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Honestly, Koichi’s explanation of は/が is… not great.
Think the reason は is being used in the question is because you’re emphasising that it’s my car that you’re talking about, while が is used in the answer because the topic (marked by the topic particle は) is an implied 私. Honestly, this is something that even Japanese people can get a bit stuck on sometimes, so I think your best bet is to just try to muddle through as best you can and you’ll get the hang of it.
Welcome!
がんばって
Welcome! Have you visited Japan before? =)
Yeah, someday. I really wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Don’t fret about rushing through the remaining lessons.
One of the tricks with the whole “Japanese has no spaces” thing is that with experience, you can learn to recognise where words start and end. In particular, kanji helps immensely in this. Usually a stand-alone kanji word will have hiragana particles and conjunctions on both sides, allowing you to visually distinguish it.
Here’s an example:
小林さんの猫は超可愛いですYou can see the 猫 sitting by itself in the middle of the sentence, yes? That’s what he means by “when the kanji is all alone.” (It’s not, in all fairness, the best of the examples, because 猫 tends to use its kun’yomi even when it’s NOT all alone, but you get my drift anyway.)
As to how you immediately know: experience. Once you’ve managed to learn a bunch of kanji and vocab, you start to be able to intuit which reading goes where much more easily.
Where’d you read this? Some context might be useful, but if I’m understanding this right, the sentence reads “I want Shelley to eat rice.” The に marks シェリー as the agent of the verb – which is to say, the doer of the verb in indirect sentences where the doer is not the subject. Specifically, the main clause is the 欲しい, for which the subject is an implied 私, but シェリー is the doer of the subordinate clause ご飯を食べる.
If that makes any sense. =)
“Whose” is the posessive form of “who”. “Whose river is this?” = “who does this river belong to?”
Welcome! What textbook did you study with at school? You may find since you’ve been studying for three years already that TextFugu is a little beneath you…
Tiny side note, it’s インディアナ. Small ィ, rather than half-width ｲ. Also, the grammar in your fourth sentence (読んでと etc) is a little off – you can’t use と to connect verbs. =)
Welcome, Me! I feel if you have to swear that you’re not a weeb, you just possibly may be. =P
On a side note, it’s こんにちは =)
Yeah, my first (and so far only) trip to Japan was seven years ago, before I started learning Japanese. For the most part I managed with just a phrasebook, some half-remembered phrases from anime, and charades, but my lack of Japanese knowledge directly lead to us spending ten thousand yen on a taxi on the first night because we thought we’d missed the last train and I was too embarrassed to try asking a station attendant about it.
Come to think of it, today is exactly seven years since that day. =)
I kinda want to try walking the old Tokaido sometime – one of the original highways that used to link Tokyo and Kyoto. Also the Shikoku 88 Temples Pilgrimage.
Welcome! Where’d you visit in Japan? =)
When ん is followed by an あ-line character within a word, the N-sound tends to be flattened out a bit to an I-sound, or even a Y-sound. Mostly this is down to mouth flaps – it’s much easier to say vowel-Y-vowel than vowel-N-vowel. So 千円 sounds a bit like “sei-en”, 原因 (げんいん) sounds a bit like “gei-in” or even “gei-yin”, and so forth. It’s not quite an I-sound, precisely – you still move your tongue up to make the N-sound, but you just don’t quite touch the roof of your mouth with it. People are still going to understand you if you say “sen-en”, but if you want to sound a bit more natural, it’s worth getting the hang of “sei-en” instead.
“Sanni” is definitely a typo, though.
I haven’t spotted an option on WaniKani to mark what I already know, which is most of the reason I’ve never really taken up WaniKani (started the free lessons and got absolutely bogged down in trying not to make stupid typos of words I learnt long ago). Other than that, print kanji text books may be the way to go.
Welcome!
I finished a degree in Japanese myself four years ago, and have also not kept my studies up quite so much as I ought. I have not, I confess, forgotten everything, though. =P
Welcome! What places in particular were you hoping to visit? =)
