Learning Japanese

[Ryuou]

Originally Posted by iLney

Next:

砂糖を入れましたか？

First off, I don't study grammar .... Is that sentence in past tense? If so, why is it translated into "Do you take sugar?" ("Did" wouldn't make much sense either)

The use here is past tense. If you wanted a waiter to ask in current tense if they want to add sugar, something like - 砂糖を入れましょうか？or 砂糖をお入れしましょうか？Hmm...is it just me or does the second one seem a bit off? In both of these it would be the waiter doing the action.

[Yu Ominae]

Been studying Japanese in 2005 in a community college before I stopped to concentrate on graduating.

2007, I entered my uni (SFU for you Canadians, specifically BC people) and had wondered about resuming Japanese. Did so in 2009 and had finished it today, had a massive semi-epic fail. Well... that's with the parts of my final exams that I'm sure I answered correctly despite the contrary. Also my first time to write a composition. I got a bad grade for having bad vocab comprehension.

Which reminds me, I got two Genki books by "mistake" as I thought the sensei who was suppose to teach my class would use it. Turns out not to be the case. I'll keep it and read up to improve my Japanese. Will now pray to get a C- instead of a D, the latter will seriously mess up my GPA.

PS - The books are Genki I, workbook and the regular one.

PPS - To those who might wonder what I like about Japan, favorite things to tinker around are the government, esp. the JSDF, anime/manga and recently, the use of non-Japanese made cars in Japan.

よろしく！

[iLney]

Thank Ryuou

友達を六本木へ行った、食事をして、映画を見ました。

I thought it should be て form?

食べてからトイレに行きます。

Should I use た here instead?

[Ryuou]

Originally Posted by iLney

Thank Ryuou

友達を六本木へ行った、食事をして、映画を見ました。

I thought it should be て form?

食べてからトイレに行きます。

Should I use た here instead?

You're welcome.

First one: That probably should be て form. Also the "wo" should be "to".

Second one: No, no た. If you wanted to use "ta" then you'd need to change "kara" to "ato". So it'd be 食べたあとトイレに行きます。 They both mean the same thing though. After you do the verb, you do something else.

[iLney]

Thank you.

Hmm, weird. I saw "ta" followed by "kara" many times...

And would please tell me why it should be "to" instead of "o"?

[Ryuou]

"takara"?...you sure it wasn't "dakara"?

Because "wo" is for objects, the thing that something is being done to. You can't go somebody, you go with ("to") somebody. If the verb was take along/with (連れる) then it could be "wo".

[iLney]

"da" ye

Somebody? I thought it was "I went to rokhonki, ate lunch and watched a movie

Edit: and 今日は = kyo wa of konichiwa?

[Yu Ominae]

Yep. That's kyowa.

Can't believe I messed that up in the test.

[Circular Logic]

It's both kyou ha and konnnichi ha.

[Ryuou]

Originally Posted by iLney

"da" ye

Somebody? I thought it was "I went to rokhonki, ate lunch and watched a movie

Edit: and 今日は = kyo wa of konichiwa?

"I"? What about your good friend "友達"?

If it has a period after it than it's konnichiwa.

[Jan-Poo]

I have a question about kanji. Supposedly there are only 1945 kanji that are officially used for japanese writing, that is the jōyō kanji list. Now what i expected is that with the exception of proper names i would only find those 1945 kanji in internet, documents and such.

However while looking for the kanji of "yami" (darkness) to my dismay i noticed it wasn't listed under the jōyō kanji. What the hell? It is a word that is frequently used in fantasy games and anime. "kurayami", "yami no sho" "yami no shoujo", are just some examples. So i thought that maybe it's just written in hiragana, to check that i searched for "kurayami" "暗闇" on google and i found 3,8M results... O_o;;;

Now i don't think this is the only exception, but seriously... do i need to learn all the nearly 6 thousands kanji to fully understand even simply internet texts? What is the jōyō kanji list for then?

[iLney]

Uhm, you only need to learn about like 3500. Based on what I've seen, many of the kanjis outside the say, 3000 range, are just old writing of the latter group

@ryu: my bad, I forgot about "Friend" . Still, that sentence can refer to just that "friend." I still don't see why "to" should be there instead

[Mystique]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

I have a question about kanji. Supposedly there are only 1945 kanji that are officially used for japanese writing, that is the jōyō kanji list. Now what i expected is that with the exception of proper names i would only find those 1945 kanji in internet, documents and such.

However while looking for the kanji of "yami" (darkness) to my dismay i noticed it wasn't listed under the jōyō kanji. What the hell? It is a word that is frequently used in fantasy games and anime. "kurayami", "yami no sho" "yami no shoujo", are just some examples. So i thought that maybe it's just written in hiragana, to check that i searched for "kurayami" "暗闇" on google and i found 3,8M results... O_o;;;

Now i don't think this is the only exception, but seriously... do i need to learn all the nearly 6 thousands kanji to fully understand even simply internet texts? What is the jōyō kanji list for then?

To teach the kids of Japan the basic 2000 kanji needed for them to get by in everyday life as they get older, that's what it's for.
By no means does it mean that they cannot pick up many other kanji in their lives, if a child's bright, they may even want to look up and research more kanji than what is simply taught in school.

Remember:
Kanji = vocabulary + literacy

And that level depends and varies from person to person, just as it does in English.
(I believe on average we know 40,000 daily use words, or something like that, but I believe that's what students of english have to try to achieve to be fairly compentant)
Anyways:

2009: The list is expected to be revised to include an additional 191 characters and remove 5 characters [1]. As of 16 Jan 2009, the list of 191 additional charaters can be seen here: [2]

As it is, they're taking 5 out and adding an additional 200 or so, now, so it will total a little over 2000.
Guess someone decided it's time for a mini update

PS:
Oh and good news, "yami" is in that new 191 list

[iLney]

Uhm, is it just me or many of the "new" 191 chars look strangely familiar...

Edit: err, nvm. I studies 2045 not 1945

[Vexx]

English has over 600,000 words (depending on who counts) yet the *average* speaker knows barely 10,000 words and may use less than 5000 words in daily speech or writing.

So that may give you some sense of scale when attacking the kanji

[Jan-Poo]

o teach the kids of Japan the basic 2000 kanji needed for them to get by in everyday life as they get older, that's what it's for.

I thought it was more than that considering there's a list of extra Kanji that can be used for names. Why is there a constant request of adding more of them? Isn't it because they actually can't use those Kanji otherwise?

Oh and good news, "yami" is in that new 191 list

Ah good! XD then i hope there are only 190 or so kanji that are so frequently used outside the jōyō

PS: on second thought that ridiculus amount of pages i found could have been chinese for the vast majority...

EDIT

English has over 600,000 words (depending on who counts) yet the *average* speaker knows barely 10,000 words and may use less than 5000 words in daily speech or writing.

So that may give you some sense of scale when attacking the kanji

Well... that's not a fair comparison. Kanji are not exactly "words", for the most part words are composed by two kanji. 6000^2 = 36.000.000. you get the general idea that to make 600.000 words you don't really need 6000 Kanji.

[Mystique]

Originally Posted by Vexx

English has over 600,000 words (depending on who counts) yet the *average* speaker knows barely 10,000 words and may use less than 5000 words in daily speech or writing.

So that may give you some sense of scale when attacking the kanji

10k?
You're differentiating by 30k, am I really that off in terms of our lexicon count as natives?

Today, more than 750 million people use the English language. An average educated person knows about 20,000 words and uses about 2,000 words in a week.

Reading and comparing a few more articles, I gain a sense of 10,000-20,000 words on average, but yeah... it seems to still be fairly... low? xD
(It's like we only use 5% of what is available...)

Grade 1 Student = 1,000+ words

Normal Person (Graduate) = 5,000 to 6,000+ words

University Professor = 15,000+ words

Spelling Bee Winners = 30,000+ (as claimed by them)

College Dictionary (Abridged) = 50,000 - 70,000

Total Words in English Language = 250,000+ (Growing)

Dictionary (Un-abridged) with derivatives = 450,000+

If one was to count the total words in a dictionary, I guess we really do use a lot less. xD

But as Vexx mentioned, using English as an example, we cannot bash about kanji too much in terms of count.
3,000+ sounds horrible, I guess because its 3,000 characters rather than 3,000 words that I can sense the doom and gloom (trust me, I hate being illiterate in Japanese)
But a person can get by on the basic 2,000 alone.
The countless combinations of all 2,000 kanji make up about what...? 10,000 vocabulary words a person could know. (If JLPT lvl 1 is anything to go by)

[Vexx]

A brief jaunt to the shopping mall and listening to conversations may make you think the average person knows less than a thousand words of English and mangles half of those (in the US at least :P ).

But yeah, as Mystique says I was basically just saying that 2000 kanji isn't as awful as it sounds - especially once you get the hang of the roots and such. In English, I can usually parse out a new word I haven't seen by knowing the latin, norse, anglo, or germanic roots (very rough approximation to seeing a new word made of kanji one recognizes ... VERY rough).

Of course, this is from someone who seems to be hung at about 200 kanji (without lunging for the kanji book) because I keep getting derailed by Real Life or other distractions, like Animesuki, meh.

[Jan-Poo]

2000 kanji sounds reasonable enough to me... 6000 not so much...

[Circular Logic]

Originally Posted by Mystique

But as Vexx mentioned, using English as an example, we cannot bash about kanji too much in terms of count.
3,000+ sounds horrible, I guess because its 3,000 characters rather than 3,000 words that I can sense the doom and gloom (trust me, I hate being illiterate in Japanese)

To be fair, a good proportion of the 2000-3000 range of kanji one picks up quite easily, since they're often really common in names, or ridiculously simple ones which haven't been put in by some odd bureaucratic edict (乙、串、and 韓 all come to mind). Well, at least they'll be updating the Joyo kanji lists soon...