Mind Distance

[Risu-chan]

No, not really -- I'm saying anyone can learn Japanese if they work at it, but people who already speak Chinese are going to have a huge boost in reading vocabulary.

(Chinese speakers won't have much assistance in learning enough grammar to *speak* Japanese, though -- Japanese conjugates very nearly *everything,* in much more intricate detail than any other major language group I've heard of, including adjectives and adverbs. And Chinese doesn't conjugate anything that I know of...)

My impression of what a Chinese speaker would get out of a page of Japanese is something like word salad:

dog (something) man (something) bite (something)
(where "something" is inflections and conjugations written in hiragana, which Chinese knowledge doesn't help with).

Now, due to the way Japanese works, there would be no way a Chinese speaker who knew no Japanese grammar could guess whether that parsed to "the dog bit the man" or "the man bit the dog" or "the man told the dog to bite" or something else.

But at least the Chinese speaker would get man, dog, and bite. People who knew neither Japanese grammar nor kanji would just see a bunch of chicken scratches... ^_^;;

Does that make sense?

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ July 24, 2003 12:54 AM: Message edited by: Risu-chan ]</font>

[Risu-chan]

"Conjugates" is the English-grammar word for not only tenses but singular/plural and, although it doesn't have an equivalent in English verbs, when used to apply to Japanese verbs, also things like differences in verb structure due to politeness level and speaker perspective.

An English verb conjugation chart would look something like:

to be
is
are
was
were
has been
had been
will be
will have been
etc. etc. etc.

For Latin and most Romance languages, conjugation charts are a lot more complicated. There are approximately 1200 possible endings for any Latin verb.

Japanese is somewhere on an order of magnitude more complicated than Latin, because it conjugates both verbs *and adjectives* on a regular basis.

I'm not going to try to get into a Japanese conjugation chart here because it would take me six to ten pages to go through the possible forms available for just one verb. ^^;;

But anyway, conjugation is the part of a verb (or Japanese adjective) which changes in Japanese to indicate things like tense, politeness level, speaker perspective, relative surety about what's being said, relative trust in the source of the information, perspective on the interpersonal relationship impact of what's being said...

It's not as scary as it sounds, because you get a set of building blocks and unlike English, Japanese is a regular language. There are barely any exceptions to the established rules. The tricky part is learning how to get all the building blocks put in the right order on the right occasion and understanding the effect the use of different blocks have on each other...

Quick illustrative example of two ends of a Japanese conjugation chart:

suru - to do something
saseraretakunarimasen deshita - to have been forced to do something despite not having wanted to (standard politeness level)

^_^;;; Don't get scared off, just go find yourself a grammar book that puts things together the way you understand it and work from there.

I've read dozens of Japanese grammar books. My favorite is "Japanese Verbs and Essentials of Grammar" by Rita Lampkin. Because of my Latin background, it puts the verb structures together in a way that makes intuitive sense to me, and I've never seen another Japanese grammar book that took the same approach. On the other hand, my friend Keith can't stand that book and much prefers one I find completely impenetrable and unusable.

So find something that teaches the way you find easy to learn, and go at it that way... that's how I've learned 6 languages so far, although I seem only to be able to keep two of them in active speaking-space in my head at once...

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ July 25, 2003 11:26 AM: Message edited by: Risu-chan ]</font>

[xjckimberly]

Hai hai!! That's exactly what I'm going through!!
The dog-something-man-something-bite-something part!!

Haha. I can read hiragana, but I but no idea of the meaning when you string them together, so I gotta learn it. I have got no idea which part of the hiragana actually means soemthing, or which parts are just things like 'are' 'to' , eg. things like 'desu'.

And 'conjugates'?? Nani desuka?? Are you talking about the equivalent of tense in Japanese? Coz I know for multiple/certain things like 'his/he/him' also got varied forms in Japanese.....

[Anime Goddess]

WOW O_O I just read the thread and WOW....I kinda got confused at some parts though lol ^^;;


But wow Risu-chan you do know a lot about it ^_^ That is cool. I wanted to take some classess on it but they don't offer any where I am..maybe they will when I go to College *crosses fingers*


But I have tried some on line Japanese tutorials(sp) and they just got me even more confussed >.<;;


Hmmm...I just hope one day I could learn it enough to read a Manga....

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ July 25, 2003 03:12 PM: Message edited by: Yaoi Manga Girl ]</font>

[yukawai]

I'm lost at some parts too ^^;; but for the fun of it, there is a funny text about why NOT to learn japenese (of course it's a lot funnier if you already know a bit of it since you understand the jokes ^^;; )

and I thought I'd share some of the pages I'm curently looking at to help me with my (very lame) autodidac jap-learning so,

Kanjisite for the hiragana, katagana, more of less their fonctions and a list of kanji, a usefull site;
Jim Breen's Japanese Page is mostly a list of link to go to find dictionaries and little stuff like that, I didn't search in it much yet;
Japanese for the Western Brain is for most basic, it's cute, I don't personaly like it but like Risu-chan said: go for the way you like it most;
Memorising the Hiragana I keep that one because it's way too funny but I guess for the starters and most english people that site would help you lot, not realy to memorize them with those tricks but more because it's the good way to pronunce them (as far as I know ^^; )
Japanese Language it's a list of "lessons" you can take; they are good and there's a few mp3 you can download to tell you how to pronunce for what I remember, it's nice.


If anyone else has nice site? (since this tread somewhat turned into a conversation about japenese ^^; )

[Shia]

hm, I can add this site simply for the hiragana-katakana game they got there that can keep me busy for hours. (I can get obsessed with such stuff so easily... ^^;; )... and I think it's a nice way to practice memorising kana [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Shia]

uhm, it's kinda embarrassing to drop in with this rather off topic question, but since there's this nice discussion about japanese running here at the moment (and since I don't have a clue where else to get help *g* ..) I thought I might try and ask:
there's this sentence from an anime it's something like "yume wa mireta da yo" and I was terrible curious about how to literally translate the "mireta" cause I don't have a clue what kind of form it is.. I assume that it comes from "miru" (to see) but since the translation of the sentence above changes with every fansubteam I couldn't really figure the exact meaning. (it's usually translated with "you've seen a dream" but I've also seen it subbed with slightly different words)
(I really hope that I got the word right, I've so far only heard it and never seen it written ^^;;; )

help anyone? *puppyeyes*

(oh, the anime is "Get Backers" if anyone wondered ^^;; )

thx thx ^^