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Sorry, but I’m going to say do commit the Chinese-style version to memory, because you are going to see it in the wild in Japan. Perhaps not in every case (unless they’ve fixed this bug of which missingno speaks) but certainly in this case. Here’s a few examples I turned up just from thirty seconds of Googling:
http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/hamatobirth/11344676.html
https://www.nissin.com/jp/news/1585
http://taka-iida.at.webry.info/200805/article_11.htmlThis one might be down to etymology, I suspect. I’ve only ever seen it with the “snake” radical, though curiously both Koichi and my kanji dictionary describe it as containing the “spring” radical (Denshi Jisho shows the “snake” radical as a component, whereas my other kanji book says the kanji comes from a pictograph of an embryo in a womb, and “embryo” is another meaning of the “snake” radical). Think I might have to see an image of it with the spring radical, because honestly I have no idea.
You want to be able to build androids with positronic brains? =P
Some characters look noticeably different in different fonts, including handwriting. 令 is one of them. As is 冷. Since you probably should be able to recognise both, it’d be real nice if Koichi actually mentioned that at all. Tofugu briefly touches on the existence of different styles of kanji in this article but never mentions that different styles can occur within Japanese too.
Give us more examples of “wrong kanji” or “aren’t kanji at all”?
It says “Quiet. Don’t make a sound.” =P
But seriously, though, the last time I tried to use OCR to capture text off something like that, it didn’t really work – possibly because the font used was a bit too nebulous, and the background a little too noisy. I might try give it a stab sometime – in the meantime, though, I’ve been playing 二ノ国 on the DS, and have been managing rather well. Haven’t actually played it in a fair while, actually. Tsk.
I wonder a little, though, if relying on Rikai is too much of a crutch. If you have to go through the effort of looking up the word in the dictionary every time you come across it, maybe you’ll learn it faster to save yourself the effort. =)
As the page says:
A motion verb is a verb that takes you from one place to another. This is different from verbs that talk about movement (or how you’re moving). For example, the verb あるきます (to walk) talks about how you’re moving, rather than getting you from one place to another. Other verbs are like this too, including はしります (to run), およぎます (to swim) also don’t work for this grammar point.
It’s possible to run and not actually go anywhere, say…
I somewhat understand the radicals but not really sure why はち starts out as volcano and then turns into 8. i’m not getting that just yet. i went back and re-read everything koichi says about kanji before you being but im just not understanding. once it clicks, ill be good to go.
Kouichi’s given fairly arbitrary names to the radicals based more on what they look like than what they mean. They do have actual meanings in Japanese, but not all of the ones on Kouichi’s list are on the official lists. For example, the radical that Kouichi’s called “fish tail” is actually a variant of the 火 radical, which means “fire”.
Both the “fish legs” radical and the “volcano” radical are the same radical in Japanese, which means “away, out of, split, oppose”. 八 is a separate character in its own right that just happens to look similar. Basically, don’t let Kouichi’s radical names confuse you – they’re only there as an aid to memory. If the names aren’t working for you, come up with your own ones, or just ignore them altogether.
I’ve generally learnt the real meanings through exposure to various things, and it does help me. For example, it’s easy to remember, say, 意 as “stand on the sun on a heart”.
I haven’t used either of those, so I couldn’t really comment on them (I’ve got The Learner’s Japanese Kanji Dictionary by Spahn and Hadamitzky, published by Tuttle, which has been quite handy) but if you have an iDevice of some description, I’d strongly recommend Imi wa? (though I still think its old name was better…)
Slight mistake, though, which you could possibly have avoided with a good dictionary: 事象 means “event, phenomenon” – the word you’re after is 辞書. =P
If you check out the dashboard – http://www.textfugu.com/dashboard/ – you can download the 30 Days and Hiragana 42 e-books, but otherwise I’m not aware of any PDF version of TextFugu, I’m afraid. You could always assemble your own, but that could take forever.
Alternately, if you’re travelling in areas which get a mobile phone signal, you could get a Kindle – not entirely sure if things have changed in newer models, but my Kindle (which is, admittedly, four years old) gets free internet via 3G.
Hi, Doctor Nick!
You know the history of kanji, yeah, at least briefly? You know it all came from China originally? You’ll generally find kanji looks similar to traditional-style Chinese characters, and generally have the same meaning (though there are a number of differences).
Welcome! Apparently English, Arabic and Japanese are the three hardest languages to learn, and you already appear to have mastered to of them, so you’re off two a good start. =)
Kind of intrigued as to why there seems to be a small rush of people who are interested by the 88 Temples Pilgrimmage…
It’s not entirely perfect, but correcting it at this point would just cause confusion, so I’ll leave it there. =P
Specifically, は (the topic marker) can replace を (the direct object marker) without issue. So すしは食べます means something like “sushi is what I will eat” – that is, the emphasis of the sentence goes on the sushi. The subject of the sentence – that is to say, the doer of the verb – is marked by が, but since は often takes its place (in the same way that it can replace を) you don’t often see it in simple sentences, but don’t confuse the topic with the subject. The particle は marks what the sentence is about, which usually tends to be the doer of the verb, but isn’t always.
I think I have to know, now: what’s the saddest?
Welcome! I’m a bit intrigued by the 88 Temples Pilgrimmage as well – trouble is, it takes a month or two to do the whole thing properly. =P
Anki reviews are when you re-study cards you’ve already seen. Anki will show them to you again when it thinks you’re ready. Which is to say, come back the next day.
No problem.
If it makes you feel any better, I think you were going to require a Japanese mobile phone to enter with anyway…
