It was his Japanese translation of the hackneyed “Me love you long time.” Not an exact translation, but close enough to make the point.
:smack: Correct. I don’t have a Japanese IME on my work computer (what a shock), so I’m stuck pasting from the online dictionary I use, and I must have pasted in 一杯 again in the place of です and not noticed. Good catch!
Nah, it was grammatically correct–you just spelled two words wrong and said “I am eating” instead of “I ate.” (Technically, “I **just **ate” would be 食べたばかりです tabeta bakari desu, but that’s a bit more grammatically complex than what you’re currently working on.)
Yes, I realize this wasn’t originally from a Japanese source nor was it an exact translation. But still, your point was apt. It was inappropriate and I apologize.
Actually, I meant to say ‘I am eating’, but I think my English got a bit mangled there.
Well then the *-te imasu *form was perfect!
When you’ve got 3.5 languages fighting for brain space, it gets a little weird.
What are the other two?
Esperanto, and the 0.5 (more like 0.05, actuially) is French.
So you’re learning Esperanto? Like really learning it? Are you part of a club or something? You know, like those people who learn Klingon?
Nah, we look down on those who learn Klingon (just kidding… 
). It’s kind of a club, and we fairly often have visitors, travellers passing through who drop in for a bit of chat. Mostly, people who loearn Esperanto are in it because they like languages, want something easy (that was me), or want to go travelling and meet people.
If you speak Esperanto, you can go all over the place and meet people who will show you around/ introduce you to out-of-the-way attractions/introduce you to attractive people/give you a place to stay for the night/explain the local train system/ etc. It’s a different way of travelling, kind of the opposite of a canned bus tour.
Esperanto has always interested me, as most languages on resuscitation do, but not enough to actually take the time to learn it. Consider me duly impressed, Sunspace.
You pass out and then pick a language? 
Or am I missing something here?
Heh. No, the language has passed out. I probably should have said “…languages on life support…”
Like it did so many things, the Internet revived it. The difference is the difference between me finding a book on Esperanto in the shcool library when I was in electronics school, being fascinated for a week, and then having an exam and forgetting about the whole thing because no-one else knew what I was talking about… and me finding Esperanto-speakers on the net, arranging a meet in person, taking it up, reading web pages, practising via IM, downloading music, contacting people overseas, and then going there and speaking nothing but Esperanto for a week. Without the net, I wouldn’t have gotten past step one.
In not too much longer, I need to find someone to IM with in Japanese.
Ah, I was reading it as, “as most languages do upon my resuscitation.” Makes more sense now.
ETA: Sunspace, I don’t use any IM programs anymore, but if you’d settle for Japanese PMs, I’d be happy to converse back and forth with you here, if you don’t mind another L2 speaker who’s more than a little rusty.
That’s greatly appreciated. I’m not sure whether I’m at the stage to make a decent conversation, but if you don’t mind someone nattering on nonsensically within a restricted set of words, I can send PMs. (Email or IMs would be much smoother, though.)
Dropping you a PM with my email, then.
Thanks!
We had our fifth lesson on Saturday. Wow. I’m a lot further with this than I ever was in French at an equivalent time. Makes me wonder whether there are any similar programs for teaching French.
And I just finished the eighth and final lesson of the beginner’s course.
We wrote a simple essay, which will be gathered and published as a booklet for everyone. Many people are continuing on to the next level. I had already paid for that, so I collected the new textbook and notes for the first lesson of level 2. That doesn’t start until January, so I have almost two months to review what we did.
The book is Minno no Nihingo. It will do us for at least levels 2, 3, and 4, which will take me to next September at least.
In today’s lesson, the teacher was introducing time terms using the kanji and then putting furigana above. Oh yes. There are kanji in my future. I know this now.
Over all, I found the course to be densely-packed with information. Each lesson, the teacher gradually built up a complex whiteboard full of details, which we photographed at the end of the lesson. These became valuable reference material.
We spent the time building up a basic knowledge of sentence structure through experience, which enables me to say things like 「Santaさんはともだちとじどうしゃです-ぱ-へきょおのあさいきます。」Santa-san is going by car this morning to the store to meet friends. 
I think that this course needs at least an hour of uninterrupted study a night, which I found difficult to do, given assorted other crazinesses in my life just now. As a result, I feel like I made maybe 50%, but I have two months to review and learn the vocabulary and go over it and over it and bring myself up to snuff. And learn katakana. And figure out how to draw the kanji we did get. And become smoother with the hiragana.
Woohoo! And glad to hear you’re continuing on.
Pssst… Minna.
Nice work! Isn’t it fun when you start putting together all the little bits into something really useful? A few notes…
*Suupaa *should be written with katakana: スーパー
The long vowel in kyou is written with an u, not an o: きょう
A shorter way of writing *this morning *is kesa: 今朝 (けさ)
One nice thing about kanji is that the more you learn, the easier it will be, as you learn various radicals (small elements that appear in many kanji in various combinations), as well as the general guidelines for stroke order and such.
がんばって! 