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Here is fine. =)
Welcome!
Oh, we went to Shanghai as well. Beijing, too. Plus Hong Kong, Guilin, Yangshuo and… Hangzhou? I never can remember the last one. It was a fair while ago. =P
Mostly good. Just a couple of issues:
1. 料理 is a noun. If you want the verb, it’s be 料理する
2. 切断 is also a noun, and its meaning is closer to “severance” or “amputation”. You’re after 切る
3. Not completely sure that 刻む is commonly used, but I’m also not completely sure what IS. My Japanese cookbook seems to use variations on 切る, like みじん切り.
5. 焼く = bake, grill. “Burn” seem to be 焼け付く, though why you’d want to burn the food is beyond me. =P
13. 椀 = wooden bowl. 碗 = ceramic bowl. Different radical. There’s also どんぶり, which is the sort of bowl you usally serve rice in. Or ボウル.
14. パン tends to mean bread. If the context is unclear, stick with フライパン.
18. 炒める = stir-fry. If you mean, like, fry in oil, it’s 揚げる. Yes, when you look that up in the dictionary, it’s probably going to show you it as a variation of 上げる – don’t ask me why.
19. Boil is more commonly 沸かす.Welcome! I’ve been to Shenzhen, once. My high school’s sister school is Shenzhen Experimental School. =)
Fun fact: the words どうも, どうぞ and すみません will get you through almost every social situation known to man. =)
Welcome!
I just heard this word last night “ねむりかつてきゃ” i might have spelled it wrong. but it sounds like “nemurikattya” or “nemurikattia”, it doesn’t really make any sense and i cannot find it anywhere…
That sounds like some sort of extended conjugation, but I couldn’t tell you exactly without some context (or a more confident guess at the spelling =P). Where’d you hear it from?
ねむらなきゃ, maybe? ねむらなかった?
43 is insane though! That is almost like being married lol
So, I looked it up. Guess my memory exaggerated a little.
Oldest cat ever: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/oldest-cat-ever
Oldest cat living: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/oldest-cat-livingNot quite, but possibly the closest to it. The entire country is below sea level.
Tuvalu?
Almost all kanji have both a kun’yomi and an on’yomi. Often multiple on’yomi. Some kanji have no kun’yomi, and there’s even a handful with no on’yomi.
After all that, your best bet is probably to ignore the fuss over “well, this is kun’yomi and this is on’yomi” because you’re only going to forget. Instead, learn the vocab, and you’ll pick up the readings of the kanji as a result. Vocab is basically always read the same way, though there are some exceptions (rule number one in Japanese: all rules have exceptions, including this one). Once you’ve got a bit of vocab under your belt, you’ll start to get a feel for which reading goes where, and you’ll even start to be able to intuit the readings (and meanings) of words you’ve never seen before – and even kanji you’ve never seen before.
Your cat was 20.5 years old?! That is probably the oldest I have heard for a cat.
Not quite twenty. I actually looked into records for the oldest cat – think it was something like forty-three. My cat wasn’t even close to being the oldest in Australia, much less the world. =)
The relevance is something like this: When kanji was originally introduced from China, Japan already had its own spoken language. The Chinese characters were thus used to write Japanese words which already existed, so the Japanese reading was given to the kanji – this is the kun’yomi. However, the Chinese characters already had readings attached to them – namely, the Chinese readings – and these were brought over too, becoming the on’yomi.
In my experience it seems to me that the more nature-themed and concrete a word is, the more likely it is to use the kun’yomi. So, for example, 川口 (river mouth) uses the kun’yomi, かわぐち, because river mouths exist basically everywhere in Japan, while 人口 (population) uses the on’yomi, じんこう, because the ideas of population-counting and census-taking and whatnot was introduced from China.
You’ll tend to find the kanji dictionaries give the kun’yomi in hiragana and the on’yomi in katakana (because it’s a “foreign” introduction), but this is purely to differentiate the two – in regular usage, readings are usually given in hiragana.
オリバー
One clever trick to finding the “standard” transliteration of your name into katakana is to look up the Wikipedia page of someone famous, and switch to the Japanese version of the page with the language sidebar. For example: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/オリバー・クロムウェル
Basically, the important consideration is pronunciation rather than spelling. For to think of a random example, the name “Leigh” is pronounced “Lee”, so the transliteration is リー. Viz: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ウォルター・リー
You’re from… Atlantis?
I had a cat. That’s not her in the picture, though. She would have been twenty-four this year, except she passed away about three and a half years ago. I still miss her…
Sounds fine to me. Japanese is normally spoken fairly fast – compared to English, it has a low information density, so they need to speak pretty fast to get the same information out in the same amount of time.
Still, this is a good way to practice your listening – try to follow along with what she’s saying with your eyes. Or your finger, if need be.
