Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
My friends did that once, they got all my food and relabelled it all, it wasn’t japanese though, it was things like Girl Power, Dom’s Powdered Cabbage and stuff like that.
but I think the idea is fine, go round and relabel all your food in japanese, put japanese post it notes on the inside of every cupboard, put some vocab on the back of the bathroom door.
Its OK its the one exception to the one exception to the there’s always an exception rule, which turns out to still hold true.
一人 is in the anki vocab pack ( http://www.textfugu.com/season-2/past-tense-nouns/4-3/#top ), but if you do find something that you don’t recognise, jisho.org is your friend, or maybe google translate (pretends to be your friend but says nasty things behind your back, but at least for this it should be ok)
Find some other tools to help you and if there is something sneaky slipped in try and figure it out using other tools, you learn better when you learn yourself, than if someone teaches you :D
Not really a podcast （by quite a way）, but
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm17548398
Its all subbed in kana! チャンス！
Sing-a-long time!
Is that really slang or is it more of the local dialect / sociolect. Move around the UK a bit and you’ll find lots of dialects. In Japan, there are similar dialects, from different regions.
Lets see… Lets say a dialect is a regional way of speaking, including a unique lexicon that may contain slang, a sociolect is similar but is typically also limited to a social class.
Slang on the other hand is more of a misuse of language or invented words created by a subculture/group.
I’d probably also want to talk about colloquialisms as separate from slang as well!
As far as slang I guess a lot of Japan’s internet culture would count, wwwwwwwwww, 88888888888888888, warota, etc. Then there is otaku culture, moe anyone? Yakuza would be another social/cultural group with their own slang.
I think Japan’s transliteration of foreign words is like the ultimate slang, and then they like shortening their words as well though that might be more of a colloquialism.
-
This reply was modified 12 years, 7 months ago by
vlgi.
The Japanese Language is very friendly to loan words, so if you examine the lexicon of the language a very high percentage of it are loan words, not just from English, but Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, etc…
Right now a lot of new things come from America, so a lot of English loan words are being used.
Most loan words are nouns, so they’re really easy to fit into the existing grammar structure.
Its also something which makes Japanese a really hard language to categorise, and work out its roots, it shares similarities as far as grammar goes with Altaic languages, but its lexicon is completely different, its hard to identify when a word in Japanese has shared roots with another language showing a link or whether its just a loan word.
I only keep going on about this was because I actually wanted to talk about the ebook but then the thread got derailed, and there was this this bad feeling generally. Its not your fault ;)
I don’t begrudge those who feel hard done by by koichi, but there are solutions to that as i’ve outlined. If you want a refund email koichi for one, if you want more textfugu, then help koichi, if you want to bitch and whine then please find somewhere else to go, theres little enough posted in this forum that if they all get filled with complaining about textfugu then it becomes pointless existing, there’s enough crap on the internet, and I have enough bitterness and cynicism myself, that I don’t need extra.
Its really easy to feel you have no options to improve a situation, and its easy to complain and whine, and sure for some people thats an end in itself, but i’d rather think that people would chose to take positive action even if its to get a refund or to help koichi do text fugu, if the choice is a third choice which is in my opinion an anti social and rude option to shit all over the forums with your bad feelings, then I think maybe that was a bad choice and you should think about doing one of first two.
If it takes this one thread to get people to either get their money back and be satisfied or help koichi do more textfugu and be satisfied, as long as they quit their bitching I will be glad, I won’t hold my breathe.
Oh and PEACE AND LOVE FOR THE WHOLE WORLD. <3<3<3<3
Have you been to another country before? If you have, think about the kinds of things you wanted to say / said. Then work out the translations of them. Then get someone to read them.(Japanese google lady as a last resort will do it for you, at least she does it for me ;-) theres also a site called rhinospike you can submit stuff to be read by natives,) Then you can listen and repeat. For real conversational Japanese you need real people to talk to.
Here are some potentially useful Phrases
Sorry I didn’t catch that, can you say it again slower please.
Stuff like :
Sorry I don’t speak a single word of Japanese.
Sorry I don’t understand Japanese.
Do you speak English?Are not very important at all really because just not speaking Japanese gets these messages across. :D
Heres some that might also be useful:
Is this thing on my plate safe to eat?
Am I doing this correct?
Please can you explain that to me?
Note I’ve left the japanese equivalents as an exercise for the reader. ;D
In my experience phrases really won’t get you anywhere, I can tell you real people never answer the questions correctly / ask the right questions, so when it comes to language learning they are more of a red herring, they can be useful to learn vocab, because you are actually putting stuff in context. Consider the language learning you’ve done so far, how much did those phrases help you? You might still remember the phrases, but would they help you communicate? Have you tried using them?
I lived in France for 4 years and my experience is phrases really are a last resort, there is no one way to say things, people will always say something different, even if their words are 90% of a phrase you know, the 10% that are different will spook you, and the pressure of the situation will make it seem like they are speaking a foreign language [ ;) ]. Phrases are really an all or nothing thing, if someone uses a phrase then you’re fine, but if not then you’re screwed. Oh and nobody really talks like those phrases.
If instead you can think how to build up phrases, or even break them down, then you have a skill that will get you a lot further. You can skip some words, because they might not be needed, or you can ask about the meaning if you don’t understand. Work on building up an understanding of the underlying rules then you just learn the vocab to fill in the blanks.
Also in Japanese, pronouns aren’t that useful for low level japanese because often context implies whether it is he, she, they etc. Also use of those pronouns is not very polite, you would usually refer to the person directly.
I think also Textfugu, maybe isn’t a 100% solution for learning Japanese, its a good resource but it needs to be used with other resources. Tofugu website has loads of articles about other resources you can use. Podcasts etc.
Try listening to japanese podcasts or TV or stuff, to get used to the rhythms and sounds of japanese.
Go to your local library and find their learn japanese audio CDs and listen to them. remembering that phrases are red herrings of course but take away vocab and grammar and pronunciations.
Youtube Japanese videos like Japanese pod 101, etc can be good ways to find out some bits and pieces.
But ultimately the best thing to do is to become super proactive with your Japanese learning. If you find stuff you need to know make a note of it, (Maybe in your japanese learning diary, ha ha, yeah I have one of those, no I was joking koichi I totally have one, don’t hurt me), then you can try and find out, using Jisho.org or something, Then find some japanese forum / resource, and say, hay yuo guise! Is this right. Following this kind of process means you’ll learn more than if someone just gives you some phrases.
Also think about how Text Fugu could be better, maybe koichi does need to add some phrases or something, 1 phrase per pagey thing, just to mix stuff up! If you can come up with a good ideas and suggestions you can email koichi with ways he could improve textfugu.
Heres a good website for some resources
http://www.tofugu.com/2010/04/06/tofugu-100-best-japanese-learning-resources/Ignore their number one though, seriously! ;P
Oh !
Also,
Don’t be afraid to skip ahead to future chapters in text fugu and read them, don’t feel you have to follow the structure 100%, feel free to sneak some looks ahead if theres something interesting or useful you see when browsing the contents page.
-
This reply was modified 12 years, 8 months ago by
@MisterM2402 [Michael]
Well have you actually emailed koichi about a refund? Did he deny your refund?
Your analogy kinda implies that you’ve emailed him for a refund and he said no, if thats the case then fair enough but I don’t expect that is true, i’m sure koichi would come to an agreement of some kind with you.
Oh I don’t think analogy is needed, you paid for something and you aren’t receiving what you paid for (or at least you don’t feel you are receiving what you paid for), the reason of why you aren’t receiving it isn’t relevant here. So it doesn’t matter if the chef is moonlighting, or catching a fish, or if he doesn’t exist at all.
What you are saying is like you bought a TV from Sony, but its not working so they should give you a PS3 and a digital camera, and a hi-fi. No they should give you a working TV, because thats what you bought and asking for other things is just a form of extortion.
If you are really not happy email koichi for a refund, if he fails to give you one go to the consumer rights people, and make them, make him give you a refund. There’s a special one for the internet which deal with international companies, apparently they’re real ball busters too.
I think in truth you believe that textfugu is worth the money even if you have to wait longer for lessons, because otherwise why would you not have already done the above?
In which case if you believe it is the case then spending the time to try and get koichi more motivated aka my first post is what you should be doing.
On a windows pc you’ll probably need to turn on the language bar. Right click on the task bar or look in the control panel, the option is something like display language bar, you should then have a icon or icons for your IME on your task bar you can click on to change between EN JP etc. For the JP IME, you’ll have options to write hiragana, katakana, full width half width, eh? and then theres the one which just types whatever you type. Have fun!
Similarly on a mac in the system prefs under language and text under input sources you want show input menu in menu bar ticked.
If it helps, become a fan of Fudanjuku, KONNICHIHA! :D
Its essentially 50% self reflection 50% telling them about why you want to do the course.
Think about why you want to go on this summer course.
If its something like I want to learn Japanese then break it down further.
Why do you want to learn Japanese, anime, no dramas, j dramas, you want to marry a japanese guy, a challenge, become a translator…
Identify a target something you want to do and then say how you will get there, e.g. taking this summer course will allow me to reach my goal by etc.etc.
Link together your wants desires, etc. to their course, explain how their course will help you achieve etc.
Maybe try thinking of the が as a politeness in this example. The question asker doesn’t mark his car as the subject, because two particles next together is just crazy. It is implied however, the answerer therefore marks it as the subject when they respond, out of politeness. Thus creating a grammatically correct sentence.
Grammatically you can’t say something about something, unless the something has been defined. So when you reply you define the something with the が particle, and once you have defined the something you can then say something about it.
Now that is grammatically, I’m sure you could get away with not using が or using は, or neither. What you’re learning is the grammatically correct way to speak, but it is important because in some situations the choice of particle will alter the meaning, and Japanese can be surprisingly subtle.
If it makes you feel better everyone is confused about が vs は generally people work it out as they go along and see more examples and they get the hang of it. The examples you are seeing are very artificial, so the real use may not be clear. So reading real Japanese and speaking/listening would be useful, but you’re probably not good enough for that yet. So for now take it as something to keep an eye on and revisit as you continue working through the chapters.
Q: わたしのくるま は すきですか？
A: いいえ、あなたのくるま が きらいです
I think が is used because the subject has not been identified in the question. If you are going to say you like something or dislike something then you need to specify it with が．
Look at all the sentences about liking or disliking things, the thing that is liked or disliked is always specified with が, because you are saying something (I hate) about something(your car) you always specify what that thing is.
So when you are being specific about something you should specify with が think of it focusing your words to be specific to that thing. It’s important to do this in Japanese as often the context is implied, in some cases you want to be very clear about what is being said, so you specify with が. But if the thing has already been specified there is no need to do so again.
You can usually find out about japanese communities in your areas.
e.g.
-
This reply was modified 12 years, 7 months ago by
