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If you don’t completely understand something then that doesn’t really sound like a case of the material being “too easy” to me :)
I’ve experienced the same thing too. But I’ve had countless times where I’ve been reading something and believed I understood the “meaning of the sentence” without fully understanding the grammar, but later discovered that my understanding was actually completely wrong. I think it’s something that happens to a lot of learners (though I’m not saying that’s happening in your case).
In regards to Harry Potter, I don’t think grammar would be particularly difficult (from the samples I’ve seen). But my concern would be vocab. Michael only knows 2000 words and having to look up more than half the words on every page just seems inefficient to me. Some people learn well through that, I’m just not one of them I guess.
Why exactly would Japanese literature be “best” right after finishing a beginner textbook? I think that approach suits some people well, but I don’t see why it would universally be the best option for everyone.
Personally when I read native material that’s too far above me then I just find it ineffecient, tedious and it does little to improve my comprehension. I’d rather have material that’s challenging but not so difficult that it’s frustrating, which is why I moved on to intermediate textbooks that build up to using native material in a structured manner.
Reading Harry Potter with a vocabulary of only 2000 words just sounds painful to me, but if you enjoy that and it works for you then more power to you :)
For what it’s worth my order history says 出荷済, though I’ve not ordered anything in a long time and don’t know if anything has changed.
Just yesterday someone asked about intermediates textbooks over on RevTK, so I’m going to be lazy and copy over my answer :p
“I will add another recommendation for Tobira. I prefer it to Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese as it covers quite a lot more grammar and for most of the book the reading exercises are longer, more varied and better structured in my opinion. I just enjoyed reading them more (though I’ll note that I haven’t finished Tobira yet and don’t know if that will be true all the way through).
I found Integrated Approach became more interesting once it starts using real Japanese newspaper article and book samples as the reading exercises, but that’s only in the last few chapters.”
So yeah, I recommend Tobira.
I’m not sure here, so take it with a pinch of a salt. But I think 二重 is being used to mean “doubly” here. So “doubly cute”.
And again this is a guess, but I don’t think パッチリ可愛い is literally saying “the girls big eyes are cute”, but acting more as an intensifier. So she isn’t just plain cute, but she’s a big, beautiful eyed kind of cute. So then basically the whole of 二重パチリ would pretty much just be intensifying how cute she is. Which I guess is why they translated it to “super cute”.
That’s all just a guess though.
Personally I hate trying to translate songs anyway. They routinely ignore all normal rules of grammar and are often symbolic, which in my experience makes them pretty much one of the hardest things to translate as a learner. Even English song lyrics can be hard to interpret sometimes.
ちゅう。
Kenkyusha has both of them, at least the “proper” Kenkyusha 5th Edition does anyway:
ぱっちり
ぱっちりした目 large bright [clear] eyes; wide-open eyes
目のぱっちりした子 a bright-eyed child
彼女は目がぱっちりしている。 She has large bright eyes.
目をぱっちりあける open one’s eyes wide
ぱっちり目をあけて起きている be wide awakeI’m not going to copy out パチリ as well, but it’s there and basically shows that it is the sound of a camera shutter clicking or objects hitting each other/closing “with a click” or “with a snap”. So pretty much what the J-J dictionaries say.
Joel, it looks like you’re using Edict. I don’t see the “quickly, suddenly” definition in any professional dictionaries.
I’m pretty sure that 「パチリ可愛い」 is 「パッチリ可愛い」. Note the 3rd definition from the 大辞泉:
ぱちり
［副］
１ 固い物が強く当たってたてる音を表す語。ぱちん。「―と留め金をかける」「―と碁石を置く」２ カメラのシャッターを切る音を表す語。また、写真を撮るさま。「事故の現場を―とカメラに収める」
３ 「ぱっちり」に同じ。「目を―と開く」
And then ぱっちり (using the 大辞林 dictionary this time as I think its definition is a bit more simple for people to understand):
ぱっちり
(副) スル
［1］ 目が大きく美しいさま。 (目の―した子)［2］ 目を大きく見開くさま。 (―と目をあける)
@Joel: Yeah, the handwritten kanji and kana in manga can be a challenge sometimes!
I think that one of the nice things about Mangajin is the variety. Issue 5 is a fun one as that’s the first one to feature a manga with an Edo period setting (IIRC) and it has pretty fun casual/rough dialogue. Then issue 6 has a sci-fi manga.
縮める is ちぢめる. But yeah, my understanding is that in modern Japanese ぢ and づ are only used in rendaku compounds or つづ and ちぢ words. ぢ is rare.
EPWING is a dictionary file format that all the major J-J and E-J/J-E dictionaries are available in. Rikaisama can use EPWING dictionaries that you have.
Perapera is limited to the free EDICT dictionary, which just isn’t as good as the professional J-E dictionaries (though it has its uses) and of course doesn’t have any monolingual J-J dictionary.
Ouch, there’s no way I’d want to read through 1090 lines of only hiragana. But I wish you luck with it!
No, he responded here too with his own answers to the questions, maybe an hour before I did. He began the post with an answer to your question about making notes and also one of his answers said something like “I’ll go with what Mark W said on this one”.
It was either him or someone else. I’m not crazy, honest!
I would instead recommend using Rikaisama for Firefox: http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/rikaisama/
It’s very similar but has more options, most significantly (IMO) EPWING dictionary support.
“Hopefully the non Danish Mark sees this.”
Weird, what happened there? I’m sure he had responded to this thread before I did, but now it’s gone.
Anyway, thanks for the exercise!
