Yeah, that's something that always draws my attention as well! I've seen a few interviews with Ghanese skeleton racer (Skull Joke!!!) Akwasi Frimpong and he has such a positive attitude, even though he came in dead last. Very inspiring to see.

So I was watching the Olympics when I noticed Czech snowboarder Eva Samková. And the first thing crossing my mind was that I should probably post about her here…

Why? Well, here's a photo:
(Or maybe you guys already know about her.)

!

(I figured there would already be a thread about the Olympics by the way; so when I found there wasn't one I decided to go ahead and make one myself, thinking there would be enough to talk about. So, use this thread to discuss your favorite sports and athletes, your country's performance, etc. )

Wow, you guys are so knowledgeable, it's impressive! Your explanations were very helpful, thanks a lot to both of you!

@Foolio:

Of course it has also become the verb form commonly used to make polite requests/orders which is probably the first usage language students learn.

This seems to be the origin of my confusion. There was a paragraph about this usage of the -te form in my book, but it didn't mention that there were other uses as well. I do now see how it is completely different from the -koto/-no endings of verbs. SuburbanErrorist's examples illustrated it nicely. Thanks again to both of you for your elaborate answers; it must take you guys some time to write those posts haha, but it does really help me

I have also downloaded JED just now. I haven't really checked out all it's functions yet, but it looks like it could be a handy tool!

As for reading practice. I've tried reading manga in Japanese, but it's still a bit too difficult for me at this point. Trying One Piece sounds like a good suggestion though, as I already know the story so I don't need to perfectly understand everything I'm reading. Thanks for the idea (and for all the other links)!

What is the difference between [verb + [I]koto], [verb + [I]no] and the -ite/-ide/-shite/-nde/-tte/-te ending of verbs?

From what I understand, [verb + [I]koto] and [verb + [I]no] are the equivalent of the English gerund and can be used interchangeably. I also understand how the -ite/-ide/-shite/-nde/-tte/-te forms are made and how they function, but I don't really see how these three things are different as words. For example, kaku-no, kaku-koto and kaite all mean "writing", right?

Does anyone have a link for the Sket Dance chapters from Extra Dance 1 and Extra Dance 2?

That article you linked looks very useful at first glance, thanks! I'll study it a bit better when I have some more time.

And yeah, I don't really expect to ever reach a level where I understand it as well as a native Japanese speaker would, but my first major goal for now is to be able to read Japanese and understand what I'm reading.

Ah, that's very helpful and enlightening! Thanks a lot for explaining. It seems that it's actually simpler than I expected, so that's nice.

About "wa" and "ga" (and when to use the one or the other); that's actually another thing I don't completely understand. My book does explain it, but it also hints at it actually being way more complicated. And when I looked it up on the internet I found that entire books have been written about just the difference between "wa" and "ga".

As for the book I'm using; I bought it mostly because it was the only one I could find that was relatively inexpensive and I just wanted something to get me started. It's more or less what I expected it to be, so I'm content with that for now. I was thinking of getting the Genki textbook later, but the one you suggested appears to be much cheaper, so that might be a better option, thanks!

So, I've been wanting to learn Japanese for a long time and I finally got started "for real" by picking up a little book titled "Speak Japanese Today, a self-study program for learning everyday Japanese". Now the lessons in the book started out pretty straight forward, but the more progress I make, the more I find myself having questions; and since the book is a self-study book, I don't really have anyone to ask. But then I remembered this forum had this thread, so I guess this might be a good place to post questions that I come up with

Here's one thing I don't completely understand:

There's an exercise on the -mashou ending of verbs, which in itself isn't too difficult, but I got confused by the word order in some of the sentences used as examples. First, the sentence "Shall we give the vase to Miss Toda?" is translated as "Kabin o Toda-san ni agemashou ka?", which makes sense. Then, the sentence "Let's invite Mr. Sato to the party" is translated as "Satou-san o paatii ni shoutai shimashou", which confused me as in the second sentence the person's name was mentioned first while in the first sentence the vase was mentioned first. But I assume this is because it should be read as "The vase: give (it) to Miss Toda" and "Mr. Sato: invite (him) to the party", with the direct object being supposed to be the first part of the sentence. So I thought I uderstood it, but later on in the same exercise there were another two similar sentences wich brought back my confusion. "Shall I give this book to Miss Yamada?" (translated as "Yamada-san ni kono hon o agemashou ka?") and "Shall I invite Mr. Wada to lunch?" (translated as "Wada-san o hiru-gohan ni shoutai shimashou ka?"). The second one of these is almost the same as the one with Mr. Sato, so that makes sense, but the first one seeme to have the word order reversed. The way I understood it I would expect it to be "Kono hon o Yamada-san ni (…)". What's going on here? Or does the word order not really matter? I hope I explained it clearly enough and that someone can shed some light on this.

Also, I would like to try to read some really, really simple children's books (preferebly in hiragana or romaji). Does anyone have some links to places where I could find those? (If something like that exists at all.)

@Femme:

Yup that should be right. There are also HDMI to SCART converters as well. I've never used either before but I have a feeling that HDMI to SCART might be better than RCA. Maybe others can comment on this!

Yup, problem is that older tvs only work with analog signals, so having an HDMI plug on one end and RCAs on the other doesn't convert the digital signal to analog at all, which is why the converter devices are needed.

You got this!

Thanks! I checked some prices on HDMI to SCART converters, but it seems they're generally about twice as expensive as HDMI to RCA converters (probably because they're better, I guess). Since this is just a small, simple "project" (and since I'm poor :P), I'd rather not spend too much on it, so I guess I'll just go with the HDMI to RCA option. I'm not someone who really cares all that much about high video quality anyway.

Thanks for the input

I have a new(ish) laptop that I would like to connect to my old TV. The laptop has an HDMI port and the TV has RCA and SCART inputs. Now, from what I understand, my best option is to get an HDMI to RCA converter and plug an HDMI cable into my laptop and into one end of this converter, and an RCA cable into the other end of the converter and into my TV. Is this correct?

I saw there are also cables with an HDMI plug on one end and the three red/white/yellow RCA plugs on the other. But I think I can't use one of these cables in this case because they don't "convert" the signal.

I don't really know much about these things, so I'd like to hear some opinions from more tech-savvy people. Am I making any sense at all? Are there any other other options that may be better?

Thanks in advance