Happy Christmas all!

>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? :)

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.

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

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 12 years, 11 months ago by  Elenkis.

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)

> 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.

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).