I want to learn it again. Or relearn and expand on Japanese. I took 3 years of it, but never had the opportunity to speak it with others outside of class. Kanji was the stuff we never really learned. I'm contemplating getting the Rosetta Stone. Anyone use that program before?
Japanese language
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@dirt:
It tells you in the first meaning. It's a Buddhist term. As for how, I dunno, when you're talking about hetu and prataya? Whatever those are.
If you want fate/destiny though, unmei 運命 is much more commonly used.
I've recently started taking classes myself - I've self studied it for about ten years, and figured I should finally start speaking it more as well, I don't have the chance to do that at all - and there's this other guy in class that … thinks he's really good. He's been studying kanji non-stop and takes great pride in all the kanji he's crammed into his head.
But his hiragana has suffered, weirdly enough. Just simple dumb mistakes most learners first do. And it drives me crazy. Touting all that kanji shit, but then he can't write in simple, fucking hiragana? Idiot.
Lol seriously? if he doesn't have a good grasp on hiragana, how is it he can have memorized so many kanji? Unbelievable, hiragana is like the backbone of the script, you can get by with just hiragana and no kanji but kanji and no hiragana gets you nowhere
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I want to learn it again. Or relearn and expand on Japanese. I took 3 years of it, but never had the opportunity to speak it with others outside of class. Kanji was the stuff we never really learned. I'm contemplating getting the Rosetta Stone. Anyone use that program before?
Rosetta Stone is fucking terrible–they don't teach you grammar at all. They try this "immersion" technique where it's just the pictures and what they're supposed to be in Japanese with no English translation, but that's really stupid with languages that are extremely different from English gramatically. You want to be able to use the tools to construct sentences yourself, not just learn "the horse jumped over the table" completely rote.
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It depends on how bad his hiragana is, but it doesn't sound too far-fetched. Study for kanji can be pretty different and you tend to stop even thinking of it in terms of kana once you get further along with it. I suppose it is kinda weird though, I rarely ever write anything outside of my N1 book and most things I write are on my iPhone or online, but the kana has always seem to stuck. If he's a kanji nerd just obsessed with memorizing as much as possible, I could see it.
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@dirt:
It tells you in the first meaning. It's a Buddhist term. As for how, I dunno, when you're talking about hetu and prataya? Whatever those are.
If you want fate/destiny though, unmei 運命 is much more commonly used.
I've recently started taking classes myself - I've self studied it for about ten years, and figured I should finally start speaking it more as well, I don't have the chance to do that at all - and there's this other guy in class that … thinks he's really good. He's been studying kanji non-stop and takes great pride in all the kanji he's crammed into his head.
But his hiragana has suffered, weirdly enough. Just simple dumb mistakes most learners first do. And it drives me crazy. Touting all that kanji shit, but then he can't write in simple, fucking hiragana? Idiot.
Thanks for clarifying I was just a little confused since I saw this in a character diagram as a relation note. And I didn't feel like this word concept was something that existed in english or german.
Hehe I hope I don't become like that I just want to get to a point where I can enjoy all the awesome things that are currently blocked by the language barrier.
I'm currently interested in maybe getting some taste of japanese television to get some variety to my listening material.
Some suggestions? I'd be nice if I can access it without to much hassle or paying much money (since I'm a poor university student :P)
I recently watched the hoko x tate show where greg from the onepiece podcast was on. It was pretty hard to understand very different from music or anime.
I still could pick up some sentences and words here and there but it was far less than normal. -
that sounds hilarious. i hate people like that. we have one of those turds in my class right now. keeps speaking and jumping ahead in class and it's really interrupting things. he was pretty good tonight though.
i looked at rosetta stone. i seen the 3 pack which i think was the complete set, and to me, it looked like most of what I learned in my basic level 1 class. If that is right, then I'd say it's a waste of cash and bs it's gonna make you fluent.
oh my head was spinning tonight. we were making more complex sentences. giving and taking things with people. then throw in those adjectives we just learnt last week, and past and neg. tenses. @_@ I need to sort this all out in my head now. lol but I'm having fun.
edit: darth, i watched that too. i had to download this "keyhole" program. i think you can watch anything from japan on it.
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edit: darth, i watched that too. i had to download this "keyhole" program. i think you can watch anything from japan on it.
Ah thanks gonna google this now, I watched it from a recorded stream (from ustream I believe).
On a sidenote, am I the only one who always gets this short surge of accomplishment after figuring out a english word written in katakana which transforms the pronounciation of the word in the weirdest ways?
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my favorite is Uoaa = War
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Kanji begin to feel a little like legostones to me. This is kind of good but also kind of annoying. I'm often slow to figure out compounds because I always have to look at each radical part. I hope that with time I'll begin seeing some of the more complicated Kanji and radicals as individual lego stones instead constructs of many legostone radicals.
What are some Kanji's that stuck pretty easily with you? (I'm one of the people that remember stuff through really complicated context situations like in a game ^^, but fail most of the time when I try to create artificial mnemonic tricks)
I always have a lot of trouble with reading common words like 次回 in anime where I know that it means 'next', but I can only read 次 as つぎ and I know that 回 is かい, but I can't put the two together to get the correct reading because I am less familiar with the on reading of the first kanji. Same goes for 生 in that I mainly associate it with the 生in 先生 and get into trouble when it's used with a different reading.
I found the seasons (冬, 春, 夏 and 秋) very easy to learn, as well as sibling terminology (兄, 弟, 姉 and 妹) and kanji for body parts and actions like eating, drinking, writing, wanting, thinking, walking, that kind of kanji were really easy for me to learn.Most problematic by a long shot for me is probably still are the kanji for hot and cold in objects as well as the other hot and cold kanji; I can never tell the meanings apart even after months of practice.
I want to learn it again. Or relearn and expand on Japanese. I took 3 years of it, but never had the opportunity to speak it with others outside of class. Kanji was the stuff we never really learned. I'm contemplating getting the Rosetta Stone. Anyone use that program before?
I'd recommend using a textbook if you want to do it the traditional way. I personally use the 'basic kanji book' series together with 'minna no nihongo' minus that series' useless kanji book, but you could always look around on the internet for something suitable to learn online.
I'm seriously wondering how anyone could study Japanese for so long without learning kanji, though. I started on kanji in my third week of classes, the moment I mastered hiragana and katakana.By the way, once again, rosetta stone sucks. You're not going to properly learn any kanji or anything remotely useful from there and it's not worth the money.
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@Silent:
I'd recommend using a textbook if you want to do it the traditional way. I personally use the 'basic kanji book' series together with 'minna no nihongo' minus that series' useless kanji book, but you could always look around on the internet for something suitable to learn online.
I'm seriously wondering how anyone could study Japanese for so long without learning kanji, though. I started on kanji in my third week of classes, the moment I mastered hiragana and katakana.By the way, once again, rosetta stone sucks. You're not going to properly learn any kanji or anything remotely useful from there and it's not worth the money.
Okay, got it. Rosestta, don't bother lol.
I do have text books from when I took it in High School. I liked them because they were pretty much the text books a elementary school kid would use. I felt we learned better vocab and grammar structures. But two years of it we really only focused on hiragana and katakana. I graduated after the second year of that class so I never got to take the Japanese III class which taught kanji.
I took it again in College but we used the book Japanese for Busy People. Which I hated the structure of…We learned how to display our business cards to business men. It was stupid lol. My college only offered one course it in.
I learned basic words in kanji because I was using it for art when I was overly into anime lol. Man, I was so close to becoming a weeaboo.
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Right now Genki is the standard. It's the best teaching tool on the market. I learned more from Genki than I did from my professor.
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Okay, got it. Rosestta, don't bother lol.
I do have text books from when I took it in High School. I liked them because they were pretty much the text books a elementary school kid would use. I felt we learned better vocab and grammar structures. But two years of it we really only focused on hiragana and katakana. I graduated after the second year of that class so I never got to take the Japanese III class which taught kanji.
I took it again in College but we used the book Japanese for Busy People. Which I hated the structure of…We learned how to display our business cards to business men. It was stupid lol. My college only offered one course it in.
I learned basic words in kanji because I was using it for art when I was overly into anime lol. Man, I was so close to becoming a weeaboo.
Well, I was majoring in Japanese and we don't have the luxury of taking a Japanese class in high school or in college apart from a short-term minor or a major at either a single university, the university of applied sciences I went to and another university of applied sciences with less Japanese and more focus on business and trade, so I figured my classes would be different from those most people take anyway. I'm planning to continue onto the Tobira book once I reach the end of my intermediate Minna no Nihongo books, since that is what my former school uses in the third and fourth years and I want to keep things consistent.
I actually completely stopped being weeaboo-like when I started learning Japanese and started collecting culture- and history books of Japan beyond just anime. Fangirl Japanese always annoyed me, but god, I remember trying to randomly copy kanji down including the translation from a pokemon ending and thought I was learning Japanese, which to be honest was quite gullible and embarrassing for me in hindsight.
We always had 4 interns from a Japanese-for-foreigners-teaching course from a university in Kyoto teaching in first year, so I keep contracting -te iru to -teru when I'm not paying attention, which wasn't very handy while we were supposed to only use the proper forms in tests and the interns' use of it kept rubbing off on us.
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@Steven:
It depends on how bad his hiragana is, but it doesn't sound too far-fetched. Study for kanji can be pretty different and you tend to stop even thinking of it in terms of kana once you get further along with it. I suppose it is kinda weird though, I rarely ever write anything outside of my N1 book and most things I write are on my iPhone or online, but the kana has always seem to stuck. If he's a kanji nerd just obsessed with memorizing as much as possible, I could see it.
lol, this morning, he went up to the teacher and basically went "see, here's the kanji for amari, the Japanese student showed me. you were wrong"
You see, the higher skilled among us have been talking to Japanese students who want to speak more English, and so through them, we can also speak more Japanese. Apparently (I don't talk with them at the same time as him), he's been using the Japanese student to learn more kanji.
Only, I bet my right foot that the student had to whip out his handy-dandy dictionary to find/remember the kanji for it.
HEY, KID, SOMETIMES, THEY JUST DON'T USE KANJI - THEY'RE LAZY TOO.
@Angelus:
Right now Genki is the standard. It's the best teaching tool on the market. I learned more from Genki than I did from my professor.
I heard about that book - all good sounding things. Our sensei's old student came back to America for a while, and he said that's what they are using in Japanese classes over there.
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There's a kanji for amari, what seriously?
Lol, just write it in kana! Kanji is meant to make things easier to read, not harder. What an idiot.
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Was it the "excess/surplus" amari or the "not too much" meaning? With the former it makes sense to use the kanji (it's elementary 5th grade level), but I've never seen the latter written as such.
I've actually become kind of obsessed with kanji study lately. I think I have this subconscious, futile hope that my native colleagues will somehow come to respect me if I take and pass the Kanji Kentei test, even if I'm only initially planning to take the same level as my 7th grade middle school students…
The books I'm using are the rather excellent official Kanken (漢検) study books. You start with the step-by-step book, which gives in-depth dictionary-style info for each of the 150-200 kanji that the given test focuses on (onyomi, kunyomi, bushu, bushu name, stroke order, stroke count, example vocabulary, with exercises to test each of those). Then there's the exercise book, which skips all the info and just gives more practice problems (kanji to kana, kana to kanji, stroke identification/counting, synonyms, antonyms, 3-4 character jyukugo, distinguishing between onyomi/kunyomi, examining the relationship between two characters in a word, inserting okurigana). Finally, I use the practice test book, which has 10+ past exams. After taking a few of those, you begin to see how much they recycle problems, and coming up with the right answer becomes rote. It takes time, but this sort of relentless repetition is the key to retention. Although obviously these books are designed with a standardized test in mind, I've found this self-study to be incredibly helpful in a practical/real-life sense. Writing on road signs, advertisements, in stores, and on tv shows has suddenly become legible, and I can even read a ton of place names and name names now.
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@dirt:
I heard about that book - all good sounding things. Our sensei's old student came back to America for a while, and he said that's what they are using in Japanese classes over there.
Yeah, you get that book and a professor who isn't a total douche and you'll be speaking conversational Japanese in no time at all.
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@CCC:
Was it the "excess/surplus" amari or the "not too much" meaning? With the former it makes sense to use the kanji (it's elementary 5th grade level), but I've never seen the latter written as such.
lol, no, not excess/surplus. That makes me wonder if the Japanese student got confused or not, and thus the guy was an ass for the wrong reason.
@Angelus:
Yeah, you get that book and a professor who isn't a total douche and you'll be speaking conversational Japanese in no time at all.
Yeah, that seemed to be what worked well for him. That and talking to Japanese people.
Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk 2
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I don't want to overwelm myself right now, as I'm still trying to comprehend the language. What CCC is doing sounds like a good method. Also, about the Genki text book. I keep getting told it's the best text too. They have a web site, but you can't buy the text from it. :\ I should look into getting it again when I have more money.
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Just torrent it.
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I have a question about Japanese. Cause it's been bugging me for years but I figured this would be the place to ask lol. Well…more specifically I'm having an issue understanding something about names. I'm not sure if it's because I only got part of the information or I need a more simplistic way of having it explained.
Stuff like this confuses me. "his last name is spelled with a kanji meaning "leech demon," and his first name is spelled with a kanji meaning "bewitching one." His name can ultimately be read as "demon in broad daylight." I don't quite get how you can spell a name with different kanji to aquire a different meaning altogether. Or maybe I'm over thinking it lol.
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I have a question about Japanese. Cause it's been bugging me for years but I figured this would be the place to ask lol. Well…more specifically I'm having an issue understanding something about names. I'm not sure if it's because I only got part of the information or I need a more simplistic way of having it explained.
Stuff like this confuses me. "his last name is spelled with a kanji meaning "leech demon," and his first name is spelled with a kanji meaning "bewitching one." His name can ultimately be read as "demon in broad daylight." I don't quite get how you can spell a name with different kanji to aquire a different meaning altogether. Or maybe I'm over thinking it lol.
Might be helpful to see which Kanji you exactly mean. I haven't spend to much time with names yet but just going of what I know, the reason for this is that Kanji have many different readings. Names are build with these readings. For example you can have two names written as 山下 but spelled differently based of choosing different readings (In this case some examples for spellings would be: Yamasaki, Yamashita, Yomishita all written as 山下).
Now to your example given that names can be read differently the phonetic reading might coincide with another word meaning.
There might be other reason for it, too. But that's all I'm familiar with right now.
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I guess I could have added that lol. 蛭魔 妖一, Hiruma Yōichi. His name was the first time I had encountered this. I thought it was neat cause I wish I could do that with my name. The meaning of my name bores me lol.
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Believe it or not, my Japanese computer in my Japanese school office is not showing the kanji, this is amusing.
While I can't see it, I'm just going to assume that the issue is that in one instance someone is translating the meaning from the actual written kanji, and on the other hand getting the meaning from one phonetic reading, despite the kanji not matching up.
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i'm listening…...........
Thou art welcome
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Been occupied with other stuff so I didn't have a lot of time to post anything interesting or educating but I ordered Persona 4: The Golden. Whenever I get it I might post some interesting sentences out of it here or maybe stuff I'm going to be clueless about. I feel bad letting this thread die again just after I revived it :P.
Also just a little funny thing I noticed but my sample may be too small. The japanese language seems to be pretty sexist (pls don't take this statement to seriously).
You can find the Kanji for woman 女 in a lot of weird combinations. Like in 好く, consisting of the radicals for woman and child. Or 姦 the Kanji for wicked/cunning which contains the radical for woman 3 times. Or even 家内 which can mean wife is written with the kanji for house and inside.Put I'm probably just being stupid here still gave me a small chuckle and I'm a little more attentive (looking for funny connections) when looking at kanji.
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i'm down with it, as long as there's some funny one's for guys. :P
i learnt in class about て form verbs the other day. How, you can use them if your building a compound sentence. "i bought coffee and went to work" but what if i wanted to say "the coffee is cold, so i made more" cold is an adjective. do you need to modify adjectives some way when you do this?
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Well the one for guys that comes to mind is that testicles 金玉 is written with the kanji for gold and ball.
As for the grammatic question, unfortunatly have to pass. Since the way I'm learning is concentrating mostly on reading/listening comprehension which leaves me with poor knowledge about grammer. But I would write it as コーヒーは寒いだからも一つ作りました
Sounds a little off though, my language sense is tingling so it might be wrong in some way or just a poor built sentence.
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no no
first of all, "samui" means cold weather, cold coffee (or anything else) would be "tsumetai"
it wouldn't be "dakara" since it's not tailing a noun, it's just "kara"
don't say "mou hitotsu" (another), just say "motto" (more)
it's past tense, so the "tsumetai" has to be "tsumetakatta"
"koohii wa tsumetakatta kara, motto tsukurimashita"
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Ah thx didn't know that since I've encountered samui a lot more frequently than tsumetai, those nuance differences always drive me insane.
I kind of had a feeling it should be kara but I went by the dictionary meanings that I remembered. Still have a lot of sentence mining to do before those things manifest.
I wanted to use motto at first but it kind of sounded weird, that's the hard part when you're developing your language sense and you can't fully trust it yet.
As for it being past tense: The coffee is cold = present tense. Pretty sure that my english in this case is accurate.
Your sentence should be translated to = Because the coffee has gone cold, I made more. Which if we talk about meaning is probably much better but and sounds better but it's not an accurate translation of the original example.
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ok, "golden ball" isn't demeaning though. :V
so, looking at glib's sentence, you do NOT have to change the adjective in the middle of the sentence. You just use them as is.
so samui is just for weather? i can't remember if my teacher told us that or not. (she's cramming too much content into this coarse for us to absorb anything.) So "atsui" would be hot weather? or hot anything.
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ok, "golden ball" isn't demeaning though. :V
so, looking at glib's sentence, you do NOT have to change the adjective in the middle of the sentence. You just use them as is.
so samui is just for weather? i can't remember if my teacher told us that or not. (she's cramming too much content into this coarse for us to absorb anything.) So "atsui" would be hot weather? or hot anything.
Isn't kintama slang? I know it literally means golden ball written like that, and it wouldn't be demeaning in English, but I don't know if the Japanese see it like that.
samui is for climate, tsumetai for things and suzushii is cool/refreshing, and on the hot side there's atsui for climate and things, and atatakai for warm climate and things, respectively, according to my kanji book.
It's one of those things I hate about Japanese; so many words to say something is hot/warm/cold… -
暑い- hot weather
熱い- hot food (things)Both are atsui.
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Kintama isn't demeaning, there's an awesome children's rhyme about tanuki:
tan tan tanuki no kintama wa
kaze mo nai no ni
bura bura"even though there's no wind, the tan tan tanuki's balls swing this way and that"
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It wasn't meant to be demeaning it's sexist just on the other side of the spectrum.
Where some words with the woman radical have negative connotations some with the man radical have positive ones. It makes you think about what kind of people might have devised these kanjis. -
The kanji for "rape" (goukan) is really bad
姦
Actually, by itself that character just means "cunning and wicked," apparently, the compound for goukan is 強姦
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Didn't one piece have that joke about kintama when Luffy was trying to explain to the Amazons what his balls were?
I feel I really need to sit down and actually start studying Japanese again. It's hard to find the time lately though. Is there a good program or method for trying to get studying in if yo're pretty busy all day?
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Didn't one piece have that joke about kintama when Luffy was trying to explain to the Amazons what his balls were?
I feel I really need to sit down and actually start studying Japanese again. It's hard to find the time lately though. Is there a good program or method for trying to get studying in if yo're pretty busy all day?
Well for Kanji if you have a smartphone get anki(or any other flashcard program) on it and a few decks do them when you have 5-10 minutes free with not doing anything.
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It wasn't meant to be demeaning it's sexist just on the other side of the spectrum.
Where some words with the woman radical have negative connotations some with the man radical have positive ones. It makes you think about what kind of people might have devised these kanjis.ah i see what your doing. that's not what i wanted though. i'm all about being fair. If they're gonna be all like that with the women kanji, then I want some sour men kanji. :P
the tanuki thing was cool.
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The thing that happens when you research Kanji with seem to have the same meaning…...
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There's a lot of that in Japanese, and a lot of it is subtle nuance that not even native speakers get.
It's like how the verb "hiku" also has different forms depending on the specific kind of "pulling" you're doing.
There's 引く - to pull in the generic sense, but then there's all the senses below:
- 弾く - pluck strings (of a bow, or stringed instrument); also works even if you don't directly touch the strings, e.g. piano
- 惹く、魅く - to attract or lure in
- 牽く、曳く- to haul or drag along behind you, as in a train locomotive (牽, e.g. 牽引) or danjiri cart, canal barge (曳き舟)
- 退く - to pull away, as in an ebb tide, or to be offended (i.e., recoiling in disgust; usually written in katakana)
- 抽く - to pull out, as in a drawer (抽き出し、抽斗) or lottery drawing (籤抽き, cf. 抽籤, semi-officially miswritten as the bastardized 抽選)
There's also a second sense of "to pulverize":
- 挽く - to grind into bits, e.g. coffee beans (挽きたて豆) or meat (挽き肉、粗挽きソーセージ)
- 碾く - to mill grain into flour, e.g. using a mortar and pestle
- 轢く - to hit/run over (with a vehicle): 轢き逃げ事件
It's great fun to quiz your Japanese friends with, because they're guaranteed not to know more than half of those unless they're shown in advance (in which case there may be some dim recognition of perhaps 60-75%).
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wow. @_@
hey, seya, i don't know you too well. are you native japanese or you just really smart? or did you just pull this all up from somewhere? you seem to know a great deal about japanese.
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wow. @_@
hey, seya, i don't know you too well. are you native japanese or you just really smart? or did you just pull this all up from somewhere? you seem to know a great deal about japanese.
Well Saiya's location (shown under her avatar) says he is in Osaka, Japan so Saiya is atleast a resident of Japan.
And ur right Saiya does seem to have some advanced knowledge of the Japanese maybe I should have him teach me some lol.
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The "dupes" (as in duplicates) section of the Kanji Damage site is invaluable for parsing all these
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Yeah I've noticed that such knowledge isn't necessarily common. I've asked some of the few native japanese people I know about those nuances and often they either didn't know or just knew by feeling what to use but coudn't explain it.
I'm very peculiar if it comes to these nuances not sure if that's a good or a bad thing but I really dislike misusing the wrong Kanji.
@gliblord thx for the site it's really invaluable!
I've encountered a Kanji that I can't seem to find anywhere it consists of the radicals 口 and 尊. The square is written on the left side of it I've found it in a compound with 話(the compound ending with it) if that helps. If necessary I can draw the sign/compound.
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The whole sentence looks like that
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The whole sentence looks like that
The kanji is 噂話(うわさばなし). Rumors, gossip, etc. So something close to "I can hear gossip/rumors from the people around me" or anything like that.
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Thanks a lot! This one drove me crazy. I seriously don't now why jisho.org didn't want to display this one even though I selected the right radicals. I've even tried to find it per stroke number.
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Does someone know how knowledgeable the average japanese is about 謙譲語 and 尊敬語.
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@Steven:
The kanji is 噂話(うわさばなし). Rumors, gossip, etc. So something close to "I can hear gossip/rumors from the people around me" or anything like that.
I imagine all your posts being said by McNulty lol, so this one is all haha.
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Does someone know how knowledgeable the average japanese is about 謙譲語 and 尊敬語.
If they're fairly well educated, they may be able to use it in the appropriate context, though it's far less common in practice than it used to be. Railway announcements in particular have gone from using things like 列車が参ります to 列車が来ます in recent years, though it varies quite a bit by company. People in part-time positions often get stuck with something called "manual keigo", which is all kinds of bad. Young people in particular absorb the manual-keigo without knowing any better, screwing up their native-language proficiency. Honorific/humble speech is still a vital part of the language to learn, however.