I have encountered a case where context-wise, it would make a lot of sense if the speakers are giving order, but the sentence ending is 言わないの！ which is "negative dictionary form + の + exclamation mark". I thought it was a typo for negative imperative form but then the verb would have to be 言うの！, too much window for a typo. Is this a correct grammar?
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Anonymous2012-05-13 22:53
>>241
correction: negative imperative form should be 言うな！ My typo.
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Anonymous2012-05-13 23:13
>>241
Grammatically, its fine but its not often said in that context. 'の' is more often indicative of a question. However, it can be used, usually by females, to demarcate a strong, confident, or emotional conclusion or emphasis. Think of it as "you're not going to say (something)" or "I'm not going to say something" instead of "dont say (something)" which would be 言わないで 言うな etc.
It's the catchphrase of Hime-chan, a semi-famous performer.
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Anonymous2012-05-14 5:10
>>238
Makes sense, I'm reinterpreting it as "It's not something to do at the festival, one of the reasons being you don't have to be a staff member to do things like that."
You can do that even if you aren't a staff member; its not something you do at a festival/you don't have anything to do at a festival.
The use of し connects the two, but the second clause is not a reason for the first.
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Anonymous2012-05-14 13:00
Does anyone know of a program/method to practice stroke order? Obviously I could just go through kanji-by-kanji, but I'm hoping there's something something more like an Anki deck out there, something with structure to it?
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Anonymous2012-05-14 14:36
Kanji has me confused. Memorizing how to write them isn't hard at all for me, but the readings is what's getting me.
Can someone give me an example of the process of learning a specific kanji? A lot of kanji that I'm learning have a lot of different readings and no indication as to what reading I should use, as I encounter it in writing.
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Anonymous2012-05-14 15:00
>>248
Every character can have Japanese (on/おん) and Chinese (kun/くん) readings. There can also be arbitrary readings (ateji/当て字) such as 煙草 (たばこ) but these are relatively rare.
Maybe you already knew that. As far as learning them goes, though, I did Heisig after two years of trying to memorize directly and found it helped. Whether or not you like that method, I feel it's very important to have some way of identifying individual radicals so that each one is a sum of parts - this makes it much easier. Heisig for me was mostly a way of realizing this.
After that, I mainly learned through seeing the characters in words (I read light novels and play video games, mainly). You see certain readings more than others, and you begin to get a sense for what sounds like what. It's a feeling similar to spelling in English - you can see a word you don't know how to pronounce, but you can guess based on other times you've seen similar patterns. For example, in 生, there is a ridiculous number of readings if you were to just check a kanji dictionary. But you'll quickly learn that it's virtually always せい except in compounds where it is also frequently しょう or even じょう, and then when it has furigana it's almost always う as in うまれる. The other readings, when you see them, you can learn at that point. I don't think there's really much value in just slamming readings alone, because you'll have nothing to attach them to (i.e., words).
Or 生きる (いきる) etc. Anyway my point wasn't to be exhaustive about the individual character, just to show that there's no need to learn Kanji on their own with all their readings. Things stick much better if you learn words containing the character using an SRS program of some sort (anki).
You did LNs after Heisig? Could you tell me what kind of experience I'd be getting myself into?
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Anonymous2012-05-15 3:38
>>251
Not sure what you want to know, but my biggest barrier for fluid reading was definitely grammar above anything else. Being able to recognize an idiom or a subordinate clause is much harder than recognizing a character. Heisig's main advantage is in writing.
I spent literally hours on just a couple of pages at first, and it took me like a week to get through the first 30 pages of Index. I then put it away for a while, and started playing more video games (specifically, Golden Sun DS, Pokemon Black, and FFIX) in Japanese, which were easier because there's less narration and more dialogue. Coming back, I started reading Haganai, which was really not that bad at all compared to my initial experience. I really think the most important thing to do is to find something you can really dedicate a lot of time to without becoming bored, and then dedicate a lot of time to it. Banging your head on a wall isn't useful.
Would you recommended I jump straight into some media that I like, then? I've been done with Heisig for a few weeks now, and I'm thinking of trying something like Flyable Heart, which I hear is relatively simple. Or should I be sentence mining before I try to do a VN?
Also, do you find playing something like Pokemon reduces your study time? I'm thinking it'll either make you end up wasting too much time on battles and what not, or it'll let you study more because of a timeboxing effect.
I never did sentence stuff, not specifically anyway. It seems like it would be a valid way of doing things, though. I kind of ended up doing it in a more roundabout way: whenever I saw a pattern I didn't know or a word that I wasn't clear on its usage, I would look it up on ALC (alc.co.jp) and they have a very nice sentence bank that I would pull from and try to understand the word. Your mileage may vary. In any case, you don't have much to lose by trying to read something you want and just working at it. Sooner or later, you'll have to. I don't know what your total experience is, but it's good to get a basic primer through something like Genki or Tae Kim.
I played pokemon mostly because I wanted to play pokemon. If I wasn't studying Japanese, I probably would have just played the translation patch. Still, the dialogue was helpful to some degree. I did video games over a visual novel or some other media because I enjoyed them, not out of absolute efficiency.
Alright, thanks anon. I'll probably give Flyable Heart a go and just see if I can manage it. I don't suppose you got any noticeable increase in reading speed when you first did Index?
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Anonymous2012-05-15 5:11
>255
A little, I guess. It's hard to really say speed because I would have a page or two that were ok, taking no more than 10 minutes, maybe (looking up all words), then I would have a page with one or two sections that I would obsess over for long periods of time. It was incredibly inconsistent.
The best advice I can give to anyone from my own experience is that if you understand the meaning of something (a word or phrase, construction, anything), if you understand how it differs from similar forms even somewhat, don't worry about every little nuance of the word. Repeated instances of it will make it more clear when it's natural to use and when it's odd.
>>234
Once you've worked through IJ (in which half the book is basically a recap of Genki 2), you're pretty much past the point where the general purpose textbooks are useful.
At that point I started using N2 studying material, but it was mostly horribly bad if your goal is to learn Japanese and not just pass a test. After a while of doing this I just said fuck it and started watching more tv instead, reading some native material like 2ch news sites and comics as well. When encountering grammar patterns I've yet to learn, I use the dictionary of advanced Japanese grammar book to figure out how they work if needed.
Oh, but now after rereading the post you didn't say you've used the books, just that you downloaded them. It'll be easier to give specific advice if you type out what you've done so far.
>>233
i didn't really get pissed, it's just a rule of mine to only shitpost itt
The reason why no one has replied is probably because there is no correct answer. Everyone learns differently, so I can't tell you if it'd be beneficial for your studies.
What I can say is that when I stopped looking up readings beforehand it did wonders for my word recognition.
When I did look up readings of words in advance they'd just stick for a few minutes, long enough to read through, but when going in cold, attempting to parse a text and having to look up the same words several times, it started getting annoying enough that I would end up remembering them long-term.
Call it frustration memory, if you want.
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Anonymous2012-05-16 9:52
I heard about a book exchange service a while back where you can trade english books for japanese ones. Anyone know what site I'm talking about?
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Anonymous2012-05-16 22:40
Is kanjidamage.com a good way to learn kanji?
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Anonymous2012-05-17 6:31
>>260
Yeah, regardless of how you feel about Schultz his structure (a non-bullshit Heisig) is good.
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Anonymous2012-05-17 9:33
I'm looking for a VN that has simple language, and an English translation to check I'm on the right lines. Any recommendations?
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Anonymous2012-05-17 13:39
>>260
Ignore kanjidamage and just download ANKI. Look up a youtube video on how to use anki, and then go into anki>file>download>shared deck and type in "lazy kanji +mod". Have fun. Oh, and AJATT.com if you haven't already.
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Anonymous2012-05-17 13:41
>>263
As an addendum, this is from someone who used kanjidamage all the way up until the 1600th kanji.
>>261
Its certainly a bit...crass. But looking at it I did feel it to be a very well put together system. >>264
Why should it be ignored?
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Anonymous2012-05-17 16:21
>>265
It should be ignored not for the fact it's badly put together, but for the fact that using an SRS (with the specific deck I mentioned as optional, but recommended) is a good country mile ahead in terms of efficiency.
It sort of surprises me that everyone hasn't just switched over to immersion+srs for language acquisition, but these things take time I guess. Like I said, I *did not* start out using the methods I use now, I simply found them to be better to a point where there was no room for uncertainty about what I was seeing.
Just give it a try and see how things go.
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Anonymous2012-05-17 19:07
>>266
it doesnt seem to have the pronunciation or anything else...am I missing something, or is it only meant to teach reading?
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Anonymous2012-05-19 10:08
bump
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Anonymous2012-05-19 21:04
Will practicing stroke order of kanji, in addition to saying the kun/onyomi out loud help me remember them any better than simply looking over cards or the kanji and saying the kun/onyomi?
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Anonymous2012-05-20 6:13
>>269
What you're doing is good for basically nothing. What you're suggesting is good for slightly better than basically nothing. There's two functional ways to learn kanji:
- Practice reading the kanji in a relevant vocabulary word, and then read a sentence with that vocabulary word written in kanji
- Practice writing a kanji in a relevant vocabulary word, and then write a sentence with that vocabulary word written in kanji
This is what 99% of Japanese classes are testing on their kanji quizzes when they're not trying to save time/give students a break, and it's for a good fucking reason. The JLPT would be doing the same, except it's fucking hard to grade thousands of written kanji or hiragana readings compared with just multiple-choice recognition questions which have 80%+ accuracy in determining one's reading proficiency of the same kanji compounds.
Spoilers: there are fifty million kanji read shi or kou. Learning that way is retarded and unintuitive because not even Chinese uses single character nouns or verbs anymore.
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Anonymous2012-05-20 6:28
>>270
To compound, you should have decks of anki cards that look like this. On one side of one card you should have 恵方 and on the other えほう, "favorable direction." When you see the kanji, you should be able to read and define it. On another card you should have "favorable direction" on one side, and 恵方, えほう on the other. In this way you are developing the two key functions of interlingual literacy. One one hand you can read a word and be able to read it out loud while also understanding its meaning, and on the other hand you will be able to take a word you want to say that you can conceptualize and write it in Japanese and know what it says. This manner of learning is far more integrated than learning the puzzle pieces of a language, because as everyone ever has discovered, we don't learn things as fragments but as complex symbols which we psychologically link to other symbols in their value (read: Gestalt theory, data entry model of the human psyche). It's both impossible and useless to learn kanji as just fragments, because they will not have been assigned a value this way, and there's no point in learning the ingredients that would allow you to make pasta noodles before you learn how to boil prepackaged pasta and make a sauce. If you do learn how to make pasta from scratch, congrats, your hard work will make you a linguist, and now you can put your skills to work by writing dissertations and teaching bored students how to design the ideal cookbook instead of going out and working in a five-star restaurant. I mean, unless that's your sort of thing, but most people learn Japanese so that they can eat that night, if you comprehend my extended metaphor.
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Anonymous2012-05-20 11:59
>>271
so...I should learn jukugo and more complex kanji first? Then delve into their construction and workings?
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Anonymous2012-05-20 12:10
>>272
No, you should do both simultaneously. Pick a kanji either by its functionality (i.e. if it's commonly used like 日 or 人) or by the Kanji Damage methodology of grouped radicals. Spend a moment reading the on'yomi and kun'yomi, but only a moment because it's not fucking important. Then learn the jukugo. Or, hell, don't even learning the systematics of kanji, just learn the jukugo if you're looking for the functional use of kanji. You should always be learning vocabulary words one at a time anyway, and you have nothing to lose by learning a vocabulary word and its reading simultaneously. While learning modern Chinese, no one does fucking hanzi study; they learn vocabulary and the one way to write a compound, even if one character has multiple readings. Hanzi are only studied individually for writing practice. This is because there's only one way to write Chinese words, and if you don't learn it you can't write something that Chinese-speakers will be able to read. Don't fool yourself into thinking Japanese is supposed to be different. There's a few exceptions where the kanji for a word isn't important, and you won't even learn them if you separate vocabulary and kanji study. The whole idea of kanji study is a wholly retarded concept and fuck JLPT and the modern world of education for trying to section kanji away from vocabulary when the two have been intrinsically linked since the silk road.
On the other hand if you want to be a juku-whore and study kanji so that you can pass the JLPT, sure, you can do that, but just go by number and JLPT test spec. You won't be developing a functional model of Japanese literacy but it doesn't matter because that's not what the JLPT tests.
>>273
Ill go with the first thing you said. Im only using the somewhat limited uses of the japanese language as justification for my boner over it anyhow.
Actually Kanji as a separate section has been dissolved and merged with vocabulary, and they've done away with the majority of the "what has the same reading as XX compound" questions.
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Anonymous2012-05-20 16:48
A question concerning the particle も
Assuming I did something too, for example fo to Tokyo, would I say:
"私は 東京にも 行く。“ as my grammar tells me to or rather:
"私も 東京に 行く。“?
Did my grammar just do this to illustrate the use of にも or is the latter option less common or wrong in any way?
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Anonymous2012-05-20 18:45
These have entirely different meanings.
私は 東京にも 行く
"I also go to Tokyo" (I went to places other than Tokyo too)
私も 東京に 行く
"I also go to Tokyo" (Other people are going to Tokyo besides me)
The English doesn't have to make the distinction but Japanese does.
>>275
JLPT is still a shitty test that's far off from measuring actual Japanese comprehension.
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Anonymous2012-05-20 18:49
>>278
Actually, I'd say comprehension is just about the only thing it measures. It is fairly awful at gauging one's proficiency at conversation or production, but anyone who can score 150+ (maximum 180) is certainly capable of solid reading comprehension.