is also a contrastive marker – that is, it marks two things being contrasted with each other. For example, “summer is hot, but winter is cold” would be 夏は暑いですが、冬は寒いです – it’s contrasting summer, which is hot, with winter, which is cold.

However, your sentence is a because sentence, not a but. I guess you can kind of see it as contrasting today with now, but to me it seems kinda weird. Surely the first は should be a が…

The general idea is that the words are used reasonably commonly, but you haven’t learnt the kanji yet, because it has more strokes. He’s giving examples of words where the current kanji you’re learning is used so that you can come to recognise it, but you (probably) won’t be able to fully read it until you’ve learnt the other kanji at a later stage.

Michael wrote:
> But if you told people just now, right here, how would they know?

You never know who here might be some sort of Japan Foundation stooge. *Eyes people suspiciously*

Dennis wrote:
> Joel, you’re right – the JLPT is given in July only in Japan.

Yeah, so many people in this thread have mentioned their plans to do it in July that I was starting wonder if I was misinformed, or just plain crazy…