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こちら and the like are more like directions rather than referring to specific people.
こちら :-
1: this way (direction close to the speaker or towards the speaker); this direction;
3: here (place close to the speaker or where the speaker is);
4: this one (something physically close to the speaker); () I; me; we; us;
5: this person (someone physically close to the speaker and of equal or higher status)They can also be shortened to こっち、そっち、あっち、どっち.
こわくない would be the negative form. Just putting that out there since Joel didn’t mention it :P
Nice. Living in Edinburgh just now for uni but originally from Mid Calder in West Lothian, which is near Livingston, I guess.
Yeah, I’m still here… for some reason :S
Hello from a fellow Scot :D Where are you from?
Welcome back SinisterT :D It’s been a while since you’ve been away but I can just about remember you ;)
Imabi looks pretty sweet. Never seen it before but will definitely try to use it at some point.
Also, how are you editing your original post? I thought the edit button went away after about 20 minutes or something. Maybe it’s changed so that you can edit posts any time now :D
Good way to find out how to say your name in Japanese is to go to Wikipedia and find the page of some famous figure with the same name (or just the page of the name itself, sometimes they have those), then go to the side bar and click 「日本語」 to go to the Japanese version of the page and see how they spell it there. Won’t always work if your name is too uncommon or if there’s simply not a Japanese version of the page.
The Wikipedia method tells me your first name can be pronounced マチュー. As for your last name, Wikipedia doesn’t have the answer, but might I suggest グルー? I actually had to look up the regular pronunciation of that name as I’d never seen it before haha. Also, did you know that if you Google “Groulx japanese”, your Pinterest (assuming it’s yours) is the 7th result? :D
Foreigner names don’t really have proper kanji equivalents so I wouldn’t worry about it.
If professional translators have gone with “I Am a Cat”, what makes you think we’ll do any better? :P I think it works quite well anyway.
Where did you hear about the resurfacing of Koichi after a long time of radio silence (with TextFugu anyway)? Was it in the recent thread “Updates update”? Cause if you have a look there, I made waaaaay too long a post with my opinions already :P Bear in mind, that’s from the perspective of a long time member; you might experience things differently since he might just update everything before you’ve caught up with the lessons.
こん一羽 is probably the most interesting version of こんにちは I’ve seen, I think :P
That’s something Koichi should probably cover before he tells people to introduce themselves here, how to type こんにちは.
へ is a particle (pronounced え) and 行きます is the polite non-past verb “to go”. So 「日本へ行きます。」is like “Go to Japan”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_particles#.E3.81.AB_ni_and_.E3.81.B8_e
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/verbparticles (section on へ)So it’s *not* the case that [plain non-past]+ほうがいい and [plain past]+ほうがいい mean roughly the same but the latter is stronger (e.g. “You should clean your room” compared to “You’d better clean your room!”)? I could swear I learned that from a legitimate source but I just can’t remember where :P
This is interesting – http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q139154308
Also, in reference to ramen, you could say: “You should probably have the ramen (as I hear the soba noodles here suck)”.
http://kanjibox.net/ios/blog/archives/2013/11/fixing-jlpt-lists/
A nice article on why the JLPT word lists suck and how to (roughly) fix them. It’s sure to interest anyone who likes natural language processing, linguistics, or just pretty graphs :3
As I post this I’ve just realised I got this link from the Tofugu Facebook page, so I’m guessing some of you have already seen it… Eh, I’ll post it anyway.
I’d just like to point out that if you’re ever seeking advice on language usage from a non-native, it pays to be wary. I was just reminded of this fact today when I happened across a guy (clearly an ESL learner) answering a question on the English language StackExchange, totally adamant that it should be “doctor appointment” and not “doctor’s appointment” because using the possessive “doesn’t make sense”. His English was generally pretty good but it’s little things like that where you probably need a native’s opinion.
That also reminds me of something I’ve heard *so* many times since starting at a uni where the majority population (at least in my class) are foreign students: even the people with basically perfect English tend to say “how it looks like” for some reason (instead of the correct “how it looks” or “what it looks like”). It actually drives me insane, even something so small XD I think it’s something to do with “how it looks like” being closer to a similar construction in their own languages. A similar thing is them saying “how do you call [it]” instead of “how do you say” and “what do you call”. I hear both so often that I sometimes find myself accidentally using the wrong ones and getting really annoyed :P
I’ve heard this site (http://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/) is quite good for getting answers from natives, though I’m sure there are plenty of others.
