Learning Japanese

[iLney]

@mendokusa & Kylaran: thanks

If it were "よく（そんなことを）言うよ！" it would make more sense. But if it stood alone like that (よく言うよ), how can I tell? (よく言った) is "well said" as mendokusa suggested).

An insult and a praise are that close?...

Likewise, in sentence like "しばらくして、女がまたこう言った." How can I tell "こう＝このように?" Is there a list of such phrases? Searching "こう" will give a bunch of nonsensical results.

[Kylaran]

Originally Posted by Alchemist007

So its like mocking?

It's more reprimanding or harshly criticizing (what someone said). [Edit]In a sense, you can think of it as calling someone out too. "Bullshit!" is one way to interpret it, but some times it's also "OMG YOU SAID THAT", if that serves as a better comparison for meaning. It's hard to fully describe without giving some good examples. Medokusa gave a good one.

Originally Posted by iLney

If it were "よく（そんなことを）言うよ！" it would make more sense. But if it stood alone like that (よく言うよ), how can I tell? (よく言った) is "well said" as mendokusa suggested).

An insult and a praise are that close?...

Likewise, in sentence like "しばらくして、女がまたこう言った." How can I tell "こう＝このように?" Is there a list of such phrases? Searching "こう" will give a bunch of nonsensical results.

I've never thought of it that way, actually. I always thought of it as the english equivalent of "she said this again" or "she said that again" (彼女がそう言った), but I do suppose in a way it means "said someone like that". I personally don't think this is a really hard concept to learn; it may not be in the dictionary, but if you hear it used naturally it makes a lot of sense to simply equivocate こう/そう as a unit with a similar meaning. I often try to pick up language holistically based on the meaning of the sentence overall (sometimes this strategy fails to work, especially when your assumptions about what someone's saying ends up being wrong), and this is one case where it feels natural to assume what the meaning is supposed to be.

As for the first part of your question, yes, the meanings can be confusing when used outside of context. In a sense, they're close, but in a sense, when used in the right context, they don't mean anything that similar, except in perhaps a literal way.

[LeoXiao]

How do are Japanese people able to read kanji fast enough if they have to first figure out what hatsuon it carries? Whenever I read stuff I have to think about what the kanji's reading is in relation to the context, and it takes a long time to do this. Do they just mess up the pronunciation a lot?

[Kylaran]

Originally Posted by LeoXiao

How do are Japanese people able to read kanji fast enough if they have to first figure out what hatsuon it carries? Whenever I read stuff I have to think about what the kanji's reading is in relation to the context, and it takes a long time to do this. Do they just mess up the pronunciation a lot?

There are times where even Japanese people mis-read kanji when the word is unfamiliar to them, but it follows the same principle by which we use to pronounce words in English (especially homophones). Take for example gourmet (Perhaps a poor choice of word, considering its French roots, but I will use it as a rough example, nonetheless.). A person seeing it may read it as "gour-met" with an aspirated t at the end in typical English fashion. If they're familiar with the pronunciation, and someone explains to them it's "gour-may", then they'll effectively have mapped the pronunciation, spelling (in the case of Japanese, the kanji), with the meaning.

To go into more detail: sometimes there are linguistic clues (example: a kanji compound with okurigana, thus signifying native pronounciation; 見習 is minarai, not kenshuu), but a lot of times it's an analogue mapping mechanism that learns through both linguistic rules and trial and error during one's childhood years first learning language. Basically, mapping sound onto meaning requires both knowledge of the rules (an example of which I just described), and another is simply knowing when irregularities occur and speaking the language naturally, to the point where you can breeze over a sentence and absorb it quickly.

Mistakes can be made by following the previously described linguistic rules during new word/grammar acquisition. For us learning Japanese as a foreign language, we try to put together which rules to use, and sometimes the rules are simply wrong. It's a mistake that children make as well.

So in conclusion to your question: they both know and don't know. For the vast majority of words in the language, they have experience and the rules apply. For more obscure terms, there may be historical or illogical reasons for the way something is pronounced, and thus error may occur in choosing the reading for the kanji despite being fluent. But for the most part, they are simply knowledgeable (aka fluent) in reading because their mind is conditioned to interpret the language a certain way.

[nikorai]

Kylaran
That is, it’s best to be a native speaker and if you’re not but you want to be like one, it becomes a big pain to learn.
I remember when I learned French at the uni, everyone hated it because they couldn’t memorize the pronunciation rules, and I loved French. And I still do. I think that pronunciation is actually the easiest part in French.
I guess that it’s mostly about memorization. Speaking of Japanese, if you don’t know the word your guess of reading by on-yomi doesn’t always work. You check the dictionary and it turns out that the reading is completely different from what you thought.
I’m reading a manga where there’s no furigana. And there are quite a lot of new words for me. So it often happens that I know only one kanji in the word and I have to input it into the dictionary and pick up the word I need from the list.
Ah, and at some point the characters visit different parts of Japan, This is where I fail completely. Say, I’ve just read the part where they visited Hokkaido. Well, I remember that 札幌 is Sapporo. And I guessed (after several failed attempts) that 函館 is Hakodate. But 小樽 was a mystery. It is actually Otaru.
I studied at the faculty where students are divided into groups according to the languages they study. So we had 4 groups, English/French (mine), German/English, French/English and Chinese/English. So those who studied Chinese had a map of China for their lessons where all inscriptions are in kanji (hanzi), so the students were specifically trained to read geographical names.
And unfortunately, Japanese is not offered at the economic department but there’s a Chair of Japanese at the Interpreters’ department.
I'm scared to think that I chose reading manga over my textbook. It turns out that I don’t have time for both so I had to put aside my self-studies. Hopefully not for long.

[LeoXiao]

So in conclusion to your question: they both know and don't know. For the vast majority of words in the language, they have experience and the rules apply.

Ok, thanks.

Here's another question: How do you say sentences like "I think that..."? For example, "I think that he is buying something right now." What I am trying to close in on here is how "that" is expressed in this situation.

I remember when I learned French at the uni, everyone hated it because they couldn’t memorize the pronunciation rules, and I loved French. And I still do. I think that pronunciation is actually the easiest part in French.

Yeah, I don't get what is so hard about memorizing these simple basic rules such as those for pronunciation. There are so many people in my German class who just can't understand that "s" is actually "z", "w" is "v", "v" is "w", and so on. It's rather annoying.

[sonotme_9FedriqSama]

wat does "nemurenu" in sentence 眠れぬ学園の生徒。refers to?. can someone give more examples with sentences with "nu" after verb.

[nikorai]

LeoXiao

Yeah, I don't get what is so hard about memorizing these simple basic rules such as those for pronunciation. There are so many people in my German class who just can't understand that "s" is actually "z", "w" is "v", "v" is "w", and so on. It's rather annoying.

Oh, I can understand you pretty much. I’ve always wanted to learn German myself but I never came to doing it. It’s that I’m more motivated to learn Japanese, after all.

Ich spreche leider kein Deutsch.
残念ながら、ドイツ語が話せません。

Here's another question: How do you say sentences like "I think that..."? For example, "I think that he is buying something right now." What I am trying to close in on here is how "that" is expressed in this situation.

Uh, literally it becomes
彼は今何か買っていると思う。
“I think that” is 　～と思う。

If he is doing some shopping then it's
彼は今頃、買い物をしているはずだ。
(He's supposed to be doing shopping at the moment (but not necessarily is))

sonotme_9FedriqSama

wat does "nemurenu" in sentence 眠れぬ学園の生徒。refers to?. can someone give more examples with sentences with "nu" after verb.

ぬ is basically the same as　ない。

眠れぬ学園の生徒

My try: a pupil from a campus that never sleeps (lit. ‘sleepless academy’).
But I usually came across 眠れぬ夜 which means a wakeful (sleepless) night. Other combinations are quite rare.

There’s a separate thread for advanced Japanese.
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=78887
Here, Ryuou-san gave an extended overview of the usage of ‘nu’.

[LeoXiao]

残念ながら、ドイツ語が話せません。

On the topic of the word "to say", how does the verb (言) work conjugation-wise? I've heard people say "imasu," "itta", "iwanai" and so on. It seems confusing, since I can't imagine where the "wa" would come from.

[Raiga]

Originally Posted by LeoXiao

On the topic of the word "to say", how does the verb (言) work conjugation-wise? I've heard people say "imasu," "itta", "iwanai" and so on. It seems confusing, since I can't imagine where the "wa" would come from.

Godan verbs that end in う go to わ instead of あ as you'd expect for the negative and such, and godan verbs ending in う、る、つ go to った in the past tense and って in the te-form. I think it's left over from classical Japanese or something (er, the わ thing, not the past tense thing). And if I'm not mistaken you'd be hearing いいます and not います, which is the formal of いる.

[nikorai]

LeoXiao
First,
話す　and 言う are different words.
Second, mendokusa-san spoke extensively about 五段活用　and 一段活用。 He also explained the changes from the point of view of phonetics but it isn't like I can easily reproduce his explanation now.

I've heard people say "imasu," "itta", "iwanai" and so on. It seems confusing, since I can't imagine where the "wa" would come from.

These people are correct.
in ワ行五段活用
未然形　う＞わ　に変えます。
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%...B4%BB%E7%94%A8

言う＞言わない
笑う＞笑わない
問う＞問わない
etc.

それが文法の問題です。練習してみてね。




　

[Kylaran]

Originally Posted by Raiga

Godan verbs that end in う go to わ instead of あ as you'd expect for the negative and such, and godan verbs ending in う、る、つ go to った in the past tense and って in the te-form. I think it's left over from classical Japanese or something (er, the わ thing, not the past tense thing). And if I'm not mistaken you'd be hearing いいます and not います, which is the formal of いる.

Originally Posted by nikorai

LeoXiao
First,
話す　and 言う are different words.
Second, mendokusa-san spoke extensively about 五段活用　and 一段活用。 He also explained the changes from the point of view of phonetics but it isn't like I can easily reproduce his explanation now.


These people are correct.
in ワ行五段活用
未然形　う＞わ　に変えます。
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%...B4%BB%E7%94%A8

言う＞言わない
笑う＞笑わない
問う＞問わない
etc.

それが文法の問題です。練習してみてね。

While these explanations are correct, I don't think either of these answer his question, which is about where the phoneme "wa" comes from in the negation of the verb 言う.

Here's a little history lesson for you LeoXiao, and everyone else unfamiliar with Japanese linguistic history (I myself have just started trying to educate myself about this):

Traditionally, many of the verbs we know as -u verbs (take for example, 言う) were once written with the kana that we know pronounce as "fu" ふ (although it's actual phonetic pronunciation is closer to the voiceless fricative hu). You'll see evidence of this if you look at writings from the Meiji-era and earlier, notably before the 1946 language reform bill. (Pardon me if I got the name of the bill wrong; I'm no history specialist.) Perhaps some of you who've watched the anime Bakemonogatari 化物語 have noticed that the katakana they use in the typesets do not follow modern kana usage rules. You can specifically find 云フ in a lot of the type sets: this is read as 言う (old kanji + old kana usage). I'm not too familiar with why it was written this way originally, but it supposedly still a mystery as to why there are very interesting spellings in historical kana usage 歴史的仮名遣い since linguists think that not even the older pronunciations of the words necessarily matches the spellings they once used.

Moving on: what you should also know is that this line of kana, はひふへほ was once pronounced as わいうえお. So, taking our knowledge of the rules governing the conjugation of godan 五段 verbs, we start from the center column (う) and shift to the first column for the imperfect form (未然形) which is what's used in the negative in modern Japanese. Thus, following the older version of the gojuon 五十音 table, we go from ふ to は. As you can see, what we know today as 言う ー＞ 言わない was actually 言ふ -> 言はない a long time ago and was pronounced いわない. This is exactly the same as 書くー＞書かない. The modern form just loses that distinction.

Also, this is actually the same reason why the topic marker は is pronounced わ. A long time ago, it would've been correct to pronounce words spelled with は as わ, and despite the change in pronunciation of the はひふへほ row phonetically in the language itself, the Japanese mostly likely decided to retain the historical pronunciation of は as わ due to its unique grammatical function as the topic marker, thus differentiating it from は used to spell other words such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.

[Edit]I initially wrote something wrong here about the historic form of the gerund って when applied to ふ verbs. Let me explain it correctly. 言って was once written いひて (pronounced いいて), which actually follows a conjugation rule of using the 2nd column/row in the 五十音 chart (similar to how 上一段 verbs are conjugated), only with a て attached at the end. For this reason, 打って was once written 打ちて. In order to reflect the geminated consonant (aka hard consonants like って and っけ), modern Japanese employed the 促音 っ. On that note, ゃゅょ for 拗音 did not used to exist either; there were different spelling rules ordaining how words with certain lengths were to be written out.

Hope this helps.

[LeoXiao]

Wow... that's really impressive. I didn't expect that much detail. It was rather helpful.

So basically, because "iu" ends in "u", it gets changed to "iwa" in the negative form. Does this rule hold true for all other verbs that end in "u", such as "au" (to meet)? Could you say "boku wa kanojo o awanakatta?"

[Kylaran]

Originally Posted by LeoXiao

Wow... that's really impressive. I didn't expect that much detail. It was rather helpful.

So basically, because "iu" ends in "u", it gets changed to "iwa" in the negative form. Does this rule hold true for all other verbs that end in "u", such as "au" (to meet)? Could you say "boku wa kanojo o awanakatta?"

Yes. That's correct. Except you use the particle と with 会う, because you meet with people. を is used for denoting actions done to objects.

[LeoXiao]

Originally Posted by Kylaran

Except you use the particle と with 会う, because you meet with people. を is used for denoting actions done to objects.

haha, lol I knew that. Stupid mistake on my part.

[technomo12]

um guys im using mozzila and the japanese words are being shown as cubed number is there an add on for mozilla to under stand japaneses characters??

[sonotme_9FedriqSama]

Originally Posted by nikorai

ぬ is basically the same as　ない。

My try: a pupil from a campus that never sleeps (lit. ‘sleepless academy’).
But I usually came across 眠れぬ夜 which means a wakeful (sleepless) night. Other combinations are quite rare.

There’s a separate thread for advanced Japanese.
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=78887
Here, Ryuou-san gave an extended overview of the usage of ‘nu’.

有難う　ニコライさん、 at first, I thought it might be a negavite suffix...but since I haven't come across it's usage from grammer point of view I wanted to confirm it and wanted to know how it is generally used in conversation that's why asked for examples.

Also thanks for the link I'll check the explaination by Ryuou-san.

[nikorai]

Kylaran
That was absolutely fantastic!

While these explanations are correct, I don't think either of these answer his question, which is about where the phoneme "wa" comes from in the negation of the verb 言う.

Ah, I’m sorry I wasn’t really informative. I’m sure it had something to do with phonetics but I couldn’t come up with any explanation myself. You know that the textbooks I learned only suggest mechanical memorization without going into any historical aspects. That’s why my head is empty. And besides when I stopped by the thread it was already 6 am at my place so I didn’t feel like doing any research either. Well I hope you understand me…

technomo12
You’re right to use Mozilla but you also have to have support for Japanese characters installed. In Win Vista it’s available by default but Win XP has only optional support for Asian languages. So you’ll have to get the disc with Win XP, go to your Control Panel/Regional settings and install the support from there. XP will copy necessary files from the cd and after that the cubes will turn into kanji. I hope that helps.

sonotme_9FedriqSama

いいえ、どういたしまして。
お役に立ててうれしいです。

But you know that my Japanese leaves much to be desired. It’s great that we have some true professionals here to help us or else it would’ve been very tough.

[Raiga]

Originally Posted by technomo12

um guys im using mozzila and the japanese words are being shown as cubed number is there an add on for mozilla to under stand japaneses characters??

You could try view>encoding and select one of the Japanese encodings, although Unicode should work...

[technomo12]

MAN THIS SUCKS!!! i have to get a XP CD >_< o well ill just read the" how to learn japanese in 30 days" book