ときだち is probably a reading mistake on your part ともだち（友達）is “friend.” おんなのひと（女の人）is “woman” or literally: woman person, with the possessive/denominative particle の in between. おとこのひと（男の人）is the same formation with the kanji for man instead of woman.
Learning kanji will start to clear some of this stuff up. Frankly, I think teachers should start introducing kanji right away with furigana for pronunciation as soon as you learn the syllabaries. That way you learn some from simple exposure and it gets a little easier to parse things. I actually have more trouble reading kids books, which are typically rendered in all hiragana, than I do reading stuff meant for adults. Even if I’ve forgotten the pronunciation or have never learned the word, with kanji I can sometimes make a stab at the meaning based on the constituent characters. With hiragana texts, I often have to re-read because I’m not sure where unfamilar words end and the next begin.
So weird question, is there a way to say “Sure, why not?” (Not exactly that phrase, but to that effect). We’re going over towns/buildings, the “no” pronoun, and using adjectives without nouns after them (non-prenominal) and we often get questions like “is the gym bright?” Obviously on a quiz I wouldn’t use this, but with peers spamming “wakarimasen” (wow, Romaji looks weeeeird after you get used to hiragana) gets a little old after a while. In English I’m not one to say “I don’t know” on those questions, I like to say “sure, why not” in a sort of semi-sarcastic fashion (kind of “it’s whatever you think it is because I can’t prove otherwise”) and was wondering if there was a way to throw this out in Japanese now or then when I’m feeling particularly bored and contrary (I’ve already mastered the bitingly sarcastic aa sou desuka? for responding to the remarkably obvious answers we give to questions while doing group practice like “Yes, I have a door in my room.”).
I’ve let my Japanese atrophy a lot over the last few years, so hopefully I won’t embarrass myself. Generally, you’re going to have a hard time with sarcasm. It exists in the language, certainly, but not to the same extent as in English. Plus, as a foreigner, people are going to take what you say more seriously in general and are pretty unlikely to realize you’re trying to be sarcastic.
The closest I can think of to what you’re trying to say is “どうでもいい” which pretty much means “makes no difference.” I suppose saying “ええ、どうでもいい” should convey about the same meaning as “sure, why not.” Here’s some examplesif you want to see how it’s used.
Sarcasm does not translate well. It’s possible to use 皮肉 (sarcasm) but it’s both much less common in Japanese than in English, and interpreted differently. It feels a lot more mean-spirited and confrontational in Japanese. As Garula said, what you say is much more likely to be taken literally since you’re not a native speaker, or even fluent at this point. I’d suggest you avoid sarcasm entirely in communication with Japanese.
Besides which, it’s not terribly helpful to reply with sarcastic comments when your classmates are trying to find creative ways to use the limited vocabulary and grammar they’ve acquired so far.
If you’re tired of わかりません, try some alternatives:
〜でしょう (I think that~ is so / It is possible that~ is true) Midway between an assertion and a guess, depending on intonation and ending particles.
明るい（あかるい）でしょう -> I think it’s bright / It’s probably bright
〜はず (~should be true according to generally available information)
In reply to the door question: あるはず -> you and I both know there should be one
〜わけ (~should be true according to your own knowledge)
あるわけ –> as far as I know there is one
I can’t remember if I posted this here before, or if someone else has, but once you master kana, the web site www.hirgana.jp can help with reading. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily useful for learning kanji (it annotates kanji with furigana), but it helped me getting my hiragana rock solid and natural. And, it means with a decent dictionary, I can read Japanese websites pretty well.
“どうでもいい” is quite strong, however – it’s very dismissive and might be rude if it’s given as an answer to an honest question. You can temper it by making it into a question: どうでもいじゃない？ “It doesn’t matter does it?” Even there, though, you’re not stating that you don’t know, you’re stating that you don’t care. “ええ、どうでもいい” is only a valid response if you want to agree with someone who already stated that it doesn’t matter.
Just because I don’t think it’s been stressed enough already: don’t use sarcasm. People will think you’re a liar, people will think you’re rude, and people will think you’re a confused little person who babbles incoherently.
If you’re tired of using wakarimasen here are some more alternatives that haven’t been mentioned yet:
どうでしょう。 Or どうでしょうね。
どうかな。Or どうかしら, if you want to sound extra feminine.
As you might notice, the operative word here is どう, which if you haven’t learned yet, you likely will soon. It’s used to ask questions and means more or less “how”. In this case, you’re answering the question with another (rhetorical) question: “I wonder, eh?”
I find どうでしょうね and its vernacular variants (どうだろうね、どうやろうな、etc.) one of the most useful expressions. わかりません is actually a bit too strong of a statement for daily conversation. It’s good when someone expects a yes/no answer and you honestly don’t know, but it tends to put an end to the conversation right there. If someone asks you if it’s going to rain tomorrow, you’re better off with the softer answers above because it gently bounces the conversation back to the other person.
I don’t think this counts as a zombie yet; I didn’t see the sarcasm posts until now.
Maybe it’s the non-native speaker thing, but I’ve had people miss even very VERY obvious uses of sarcasm. One of my friends had to travel to Hawaii for work, and I said, “Oh, you have to go to Hawaii? Wow, that’s terrible!” Someone else in the conversation asked me in all seriousness, “Why is it terrible that she has to go to Hawaii?”
I don’t really use it much here, and it worries me a bit that jovan says it can come off as mean spirited, but there are just some times when I desperately want to be sarcastic. They just don’t have it in their culture at anywhere near the amount we use it.
Jragon, you’ll also miss out on some of the fun specific to being an L2 speaker of Japanese if you try to leave English out of it. For instance, during my semester in Japan, my other foreign exchange friends and I would sometimes refer to being “tree in a box” (instead of saying 困った).
But you do pronounce both of them… sort of. The best way I can describe it is that you sort of “stick” on the first one for a second.
ここではきものをぬいでください。
I’d go with まあね(Maa, ne)–something along the lines of “Sure, I guess.” I’m female, tho, so YMMV
