help me learn japanese

replace the ums and ahs with ano and eto, it's good for your language confidence to feel like you're still in japanese even when you're making mistakes/being slow.

So desu ne / nn / e are all useful for killing time while you're brain kicks into gear too. I'm sure there are more.

replace the ums and ahs with /ano/ and /eto/, it's good for your language confidence to feel like you're still in japanese even when you're making mistakes/being slow.

brilliant! thank you

and from me too!

i've been working 40+ hour weeks since i started my two jobs, but my commute is 1 1/2 hours each way, so i've been cramming in as much 日本語 as possible on the train/bus. i am kind of enjoying the challenge of writing 漢字 in a rocking train car, and walking around with the pimsleur lessons on, not caring who hears me repeating the lessons. :D

ス is my favourite character to write so far, only 25 in mind, maybe RO will be bitchin', also my Hiragana handwriting is getting totally baddass.

Remember to get yer stroke order right at the beginning, otherwise you'll get into terrible handwriting habits like I did.

i am fond of ネ as far as kana go.

Remember to get yer stroke order right at the beginning, otherwise you'll get into terrible handwriting habits like I did.

― OORT (Matt #2), Tuesday, 4 June 2013 00:41 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is so very important. even if you're one of those people who 'nah i don't need to handwrite, everyone types anyway', try writing a kanji in your phone in the wrong stroke order and see what happens.

ネ is really just a showoff ス

ヘ is the same for both, wonder why.

http://i40.tinypic.com/30rpevd.jpg

hiragana and katakana へ are both formed from shorthand for the character 部.

Both hiragana and katakana evolved as shorthand for kanji. Writing in Japan was at first in Chinese: before the invention of the kana, if japanese sounds needed to be expressed in writing, they used kanji phonetically. Since no-one had agreed specifically which characters would be used to represent which sounds, there wasn't a one to one correspondence. A sound could be represented by a number of different characters, usually not more than 5. So, e.g., the sound we write as え might be represented with 衣, or 江, or 得 -- usually in a reduced or simplified form. え itself is a simplified form of 衣; エ is a simplified form of 江. By the 9th century or so people were quite consistently used the simplified forms that we know as kana, but (especially in the case of hiragana) the choice of characters was a matter of style more than anything else. As late as the 19th century people were still using multiple characters to represent the same sound (and a lot of those variant hiragana look the same as the modern katakana).

Katakana were used for annotation and thus tended to be smaller and neater: they are by and large taken from small elements of the kanji associated with a sound. Hiragana tend to be formed from the whole kanji written cursively, and were used for writing running text and as an all-purpose syllabary for people who weren't in a position to learn kanji.

Really interesting ty! Do you know when and by what process Katakana were assigned to loanwords?

got into a conversation w/ a native 日本人 on the bus who noticed my flash cards :3

I never realised that back translating loanwords in Katakana would be as tricky, did anybody else find this a problem?

In what way?

Just simply figuring what the loanword is after it's been a bit mangled by Katakana.

It's okay with more common words, but something like ロッジ isn't so obvious

yeah, reading katakana words ends up as the hardest thing, soz like.

the process of assigning katakana to loan words: hm. you find katakana being used for grammatical information in official writing all the way through the tokugawa period - and it's used for official announcements written up on boards well into meiji - but maybe that's just in its role as the clearest and most legible of the scripts. It's being used for loanwords from Dutch and Portuguese in the 18th century at least. Loanwords could also pretty often have kanji characters assigned to them either by sound or meaning, e.g. lamian / ramen 拉麺, tobacco / tabako 煙草 ("burning grass"), holland / oranda 阿蘭陀, coffee / kōhī 珈琲 --- you'll still see these on e.g. signage, because they look cool, but since the early 20th century and particularly since the script reform of the 1940s they aren't in common use. (chinese words are often left as kanji, but subsequently can end up being given a japanese pronunciation)

The thing to remember about loan words into Japanese is that often they do not come from English - e.g. エネルギー is from German, ビール is from Dutch, タバコ is from Portuguese, レストラン is from French. So you can't necessarily use English pronunciation to predict what the loan word will sound like, or instantly tell from the katakana word what its source was.

Also you get just frankly weird ones, the way one does in any language that incorporates foreign words -- for example, the last time I was in Japan I went into a public toilet in a station and found a sign up saying something that I translated to "it is a crime to use the consent in these facilities" - with this katakana word in there, コンセント, that I didn't recognise but certainly read as "consento". So I was a bit baffled and maybe slightly worried by it? But eventually remembered that I had a dictionary and could look the word up, and it turns out that "consento" is short for "concentric plug" and means "the wall outlet", and so it was telling people not to, you know, charge their phones there.

コンビニ

I have trouble with some of the English ones! Was stumped by ボランティア yesterday, thought it was a proper noun.

http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb8d53ef017eeb2b0a9d970d-pi

ブラジル - oh come on ffs, Brazil?

Guys, how do you render out a word like 'where' in Katakana? Specifically puzzled by a 'wh' sound.

at a guess it would be something like ho-e-i-ru
whip is ho-i-pu, white is ho-wa-i-to etc

The "wh" sound is just "we" I think, you see ウェ used for words like that. "Western" is ウェスタン for example. "Where" might be ウェアー?

Nm, disregard what I said. I think zappi's got it, was not aware of "h" being used as a sound for words like whip!

ウェア = ware (as in sportsware, warehouse, etc)

Thanks! D'y think my band's name, 'Nowherians' would be ノウエアリアヌス ?

probably with n rather than nu? also you'd need to lengthen the o on 'no' - ノーエアリアンズ ?

wikipedia tells me that the Ride album "Nowhere" was katakana-ized as "ノーホエア" tho, so maybe you're looking at something more like ノーホエアイアンズ

http://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=ノーホエア+&title=特別%3A検索

okay, that's not helpful - basically, ノーホエア seems to be the conventional transliteration. (ノーホエア・マン, ロード・トゥ・ノーホエア, ノーホエアズ・トゥー・ファー・フォー・マイ・ベイビー)

ノーウェリアンス apparently! Got that from the horses's mouth as it were, not that I'm calling my wife a horse you understand.

Thank you Emi! (and everybody)

Yet another take:

ノーウェリアンズ
[nōuerianzu]

chōonpu after "no"
trailing (small) "e" on "ue"
dakuten on "su" for "zu" (cf, vegetarians, barbarians, etc.)

Hope this helps!
Jersey Al ブロッコリー

lol, i hate katakana

I think I'm beginning to also.

Today I was feeling smug, I found a PDF with the first 103 Kanji for JLPT N5, so I abused the works printer and got it all bound up nicely at the copy-stop, only to find that near the beginning there is a big list of 'extended Katakana' which I haven't seen in the Kodansha books or elsewhere.

So now I'm sat staring at this page in mute horror like it's a big glass tube full of facehuggers.

fuck an extended katakana

extended as in like ヴァ or フォ or ディ? or extended as in like ヱ or ヲ？

The former, what the heck is ヱ ?

"we" (you are unlikely to ever see this in a modern text)

ゑ

yeah that's my fave

Well I started the big one, learning Kanji, the Heisig way for now. The ios app is really great for practicing each set, that's for sure. For those who know Kanji, how many did you do per day / session?

when i used heisig i was doing about 30 a day, but promptly forgot all of them. rote memorization of kanji/yomi has worked better for me.

Promptly as in you forgot them the next day when practicing or a month later earlier kanjis were forgotten.

i just forgot all the mnemonics provided by heisig as well as the ones i'd made up for the kanjis.

heisig was in fact useful for me though, in that it helped me think of kanji in terms of being made up of smaller parts that reoccur often, which made learning them afterwards a lot easier.

i usually try to do 5 a day but it's been a couple weeks since i've learned any new kanji :\ i've been reviewing the ones i know though, and there's probably a 95% retention rate.

So you went through the whole program?

Whether it sticks or not I'm having a good time, although only a few days and 100+ kanji in, it's nice to be able to understand some pieces of the puzzles.

Thought I'd link to this guy's JLPT related site, I'm a looooong way off N5 even, but It's insightful to hear about one student's ups and down. I also like the fact that he is kinda low-key and doesn't come across as super erudite, peppy and all HI THERE like some folk's websites or YT channels.

http://jlptbootcamp.com/

doesn't come across as super erudite, peppy and all HI THERE like some folk's websites or YT channels.

a big part of me wants to murder that "fluent in 3 months" dude for this reason