Welcome!

Welcome! Fairly sure there’s at least one person on this forum who’s currently stationed at Yokota, but I don’t know if they’re still actively posting…

I’d love to visit Japan again, myself – just went for two weeks back in 2010. =)

I reckon you start to get a feel for it after a while. Once you’ve gotten a few kanji under your belt, you’ll start to be able to intuit the readings for words you’ve never seen before, and even guess at their meanings.

But yeah, sometimes it’s just plain old rote memorisation. Maybe try picturing the occupation as you’re thinking of the word.

Just go with ドーン. It’s not really worth the heartache of coming up with a kanji name unless you’re required to for whatever legal or bureaucratic reason.

Welcome!

In all fairness, the English alphabet is exactly the same, except you’ve been using it for so long that your recall of what each letter means is essentially automatic. With enough practice, Japanese will be just as easy for your to read.

You sure you’re on radicals? Radicals don’t have readings, per se, though most of them exist as kanji in their own right, which do.

Anyway, meet the two types of readings: kun’yomi and on’yomi. Basically, the Japanese writing system was imported from China by Buddhist scholars way back in the year dot, but prior to that, it already had its own spoken language. Basically, kanji were then used to write down the words that already existed, so the native Japanese reading was given to the kanji – this is called the kun’yomi. However, the kanji already had Chinese readings attached to them, and these were introduced as well – this is called the on’yomi.

When Koichi introduces the kanji, he calls the on’yomi the “reading” – the kun’yomi occasionally comes up in the “vocabulary” section, but it’s never explicitly indicated as such. I’ve not the foggiest idea why he does it like this. As a rough rule of thumb, when a kanji’s standing on its own, or has okurigana (= hiragana ending used to indicate verb/adjective conjugation) then it uses kun’yomi. When it’s in a compound word with other kanji, then it uses on’yomi. This is a VERY rough rule of thumb, though, and there’s about a thousand and one exceptions. You’ll get a feel for it after a while.

In this case, 八 has an on’yomi of はち and a kun’yomi of や. Numbers tend to use on’yomi most of the time, but when attached to the generic counter つ, they always use kun’yomi (though this is only ever used for the numbers one to ten – kun’yomi does exist for higher numbers, but it basically never gets used). For any other counter, you generally use on’yomi (notable exceptions are 人, which uses kun’yomi for 一人 (ひとり) and 二人 (ふたり) only, and on’yomi after that, and 日, which has the absolute freakiest readings which I won’t get into at present to avoid confusing you).

So:

一 (いち) -> 一つ (ひとつ)
二 (に) -> 二つ (ふたつ)
三 (さん) -> 三つ (みっつ)
四 (し／よん) -> 四つ (よっつ) (Because し = 死 = death, よん is often used instead)
五 (ご) -> 五つ (いつつ)
六 (ろく) -> 六つ (むっつ)
七 (しち／なな) -> 七つ (ななつ) (The readings for 七 tend to be fairly interchangeable, dunno why)
八 (はち) -> 八つ (やっつ)
九 (きゅう／く) -> 九つ (ここのつ) (く sometimes gets used because it’s easier to say)
十 (じゅう) -> 十 (とお) (No つ for this one. Dunno why)

Welcome!

です is the copula – not quite the same thing as the state-of-being verbs. A copula is a verb-like object that goes where no other verb is needed. In English, the copula happens to be the state-of-being verb, which confuses matters a little, but that’s not the case in Japanese.

Anyway, the point is that there’s two basic levels of formality: the polite form, and the dictionary or plain form. (Well, there’s more than two, but for the most part, you’re just going to encounter these two.)

In the polite form, sentences end with です and verbs end with ます. It’s a fairly good neutral level of politeness that will cover pretty much any concievable social situation you’d encounter if you visited Japan as a tourist. Since everything conjugates the same way as well, it makes a fairly good place to start for new learners.

In the plain form, the copula becomes だ or even gets omitted, while verbs have a bunch of different endings all of which have a う-sound – also called the dictionary form, because when you look the words up in a dictionary, that’s what you’re going to find. It’s more casual than the polite form, and there’s also a bunch of grammar structures that require the use of the plain form. It’s a little more complex, but also a bit more versatile.

There’s differing schools of thought as to which form new learners should start with. TextFugu’s elected for polite-form first, while Tae Kim has evidently gone for plain-form first.