Help me learn Japanese!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Yep, I did mean kanojo – I thought it looked funny when I typed it.

She is 16 – it is an exchange program through the city. Hendersonville has a sister city in Japan and every other year (I think) a few Japanese students come to visit here, then on the off years we send students over there. She is excited as all get-out – her dream is to eat fugu, go figure, right? ETA, she will be there for about 2 weeks, the first 4 days or so as part of a tour group, the last 10 or so in a host-family home. The city is very close to Tokyo, IIRC.

Rosetta Stone does teach hiragana/katana – if you want. It gives you the option of learning to read/write as well as listen/speak. I think that’s the coolest part – if we can read it, we can figure out with a dictionary the rest. The program really just teaches you to associate sounds with pictures, which makes me feel like I am not really learning – with my memory (which is damn near eidetic sometimes) I just feel like I am cheating. I mean, I would feel comfortable saying “the cat is asleep” or one of the other idiotic phrases it has taught me, but…you know? I mean, why in hell would I need to say something like “the horse is not swimming” – which, yes, is one of the things I have learned. Or at least, since RS doesn’t give you translations, I assume that is what it means.

22

For Kanji learning, I might as well trot out the “heresy” of the Heisig mnemonic system. If you can make a commitment to invest an hour a day for 4-5 months, you can learn how to write and recognize the meanings all 1946 of the joyo kanji. After that, your vocabulary explodes because every word looks familiar, and you can move through a dictionary with ease to look up what you don’t know.

The reason I say “heresy” is that (a) it doesn’t work as well for people without a strong episodic/visual memory, and (b) the concept of kanji having “meaning” is falling out of favor (though very often there is a 1:1 correlation between a kanji and a clear unambiguous meaning.

If you’re going to try it, make sure you get a spaced repetition software program (I suggest mnemosyne, which is free), understand the arguments for and against the method, and commit to an hour a day for 4-5 months. You will probably be amazed at how much you can learn.

23

Some free resources for studying Japanese/kanji. They break the kanji down by level.
http://jlpt.renshuu.org/
http://www.speedanki.com/

There are others-- see if I can dig more up later.

24

Fair enough, I was expecting to use some doublethink to do it, but I’m thinking I may abandon the initial concept and try and go for a more relational approach once I achieve basic proficiency and have something to base it off of.

(Just making sure I’m correct) Well the “ō” is longer than “o” isn’t it? Bar-o (I need to memorize the keycode but I’m in a hurry right now so I’ll just type that) is going to be two mora instead of one (or part of one) and since each mora is the same length it extends the sound by one “beat” (I’m not sure if that’s a good word for it, but ti’s the first one that game to mind). That’s what I’ve gathered from personal study and listening to people speak the language though, not certain.

I don’t do it in class, and fair enough on the child point, it’s similar to how my dad taught me from the ground up but my dad was… weird (he only used specific words around me even when I was a baby so I understood basic words implicitly and then would introduce ANY new word I heard as a construction of how it works in the structure of the language/how it’s composed).

That may be the region my younger instructor (I think she’s a graduate student) is from, because it’s pretty noticeable on her and sounds somewhat different on my “regular” instructor (more like the “washington” example).

I understand -o and -oo (I think, see above), but what’s the difference between -oo and -ou? If I really try and “force” it I can get a small, barely noticeable upward inflection from the “u” sound (not anywhere near on par with a “?” upward inflection, but there) is that it or is there something else I’m missing?

Thanks for the sites and everything all of you, I have to go to calc now and then review my hiragana later, but I’ll check back in, I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback. Thanks!

25

First you need to make sure you understand “o”. In English, our long vowels are diphthongs except for “e”. So the English long “o” is really the Japanese “ou”. You make sure you round your mouth into a “u” at the end, as if you were saying “show”. I don’t really have a good analogy for -oo as it’s not really something we do in English… just take the Japanese monopthong o and hold it for just a beat longer. Don’t make it into a diphthong and don’t round into a “u”.

26

In theory that’s how it works, but it’s not really that cut and dried. If everyone really gave the full two beats to oo or ou it wouldn’t be as subtle a difference. But as I mentioned above, I can’t really hear people say kinou-- just sounds like kino to me. Maybe if we were having a discussion about playing Keno yesterday the differences would be more emphasized, but I think in practice native speakers give a slight lengthing to the extra beat unless they’re really trying to emphasize the word. Note that this may also be a product of the speech styles of where I live.

Again, there may be a subtle difference, but I’ve had native speakers tell me that there’s really not much of one. As someone mentioned upthread, just work on getting the basic sounds, because if you’re concentrating on making a slight terminal u instead of a terminal o, you’re probably going to end up overemphasizing it.

27

Yes, the macron denotes a long vowel. There is no difference between oo and ou. In kana, the /o/ sound is usually stretched by adding a /u/: おう. However, in some words, the kana for /o/ is used instead: おお.

My advice with regard to pronunciation is to know the difference between important and not-so-important differences. Getting your long and short vowels sorted out is crucial. Learning how to pronounce obstruents, denoted by the small っ kana is also very important. However, don’t fret so much about details like getting the /sh/ just right. Furthermore, a message board is a terrible place to look for pronunciation help. You need to have a native speaker say these sounds for you and give you honest feedback.

Onnanoko and kanojo are not only not interchangeable, they’re not even the same type of word. Onnanoko is a noun that pretty much translates to “girl”. Omedetō gozaimasu! Onnanoko desu! (“Congratulations, it’s a girl!”) Onna by itself is “woman” and ko means “child”. Kanojo is a pronoun that translates as “she”. However, be very weary of pronouns! Japanese doesn’t use pronouns unless they’re necessary. If it’s clear, from the context, who is being talked about, drop it. If you can replace it by the person’s name or title, do it. It might seem strange, but a simple English phrase like “she loves you” is actually very difficult to translate in Japanese because of pronouns. You can end up with several valid translations that are nevertheless not interchangeable, depending on who “she”, “you” and “I” are. I know that’s not the kind of thing a beginner wants to hear, but it will likely take a long time and some immersion before you get this part of the language right.

Also, in vernacular speech, kanojo can be a noun that means “girlfriend”, which is one more reason to be careful when you use this word.

28

I can think of a few other reasons why the system is disliked, most notably the way it separates between learning kanji, learning readings, and learning vocabulary words. I’ve known a fair number of beginning students of Japanese who have raved about it, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who actually stayed with the books and became truly kanji literate. But few people ever do that, I guess.

29

I think most people don’t really give it a chance. The Heisig method is a huge, powerful springboard that takes some time to construct. Many people need incremental, visible progress to stay motivated. With the Heisig method there’s a big jump at the beginning, then it grinds for a few months. But when I finished it, my vocabulary started exploding because suddenly context was all around me. Peoples’ mileage does vary, of course.

30

This is what bugs me about the RS software – it is obvious to me that the former means girl and the other was some form of pronoun, but then they bring in another couple of what-seem-to-be-pronouns (can’t think of them right now) and no explanation why one is used over the other. I will pass the information about using names instead of pronouns on to my daughter – she will use the language more than I, I am sure. I always find it easier to drop pronouns if I can anyway :slight_smile:

31

I’d say this was the predominant meaning, but that may just be the people I socialize with. generally, though, if someone asks, “kanojo iru?” they don’t mean “Is she here?” but “Do you have a girlfriend?”

32

In everyday conversation, that’s true, and yet, despite studying Japanese fairly intensively for four years before moving here, it’s something that was never mentioned to me. You see kanojo the pronoun used a lot more often in literary contexts, though, especially when translating European languages.

For a beginning student, there are two very important skills to learn. One is to learn to systematically drop that which can be inferred from context. Very often this means that you have to learn to “let go” and construct sentences without a subject. This is why you generally don’t need, and shouldn’t rely on pronouns.

The second important skill is to understand the grammatical concept of “topic” or “theme”. This is probably the single most important concept in Japanese grammar and yet it’s frequently badly taught. The worst teachers tell their students that Japanese has two kinds of subjects, indicated by the wa and ga particles. In fact, it doesn’t. Wa indicates the theme, which may or may not end up being a subject when translated into English.

The easiest way to understand themes is by replacing wa with the Valleyspeek “like, you know”.

“My boyfriend, like, you know, he’s cool.”
(Kareshi wa kakkoii.)

Here “he” is the grammatical subject and “my boyfriend” is the theme. The majority of Japanese sentences are structured this way:

Zō wa hana ga nagai. “Elephants, you know, (their) nose is long.” (That’s a famous sentence used to show the difference between theme and subject. You’d more properly translate that as “elephants have long noses” – the idea is the same but the Japanese speaker will structure the thought differently.)

Sushi wa tabenai. “Sushi, (I) don’t eat (that).”
Watashi wa sushi wo tabenai “Me, (I) don’t eat sushi.” (Those two sentences are almost the same but the emphasis is different. In the first you’re talking about and singling out sushi, in the second, the emphasis is on “me”.)

If you manage to learn how to think in theme-complement fashion, you’ve taken a significant step towards fluency.

33

In regards to し, what you’re probably hearing is a variant like /ɕ/, which doesn’t exist in English as far as I know. Some Japanese do pronounce the initial consonant slightly differently than a plain old /s/ sound, but that’s not really anything you need to worry about. Ballpark is close enough for now, refine your pronunciation and accent through conversation with native speakers. As long as you don’t sound like John Wayne trying to say ¿Cómo se llama usted? and instead coming out with something more like, “Cow-mo say llama you-stead,” you’re golden. Besides, some people have a talent for pronunciation, some don’t. I’ve got a friend from Canada who still sounds like he’s speaking English with Japanese words, but he probably knows more characters and vocabulary words than me. Sounds like since you’re hearing the subtleties, you’re not like him. Imitation of native speakers will correct any problems pretty quickly.

For learning 漢字 I independently came up with an approach that’s pretty much like Heisig’s. Found out about his method a couple of years after I got here and realized that I’d been doing what he was doing all along. Meanings stick in my head easily, so I can get the gist of a lot of things even when I can’t remember the actual reading. When I was being a good boy about studying I could power through about 20 漢字 a day with about 80–90% retention of meaning after several days without reinforcement. I’d review every week or so and cull out the ones I couldn’t remember for further practice.

The drawback is that unless you learn vocabulary too, as Sublight recommended, you lose the pronunciation or readings pretty quickly, or never acquire them. I made that mistake at first. Vocab and meaning reinforce each other pretty well as mnemonic keys, though. Stuff like 馬鹿 makes a lot of sense: “stupid” like a horse or deer. Even more difficult things like 天然資源 (natural resources) fit well with the character meanings if they were learned individually.

My suggestion would be a blend of the approaches. Learn the core meaning as a key to understanding, which you’ll need to acquire for the くん読み of many characters anyway. Pick out at least 2–3 compound vocabulary words using the character for each main reading. You can build from there. Learn important odd readings as independent vocabulary terms. You also quickly learn some readings of the characters used in the compound words this way, even though you might not have studied their meanings yet. It’ll snowball pretty quickly if you’re diligent about studying and reviewing.

34

Okay is there like, a Japanese language pope I can talk to or something? I take issue with calling something a double consonant when you don’t actually, you know, pronounce one of the consonants. Why not call it a “pause” or “hesitation” or “break” or something? I don’t care how it’s romanized, the name seems rather misleading to me. [/not-really-that-mad-but-will-pretend-to-be-anyway]

No questions, just wanted to put that out there. Thanks for the answers above.

35

The proper term is sokuon.

36

Well, I thought it went without saying that the Japanese term would make some sense, I just take issue with what they decided to call it in English.

37

That’s not really the “official term”, though. It’s just what some people use. You could also use geminated consonant.

38

Just remember that it takes a child many years to learn to speak! Plus, it takes someone there to teach it.

Actually, though, I’m sort of trying to learn Chinese that way, from my wife but it does take a long time.

I’d still work on the vocabulary lists for the tests, though.

39

Fair enough jovan.

So, can anyone tell me what “ときだち” could mean? From context* it looks like it could be “friend” but I’m guessing that word isn’t usually in hiragana considering I can’t find it in any dictionary. The only other word around it is “おんなのひと” which is woman(I think), this doesn’t really give me any clues though since the one above “おとこのひと” is “せんせい” (with corresponding drawn picture of “professor” character), so that only gives me a little hint.

*It’s under the drawn picture we’ve used as a “friend” character to practice what to say to who.

40

I should mention that this isn’t homework, I’m studying for a daily quiz and forgot to write it down when she was doing the presentation, so I’m going off the slides from it I downloaded. So you’re not helping me cheat on homework, I should have the info written down she has the translations for most of them written, just not that one and sensei (which we should already know by now).