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  • in reply to: Christmas 2011 #22965

    Elenkis
    Member

    Happy Christmas all!

    in reply to: The "I found some Japanese I don't understand" thread. #22964

    Elenkis
    Member

    Armando, your translation looks fine to me. You could also use something like “wishful fantasy” for 都合のいい妄想, but that’s where translation gets subjective :) I don’t see anything wrong with how you translated it.

    Gigatron, 信じたもの is the topic of the sentence. 都合のいい is an adjective that’s modifying 妄想.

    in reply to: manga/anime pronunciation #22836

    Elenkis
    Member

    >The “me” in “anime” sounds the same as how you’d pronounce the month May anyway.

    No, not in Japanese. The え vowel in Japanese is too short and clipped to sound like “ay” or “ey”. It’s closer to “eh” as Joel says, like in “bet” and “met”.

    Listen to this audio clip of the word 宣伝 (senden):

    http://assets3.iknow.jp/assets/legacy/JLL/audio/Int/JW00452A.mp3

    It doesn’t sound like “sayndayn”, right? :)

    in reply to: manga/anime pronunciation #22817

    Elenkis
    Member
    in reply to: TextFugu vs. RTK for learning Kanji? #22795

    Elenkis
    Member

    Since I don’t want to keep writing up huge posts explaining RTK every time the subject is mentioned, I’m just going to copy my last one:

    RTK is difficult to explain because it can be hard to see the benefit until you’ve actually done it for a while. But the principle of it is that it’s a simple divide and conquer strategy to learning. You break the learning up into separate processes that in theory makes things easier to remember. Think about seeing a Japanese word for the first time and trying to remember it; you have to remember the meaning, how it is read, then you also have to remember whichever complex new characters it’s using that you’ve not yet learned. That’s a lot of information for your brain to memorise at once, just learning the kanji alone is a task.

    Wouldn’t it be easier if you already knew the kanji in that word so you didn’t have to deal with that at the same time? Then your brain would just have to focus on remembering the pronunciation and meaning of the word, and associating it with the already known kanji should be easy and pretty natural (this is one of the advantages Chinese students of Japanese have). So you’re not also having to learn new characters at the same time as a new word. Just like learning words in most other languages.

    It’s a bit like the way Textfugu breaks down kanji into radicals that you learn first, in order to make learning the bigger kanji easier. RTK breaks it down so that you learn the characters first, in order to make learning whole words easier.

    Now that isn’t going to work for everyone, no learning method does. If you’re the kind of person that has no problem learning 20 new words every day with full kanji and have a good 90% retention of those words, then RTK may be of little benefit to you (or it may let you learn 40 words instead of 20!). But some people find it to be a very effective method, perhaps especially for some of us older guys whose brains no longer store new information as easily as they once did :)

    For me, RTK made words quite a lot easier to remember and retain.

    in reply to: The "I found some Japanese I don't understand" thread. #22794

    Elenkis
    Member

    I use a Samsung Galaxy Note myself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAk_MjRD0B4

    Any Android based phone can do it, if you are able to buy the software from the Japanese market, which can be the biggest problem.

    The iPhone comes with Chinese hand writing input, which works ok for Chinese kanji but wont recognise the ones that have been changed in Japanese, and of course it wont detect kana. Some iPhone dictionary apps have their own Japanese handwriting detection built in, such as the Daijirin app:

    http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/id299029654?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2

    in reply to: The "I found some Japanese I don't understand" thread. #22786

    Elenkis
    Member

    Plus 嘘をついた is a common expression: “told a lie”

    Though I have to admit that I couldn’t make it out clearly enough at first. I used the handwriting recognition on my phone to roughly draw what I saw and it suggested it as a possiblity, then I had an “oh right, of course” moment :-p

    in reply to: The "I found some Japanese I don't understand" thread. #22781

    Elenkis
    Member

    It’s 嘘 (うそ).

    in reply to: The "I found some Japanese I don't understand" thread. #22654

    Elenkis
    Member

    It’s 以外, not 似外 :)

    Like… A small advertisment that displays in addition to the original browser, the instant you open a webpage.

    In other words, a popup.

    • This reply was modified 13 years ago by  Elenkis.
    in reply to: The Study Thread #22647

    Elenkis
    Member

    Hope it’s ok to post this, but you can have a look through the first 30 issues here: http://www.thespectrum.net/features/mangajin/

    That would let you decide whether or not it’s for you. It might be that you’re beyond a point where such guidance is helpful, and would benefit more from just pure Japanese. But I’d still thoroughly recommend it to anyone looking to break away from textbook Japanese into real Japanese.

    in reply to: The Study Thread #22607

    Elenkis
    Member

    If you’re interested in manga then another excellent resource for reading is the Mangajin magazine series. Each issue is about 90 pages (70 issues total) mostly full of real manga with translations and notes on the opposite page. The notes are especially useful for the colloquialisms that manga is often full of. It’s like a manga version of Breaking into Japanese Literature.

    It covers a variety of manga from different genres and speech styles (and difficulty), including some classical Japanese. Keeps things interesting.

    Unfortunately it’s been out of print for over a decade now, but every issue can be found in PDF format online if you care to look for them. (I don’t condone copyright infringement, but in this case the company no longer exists and the works aren’t in print)

    in reply to: TextFugu vs. RTK for learning Kanji? #22606

    Elenkis
    Member

    Well Textfugu’s kanji isn’t likely to be finished for another 2+ years.

    Which doesn’t mean you have to use RTK if that doesn’t work for you, there are other methods. But Textfugu seems to get new kanji too slowly to be practical until it’s been completed.

    in reply to: katakana help #22570

    Elenkis
    Member

    > They want you to answer in romaji? Seriously?

    I can only speak for iKnow. You type in romaji, as you would with any qwerty based IME. The text on screen is automatically converted to kana as you type.

    Essentially it has its own built in IME, so doesn’t require one to be installed on an OS level.

    in reply to: The "I found some Japanese I don't understand" thread. #22373

    Elenkis
    Member

    消えてしまう just means “vanish/disappear entirely”, not that it “has vanished” (which uses past tense conjugation in Japanese from what I’ve seen).

    Just wanted to clarify that :)

    in reply to: The "I found some Japanese I don't understand" thread. #22370

    Elenkis
    Member

    で would be incorrect in that sentence. When で marks a location, it marks the location of an action or event. It can’t be used to mark existence (unless it’s the existence of an event).

Viewing 15 posts - 136 through 150 (of 267 total)