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How would you say “toe” in Japanese? Seems a pretty noob question, but I’m not really sure.
The dictionary says 「指 – finger; toe; digit」, but then how do you differentiate between a finger and a toe? The dictionary also has「足指 – toe」, but it’s not listed as a “common word”. (On a similar note, how do you differentiate between 足 meaning leg and 足 meaning foot?)
I asked my Japanese teacher and she said つま先, but what I was trying to say was specifically about toenails/toe tips, so I’m not sure if that could be used as a general word for toe.
Why not think of 手で as an adverb? As far as I can see, it’s functioning like one (whether or not it’s formally classed as an adverbial phrase, I don’t know). In English, adverbs can be thrown all over the place – “Quickly, she ate the apple” vs “She quickly ate the apple” vs “She ate the apple quickly” vs “She ate quickly the apple”. In Japanese it’s similar in that there’s no one specific placement of an adjective in a sentence.
(I know Japanese is Japanese and English is English, but it can help to draw parallels between the two sometimes, to make sense of things, or to show that certain things in Japanese aren’t really that weird in comparison to what you know about your own language.)
From what I’ve seen so far, it’s pretty common to put the adverb right before the verb in Japanese:
「日本語を毎日勉強しなさい。」「宿題をまだ終わってしまう！」
「足が痛いのに早く走っていますね」
And as I think someone might have already noted: particles come *after* words, not *before* them. So in this case it’s かんじを, not を かく, even though it’s common to see を precede a verb.
Wow, that’s a long sentence…
Don’t waste too much time learning readings – they come naturally as you learn more vocab.
Saying that “be” is a verb isn’t *defining* it, it’s just categorising it as a verb. It’s not so simple to actually explain what “be” means. Plus, it’s better to say “be” is a copula than a verb.
Woah, for a minute there I thought you were saying that was YOUR 38,000th post o.O
I was thinking “how much time does this guy spend on here?!” XDAnd we do say “aye” a lot, so it’s a reasonable assumption ;)
オッパン・ガングナン的！
Heh.
@Joel: How are you using the grammar dictionary? Are you simply just reading through and hoping something sticks? Or do you make flash cards, or come up with sentences, or… something else, I dunno? When it’s come to grammar in the past, my approach has kinda been the first one, but I’m not sure if it’s really the most effective.
Is Joel Scottish…? I never knew.
@missingno15: Why would it being a personal deck make deleting all the cards easier? Wouldn’t it be *harder*, since you spent all that time and effort making it? haha
I know when it gets to the stage of having 1000 cards due it’s just not feasible to continue, but doesn’t that mean you lose all the progress? What do you mean by starting from scratch – do you add all the same cards back, or just start adding new cards?
Hopefully I won’t get to that stage, as I don’t really wanna delete the whole deck XD
@Cassandra: The only person that really warrants any moderation is Bbvoncrumb ;)
“Hopefully the reviews won’t back up again but if they do, they can just sit there. Right. My perfectionist self is still working through that concept…”
Haha, I know what you mean – reviews on Koohii started piling up a while ago; it was hard, but I finally decided to stop doing them outright. It was a real struggle to watch as all those cards lay there not getting reviewed, but I’m much better off now not doing them. There are 1551 reviews due there, but no way am I doing them XD Only the “7+ reviews” box has any cards left that aren’t due. My profile says I did 35697 reviews total, so it had a good run ;) It was also hard stopping some of my old Anki decks, but it’s so much better now that I’ve just got the one (Core 6k).
Hey, I’d still class myself as “beginner” as well! I mean, my reading skill and kanji are maybe a little more than that, but overall I’d say I’m about A1/A2 on the Common European Framework (which is meant for European languages, but the descriptions of different levels can reasonably apply to Japanese too).
Good luck with your future plans, I know you can do it ;) Hearing how someone else hasn’t had a great time of it and is turning around is actually quite motivating, so thanks :D
@Mark: My reviews are around 100/day now, but I’m actually looking to bump that up to about 200/day (or more like “add enough new words to get to that stage”). I’ve started listening to old radio shows done by Ricky Gervais, and I find I can easily do all my reviews in the time it takes to listen to one episode :D Probably not as good as listening to Japanese radio, but reviews can be boring, so it helps me get through them haha. Also helps regulate how much study time I get through each day.
I imagine you already know a lot of the important stuff from Core 6k already, so yeah, you’re probably better off keeping doing what you’re doing. Nice that you’re using a monolingual deck, should be very helpful. Do you just take a definition straight from a dictionary, or have you got like example sentences too?
@Tsetycoon13: I thought the exact same thing XD
“Ugh, not *this* again… wait… the first reply is… mine? lolwut”Ah, that’s my mistake. I read that he also wanted a Pokemon vocab deck, and for some reason, I didn’t realise everything in the link was onomatopoeia; thought it was just standard vocab in response to his second question (didn’t look at it too well) >.< I wasn’t thinking properly about the script thing either…
I’ll just go now…I noted the part about する verbs being based on nouns, but unless I already knew the noun it was going to be hard!
Well then, what does that tell you? Learn more vocab, of course :D When you’re at a beginner level, it’s not really essential to be able to predict anything, so don’t worry about “How can I tell this or that just by looking at it?”. If it’s an ambiguous case – or something else you’re not sure of – look it up, don’t be frustrated that you can’t guess it straight away; like Joel says, you’ll develop an intuition for certain things over time.
Don’t think a script would work: there isn’t one strict pattern to follow. Plus, how is it supposed to pick the right kanji?
