August 11, 2008

A few Thoughts ON learning Japanese

There is spoken language and the written language. The Japanese language is not so unique as it has borrowed kanji or characters from Kanji has deep meanings contained within each character which represents meaning like words. Much different than what we, who are stifled by the alphabet, are use to. We can see the meaning of things inside the kanji also.

Therefore from the get go, we should try to wean ourselves from the temptation to look up words in a romaji dictionary because it makes it harder later or at least less easier to learn Japanese in depth if you cannot read the language. At the beginning there is no choice other than to study and memorize words that to decipher meaning. We should use a dictionary like sanseido’s daily concise wa-ei jiten.
Week 1 verbs - Drink, Sleep, Eat, go hataraku. Put verbs in all bases. Japanese Nouns: coffee, tea , milk, water, coca cola , sake , aquarius, beer, juice.

Japanese Adjectives - oishii, suteki na, benri na, okii, nagaim samui, atsui, chisai, mijikai.

Grammer masu, masen, mashita, masen deshita etc,
BII +tai desu = I want to. polite form. Without the desu its plain form.
Shall we +verb or let’s +verb = BII + masho (long oh vowel sound)

Be careful when studying Japanese for the first couple of times to make sure and pay attention to some awkward details that might throw your study off. The various types of Romanization techniques used to display the Japanese syllables to westerners varies greatly and should be duly noted. For example putting two a’s together doesn’t equal just one sound it will actually be a then a repeated after it as in okaasan or mother. in Japanese vowels can extend themselves into their double impressions where two vowels are connected into one yet the true pronunciation will be elongated double vowel sound.
Adjectives- are fun to play with Practice putting the adjectives in front of a noun etc
ex.
New car – atarashii kuruma,
Old house – furui ie
Big mouth – okii kuchi
Small flower – chisai hana

Remember that nouns have no plural as such as we do in our western tongue so new cars would still be atarashii kuruma, or big mouths would still be okii kuchi