Learning Japanese From Zero

[dampingwire]

It's funny, because I started by trying to read the sentence at the top, and spent over a minute puzzling over it before realizing that it was probably just the instructions, and that the actual question was probably just asking for the reading of the kanji below, which I knew instantly.

At N5 (and up to N3 iirc) the question wording is pretty fixed and the format of each question doesn't change. So if the first question is "give the kana for the underlined kanji", that's what it will be every time. You can save a good deal of time by not reading the question!

Also, the instructions that are printed on the front are worth reading through: they are also the same every time but I think they are part of the CD they play for the listening test, so it's worth knowing what it sounds like so you can stay relaxed during that part!

Anyway, I got the first two questions easily, since they were about kanji, but I missed the third question, which was a vocabulary question, so I stopped there. The word they were looking for was うるさい which WK covers (as 煩い)... at level 60!

うるさいis pretty common, but it is usually written in kana in my experience. So although the kanji is relatively "high level", the word isn't.

[golyplot]

That's what I figured. WK doesn't include kata-only words at all, but it sometimes includes obscure kanji writings of the same word.

Anyway, seeing three three month mark pass by inspired me to redouble my efforts and actually get serious about Japanese study... which only lasted a day and a half, as I didn't get any study done yesterday, apart from the morning. Hopefully I'll be able to get things back on track tomorrow. Of course, even in the best of times, mental energy is in short supply, which is why my usual strategy is to race to the point where I can watch shows in the TL, which doesn't take any energy. But sadly with Japanese, that doesn't work so well.

[golyplot]

Well I managed to pull myself away from arguing with people on the internet for long enough to do some study last night. I read my third article on NHK News Easy. I tried ichimoe like Ryanheise suggested, but I didn't like it as much, so I switched back to Jisho.

It's a bit ironic that I'm focused on practicing reading when my entire goal is to develop listening comprehension skills, but my reasoning is that if I can't understand something when it's written out and I have the time to ponder every character, there's no way I could possibly understand it when it's spoken.

[devilyoudont]

Just to clarify, ichi.moe is only to split a sentence into words, it's not a replacement for a dictionary.

[golyplot]

Well, my Lingodeer subscription finally ran out this morning. Despite completing Japanese I two weeks ago, I only managed to get through the first eight lessons of Japanese II, partly because they're a lot harder, and partly because I was taking my time to try to understand them better.

I think one of the sentences from the final lesson sums up why Japanese is hard in one sentence:



You really don't appreciate just how much of an advantage having the sentence patterns already ingrained in your mind when studying european languages is until it's missing. I remember when I first started studying Japanese, I mentioned that it puts the verbs at the end of the sentence, to which my dad commented "Just like German!" leaving me dumbfounded for a moment before explaining that no, it is not like German at all. But I think this sentence is the perfect demonstration of that.

English: This is the air conditioner I bought at the department store last week
German: This is the air conditioner that I last week at the department store bought have
Japanese: This last week department store at bought air conditioner is

By Japanese standards, Romance and Germanic grammar is basically the same as English.


Also, I think Lingodeer was practically trolling me with the example sentences at the end. The last lesson contained the sentence "I want to buy a vacuum cleaner that is easy to use." where use is the word marked with the subject particle! Likewise, in the sentence "Alpacas are animals with big eyes and soft fur," eyes and fur are marked with the subject particle. I thought that maybe this was some other usage of が that I didn't know about, but at least according to Lingodeer, it actually was the subject particle in these sentences!

Oh well, Lingodeer is over now. Time to start experimenting with other forms of study.

[dampingwire]

The last lesson contained the sentence "I want to buy a vacuum cleaner that is easy to use." where use is the word marked with the subject particle! Likewise, in the sentence "Alpacas are animals with big eyes and soft fur," eyes and fur are marked with the subject particle. I thought that maybe this was some other usage of が that I didn't know about, but at least according to Lingodeer, it actually was the subject particle in these sentences!

I'm only guessing at what the original sentences might have been but they probably were of the form:

Code: Select all

modifying-clause nounを rest-of-sentence

where

Code: Select all

modifying-clause noun

is used as a noun phrase.

An example I can see in KZM N3: 子どもたちが話している賑やかな声

The whole thing is a noun phrase meaning something like "the lively voices with which the children spoke".

So I suspect that the first sentence was "[[use が easy] vacuum cleaner] like to buy" or some such arrangement.

The second one sounds like it me be the pattern あの人は手足が長い。[That person has long arms and legs.] where you might render it in your head as "legs and arns: long".

[crush]

As for European languages, in Basque it'd be pretty much the exact same word order as Japanese, just with conjugated verbs/cases (which we don't have to worry about in Japanese). I'm tackling Japanese after Mandarin/Cantonese and Basque so these sorts of things don't really trip me up, and it seems that you do understand it just haven't internalized it quite yet, so i'll just say it just takes time to get used to. Eventually it'll feel as natural as pushing the verb to the end of the sentence after "dass" (which seemed so foreign to me when i first began learning German). I think the Cure Dolly videos do a decent job of covering the issues in the second part of your post (that dampingwire went over).

[golyplot]

Sorry, I was using "European" as a shorthand for "Romance and Germanic".

[golyplot]

Last night, I tried watching the opening of Carmen Sandiego in Japanese. I've previously watched Carmen Sandiego in French and Italian, so I have a decent idea of the dialog already. However, I still couldn't make heads nor tails of 95+% of it. But I did catch the occasional bits and pieces, so hopefully that means I'm improving.

Also, I created a new Bunpro account and started that again. I figure that since I barely used it during the free trial last time around, it is ethical to just start over with a new account and do a new free trial. Bunpro seems to be better for reviewing grammar than actually learning it, and this time around, I have a lot more to review, so hopefully it will work better.

[golyplot]

I haven't tried to read any NHK News Easy articles recently, because the last time I tried, I got frustrated that even Google Translate wasn't able to provide a reliable translation so I had no basis to understand what the article actually said. Unfortunately, I haven't really found anything to replace it with either, especially since I'm not doing Lingodeer any more.

I wanted to start doing some vocab practice with Anki, but I only have access to a desktop computer on the weekends, and while ankiweb seems to allow you to study online, it requires the desktop version of Anki to actually add a deck and get started for some reason.