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Ok will do. I know Japanese is somewhat of a compact language… in order to sound more Native anyway so hopefully later on once I hear casual Japanese conversation, your tips will come to mind. Thanks! :)
I’m with Aikibujin on this one. It’s probably better to plow through textfugu and then go on to native material. Plow through/slowly go through/skim through/whatever you need to do so that you cover all the Seasons. Else you might be bogged down with all the technical stuff that was probably on textfugu. So the time spent trying to figure out stuff on your own if you were learning Japanese through games could have been spent studying Japanese on textfugu and reviewing the practice lessons. 8 seasons is pretty long and personally that’s around 6 months worth of studying for me anyway. So after you do all 8 seasons and you start practicing with gaming, you’ll at least know what you are weak on and can come back to textfugu and know where everything is and what to spend more time on. It’ll be back and forth with native material practice and using this site to fill in things you don’t understand but has already been previously covered.
Thanks for the example. Will look into it some more. :)
Joel,
Can you please give an example of what the comma looks like in speech if dropping the は? So in the future…if I see it, I’ll know what to make of it.Thanks.
I’m also fairly new to Japanese learning and have not concentrated too much of the kanji yet. I have been studying it but not memorizing it as much.. More skimming through it and reviewing the kanji that reappears in the Practice section of each lesson than purely rote memorization/reviewing the anki deck since in the Practice section, the Kanji always appears in context.
This is my own method that I used to get a better handle on Kanji. I do not bother with whether or not it is kun/on. Because when you say the vocabulary words, it’s spoken language and people aren’t think kun/on/kanji when they are speaking. Which is why I learn the hiragana first because learning how to say the words means my brain is registering this as new vocabulary. I do this for all the kanji vocabulary like a vocabulary drill. Hiragana first, then kanji a few days later. Once I am comfortable with the new 5-6 vocabulary words in the kanji section, I write the kanji out 10x each while repeating the hiragana in my mind or out loud. When I eventually see that kanji/kanji compound, I will be always be “reading” the vocabulary word.
Ex. You know the word “stop” in English. Say you’ve never seen a stop sign before. The Stop sign is a symbol. Kanji is a symbol. The meaning/reading associated with stop is solidified in your brain before you even see the STOP sign that is painted red with the letters. So when you see the Stop sign over and over, your brain first goes to the meaning of the word “stop” and then you read the actual sign and you are no longer conscious of reading the letters “stop” on the sign but you know what it means. It goes back to how you already knew the meaning of the word “stop”…which is why I learn the hiragana first and forget about the whole kun/on/kanji when learning new vocab.
Once you get a method down (doesnt have to be this method) on how to approach learning kanji, it will make more sense. You can always go forward a bit in the lessons and go back to kanji to revise your learning/studying method as you find new understanding on how to approach kanji.
Oh right… I was really confused back there as I thought the は was strictly for A is B pattern. The です or だ makes that pattern transitive and not the は. Got it.
So it would not be grammatically correct then to have “わたし にほんご を おしえます”. No は particle. Since the main subject is “I”.
In Japanese, the grammatically correct sentence contains the は particle in:
わたし は にほんご を おしえます。 Because you need to identify the “I” as the main subject. So a sentence will always need the は to identify the main subject when speaking regardless of what comes after– in this case more grammar like を for verbs?Am I understanding this correctly?
Thanks.
Ahhh I see. It’s good to know that the various spellings for vanilla are OK so that on the occasion I do come across other words that have a few different spellings I will be able to pick out the most common one.
Thank you!
Your parents are always going to be your parents… so regardless of how they react, whether it’s good or bad.. don’t let it dishearten you. If you want to tell your dad, then by all means tell him.
You may not understand this at 18 years old but your tastes/preferences will change as you get older and there will be other things in your life that you may want to do/learn, so Japanese is only one aspect of THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Learning Japanese means you want to be a person who knows Japanese and is interested in Japanese culture… you don’t need approval from anyone to do this. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and commitment to learn a foreign language, or do anything in life that is worth doing…anyone who laughs at this type of endeavor, makes you feel ashamed, or belittles your efforts says more about them than it could ever say about you. That’s the social support aspect of my response… The TED video is credible. Think of it as the millions of people who share their New Year’s Resolution with friends and family and them sit around and eat donuts the remaining 364 days out of the year.
Feel better. Don’t let your parents’ opinion weigh you down. Keep your progress/Japanese learning to yourself if you are around negative energy… just because learning Japanese is hard as it is and you don’t want to expend energy on things that are not going to help you.
Thank you! That sounds like a great possible explanation.
Haha@ any sound comes out at all… I think I got the tongue position correct now–it touches the inside of my teeth. It’s a very soft “L” sound that can pass for an r. Almost like it starts off as an L and finishes off as an R. Thanks!
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This reply was modified 10 years, 8 months ago by
prismcolour.
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This reply was modified 10 years, 8 months ago by
Ok… I haven’t gotten around to listening to various sources of material aside from what’s on this site. I think it will help later on once I start venturing outside to some native material/books on tape/movies with subtitles so I can hear common words spoken by a variety of people. Hopefully the correct way to say things will eventually sink in.
I went back to review some of the hiragana pronunciation guide from Season 1 and saw this:
“The Japanese “ra, ri, ru, re, ro” is kind of a mystery for a lot of people, and here’s why. The Ra-column is made up of multiple sounds. It’s part R (I’d say around 75%), part L (I’d say about 20%) and strangely enough, part D (I’d give this about 5%). Combine these together and you have the “Japanese R.” By doing the exercises above, you should be able to get the R & L sounds. The subtle “D” sound should come naturally with those things, though it’s not as important as the R & L.”So I guess the variation I am hearing within これ, それ, あれ is normal.
Thanks for your suggestion!
Sorry late reply… but the yō romaji confuses me. If romanzing, I would prefer the よう.
Thanks for the link Joshua–as this is dictionary sheepishram was referring to. Will look for it when I go to the bookstore so I can flip through it in person.Oh sorry! I wrote the hiragana wrong for 一人 because I thought I was hearing the “S” sound so I wrote it as ひとつ. That makes all the sense in the world now that it’s hi-to-ri since you helped me see I wrote the hirigana wrong.
Will update the thread for 一人 = ひとり. I’m solid now… happy to know there won’t be too many curve balls in pronunciation since Japanese is pronounced the way it’s spelled.
Thanks again! :)
In general, I’m having trouble getting an ear for the speed at which things are said. I’m not sure if I hear things incorrectly because something is spoken too fast for me to pick up particular kana or if there are only a few instances in Japanese where words are pronounced differently from the way they are spelled.
From what you told me, you said Japanese will generally be be pronounced the way it is spelled…so can I assume I need to train my ear to listen to the kana faster because it seems they speak very fast? Or should I just memorize the way things are pronounced by listening to it first without looking at the kana?
So when you yourself say it, there is no Shhh sound? Do you hear the Shhh in the audio? I just want to make sure that my ear is not deceiving me because in the audio I hear a slight “Shh” sound and I couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from. http://www.textfugu.com/season-2/past-tense-nouns/practice/
Thanks. :)
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This reply was modified 10 years, 8 months ago by
