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Numbers would be pretty useful for reading/watching the news. And prices in shops. And telling the time/date. And arranging appointments. And really just counting anything (you might not regularly need to say anything about 6 cats, but counting objects is such a fundamental thing). It’d be silly not to learn them at an early stage.
Just some everyday situations in which you might need to understand numbers:
“75.2 dead in car accident”
“Yen up by 300 1/5%”
“The Diet will convene again on 32nd of Smarch”
“1 in 9001 people carry the SuperSARS gene”
“The time now is 2 minutes past 100 o’clock; time for the weather”
“3 blocks down that way, you’ll see a house with two yellow windows and one half-black half-white; turn right on that corner…”
“That’s 678/56 yen for the two dozen potatoes”
“If you can hold on another 20 minutes, I’ll get you to the hospital so they can reattach your head”Y’know, just the usual…
If you already know about te-form and are just asking why it should be 飲んでいません instead of 飲みません, it depends on what you were trying to say, what the context is i.e. what the (XXX) part is.
From the inside cover:
Level One: Natsume Soseki (from Ten Nights of Dreams)
“The First Night” – A beyond-the-grave romance in which love is proven to be stronger than death.
“The Third Night” – A sinister child confronts a guilt-ridden father with evidence of a crime long past.
“The Fifth Night” – There was love even in the age of samurai–but there were devils too.
“The Seventh Night” – Despair and loneliness make a man do something he will regret–forever.Level Two: Akutagawa Ryunosuke (short stories)
“In a Grove” – A murder has been committed, but which of the seven witnesses is telling the truth?
“Nose” – Primitive plastic surgery has unexpected consequences for an old monk.Level Three: Akutagawa Ryunosuke (short story)
“Rashomon” – Two destitute people confront stark moral choices in a desolate city.“The Fifth Night” sounds like something you might be interested in, Astralfox :D Wouldn’t buy a whole book for one short story though haha.
Finally started reading the book tonight. I only managed to get through one page in the half hour I was on the bus; granted it wasn’t that easy to read on a shakey bus, but the actual material was pretty tough going :D
There are about 7 classic short stories, split into 3 groups based on their length and complexity. It’s all written in the original Japanese (where the story is older, kanji and kana usage may be updated). In a two page spread, there’s half a page of the Japanese text on the upper left, the English translation on the upper right, and a kanji/kana -> English dictionary (no romaji :D) in the bottom two sections; not proper dictionary entries, but just a few equivalent English words (which apparently are usually kept different than those used in the translation, to get you thinking about word choice and literary nuance). The English translation is made to keep the same structure as the Japanese so that it’s easy to follow; at the basic level, it’s supposed to be a direct translation but still keep a little a little flair and, according to the author in the foreword, is in “the style of great English authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde”.
In that one (half) page, there were so many words I didn’t know, and some grammar structures/particles/connectives that were difficult to understand even after reading the translation. Very tricky, but it’s good having the words and readings given below, and it’s helpful having the translation closely follow the original text. I look forward to reading more of it.
Good to hear, Lindy :D
They were pretty good at first, when I was still doing TextFugu’s kanji section. Then I caught up with it (think Koichi was still writing lessons for 4- or 5- stroke kanji at the time), and while I was waiting I decided to try Remembering the Kanji. I did print them off, laminate them and put them up on the wall for a fair while, but RTK made them redundant.
Oh wow, I think this was my first thread in the new forum. Getting close to two years ago now o.0 Where the hell did all that time go? XD
Just wanted to ask, what happened to Chef Tom? Did he give up doing Japanese? I can’t remember. And Lindy too. And lots of other people :S
Yeah, it would be helpful to read up on volitional form, to use with しようとする. Here, しよう is kind of a placeholder used to represent some verb or other in its volitional form (usually, しよう is volitional form of する, but here it’s just a generic verb).
Got a new book delivered today: Breaking into Japanese Literature. Anyone else reading/read it? Sure it was mentioned here a while back. No romaji, looks great :D Hopefully get me starting to read more.
@Mark and kanjiman8: Still not upgraded to Anki 2. I’m resistant to change like that :P
何かしてみる – try to do something
食べてみる – try to eatThose are two different things. I think your problem is that you’re confusing yourself over the English “to do” – eating is “doing something”, but you don’t “try to do eat”.
I think みる is something like “to try something out”, whereas ～ようとする is “make an effort to do something”. Again, you’re getting caught up with “to do”. It’s just 「volitional」＋とする – no te-form there, and you use the volitional form of the verb in question, not simply しよう (unless that’s actually the verb you’re wanting).
Explained better here: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/try
Bet anything I’ve been beaten to the punch by Joel while I’m typing this :P
EDIT: Guess I wasn’t :D-
This reply was modified 12 years ago by
MisterM2402 [Michael].
How do you find talking to her in Japanese? Is it all very short, basic sentences? Does she try to speak simple Japanese to you, or does she speak normally and you just have to deal with it? :P I’m scared that if I had someone like that, I wouldn’t be able to say/understand anything beyond a very quick introduction >.<
For vocab, I’m just working through the Core 6k deck, which comes with example sentences. Like Mark said, I don’t really read the sentences besides the first few times or when I forget the exact meaning. Gonna be a LONG time before I’m finished adding new cards to that deck, but once I do, maybe then I’ll gradually make my own monolingual deck. Just over halfway through and not added any new cards in a while, so yeah, won’t be done any time soon…
Yeah, so like if any of you met *me* in real life, that’s the kinda language I would expect you to use.
…You’re right. Just went and had a look through my deck, and sure enough, げき has a ‘hard g’ while えんげき has the ‘nasal g’. Granted it was different speakers, but on comparing it with every other word that contains 劇, the pattern holds (every word containing 劇 being：劇、演劇、劇場、悲劇、喜劇). Why didn’t I notice that before…? Guess I’ve been saying it wrong all this time then XD Still, like you said, that’s the Tokyo accent. Others may be similar or may vary (most likely).
Everyone just listen to Joel from now on; he knows far too much :P
“Does the ‘ng’ pattern only apply to ‘ga’, or does it apply to the whole ‘ga’ column?”
Y’know, that’s something I was mulling over when I was writing that last reply haha. Just trying to think of examples. Thinking about the example sentence audio that goes with Core 6k: きぎょう and げき/しげき/げきじょう get pronounced “ki-ngyou” and “ngeki/shi-ngeki/ngeki-jou”, whereas ぐうぜん gets pronounced “guuzen” with the hard g. Bear in mind the audio for Core 6k is recorded by at least 3 different people, though the examples still show it can vary, that there’s no set way to pronounce the ‘g’ sound. I get that you want to pronounce it “correctly” sooner rather than later, but it’s one of these things that you just get an ear for and you pick up.Yeah, Core 6k is an Anki deck. It’s a list of the 6000 most frequently used words (can’t remember where they got the data for that). There was a flashcard site a while ago called smart.fm that was the SRS of choice for TextFugu when it first started – which was switched to Anki once smart.fm became a paid service called iKnow – and that’s where Core 6k originated, but some kind folks spent lots of time and effort converting it to a free deck on Anki. Should be almost top of the list if you have a look for it in Anki’s shared decks section, since it’s so popular. It was smart.fm’s main attraction back in the day, I think. It used to be split into 2 parts: Core 2000 and Core 6000, but now I think they changed it to Core 1000, Core 2000, etc, so if you’re looking for it, it might be under different names.
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This reply was modified 12 years ago by
