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じゃありません = じゃ + ありません
じゃ = fractionally more casual version of では, while ありません = negative form of あります, “to exist”.
At typical speaking speed, you’ll typically find it gets smeared into “jaarimasen”, but strictly speaking it’s “ja-arimasen”.
Aye, Japanese is spoken very quickly. Supposedly it’s all to do with information density – Japanese doesn’t contain a great deal of information per syllable (which is to say, on average it takes more syllables to express the same point in Japanese than it does in, say, English). As a result, people need to speak much faster in order to not wind up having to stand there talking all day.
Yep. Basically you just type it how it’s romanised. So れっしゃ is “ressha”, べっちゃ is “beccha” and so forth. If you want to just type the small っ on its own, you type “ltsu” or “xtsu”. I think of it as “l for lower-case” – same trick works for the small や-line and あ-line characters.
Well, writing is easier than speaking in any language. And for some odd reason, I often find myself getting tongue-tied as well. I generally find the best thing to do is pause, take a deep breath, and try not to rush. Once you’ve mastered it a bit more slowly, then try getting it up to speed.
Also, it might be worth trying some shadowing. https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/activities-for-fluency/
I wish my ability to listen was better!
I hear that. I’ve been at it for six years, and my listening ability still sucks…
I’m getting pretty quick at typing hiragana and learnt a shortcut to switch keyboards which is a massive help.
Alt+Shift is pretty standard for most IMEs. =)
Welcome!
Fun fact: “Ashley” was primarily a boys’ name until about the 1960s (and still is, in the UK).
Some site(sorry I can’t remember where) I read about another learning tool. You should watch an episode of anime with the subtitles on. Then immediately after that watch the same episode but block out the subtitles.
This site? =)
I have to admit, I’ve never heard a “d” sound, though perhaps it’s just some kind of personal difference (rather like the fun with the black-blue/white-gold dress we had a while back). This kinda ties into the fact that the sound just doesn’t exist in English, so your brain just leaps for the nearest equivalent it can think of. Koichi also describes it as part “d” – he says “part R (I’d say around 75%), part L (I’d say about 20%) and strangely enough, part D (I’d give this about 5%).”
For me, I kinda pronounce it with my tongue in the L position, but with the edges touching the roof of my mouth rather than the tip. Which, come to think of it, is probably halfway between the L position and the D position.
And the more I learn about the Japanese culture, the more I feel like visiting Japan would be really cool.
Visiting Japan is really cool. =)
Having trouble finding which practice sheet you’re talking about exactly, but yeah, the dictionary past form for だます should be だました. Unless the mistake is that the verb should be だまる, in which case the given past tense is completely correct. Kinda think it’s the latter – my gut says Koichi is more likely to use だまる as an example than だます.
He’s working on the next big iteration. He promises. It’s called EtoEto, and it’s intended to combine this, WaniKani, and a new advanced section called Kuma into one website.
To be honest, he’s been working on it for a while. Wouldn’t mind awfully if there was just a little more feedback here in the forums. Think it’s been literally years since any of the moderators even posted. In all fairness, Winterpromise left a while ago to focus on her Chinese studies, hashi moved on to bigger and better things, and sheepy is… well, sheepy. Koichi doesn’t really have any sort of excuse, though.
Don’t want to discourage you, mind. What’s here is still pretty good. I never really paid much attention to Anki anyway. I use an app called StickyStudy on my iPad for flash card study.
The answer here is pretty much the same as my immediate previous post in this thread. Only with それ replaced by ビール. =)
Yep, katakana ー = extended vowel. ター = たあ, though you’d often just write it as たー anyway. For example, “ramen” in Japanese is ラーメン, but you’ll often see it written らーめん as well. The small っ in katakana is the same, only in katakana: ッ.
You’ll tend to find a lot of technical terms are foreign loanwords. =)
And yeah, I’m not a huge fan of Jisho’s current layout…
Tiny side note, ソフトウェア transliterates to そふとうぇあ – note the small ぇ. ～うえあ has a slightly different pronunciation (though to be fair, it’s an equally valid way of writing it). フィルター to ふぃるたー as well. Note ふい = “fui” but ふぃ = “fi”. There’s a bunch of extra combinations and glides which exist only in katakana to cover all sorts of weird foreign pronunciations.
I think Koichi’s opposition is mostly to the standard practice in Japan of hours of rote copying, but I do kinda think he takes it a bit too far.
There is some logic, though – in Japan, aside from students learning in schools, writing on phones and computers has increasingly become the norm. In fact, the most recent update to the Joyo Kanji (the list of 2000-and-change kanji defined by the government as all the kanji that may be used in official documents and newspapers and whatnot) took the opportunity to add a bunch of kanji for which the words are in common use, but the characters are just plain too fiddly or complex to write by hand. Like 熊 (くま).
My take: if you enjoy the writing of things, go ahead and learn how to write them. You may need to study the stroke orders (and the ways some characters change when handwritten) from other sources, though.
