Help me learn Japanese!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So at the University of Arizona I’m taking Japanese and given the complexity of the language I figure I’ll have a few questions as things come up (especially since I’m “that guy” that was always in your classes that couldn’t accept things as they were and had to know the etymology/reason/ambiguous “why”/whatever). I’m thinking of taking it as a minor (or maybe double major, both Comp Sci and Japanese have the most pathetically small amount of credits you’ve ever seen), but I have time to get infuriated and hate it yet. I’m also a little afraid I’ll fall behind since I don’t know anyone in/from Japan (or otherwise fluent) so I don’t have anyone to converse with.
AAAAnyway… I have a couple basic pronunciation questions, from searching they’re fairly common questions, but don’t go quite into a few bits of minutiae I’d like.

  1. In words that end with “u” (i.e. Desu; Onegaishimasu) I understand I’m supposed to “drop” the “u.” But is this entirely dropped (like the “e” on some of our words) or am I supposed to round my mouth to an “u” sound as I’m stopping my speaking, making it silent but changing the sound of the word slightly? Basically do I end on a hard “s” or is it kind of like “su.”

  2. How am I supposed to vocalize し (shi, if your language packs aren’t installed)? It’s obviously not a rounded mouth “sh” (i.e. a librarian saying “quiet”), I’m trying to kind of make a long “e” with a “sh” sound and my tongue at the roof of my mouth, it sound really close, but not quite (my teachers have the littlest bit of a “whistle” when they do it too, but that may be a personal accent thing). Any tips on getting the sound to come out right?

  3. This is more of a personal question, we’re mostly just doing idiomatic hiragana and katakana right now and aren’t on construction yet, but are forms of (-de?) “gozaru” used outside of a few idiomatic expressions anymore? From what I gather it’s basically an archaic word that serves a similar function to "desu,’ but why then do we say ohayou/ohayoo/ohayo/ohayō (seriously, how many different structures can you have for romanizing one string of letters?) gozaimasu and not ohayoo desu (or a form thereof)? Is it just a linguistic artifact that’s only really interesting if you’re interested in language evolution? (In which case, I’m still interested!)

  4. I’m trying an experiment, yes, on myself… yes it may affect my grade, but I’m trying it and need advice on whether this is actaully a Bad Idea™. Instead of learning meanings of phrases I’m trying to learn them somewhat like a child learns them, that is to say idiomatically through context. That is to say, if we’re learning the phrase “open your textbook” I’m trying to associate it with the actual ACTION of opening my textbook rather than the words “open your textbook.” The reason I’m trying this was because I struggled a little with German because I was constantly looking up words for what I was trying to say instead of learning how to speak a language. So far (and mind you, it’s only been a few days) it’s been working, but I feel I may be going a little bit slowly compared to the rest of the class. My rationale behind doing this is that if I can associate the language with concrete ideas rather than another language’s description I’ll be better at construction and from there I’ll be able to expand my vocabulary faster if I can define things with other things in the same language. And through that I’ll be learning Japanese rather than “Japanese through the window of English” which I have a feeling is what trips a lot of people up when it comes time to actually converse or learn the stroke order, sound, and basic meanings of 1500 Kanji (many people who are in higher classes admitting they can’t have anything more than otherwise scripted conversations and have to use English mnemonics to remember how to write Kanji, which I want to see if I can avoid). Thoughts on whether or not this is a bad idea?

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  1. It’s not totally dropped in theory and is pretty much just voiced so softly so as to be practically irrelevant, but, in practice, you can get away with just saying it as “des” or “mas.” You will sound much more unnatural if you accidentally overenunciate the “u” rather than if you underenunciate it. A Peruvian friend of mine always and consistently overenunciates his /u/ sound and it really sounds weird.

  2. I’m not sure what you mean by a “whistle,” I don’t hear it in any of the speakers I’ve interacted with, but perhaps I just don’t understand what you mean. し is pretty much just pronounced as /ʃɪ/, just like it might be in something like Washington. Sometimes the vowel sound is weak, though.

  3. Yeah. In formal speech they are used all the time. At work I often use constructions like “de aru” and “de gozaru” because they sound considerably more appropriate than just “desu.” Also, everybody else here uses them so I don’t want feel left out. You hear them alot in speeches, too. The other honorific and polite forms are in pretty common use, too. You’re not going to hear it from your friends down at the pub, but at work, definitely.

  4. Learn it both ways. If you focus entirely on idiomatic meaning this could really trip you up on tests. After moving to Japan I’ve found that, with a lot of my new vocabulary that I’ve picked up “naturally,” I can no longer give English equivalents very easily. It’s okay most of the time, but if you were to quiz me in English about it I would probably be screwed. So, sometimes I sit down with a dictionary and drill myself on these new words in English so I can still translate/interpret when necessary. So learn it idiomatically and, after you know it, learn how to translate it. For a foreign language course, the ability to translate is pretty important. Of course, YMMV.

3

Oh, and I wanted to add:

You do not say “Ohayou desu” because “ohayou gozaimasu” is, in itself, a semi-archaic (but still rarely used) polite adjectival construction. It comes from the word “hayai”( for “early”) which, when made into its polite form, becomes “ohayou gozaimasu.” In this same construction, you can say “osamuu gozaimasu” (from “samui” for "cold). And so on. Very few people really use this construction anymore, but it remains in a few ritualized expressions such as “ohayou gozaimasu” and “arigatou gozaimasu” (from the adjectival “arigatai,” meaning “welcome; thankful; grateful”)

The verb “gozaru,” by itself, also still gets a lot of use, as well, as it is a polite form of the verb “aru,” for “exist inanimately.”

4

Damn, keep missing my edit windows. :frowning:

Wth regard to the dropped /u/ thing:

Sometimes you will hear people enunciate the /u/, but this is fairly analogous to emphatic enunciation in English. For example, when apologizing emphatically, (as opposed to just an off the cuff “Oh, thanks”) you often hear people giving the /u/ a full enunciation. Not always and not all people, but you do hear it. To enunciate the /u/ for every single word, though, sounds kind of childish, IMO (and the opinion of my coworkers, at least).

5

Yay, beginning Japanese questions! I can finally answer something!

  1. The s sound in desu is just a shortened form of the English s. In English, I feel like we hit the s a bit harder, like saying yess. When you clip the s, your mouth naturally makes a tiny u sound. Try hissing like a snake-- the sssss can just trail off. But if you cut off an s partway through saying it, there’s the tiniest “uh” sound as you do it. So rather than thinking about adding a small u, think about shortening the s.

If you do it right, you’ll be able to hear yourself say “desuh ne?” as opposed to “dess ne?”

There are also rules for when you drop the u in the middle of other words, but I’m not very familiar with them. I think I’ve heard it enough to drop them in the right places, but my Japanese isn’t good enough to extrapolate the rules off the top of my head.

  1. Again, the sound is a bit weaker than the librarian’s shhh. I guess it’s similar to the sh in shine. If you really emphasized the shh like a librarian would, shine would sound really odd. Also, like all of the other vowels, they’re shorter than the English equivalents. The word for newspaper, shimbun, sounds like the shi in shimmy, but the shi in sheen is too long.

This shortening allows for the subtleties of the long vowels when two are together, like what you mention in your next example with ohayou. Theoretically, ohayou has a longer o sound at the end than the non-word ohayo. In practice, they sound the same. The words that the long vowel is more emphasized on are words that would be homophones without the emphasis (and occasionally not even then, just allowing context to convey meaning).

For example, 巨大 and　兄弟 (kyodai and kyoudai), the words for huge and sibiling, sound different. However, at least to my ears, and perhaps someone with more years of listening experience can check in on this, common words such as 今日 (kyou-- today) and 昨日 (kinou-- yesterday), do not have the long o sound emphasized.

Oh, and I’ve never heard a whistle on a shi sound.

  1. I haven’t done much of the polite form, but it is still definitely used in formal situations. Also, as you point out, in things that have become almost like idioms. So it’s always ohayou gozaimasu (even though most people, especially men, cut it down to something that would be unrecognizable if you didn’t know the phrase already-- hayozaimasu, zaimasu, or my favorite, sss).

There are also nouns that (almost) always get the honorific o-. O-cha (Japanese green tea), o-nigiri (a rice ball, usually wrapped in seaweed with something inside it), o-kaasan and o-tousan (mother and father, though I’ve heard the o- dropped on these).

  1. I think you should approach the learning however is going to get things to stick the fastest. An approach like that would never work for me, because I need a framework of grammar to insert new words into (“ok, that’s a verb? and it’s conjugated like this in this context? alright got it.”). However, I have learned things like songs and such to which I didn’t know the meaning, which were helpful later when I learned that particular section of grammar. In a case like that, I always had an example in my head that I knew was correct, because I could sing it to myself. In learning grammar points where I didn’t have that, I often struggle to remember the correct construction, and mix myself up because I didn’t have any one example I knew was definitely right.

So I think that both ways are helpful. For me however, the rote memorization of phrases plays a far far backseat role (like I’m driving a stretch Hummer limo with the grammatical approach riding shotgun and the phrase approach is looking out the back window with a bottle of gin in its hand wondering how it got there). But really you should attack it however you deal with languages best.

6

Oh yeah, I meant to mention this. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a desu with the u emphasized IRL, but on an anime a girl kept doing it. The other characters reacted to her with annoyance at her “cute” use of the u. My super couldn’t really speak to the context with which the u would be emphasized. It is a “cute” thing, like something a girly girl would use, or a childish thing, or a cute childish thing, like a kid playing up the cute card (like Shirley Temple, or something)?

ETA: Damn, now that you mention it, I realize that I do hear it on the end of arigatou gozaimasu from time to time. Just not on desu.

7

Just so you know, this is generally useless with gaining fluency in a foreign language. Later in your post you mention you want to emulate how children learn; this isn’t how children learn. You are however an adult, and adults sometimes find it helpful to work things out like this, but don’t waste your fellow students’ time in class digging too deeply with this stuff; just catch up with your professor afterward and waste her time with it.

Generally it will be indistinguishable from a hard s. If you listen to news anchors or someone speaking formally, you can often hear them distinctly pronouncing the ‘u’ sound.

Regarding pronunciation, don’t get too wrapped around the axle about the one true way to pronounce any syllable. One thing you will learn quickly with Japanese is that there is an ungodly variety of regional dialects. In some parts of northern Japan you will hear “shi” as a hard “sh” lacking any “i” at all. In other parts they really sing out the vowel, and in other parts you can hear that lisping whistle that is almost an ‘s’. In your case, just take the word “ship” and drop the “p”.

Absolutely. It is an honorific form of aru. Its etymology may be archaic but it is very much a part of modern Japanese. If you work in an office, for example, every morning you’ll be expected to say “ohayoo gozaimasu”. If you greet your boss in the evening, “oban de gozaimasu”. Best to memorize the whole thing as a stock phrase rather than picking apart the etymology, because the farther back you go the more the meaning breaks down.

If it works, it works. Different things work differently for everyone.

One last note… if you want to put a lot of energy in overdoing some pronunciation, focus on the difference between -o, -oo, and -ou endings. I’m told by natives that this has a huge effect on comprehension and makes you really stand out as a foreigner (other than your big round eyes and cargo pants).

8

the “su” at the end of desu or gozaimasu is variable. I have a student who says “thank you desu” and hits the “su” as just an “ss” sorta like “dess” but many of my fellow teachers say “ohayo gozaimasu” and do a very small “u” at the end, like "ohayo gozaimasu

“shi” (し） I generally hear as “she” so when a student comes into the teachers’ room they say “shitsureishimasu” then “shitsureishimashita” (shit-su-ray-she-mass and shit-su-ray-she-ma-she-tah)

But I should stress I live in inaka (countryside), out in Toyama, and as CosmicRelief said there are an ungodly number of dialects in Japan (my teachers speak Toyama-ben. Like some will say “doyoi” instead of “tsukarata” for tired, and we end a lot of sentences in “ne” like “gomen ne” or “cha” instead of “yo” which is just weird)

As for gozaru being archaic… yes, it is, but so are lots of things in Japanese. There are MANY different levels of formality, and depending on the situation you’re in and who you’re talking to, you’ll use a different level. I say “ohayo” to students (or just “good morning,” hehe) and friends and such, but “ohayo gozaimasu” to other teachers.

As for idioms, I think they help. I remember “sen-” and “rai-” (as in sen shou and rai shou" or last week and next week) by remembering that raichu is the evolved form of pikachu. It’s weird, sure, but it works :smiley: That said it is better to relate japanese terms to other japanese terms for memory, as it is in any language, but it’s very difficult when you just start out speaking. Imo, that’s basically a level of fluency you have to work towards, not start out at, when it comes to learning a foreign language.

9

I don’t think we can be friends anymore. :frowning:

:wink:

10

What you wrote is true, but it bears mentioning that the spectrum of “cute/childish” also has a different prevalence and significance in Japan than it does in the US. It can connote that you are friendly, cooperative, or subservient. Those Japan values these traits culturally more than the US, there is a time and place for it. Specifically concerning the “u”, the first thing that comes to mind for me is actors in commercials, public servants, restaurant servers, or people making sales pitches in front of stores.

11

Oh, and when you do get around to working on the kanji, I find it VERY helpful to learn the names of the radicals. For a simple example, it’s easier to say that 休 has the person (or katakana i, if that’s how you want to remember that one) and tree than to memorize each stroke. This is much more helpful when you remember the more complicated radicals. For example, once you learn the kanji for long (長), it’s much easier to see that this 脹 is made up of moon and long. Or that 葉 (leaf) is just grass, tree, world.

They sometimes even work as pictures, like 間 meaning interval or space has a picture of the sun shining through (the space between) a gate.

ETA: Cosmic, my last sentence was supposed to be a question rather than a statement (mixed up it and is). Thanks for the info.

12

They don’t sound the same. There’s a (subtle) difference between ohayō and ohayo, the first being the “correct” pronunciation and the second an informal, and somewhat feminine, variant. Similarly kinō (yesterday) should sound different from kino (the game Keno). Kyōto (the city) is not the same as kyōtō (vice-principal). Kyō ka? (today?) sounds different from kyoka? (permission?).

13

I think that you’d need a lot more immersion than you’re going to get for this to work, especially once you start getting hit with long lists of vocabulary to memorize.

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Learning Japanese I think I’m learning Japanese I really think so.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled informative thread.

15

haha, how about my remembering “dooitoshimoshite” (you’re welcome) as “don’t touch my moustache” ? :smiley:

16

As penance, you must eat a duck and mouse.

17

About learning kanji, Jragon, my advice would be to focus less on learning lots of individual characters, and more on learning the kanji compounds for lots of vocabulary, particularly words that share the same kanji. This should help by letting your vocabulary practice and writing practice reinforce each other, as well as showing you the kanji as they usually appear in the wild. In general, learn vocabulary first, then learn the kanji.

I advise this route because I took the opposite one: spending lots of time learning all the readings and meanings of hundreds and hundreds of individual kanji, because that was what I found really interesting. As I discovered later, that’s all relatively useless* if you don’t have the vocabulary to apply the characters to.

*Although when I encounter an unknown word, I can often guess how it’s pronounced. Kinda useful, but far less than having a vocabulary that I can use to communicate with people

18

Oh god, I’ve wasted my life! sob

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I won’t be any help to the OP, but I wanted to point out that I will be subscribing to this thread. My daughter will be going to Japan in July, so we have bought the Rosetta Stone Japanese program and are learning it as a family. This thread will help me, I think.

FWIW, the Rosetta Stone program seems to be working pretty well, although like the OP – I’d prefer to know the etymology/structure/why of a language, so the immersion is a bit annoying for me. For example, what is the difference between onnanoko and kojoma? There are several words that are being used interchangeably that I assume are like girl vs she vs some other pronoun? I grok the difference between onnanoko and onnanohito – and the other endings (adding tachi makes it plural, right?)…I may end up getting a complimentary book, to learn as a student, not just with the immersion method.

20

Did you possibly mean kanojo for the second word?

How old is your daughter and how long will she be in Japan? Does Rosetta Stone teach hiragana/katana?