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Welcome! Stick it out, you’ll get the hang of it. =)
I did a Diploma in Japanese at UNSW. What textbook are you using? Kinda surprised you’re into kanji already – think we were barely starting on katakana by week three.
If you’re doing translations for practice, you may want to think twice before using song lyrics – just like song lyrics in English, Japanese song lyrics tend to be fairly loose with the standard grammar rules, for the purposes of syllable counts and stress placement.
V-て on its own is almost always an abbreviation for V-てください = please (verb).
食べて = 食べてください = please eat
返して = 返してください = please give (it) back聞かせて = 聞かせてください = please let me hear you
Honestly, I don’t know if you would have learnt that from continued study – for some reason, people often don’t seem to think of mentioning that.
If you wanted to do it on a website or something, there’s an HTML tag for it, or somesuch. It’s supposedly a bit hit-and-miss, though – not all browsers treat it the same.
I haven’t got an Instagram account, so I can’t follow, but I’ll certainly keep an eye on it. =)
Doesn’t chocolate on fries just scream “Halloween” for you? =P
Alrighty. More info from the grammar dictionary:
For the first point: から can be used in place of に when the agent is a sort of source – that is, there is something coming from the agent. Which is to say, you can say (for example) 山田さんはみんなから尊敬されている (Yamada-san is respected by everybody), but not その時計は泥棒から盗まれました (That watch was stolen by a thief).
For the second point, there’s two things I forgot. Firstly, the existence of the indirect passive. This form doesn’t exist in English – basically, an event involving an action by an agent affects another person. Usually the event negatively affects the other person.
Secondly, 来られる is also the potential form of 来る – i.e. “can come”.
Not entirely sure what exact meaning is being invoked without seeing context.
It’s no bother – ask all the questions you like. =)
For the first question, you’d probably avoid the ambiguity by using から for the sender rather than に. I’ll have to wait until I can get my hands on the grammar dictionary to be completely certain of that, though.
For the second question, 来られる can mean “(someone) came to me”, but note that passive voice is also used for politeness – because it’s indirect, and indirectness is polite – so you’re probably going to see it used like that a bit more. When passive voice is being used for politeness, its meaning is the active voice instead.
Welcome!
Welcome! What brings you to Tokyo? =)
To be honest, if you want to focus on kanji, you might be better studying with WaniKani rather than TextFugu (though if EtoEto ever comes out, they’ll become part of the same site…)
Welcome! You going with JET? Know where you’ll be teaching yet?
I’ve occasionally thought of doing something like that. Never actually done anything about it, though…
Welcome! =)
Welcome! Got any places in particular you’re interested in visiting? =)
Rude and crude? =P
But yeah, they’re both the same in Japanese. You can even word it as “I’ll study for the sake of my mother”, for example. In casual usage, you can switch the clauses – べんきょうする。ははのために。 – but that’s fairly casual.
じゃない is a bit more casual. Typically you’d use ありません more when writing, and ない more when speaking, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule.
Oh, a Kiwi. =P
Welcome! =)
It’s certainly worth visiting. I did so myself six years ago, before I started learning Japanese – managed to get by with a second-hand phrasebook, some half-remembered words, and charades. These days I’m actually working on a translation, of a drama series named Teppan.
