ダッミト!! (Lol, that was my attempt at DAMMIT! in 日本語)

Yea, so I haven't sat down here in forever. Last time I did, I did the third lesson in Season に called 'Before You Learn Kanji.'

Although the content was heavy (も), I was excited at the end because I was under the impression that kanji would be next. Only to find out that wasn't really the case. I took a bunch of notes on that lesson though and I want to document them here tonight. On a pretty positive side note, before I get started with those notes, the next time I logged into TextFugu, I saw that I could sign up to alpha test their new kanji learning tool, WaniKani. I did and IT IS AWESOME!! So, although I haven't been here in awhile, and although I was a bit disappointed after the last lesson (I mean c'mon, I was sort of excited instead of frightened of kanji!), I've actually been learning quite a few kanji (and more radicals of course) using WaniKani. It's really cool. So, in essence, what I'm trying to say is that I haven't been a totally bad kid when it comes to my 日本語 quest. In fact, I've been all over the WaniKani, so at least there's that!

Anyway, about those notes. . . Here they are. . . Verbatim! (It's kind of scary. LOL)

Before You Learn Kanji

Know the first set of radicals well. It's going to suck - period. However @ least with TextFugu it's going to be less hard.

(おん) On'yomi - Original Chinese readings

• Long story short due to Chinese history, kanji have multiple おん readings and many of them are used. Fortunately, for each kanji, most use a single on'yomi 80-90% of the time. (Think 80-20 rule - sort of)

(くん) Kun'yomi

• Quite a bit different from おん reading. くん are actually native 日本語 words that have been associated and attached to kanji as it was being imported

• *In order to make kanji accessible to [those] who didn't speak Chinese, ひらがな got attached to kanji. Ex: the kanji for "eat" or "food" is 食 / しょく (on'yomi)
• The on'yomi is the original Chinese pronunciation but his on'yomi isn't (usually) used on its own to say    "eat" or "food." You often have to combine kanji together to form jukugo (combo kanji) in order to create a word using on'yomi pronunciations. For example, 夕食 (ゆうしょく) means dinner. You can see how the kanji are combined to create a word. (Ha! I guess...)

• The kun'yomi is different. (Yay!) Since it is the Japanese pronunciation of a word or concept, the Japanese figured out their word for eat and applied it to this kanji. The word for "to eat" in Japanese is たべます, but that's too long to stick in one kanji (plus when its on its own, you already pronounce it しょく.) So by adding hiragana to kanji, it shows how to read the kanji. When written in Japanese, and kanji, it looks like this: 食べます. (た.べます)
• When you learn the kun'yomi, you learn the whole thing - hiragana, kanji and all
• *Think of kun'yomi as new vocabulary you learn with the kanji*

• Because Japanese words didn't fit w/ kanji perfectly, some duct-taping had to happen i.e. often times, hiragana will be attached to a kanji to "complete" it and show the kun'yomi reading.

When to Use the On'yomi and Kun'yomi (O_o)

• Pretty difficult.
• General rules which might help.

1. When a kanji is sitting on it's own, often times you'll use the くん reading. (There are exceptions to this--aren't there always??!)
2. When a kanji is combined with another kanji, and no hiragana is attached, you'll probably use the おん reading. This is jukugo.
3. A lot of the time, you'll have to have prior knowledge of a particular word before you can know the pronunciation of it. Often times, you can guess the pronunciation of a word/kanji, based on your studies/a few indicators, but in the end preparedness and experience is key. Even Japanese speakers can't always figure out the pronunciation of a word they haven't learned in context before. It's not like English where you can just sound it out, after all!!

So, yea. After digitizing those notes, I think I might be just as confused if not more than when I wrote them. No freaking wonder why most students of 日本語 quit. This stuff is tough. If I hadn't learned several kanji and their readings (even though I couldn't tell you definitively whether the readings I've learned are おん or くん honestly -- I guess likely くん based on general rule 1 above) via WaniKani, I think I'd be pretty depressed right now. LOL.

Goodnight and またね!

Season 二.二 - Negative tense nouns continued/Radicals 2

So yea... took me more than 'あした' to get back here in the study cubby and finish up this post. I've done some practicing of the negative tense nouns in the interim but not enough. I would really like to change that. If all goes according to plan, I'll be going back to Torrance in September so I would really like to get a lot done between then and now.

So.... back to the matter at hand.

OK. Practice for this section consisted of reading lots of 'It is not _______ sentences, importing said sentences into the Anki sentences deck for further practice and the level 2 radicals as well as importing those radicals into the Anki Radicals deck. I technically got through everything except completing the level 2 radicals and the respective Anki piece last time I was here. There were so many level 2 radicals that I ended up leaving a bit intimidated. Tonight I went over all of them (there are 十五!!) and got them imported into Anki. These are tough considering the level 1 radicals only had 三.

Here are those level 2 radicals and their mnemonics:

• Seven 七

What does this radical look like? Hmm, nothing much. What about if you turn it upside down? Now does it look like a 7 with a line through it? Close enough to help you to remember that this radicals is seven.

• Two 二

One line plus another line equals two lines. This radical represents the number two.

• Person 人

If you were to draw a person with just strokes like you see in kanji, you’d create a stick figure. This is just the legs… but why is it just the legs? This stick figure is a zombie stick figure. It comes at you, and you push it away, but when you do, the whole top half gets torn away. He looks up and says “Hey, I’m a person too, you know.”

• Enter 入

 Be careful, this radical looks a lot like the “person” radical (人). What’s the difference? It has something extra sticking out the top, off to the side. This is a tee-pee with a nice big ENTRANCE in it.

• Power 力

Imagine a guy flexing his arm downward to show off his steroid-pumped arm. It’s huge. It’s so full of power. Imagine a power meter on his arm too with the needle running all the way to the right, filling up the entire power meter. (*Random Brainpick: I don't know if I really follow this one. Looks like the カタカナ for カ to me. In fact, just like it.)

• Sword 刀

If you look at this radical, it looks like the bottom part of a sword – the handle, more specifically. This radical also looks a lot like the power radical, so don’t get confused. It’s missing the little nubbin at the top, because 90% of the power comes from the sword to cut your enemies down (which is why the sword radical is 90% of the POWER radical).

• Cross 十

This radical looks like a cross. Who carries a cross? The Jews do. Imagine a Jewish rabbi carrying a bunch of these crosses around (in case you’re wondering “why all the Jew?” it’s because the word Jew will help you to remember the pronunciation of a kanji later, too).

• Stool 又

This looks just like a fold-out stool, amiright?

• Nine 九

If you look at this radical in just the right way, you’ll notice that it kind of looks like the letters “n” and “i” (the “i” comes from the little flippy-up stroke on the right side). What do the letter’s “n” and “i” start spelling? Why, the word nine.

• Nail 丁

See the barb radical with a head on it? It looks just like a nail. That barb on the end looks painful. Imagine getting that nailed into your arm – imagine how much it would hurt to pull out, too. No, really, imagine it – it will help you to remember this radical so much better.

• Volcano 八

This radical is going to be very similar to some other radicals (人, 入, and another coming later), but the reason this one is a volcano is because of the blown out top. If you’ve seen a blown up volcano, often times the top is flat instead of pointed because it exploded sometime in the past making this a volcano.

• Lid 亠

This looks just like something you’d put on a kettle, right? Even a little handle to make sure you don’t burn yourself. This radical is some kind of lid.

• Fins ハ

Human legs look like this (儿) because we have feet. Animals have feet too. What doesn’t have feet? Fish legs don’t have feet. They’re just little fish fins sticking out, like these fins here.

• Enclosure 勹

This radical encloses a lot of things (or at least tries to enclose things). It’s like a big latchy box that goes around something and then chomps down to enclose it, making this the enclosure.

• Lion L

This L-Shaped Radical is the radical lion, because “L is for Lion.” You’ll have to remember two steps for this one. You’ll see that it’s an “L,” then you have to remember what “L” stands for. I think “Lion” is one of the first things that comes to mind, and it’ll make for interesting mnemonics, which is why this radical is lion.

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This post and the one preceeding it make up the 'Negative Tense Nouns' chapter. On to the next which is 'Before You Begin Your Kanji! Exciting and terrifying all in one!

またね!

Season 二.二 - Negative tense nouns

Negative tense nouns are step 二 of 四 when it comes to noun tenses (present/future, negative, past and past-negative.) We already know about positive/future tense nouns so this is the next thing on the list. Per Koichi-san, this will help to solidify knowledge of basic Japanese noun grammar as well as create the building blocks to past-negative noun tenses!

So far, we've learned a lot of sentences like, 'It is a monkey.' 'It is a cat.' 'It is an apple.' The syntax for saying 'It is not _____.' is very similar. You just replace the です with the negative form of です, which is じゃありません. It's a mouthful and hard to pronounce. So to say 'It is not a monkey' you'd say さるじゃありません.

Koichi-san mentions that eventually we will  learn the less formal version of じゃありません which is shorter and easier but not useful in almost all situations like the neutral formal version that we're learning now. *Random brainpick: I'm guessing the format for negative nouns I learned using the My Japanese Word Coach on the Nintendo DS was the less formal one as there was no じゃ, only ありません.*

There were a couple of new vocab words introduced here which I want to note, although Koichi-san stressed the vocab is not really something to hang on here. It just wouldn't be my style to let something new go un-noted! I want to know it all! (If my brain can keep up!)

cherry - さくらんぼ
peach - もも
tangerine - みかん
bicycle - じてんしゃ
newspaper - しんぶん
apple - りんご

We practiced a few sentences based on a picture of a みかん. The first one was the question: みかんですか to which the answer was はい、みかんです because the picture was of a tangerine. Next was the question さくらんぼですか to which the answer was いいえ、さくらんぼじゃありません because the pictured fruit was not a cherry.

*いいえ is no in 日本語 while はい is yes.*

The practice for this lesson was more than I could complete tonight so I will finish this blog post tomorrow!

またね!

Season 二.一 - Asking questions in Japanese / Radicals 一

Basically, to ask a question in Japanese, you simply add the particle か to the end of a sentence. There are some exceptions (aren't there always??) but this is a general rule of thumb to follow. At least for now while we're just in the simple grammar stages

For example, the sentence でんしゃです can be turned into a question by simply adding か to the end - でんしゃですか. You go from stating that 'it is a train' to asking if it is a train.

As far as the first radicals lesson, we looked at the one-stroke radicals which we need to learn the one-stroke kanji. They are as follows along with their mnemonics:

• Ground  一

This radical consists of a single, horizontal stroke. What’s the biggest, single, horizontal stroke? That’s the ground.

• Barb亅

This radical is shaped like a barb, like you’d see on barb wire. Imagine one of these getting stuck in your arm, and think about how much it would hurt to pull it out with that hook on the end.

• Stick｜

This is a single stick, standing upright. It even looks like a stick. The stick is standing up straight because it can stick out of the ground (radical), which is why it’s vertical.

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At the end of this lesson was a practice session that included です and ですか sentences along with a new Anki sentences deck that consisted of questions that was merged with the existing Anki sentence deck and a new Anki deck for the radicals detailed above.

I covered this lesson in its entirety last time I sat at the study cubby, but needed to get to blogging on it which is what this is all about. I haven't been doing well with getting into the cubby every day but I'm trying to stay motivated to change that. I need to be here AT LEAST three times a week.

Onward!

Time for another catch up post!

Heeeeeey! So it's been awhile again. Not as long as I thought it had been since I last posted though, so that's awesome! Good thing this time (like last time) is that I've still been studying 日本語 quite a lot lately, even though I haven't been posting about it.　

Since my last post, I've covered a few sections of TextFugu to complete Season 一 in it's entirety! ^_^

Going to summarize what I've done since I was here last. It's a lot so it will make for a long catch up post so try to keep up. :)

Passion List

I created my passion list, which is a list of 二十 vocabulary words that revolve around something that I am extremely passionate about -- Ron Paul and the message of liberty!! Koichi-san wanted us to create this list of vocab words so we can associate something we already like into our 日本語 studies to keep us motivated.

Here is my passion list!

liberty - ふき
government - せいじ
president - だいとりょう
doctor -　いしゃ
economics - けいぜいがく
gold - おごん
debt - ふさい
revolution - かくめい
Constitution - けんぽう
America - アメリカ
republic - きょわこく
representative - ぎいん
war - せんそう
freedom - ふき
money - おかね
bank - ぎんこう
prosperity - はんえい
people - ひとびと
speech - えんぜつ
rights - じんけん

I created my worksheet, looked up the vocab using the radical online dictionary Koichi-san referred to - http://jisho.org/ - and created my Anki deck to study these words. I know most of these pretty well by now. Viva la かくめい!!

Japanese Grammar with Yoda

Next up was a section called Japanese Grammar with Yoda. In this section, there were a few Yoda highlight videos which were entertaining, especially since I'm not particularly familiar with Star Wars. Point being in this section is that when speaking Japanese, the order we are accustomed to in English is flip-flopped. Yoda's way of speaking is sort of parallel with this at least in the simplest and most basic forms of Japanese grammar. For example, in English, we would say 'It is a strawberry' but in Japanese the flip-flopping that occurs makes it actually 'Strawberry it is.' So needless to say, we covered and practiced です in this section and created very basic sentences with various nouns like strawberry, grapes, etc.

In this section, I did end up learning some new vocab words so gonna record those for future reference:

strawberry - いちご
monkey - さる
pumpkin - かぼちゃ
grapes - ぶどう
banana - バナナ

There were others used but I knew them already like でんしゃ, つなみ, とまだち, すし, さけ, さしみ, すもう, みず, せんせい, からて, いぬ and ねこ.

Also this section, we practiced using the words from the passion list with です.

Lastly there was a new Anki deck introduced for download for the various TextFugu sentences we worked on in this section and a practice ひらがな worksheet to make sure we had them down prior to moving on to the next section: Intro to Kanji!!!

Intro to Kanji

This section was just purely information for the soaking about how most Japanese learners learn Kanji according to how Japanese school children learn Kanji and how that method fails most non-Japanese who are attempting to learn the language. This is mainly because Japanese school children learn Kanji in procession based simply on the meaning of the Kanji, not the complexity of the characters themselves. I mean they learn Kanji that are sometimes in excess of 15 strokes before they learn Kanji that have one stroke because the word meanings themselves are less complex. Koichi-san detailed how the TextFugu methodology for Kanji learning was different and thus actually much more effective for learning to read Kanji quickly as we would be focusing on complexity as far as number of strokes and not meaning of the words. Koichi-san also stressed that it isn't really necessary to learn how to write Kanji at this stage and wanted us to focus more on learning to read it.

He also introduced the concept of the 80-20 rule. Developed by Vilfredo Pareto, the 80-20 rule states: “80% of the efforts of something come from roughly 20% of the causes.” We will also utilize this concept in learning Kanji. Koichi-san believes that:

20% of kanji makes up 80% of all that is written, therefore we’re going to learn that 20% first, so you can start using your reading abilities in real-life situations as quickly as possible (which is really the best way to practice, anyways).

The goal TextFugu aims to achieve in respect to Kanji is to get us reading it as soon as possible and to help us learn the most useful things first.

In essence, the TextFugu method for Kanji learning totally turns the traditional method on it's head. Using the TextFugu method we will:

First - learn the radicals - sort of the building blocks of Kanji
Second - once the radicals are learned they can be put together to build Kanji
Third - continuing this progress - as previously mentioned we'll learn Kanji by the complexity of the characters themselves vs. the meanings. This helps us to build on concepts we've already learned through teh first and second steps to create learning more and more complex Kanji with far less brain-strain
Fourth - using practice worksheets, unconventional memory tricks and other tools to study the Kanji and  move them into long-term memory

No time like the present to get started so next up was...

Intro to Radicals!

This section began groundwork for learning actual Kanji. Radicals are very rarely taught in 日本語 but that's not really a good thing. Kanji radicals are basically like the letters of the alphabet so to speak. In 英語, we had to learn the letters that make up words before we could actually learn words and that's how radicals work too. Kanji are typically made up of several pieces so instead of just trying to remember what strokes go where, we can actually learn the different pieces of the kanji that make up the strokes. LOL, not sure if this will make sense to an outsider, but it makes sense in my head. For a final attempt at explaining, the kanji for 'walk' is made up of 8 strokes. Instead of remembering 8 separate strokes, we can actually just learn the three radicals that make up the 八 strokes. The radical method is really supreme for the purpose of long term memory and that's what learning a language is really all about.

We'll start off learning the radicals only made up of one stroke each, then use those radicals to learn the 2 stroke radicals then use those to learn the 3 stroke radicals and so on and so forth. The methodology really is designed to keep building upon things you know so as to reinforce and strengthen the learning you do.

In order to learn the radicals, we'll use mnemonics. Here are the steps:

1. Take advantage of “flashbulb” memory - we remember things that are traumatic or shocking more thoroughly than other memories - think about how you can remember minute details about certain events in life - like where you were when 9/11/01 took place
2. Make things ridiculous - we'll use crazy little stories so as to enhance our memories - you don't remember ordinary things like you do outlandish things
3. Use Multiple Senses
4. Put together memorable stories - flashbulb memories + ridiculous stories
5. Practice - makes perfect!

This summarizes the end of Season 1. Now on to Season 2 and the radicals themselves!

またね!

I'm baaaaaack!!

Wow! Been a very long time since I've posted here!

Cool thing is that I haven't been on a complete abandonment of my 日本語 studies!
Since my last post, I've completed the Reading, Writing and Memorizing ひらがな piece of TextFugu (Hiragana 31-46: まみむめも、やゆよ、らりるれろ、わを、ん, Dakuten: がぎぐげご、ざじずぜぞ、だぢづでど、ばびぶべぼ、ぱぴぷぺぽ, Combination Hiragana: きゃ、しゃ、ちゃ、にゃ、ひゃ、みゃ、りゃ、ぎゃ、じゃ、ぢゃ、びゃ、&　ぴゃ Columns and finally Long vowels and the small　つ! I've also been utilizing drag and drop ひらがな quite regularly (even using the カタカナ version a bit too) as well as Anki when I'm here on my netbook in the study cubby and finally a few apps on the iPhone I got for Christmas to study vocab and kanji!

Wanted to make a few notes about the Long vowel and small っ section of TextFugu before I move on.

• Long vowels: Pretty subtle difference between regular/short vowels - just double the length of normal vowels.

• Here is a helpful pattern to follow as provided by Koichi - pronounced Kouichi - an example of a long vowel!):

• あ-Column + あ – examples: ああ、かあ、さあ、まあ、きゃあ

• い-Column + い – examples: いい、きい、しい、じい

• う-Column + う – examples: くう、じゅう、にゅう、りゅう、ふう

• え-Column + え – examples: ええ

• お-Column + う – examples: おう、こう、そう、とう、じょう、りょう、ぞう、どう、もう

• *お-Column + お – examples: おお、とお

• *Sometimes お-column kana can be extended with お as well (though you’ll see う extending お-column kana more often).

• Small っ: allows for double consonants
• For example, the word Japan (Nippon) written in ひらがな utilizes a small っ because the 'P' is doubled. So, it's written にっぽん. 
• The small っ is obviously written smaller than the normal size つ as you can see here. The small っ doubles consonant sounds while the full-size つ is just pronounced 'tsu.' The small っ always comes right before the consonant sound you want to duplicate.

Last thing regarding finishing the Reading, Writing and Memorizing section is that I went back and completed all the previous worksheets for this section, as a refresher and a way to push forward.

So, that pretty much sums up where I'm at now. Onward!!

またね!