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Damn particles! They ruin everything! hehe I *kinda* get what you’re saying, yeah, but I guess I won’t fully understand the use of も until I see more sentences that use it – translating Japanese into English sometimes makes it a bit harder to understand, I think >.<. Or maybe Koichi needs to get his ass in gear and make a lesson on it :P
It seems to be that, in this forum, I have the most questions and you have the most answers hehe And like I keep saying, I appreciate it :)
I met this Japanese guy on Facebook who’ll be coming to Edinburgh Uni for a year to study and he added me as a friend since I said I was wanting to take Japanese classes. So anyway, he messages me a few basic questions in Japanese and I reply as best I can.
He then replies “Goodness!! すごいよ！！日本語本当にうまいね！！seriously woooow!本当にびっくりしました！どこで習ったの？？びっくりしましたーーー！！Michaelの日本語は本当に素晴らしいです！自信をもってください！
I try to correct your sentences even tough most of them are soooooooooooooo super perfect!!
[then he corrects my writing a little]
Seriously your Japanese is super great! it’s so impressive! Thank you!”
Wow, he really likes to compliment, doesn’t he :P What I wrote wasn’t even particularly complex, either. I guess that’s Japanese people for you :P
Ah, ok :)
Next question :P
In the dictionary it says 何も when used with negative verb = “nothing”. So why does「私は何も出来ない。」mean “I can’t do ANYTHING.”? Should it not be “I can’t do NOTHING.”? I know double negatives like this are used casually in English, but are they used differently in Japanese? Surely a grammar textbook (where I first saw this kinda thing) wouldn’t have such casual speech in it’s example sentences. A whole lot of example sentences on Jisho.org have this grammar too.The actual example from the book is「彼は何も言わずに部屋を出て行きました。」- “He left the room without saying anything.”. It sounds like they should be using 何でも instead, but I guess the books are right?
Is it just acceptable to use double negatives in Japan? haha
Also, why use 「出て行きました」and not「出ました」?
Really appreciating everyone’s help here :D Thanks a lot.
Odd… I was just reading Tae Kim’s page on “must” and it’s shortened forms haha What a coincidence.
Also remember that verbs whose negative form would be んだ use じゃ and ぎゃ. Apparently, this works for ぐ verbs too (as mentioned in the comments on that page).
If お/酒（お/さけ）can mean the rice wine we know as sake OR just plain old alcohol, how do you differentiate?
It must be different in the US – in the UK, you have to be at least 16 to get a proper job :P I’m 18, been constantly looking for work and I’ve been unemployed for near enough a year XD
I don’t mean to put you off, though – you should totally go for it :) I guess the job market in the UK must be much more dire for young people than in the States >.<(You mentioned Target, so I assumed you live in the US haha)
I use KeyHoleTV. Though to be honest, I don’t think I’ve actually used it in about a couple of months :P
Having it called “tendon” gives me the image of tempura pig’s tendons XD Just lovely.
Ah, that seems to make sense. Didn’t think of なる as being anything other just plain old “to become”. If it had been written as 鳴る I would have known to look it up (I assumed it was just some funny grammar form using plain なる in a weird way).
And yeah, I can see how it could become confusing without the と言って.
Also thanks for your help in the other thread, may as well just say it here haha.
Well for me, going kanji->keyword really helped. I think it strengthened the connection between the two. For me, just because “perfect” and “tie” aren’t really all that related to 完結 doesn’t mean they wouldn’t help me learn the word. So when I’m drilling vocab and I see 完結 I would think “right, so that’s ‘perfect’ and… ‘tie’… ah yes, that’s ‘conclusion’”. Whether the keywords actually relate to the vocab they are used in – and in a lot of cases they actually do – it doesn’t matter because the association goes on in my brain regardless. Obviously there comes a point when I know the word well enough not to think of it in terms of Heisig keywords.
As an example of keywords that DO make sense: 飛行機 – aeroplane – composed of “fly, go, machine”. How would that NOT help? :P Or how about 結婚 – marriage – composed of “tie, marriage” – the marriage keyword is obvious and I think of tie as “tie the knot”. Though, in both cases, I don’t think of them in Heisig-terms anymore, because I just “know” them now.
And, even though I do drill both ways (giggidy), like he says, “Eventually you should just be associating the kanji with the word in Japanese that you have in mind.” – that’s what I do.
Looking at the big wall of TextFugu vocab stuck on the… wall behind me, I’m finding it difficult to find cases where the Heisig keywords *don’t* make sense XD
Also, I think as I learn more words, I rely on Heisig’s terms less and less, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t *really* helpful.
And as one last point, I have 2 decks for TextFugu vocab – one backwards, one forwards. I was finding that when writing lang-8 posts, I was thinking of what I wanted to say in English and couldn’t convert it to Japanese because my brain wasn’t trained to go that way :P Going English->Japanese actually really helps going Japanese->English (i.e. I got much better at going Japanese->English after creating the second deck). It means more reviews but meh, I can live with that – it pays off in the long-run, for me at least.
Works for me, don’t see why it *can’t* work for anyone else. I’d say give it a shot and if it doesn’t work, just scrap it :)
When I did it, I wrote down the kanji and name in my Japanese notebook, just for reference (and I guess the act of writing it out helps you remember). Look up a Shared Deck for RTK instead of creating your own – that would take forever! :P I believe the RTK deck is at the top of the list because it’s been downloaded the most. File>Download>Shared Deck… just incase you didn’t know already :)
It wasn’t until quite a way into the book that I discovered a really useful strategy – use kanji.koohii.com for reviewing keyword->kanji but then use Anki for reviewing kanji->keyword. Doing it both ways (giggidy) really helps – you might see a kanji out in the wild and think “oh… what was that one again?”, just because if you only do it keyword->kanji that’s all your brain will be used to.
Another suggestion: my “cram” technique. After you’ve written a certain amount of kanji in your book (or however you do it), say every 10 or 15, select the cards in the Anki browser and click Actions>Cram…>Random order. Go through the list a couple of times, clicking “Soon” each time so that it will show the card again. Not very good if you like keeping your Anki stats high, but they don’t really matter, right? If you’re really bothered about stats, just make a duplicate deck to Cram with. I stumbled onto this method about halfway through, and let me tell you, it increased my “first-time review success %” on koohii tenfold (I’m being serious). I was pretty shocked at how much better it was doing this XD
Any more questions, just ask :P
I know it’s quite an old post, but what is meant by the「今の日本にあるほとんどラーメン屋」part of the sentence「今の日本にあるほとんどラーメン屋は機械で注文するの？」? Also, isn’t「の」quite a feminine way to end a sentence (unless followed by だ or です)?
Definitely get squared paper for practising kanji – I find squares a little bit bigger than English letters to be good, but you might wanna go bigger as you are just starting out. I started off slow, but by the end, I was doing 60 kanji most days. One time, I did 100 kanji/day for a couple of days but then the reviews became unbearable haha.
@Revenant: I’ve always been a little confused by the AJATT “sentence mining” method, even after reading his site haha. If there’s to be no proper grammar learning, how will you make any sense of the sentences? I think I’d like to get a little more intermediate on the grammar front before I use that method for getting new vocab.
The way he writes kinda puts me off his method a bit, whether it’s useful or not haha – it’s like he’s saying “if you don’t live and die for Japanese, you are worthless, will never learn *anything* and don’t deserve to be here”. A bit of an exaggeration, I guess, but he’s not that tolerant of people that aren’t as engrossed in the language as he is/was.
I have 3 stickers! Mwahahahaaaa! *twiddles moustache*
I’m gonna wait until I’ve finished my current Japanese study notebook, so that I can put it on the next one. The next one will be bigger (A4 size), so it’ll last longer. That probably won’t be until I get to uni, though – still got 1/3 or so left of the one I am using now (which, considering I started using it last year, I have all of RTK and lots of vocab in it, and it’s A5 I think, has lasted a pretty long time hehe).
Well, there was that one time in Pokémon where Misty-
Oh wait, I’m thinking of a different thing…
;)
