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Tuesday
12/4/2007 9:34:32 AM
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Michael Wells
Wow, I haven't written here in ages. I haven't done much Japanese study since the beginning of 2007, but some conversational practice has been good. Lately I've begun a bit of Chinese and so, back to the Internet to learn what I can.
There are some great resources popping up. Check this one out...
http://myhappyplanet.com
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Wednesday
11/8/2006 11:13:55 AM
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Michael Wells
One of my primary interests in Japanese is in understanding how Japanese thought is different from western thought. Language is a great indicator of this, as language constructions expose those patterns and distinctions clearly.
Recently I've begun to notice a clear distinction in the Japanese mind between animate and inanimate objects. Many terms are used differently in each of the two cases.
Defining animate and inanimate is a bit tricky for me at this early stage, but so far I understand it to be
- Animate. Things that are both alive, and move. Essentially, people and animals.
- Inanimate. Things that are not alive, or things that are alive but don't move. Books and trees, are respective examples here.
The most obvious example of language differences when relating to these two categories are;
- います exists (animate object).
- あります exists (inanimate object)
But there are also variations among verbs, and phrases, such as;
- せがひくい "height is short". Can only be used with animate objects.
- みじかい "short (in length)". Can only be used with inanimate objects.
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Tuesday
10/31/2006 6:32:20 AM
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Michael Wells
Many have told me that there are some significant language differences between Japanese cities -- but it's not until I began practicing Nihongo with my Japanese friends (who are all from different cities) that I began to notice how common and significant a challenge this is.
On occasion, one friend will teach me a phrase that another friend does not understand. Or, I might find a phrase in a textbook that only some Japanese are familiar with. As an example, Pimsleur's CD's are a fantastic practice tool, and they do a great job of connecting your ears and your lips to your Japanese vocabulary, as it were.
However, one of the very first phrases they teach is "ikaga desuka?" which is described as meaning "how are you (doing)?". Literally, I think it translates pretty much as "how is it?", which is meaningful to most English-speakers. However, so far only one in four Nihonjin I have tried it on knew what I was asking.
Now, this may be a goof on Pimsleur's part (unlikely), or it may be that the phrase is outmoded and "how is it?" can no longer refer to a person's day (or week, or recent events in his or her life...). It seems more likely to me that the phrase was never widespread, but that perhaps it is common in Tokyo? These are guesses of course, but it will be interesting to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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Sunday
10/22/2006 8:38:19 AM
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Michael Wells
Recently my studies have split into four vectors;
- Learning vocabulary
- Learning grammar
- Improving kana recognition (working on katakana now)
- Conversational japanese
The fourth one is new; I would have thought that, normally, as I progressed with vocabulary and grammar, that the ability to converse would naturally follow -- and that's true to a point. However the way you typically learn Japanese grammar focuses on the -masu form of verbs which is a bit unnaturally polite for regular conversation among friends.
It turns out that there are a lot of common phrases which make use of other verb forms that I haven't learned yet. For example, soo shiyoo, which means let's do that. "Shiyoo" is a form of "shimasu" します, to do, but it's not a form that I have learned yet. I don't know when it's used or how it's created so for the moment, I'll just be memorizing "soo shiyoo" and moving on none the wiser.
Or how about; doko iku which means either where are you going? or, where do you want to go? (or maybe both? I'm not precisely sure...) Iku is a form of ikimasu いきます, to go. What form is it? I have no idea.
And so it goes; I'm seeing lots of these, so although I assume there are some formal grammar rules behind the construction of these phrases, they're currently lost on me, and so conversational Nihongo is a second language entirely.
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Sunday
10/22/2006 8:32:32 AM
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Michael Wells
A good friend of mine who is also learning Japanese reminded me of the movie Shogun.
Athough I was very young when it played on tv, I loved this movie. It absolutely sucked me in -- despite the fact that I was really too young to watch it (the folks sort of dis-invited me from the living room).
Anyway, it was one of my first real introductions to Japanese cultural ideas and however innaccurate, antiquated, and hollywood-embellished it may have been, it never occurred to me until now how enormous its impact was on my interest in Japanese culture.
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Saturday
10/21/2006 4:29:05 PM
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Michael Wells
I was once told that one of the great things about the Japanese language is that there is very consistent phonetic pronunciation. That is, a given writing has only one way of pronunciation, and if you can read it, you know for certain how to pronounce it (unlike English, which has a number of exceptions to normal pronunciation rules).
But I think that perhaps my Japanese teacher was generalizing a bit much. It seems that there actually are different pronunciations that speakers rely on to disambiguate.
Take for example, ippai いっぱい
But, there are two pronunciations, and they mean very different things. My favorite Japanese dictionary gives 3 definitions for いっぱい;
一杯 【いっぱい】 (adj-na,adv,n) (1) cup of ...; drink; (2) full; (3) to the utmost; up to (one's income); (a) lot of; much; (P)
Notice the first and the third definitions... now, I can't remember which is which, but I've been told by native speakers that if you say IP-pai, it means one of them, and if you say ip-PAI, it means the other.
Do I have that wrong? Can someone verify this for me?
Also witness;
酒 【さけ】 (n) alcohol; sake; (P)
and
鮭 【さけ; しゃけ】 (n) salmon (edible fish, Salmo salar)
Both rice wine and salmon are pronounced "sake", but often times salmon is pronounced "SHA-ke" to disambiguate. Personally, I think it should be the other way around, because "SHA-ke" is easy to say when you're drunk. But if you notice in the dictionary entry for salmon, above, it lists two possible pronunciations -- "sake" さけ and "sha-ke" しゃけ.
I'm glad to see that in writing somewhere; thought I might be going crazy.
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Saturday
10/21/2006 4:28:05 PM
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Michael Wells
Very busy! Apologies for not writing more; The first 10 weeks class has finished, but there were not enough people for the next class, so we've skipped ahead and combined with the intermediate class. A bit of catching up to do...
ちょっと むずかしい、 でも とても おもしろい ですよ。
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Saturday
10/21/2006 4:22:30 PM
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Michael Wells
It is often said that the Japanese equivalents of Yes and No are はい and いいえ, respectively, but in fact it appears that there are significant differences.
In Japanese, はい and いいえ equate more directly to "that is correct", and "that is incorrect", rather than the English "yes" and "no". There is a big difference.
Therefore from a native Japanese speaker's perspective, English questions such as "Would you mind?" are very difficult to answer... neither はい or いいえ are workable responses.
Here's another example...
You don't have any salmon today, do you?
In English, a response of "no" would mean "no, we don't have any salmon today. However in Japanese, a response of いいえ means "no, that's not correct -- we DO have salmon today".
おもしろい ですね。
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Monday
8/21/2006 12:56:41 PM
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Michael Wells
I'm reading an interesting book called Japanese Beyond Words, which focuses primarily on cultural aspects rather than language. It's an excellent book, one well worth picking up if you've ever been interested in the Japanese social mindset.
In one portion of the book, the author, Andrew Horvat, laments the poor quality of language education in American schools, which is something I've been recently frustrated with. My high school had excellent language program, but it was limited to French, Spanish, and German -- no hint of asian languages anywhere.
Horvat points to another book called The Tongue-Tied American, in which Paul Simon (Ex-Senator, Illinois) further laments. Horvat writes;
[Simon] attributed it in part to the legacy of forced Americanization of immigrants. He quoted one New York City school commissioner a century ago who saw his "paramount duty" as "obliterating from the very earliest moment all the distinguishing foreign characteristics and traits, which [students] may bring with them, as obstructive, warring, and irritating elements."
Thus, for many Americans, wrote Simon, "to speak another language has been a matter of shame, not of pride."
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Tuesday
8/15/2006 2:56:42 PM
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Michael Wells
Time to learn some vocabulary, but I can recognize the 46 hiragana characters! Woot! I just made it through my flashcard set 3 times with no errors.
Basically, I did this by whipping up a flashcard program that makes me do tile-matching, hiragana to romaji, and says each character as I click it. It worked great, and I'll have to expand on it when I move to katakana, and later (somehow) kanji.
So I can recognize and sound them, which means... sort of, I can pronounce Hiragana, and perhaps in doing so, recognize some basic words. The next, probably more difficult step is to hear the hiragana and know how to write it. Have to figure out how to write a program for that...
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Tuesday
8/15/2006 2:21:04 PM
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Michael Wells
A great friend of mine (suteki na tomodachi?) named Miyuki loaned me a book named Japanese for Busy People. Many other nihongo-speaking friends of mine have recommended this book to me, so this was a fantastic stroke of luck, but even better (!) this particular edition is written in hiragana! Essentially, there is no kanji, and very little katakana in the book, and it has some English text for explanation of usage.
Sure, it will be a bit harder to get started, but its a major impetus to finish learning the hiragana character set, so that at the bare minimum, I can read and sound out the text of the book phonetically. This is incredibly exciting, already I can read simple words and phrases like ano, anata no, watashi wa, Tanaka-san, ... I imagine I'll have to read it with a hiragana dictionary in hand, but I can't imagine a faster way to expand my practical vocabulary and reading skills.
Unless I didn't mention it earlier, I have a big beef with romaji in that it seems to be often misleading in pronunciation. Even if you know the particular rules romaji system you're reading (Hepburn, etc.), there are key elements of the pronunciation such as glottal stops, which seem to be lost in the romanization. The hiragana, however, is completely trustworthy in its pronunciation.
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Thursday
8/10/2006 8:50:44 PM
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Michael Wells
Domo Arigato is probably the first japanese phrase I've ever learned, from the old Styx song, Mr. Roboto. If you remember the words, it goes something like this;
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto
Thank you very much-o, Mr. Roboto
So, for years, I've translated as, simply, Thank You Very Much, and I assumed, with my Anglo-brain-wiring, that it was;
- Domo == thank you
- Arigato == very much
- Domo Arigato == thank you very much
Wrongo!
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Thursday
8/10/2006 8:40:58 PM
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Michael Wells
There are three forms of writing in Japanese -- Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji, and they have some interesting aspects;
Hiragana. An alphabet of 46 characters, which make specific, distinctive sounds. These are used as the basis of the primary Japanese alphabet. Hiragana has the unique feature that if you can read it, you can pronounce it, almost (?) without exception.
Katakana. A second, different alphabet of 46 characters, which make the same sounds as Hiragana. I'm not sure how it evolved, or why it exists; however, it functions in the same way as Hiragana. Katakana is often used for foreign words or "loan words" which have been adopted in Japan. You'll often see place names written in Katakana.
Kanji. Glyphic; it's likely, I think, that in just seeing a kanji character, you'd have no idea how to pronounce it from its component parts. But, you might have a gist as to its meaning, even if you've never seen it before. Derived from Chinese, although as I understand it, there are some differences. A Japanese speaker in China can't (I hear) communicate in written Kanji to a Chinese speaker without some difficulty.
Kana referes to (also as I understand it) Hiragana and Katakana, but not Kanji. So it does not translate to anything really basic an obvious like "writing", but possibly more to "letters" or "alphabet", which Kana are, and Kanji is not.
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Wednesday
8/2/2006 10:40:58 PM
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Michael Wells
This wasn't precisely on my schedule for the day, but due to one of those wierd universal confluences of events, I signed up to learn Japanese today. It just happens that through karate and taiko I have more Japanese friends now than I've ever had, and... well it just made sense.
Unfortunately, I'm 12 weeks behind in the class, which means some really serious catch-up ahead of me. This could be brutal...
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Copyright © 2003-2010, Michael Wells. All Rights Reserved.
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