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Waaaaaait, wait, wait, wait… Edinburgh is marked as “England”? Who made this game? :P
Yeah, I was wondering if I should maybe not answer – seeing an answer that looks generally right might make other people feel there’s no need for them to answer too. If you make another mini lesson, I’ll hold off for a few days to see if anyone else answers :D
It’d be awesome if tons of people tried answering but the forum just isn’t active enough for that. I’m surprised Aikibujin didn’t answer though, (s)he’s usually around quite often.
Yeah, I guess they both start from the beginning. My main point is to pick the one you like better, not necessarily the one with most content. Better yet, pick as many different resources as you can and get the good parts of all of them :D Read Tae Kim *and* Genki *and* Japanese for Busy People *and* whatever else you can get your hands on – the more different explanations, the easier it will be to understand stuff. Having said that, Tae Kim is pretty good and it’s free, so I’d probably start there if you don’t have infinite money (or a lack of morals).
@Cimmik: It depends how you define “level”. Your grammar and vocab and general reading skills will improve with such courses, but listening/speaking/writing won’t. Don’t pick the one that takes you to the most advanced level once you’re through with it, pick one that starts at an appropriate level for where you’re at just now and that is enjoyable. Tae Kim might have more content than Genki, but if you prefer Genki and find it easier, try it first.
Took me a while to realise this is Tsetycoon! I couldn’t remember a “Matthew” doing a mini-lesson before ;)
1) What does ではまず mean?
“Well, first of all”. Maybe では and まず have a slightly different meaning when combined as ではまず, but when taken separately, that’s what they mean… I think?
2) What does みて mean in this context?
“(Please) try to X”.
3) How would you translate the whole sentence?
“Ok, firstly, if you could look this way.”. I know there’s the “try to” bit in there but I’m not sure you’d say it exactly like that in English. There’s also “please”, but again, it doesn’t seem natural to say that in English (in this context, anyway).
4) What level of politeness is this sentence?
Pretty polite – sonkeigo, right? Sounds like a tour guide in an museum or something, “If you could look over here at this exhibit”. We don’t have a direct equivalent of keigo in English so translations are bound to lose a lot of the politeness if they’re to sound natural.
Edit: Damn, Joel, you beat me to it! I opened this tab a while ago and it looked like nobody had answered before I submitted mine :(
Tobira is an awesome textbook but it would be way too hard for someone who’s only done TextFugu. I’d say have a look at Tae Kim’s grammar guide, or maybe some other beginner textbook like Genki or Japanese for Busy People, since TF covers so little. Read some simplified news articles on http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/index.html too, those are good. Try out Core 6k on Anki for learning new words.
Not an exhaustive list but just a few good resources I recommend :)
I don’t think it’s that Koichi doesn’t understand “topic” and “subject”, it’s probably more that he wants to write so that people with no knowledge of English grammatical terms can understand. I’m sure most people come across the definitions of such terms at some point in studying a language but for them to be thrust at you in the very beginning, it might put some people off. You shouldn’t really need grammatical terms to learn a language anyway – I can’t remember anyone telling me as a baby: “Now, Mister-chan, ‘the’ is the definite article while ‘a’ and ‘an’ are indefinite articles.”. Not saying they’re not useful at times, just that they’re not *necessary*.
“I am guessing it “changes”, “Japan” to “Japanese”” – that’s exactly it.
“but even so I am still unsure what ご is” – I’m not sure what you mean, you already explained what it was. I guess if you wanted more explanation you could say “it’s a suffix” but I’m not sure whether that’s what you were looking for.
As far as I know, you can do similar with just すぎ, making the word a noun (or な-adjective?), so you could also say 水が多すぎです。.
Stick the ともだち post-it on your computer :3
By the way, your signature says “I haven’t been around long enough to warrant a cool signature” – I’ve been around almost the longest out of anyone that still visits here and I’ve not even got a sig :D To be honest, I didn’t really know that was possible… :S
The WK forum sounds good. I don’t actually want to *use* WK, though.
Seems pretty neat. I’m sure I would have liked something like this when I first started. The only annoying thing I can see is that it takes quite a while after guessing correctly to show you the next card.
@thisiskyle: You forgot to mention actually living in Japan, which makes your history very different to mine ;)
I think as well as vocab it would be helpful to learn radicals and how kanji are made up of them. I’d suggest reading RTK (you said you could get it from the library?) but instead of working through it the proper way like I did – doing flash cards and making up stories for every single kanji – just read through the book, focussing on bits concerning radicals and stroke order. I feel the main strength of the book is the reader building a familiarity with kanji and how they are composed, and I’m sure this can be done without remembering every single kanji in the way it tells you to. Maybe write out each one a couple of times to get a feel for it, but I think the way I did it with endless flash cards was a waste of time. If I was to redo learning Japanese from the start, I’d definitely not spend so much time on RTK, I’d go through it in a much smarter way.
That “What level are you?” list is just reminding me I need to add more sentences to Anki. I started a deck but couldn’t be bothered doing any more at the time, so I’ve got about 10-15 sentences so far :P
The first sentence is “Keeping track of your Japanese level is of great importance”. I’m not sure if he just means in the context of following the website, but in general it’s really *not* important to know what “level” you are. No one is really at a single level anyway: someone could be “Business” in one area but “Intermediate” in another and “Elementary” in another. I’m working on an intermediate textbook but no way in hell can I understand 15% of Japanese TV haha.
I’ll definitely have a perusal of the site later when I have time though, even if I think the level guidelines page isn’t very helpful; I’m interested to see what their system is. I could have sworn I’d seen the site before, maybe linked from AJATT?
