Ronald has done what appears to be a tremendous job on getting the grammar guide to the iPhone. I only say “appears” because I don’t have an iPhone to try it out. But if you do, try it out and add a review!
Grammar Guide iPhone app and app homepage.
Thanks Ronald!
I’ve been following the mobile tech news including the new android and iPhone with interest. It certainly seems like a lot of exciting stuff is happening and many areas could offer innovations in learning languages. In particular, voice recognition could potentially allow a program to check your pronunciation and text-to-speech could read out any Japanese text. Definitely, Android seems to have a lot more innovative stuff that could be potentially leveraged for language acquisition. And we already have touch screens all over the place so I’m hoping it’s only a matter of time before you can look up kanji online by writing it with your finger. Still, I haven’t bought a smart phone of my own, so I can’t test anything myself. I’m just not keen on being online all the time and certainly not by paying $100 every month. I already pay over $40 dollars for broadband. I’m not even on the road that much and have access to a computer most of the time.
Do you have a smartphone and is it worth the money?
I started learning Japanese as an adult (college sophomore) and became proficient in about 5 years (full story here). So I’d like to think I know the various phases you go through when learning a foreign language. There are different things to watch out for in each phase so let’s look at the long journey and how to successfully reach the end of the rainbow to find the pot of gold. Unfortunately, in real life, a rainbow is completely round so there is actually no end so good luck with that. Ha ha.
There are roughly 4 stages of language acquisition: excitement, depression, laziness, and acceptance. The excited stage is when everything is new and you feel a tremendous amount of progress everyday as you learn words like “to do”. Following that is depression upon realizing that no matter how much you learn, it’s still not enough. After you reach a certain level, you then become lazy because you can get by most of the time with what you know. If you overcome the lazy stage, the final stage is acceptance as you become resigned to the fact that learning a language has no end. You try the best you can and keep learning for as long as you use the language.
Yay, you’ve always wanted to learn Japanese and now you’re finally doing it. Everything is new and shiny and you’re making huge progress everyday. Relative to what you already know about the language (nothing), every additional piece of information easily doubles or triples your knowledge of the language. Enjoy the feeling while you can but don’t get enamored with that artificial feeling of ease and progress because it has diminishing returns. As you learn more, each additional piece of knowledge will count for less and less as compared to the whole even though you need to exert the same amount of effort.
The more you learn, the more options you have to sort through. The sentences get more and more complicated and you don’t know what to use for what or when. You’ve learned a bunch of grammar and vocab, and you might even understand quite a bit of the language (perhaps once you ask the speaker to slow down and repeat several times). But when it comes to expressing your own thoughts, you just don’t know where to start. All the knowledge you have is just floating around in a jumbled mess and you don’t know how to fit it all together. You’re stuck in a very frustrating position which one can describe as a “language limbo”.
This is a very depressing stage because it feels like even though you’re studying and working hard, you’re not getting any better at the language. This is the most difficult stage to go through especially if you don’t know it’s a stage that has an end. Don’t worry, it will not last forever. It’s a very important step where you need to take your cognitive knowledge and train it to the instinctual level. In other words, even though you can technically learn a new word or grammar, you don’t really know it until you’ve trained yourself with many hours of speaking and reading practice. Language is not a cognitive process. If you need to think about what grammar to use or how to construct your sentence, you haven’t actually learned it yet.
Punch through and practice, practice, practice. Like a tangled wire, it’ll look like a mess for a while until you reach the end of untangling the mess. It’ll also help to meet new and interesting people to practice with (especially of the opposite sex đ ). Get out there and meet people!
There’s a certain point in your language studies where everything just starts to make sense. You get a feel for how the language works as a whole and you can start to pick up and absorb new parts of the language relatively easily. This is the point where you generally have at least a rough idea of how to say everything even if you don’t know the exact vocabulary or grammar. This is also the point where you can talk about and learn new vocabulary or grammar within the language you’re learning.
This is a pretty good phase to be in. Even though you don’t know how to say everything, you can generally break it down with simpler words and concepts. Instead of saying, “I’m so hungry I could die”, you can say “I’m very hungry”. Sure it may not be exactly what you wanted to say but you can get by. But that’s the big danger of this phase.
You should always try to push yourself beyond the vocab, phrases, and grammar you’re comfortable with. Try out some more difficult words such as ãįžå¨ã instead of ãäģã, ãåŋ čĻã instead of ãããã or ãå¤æã instead of ãæąēããã. Push yourself to be more than someone who can speak Japanese but rather someone who can speak Japanese as an educated native speaker would. Sure, you rarely use phrases such as ããéããããããããĒããã or ãããĢéĸããĻã¯ã but you know what? Rarely doesn’t mean never. And if you put all those more advanced phrases and vocabulary together, an educated adult speaker will use them quite frequently on the whole.
Read! Reading is still one of the best ways to expand your vocabulary and power of expression. And don’t just read manga! Read real books that challenge you. And watch programs or talk with people about something more complicated than what you did last weekend.
If you reach this phase, congratulate yourself and take a look around. With all your experiences and hard work, you’ve truly achieved something remarkable. You crossed language and cultural boundaries to open up a whole new world of potential in culture, job opportunities, and interpersonal relationships. You’ve also gained a lot of growth as a person and expanded your outlook and broken some assumptions you’ve had. You also probably got a lot more than you bargained for when you initially decided just to “learn a new language” that most likely changed your life path in a significant way.
As you and I know, we’ll never stop learning. There’s always a new word or expression. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking of a word I just learned with a Kanji I’ve never seen before even though I don’t even live in Japan anymore. If you’re reading this and you’re still in phases 1-3, just know that all the hard work will totally be worth it. Or maybe you already know that.
Does anybody else find there’s no good male word for “I”? ãį§ã is too formal except for work (which I no longer do in Japanese). I was comfortable with ãäŋēã for a while but now I’m too old and Mr. Rogers-ish. And I never liked ãåã as it feels a bit too much boy scout-ish. I wish there was something not as rough as ãäŋēã but not so boyish as ãåã. Maybe something new in that crazy slang young people are coming up with all the time?
I finally got around to adding sounds to the Hiragana chart. Check it out. More needs to be done but it was hell getting it all working. I didn’t feel like using flash (not supported by iPhone and iPad) and instead opted for the html 5 audio tag. Only problem is that there is no single audio format that works for more than 2 browsers. So I wrote a script that changes the audio file based on your browser. The volume control is buggy in Firefox and of course, none of this works for IE (until IE 9). Anyway, long story short, setting up audio on a webpage is still a LONG way away from being something a non-techie can do. Isn’t that kind of sad?
After decades of innovation, we now have pocket-size computers that are more powerful than ones that used to take up whole rooms. But despite all the hardware advances we’ve made and the decades of research in computer natural language processing, Google translater still gives me this translation.
äŊããĻãããŽīŧ – What are you?
Hmm… nice try. The point I’m trying to make is that translation is and always will be an art and not a science. Especially with languages that are so different from each other such as English and Japanese. There will always be different interpretations and decisions to make on defining what the “best” translation is. It’s like trying to piece together the same lego set but with entirely different pieces. You can get some things to look similar or even almost identical but you’re gonna have to improvise on places where the pieces just don’t match.
However, there is an easy benchmark for determining how good a translation is for language acquisition: “how does the translation help you learn the language”? As adults learning a second language, it behooves us to learn new words by translating to our native language. You can save a lot of time by memorizing the word ãåéã as “friend” rather than learning how a baby might from scratch. However, with longer sentences and more abstract concepts, translation can often be more of an hindrance than an aid depending on how you go about it. Ideally, translations should serve as a stepping stone to learn the core concepts with the aim of doing away with translation altogether. In most cases, this means going for the most literal translation.
For example, which of the following is a “better” translation?
éŖãšãĻãããã§ããīŧ
1. May I eat it?
2. Even if eat, is good?
In the first translation, the translator (in this case, me) made a lot of decisions to try to craft what I thought was the most natural translation (“may” vs “can”, etc). If I was hired to translate a Japanese movie or text, #2 would be a terrible choice. But as a language learner, looking at translation #1 doesn’t help me understand anything about the core concepts that can explain other similarly structured sentences nor does it help me internalize the language for my own use.
éŖãšãĒããĻãããã§ããīŧ
Even if don’t eat, is it good?äģããčĄãŖãĻãéãĢåããĒããã
Even if go from now, will not make it in time.
Some concepts just don’t translate into English very well at all as you can see in the following sentences.
ããŽããã§ãã
It is that manner/appearance.ææŠãčĩˇãããããĢããĻããžãã
Morning doing in manner/appearance of waking up early.ããŖã¨æŗŗãããããĢãĒããžããã
Finally became manner/appearance of able to swim.ããŽæ įģã¯ãããčĻããããĒæ°ãããžãã
As for this movie, feeling of manner/appearance of having already seen.
But it doesn’t matter how bad the translation is, as long as it gives you an idea of the intent of the original Japanese and helps you conceptualize and internalize the concepts. That’s really the “best” translation. That also means my translations are just as bad if they don’t work for you, so take translations as just a hint for you to figure out the meaning on your own. When you can “feel” the meaning without quite being able to express it in English, that’s when you know you’ve truly learned it.
I got the following email the other day. I thought it was interesting for a number of reasons and instead of replying, decided to share here instead.
Hi,
You make a good grammar guide, but sadly few people will ever use it. It is foolish not to put the guide in romaji and have it help people that are tourists or beginners in Japanese. Japanese has all over 200 kana, with all the variations. A better approach is to have both the romaji and kana.
Not using romaji, which appears partially due to people being infected with Jim Breen’s madness, is doing more to hinder Japanese instruction than to help it. When a casual user needs to look up a word in Japanese or understand some pointers for speaking Japanese, hitting them over the head with kana and kanji is absurd. Even Google translate has a romanization option. Everybody looking to learn Japanese is not a full time student and many want to speak it and not learn kanji or kana. Furthermore, many Japanese know how to use romaji, because that is how they input Japanese on their keyboard or phones (before it is converted to kana or kanji).
I’m just letting you know, that not everybody agrees with Jim Breen’s ridiculous, elitist, and pompous anti-romaji crusade.
Feel free to discuss in the comments.
I know there’s still many of you out there that still feels uncomfortable about the difference between the ãã¯ã and ããã particle. You might have even read my first post which covered this very topic. Maybe my explanation didn’t “vibe” with you (translation: something’s wrong with you), so let me give you a more concrete example. Ignore the parentheses, I really don’t know where they come from. I think it’s a secret WordPress plugin.
I’m going to be revisit the two particles with the following story.
While chatting over dinner at a restaurant with fellow exchange students and some Japanese students, one of the exchange students exclaimed,
ãį§ã¯ã¤ãžããĒãīŊīŧ īŧŧ(*^o^)īŧã
We all had a good laugh because it seemed like she was saying she was boring.
If you’re reading this K, I don’t mean to insult you in anyway. Honestly, it’s the kind of mistake we’ve all made in the past. So exactly what was wrong with what she said? Doesn’t ãį§ã¯ã¤ãžããĒãã mean “I’m bored”? If not, how can you say “I’m bored” without insulting yourself?
The answer will probably blow away some of you new to this language. ãį§ã¯ã¤ãžããĒãã can mean either, “I’m bored” OR “I’m boring” or more accurately, ãį§ã¯ã gives us no information on which interpretation is correct.
The ãã¯ã topic particle only tells us the general topic of the conversation and has no direct connection to the rest of the sentence. All it says is, “this is what I’m going to talk about” and doesn’t explicitly specify its relation to the rest of the sentence.
į§ã¯ã¤ãžããĒãīŊīŧ – As for me, boring!
As you can see from the translation, saying ãį§ã¯ã¤ãžããĒãã without any context is highly suggestive of your incredibly boring and dull personality. If there was additional context, you might be able to pull it off such as the next example.
A)ããŋããĒãæĨŊããã§ããããīŧ – Everybody’s having fun, right?
B)ãį§ã¯ãã¤ãžããĒããã – As for me, boring.
Here, you can make the argument that you’re saying you’re bored because the question just asked was whether everybody was having fun. Another example is when you make it very clear that the role of ãã¤ãžããĒãã is completely unrelated to you.
A)ãããŽæ įģã¯éĸįŊããŽīŧ – Is this movie interesting?
B)ãį§ã¯ãã¤ãžããĒãã¨æãã – As for me, think (the movie) is boring.
So if the topic particle doesn’t really seem to work, what if we use the ããã particle instead? The ããã particle doesn’t specify whether you’re boring or bored either. It just identifies you as the one that is ãã¤ãžããĒãã. Whether that means boring or bored is kind of pretty much up to the interpretation of the listener.
A)ãį§ãã¤ãžããĒãã – I’m the one that is boring/bored.
B)ã?
B would be pretty puzzled because A is identifying herself as the one that is boring or bored and B didn’t know they were trying to find the one that was boring/bored. The only context in which ããã would make sense here is if you were trying to identify the one that was boring/bored, in other words, answering the question, “which is the one that is bored/boring?”
A) čĒ°ãã¤ãžããĒãīŧ – Who is the one that is bored/boring?
Bīŧ į§ãã¤ãžããĒããã – I’m the one that is bored/boring.
If you do a google search on “į§ãã¤ãžããĒã”, you’ll get a small number of results because this kind of situation is pretty contrived. So ããã doesn’t really work for our purposes.
In general, unless you want to make a distinction between your own opinion versus other people around you, you should generally avoid using ãį§ã¯ã at all. The ambiguity of topic’s role in the sentence makes using ãį§ã¯ã and ãã¤ãžããĒãã together a dangerous combination.
ãį§ãã doesn’t really work either because it identifies you as the one that is boring or bored among all the people who are potentially bored/boring. The only context in which it would make sense is if you knew somebody was boring/bored and you were trying to figure out which one among a group of people was the boring/bored one. It’s not a very likely scenario, which probably means you’re not using ããã correctly.
It is important to remember that people generally will assume you’re talking about yourself unless you say otherwise. So for the most part, you don’t have to say ãį§ã with either particle. People learning Japanese often get so catch up with the contrived differences between ãã¯ã and ããã, they often forget the option of using neither. So to conclude, in the original story, I would probably suggest to K to say something along the lines of the following instead next time.
ããĒããã¤ãžããĒãīŊīŧ īŧŧ(*^o^)īŧã
Follow my twitter account!
I’m going to try something interesting (or at least I hope it turns out interesting). (Hint: read post title)
I’ll wait a few days to start or until I get 100+ followers.
The response to part 1 was very positive so as promised, here’s part 2 of ordering food in real Japanese. I imagine the first thing most people come up with when thinking about Japanese food is “sushi” but for me, I would definitely say it’s “ramen”. Ramen was definitely a big part of what got me interested in the Japanese culture very early on. Tampopo is still one of my favorite movies of all time. If you haven’t watched it yet, you’re seriously missing out.
ååˇéģããžãŋãŗãŋãŗéēē
Ahh, the rich and complicated world of ramen. There’s so many things to cover but let’s just start with the basics. First of all, ramen is everywhere in Japan so finding it is like trying to find a Starbucks, not very difficult. However, Ikebukuro is perhaps one of the neighborhoods more famous for it’s ramen. There’s one I particularly liked whose name I can’t recall where you can crush your own fresh garlic (I love garlic).
Before we get into all the crazy ingredients that can go into ramen, you should first become familiar with the major types of ramen. These types will be generally enough to get your ramen fix in most generic ramen shops. Of course, many restaurants try to come up with clever names but it’s usually just marketing for these basic types of ramen.
A typical ramen menu (among other things)
This is the main list but there are other types of ramen out there like ããĢãŦãŧãŠãŧãĄãŗã, for example.
In addition to the major types of ramen, sometimes the cook will ask you how hard you want your noodles. Personally, I prefer al dente as do many of the more hard-core ramen enthusiasts. You can even ask for soft but who likes soggy noodles? Another great trick for a really filling meal, if the option is available, is to save the soup and order an extra ball of noodles. This is called ãæŋãįãīŧããã ãžīŧ. It’s like an extra bowl of ramen often for as little as several hundred yen!
Oh boy, this is going to be a doozy. A small number of ramen shops give you a list of ingredients, allowing you to choose each and every ingredient in your ramen (often charging you extra for each one). My wife usually picks miso, butter, and corn…. Ugh…
In Japanese, this is called ãå ˇãīŧãīŧ, which basically describes the solid stuff in any kind of soup or stew. There are a lot of ingredients so I’m only going to go over the major ones except for those we already look at in the major ramen types.
Also check out this the wikipedia ramen entry. There’s a lot more information about ramen as well, such as regional specialties. It’s all in Japanese but there’s also plenty of yummy pictures to feast your eyes on. Lovers of garlic and thick ã¨ãã㤠soup like me will love įæŦãŠãŧãĄãŗ, though as I painfully learned first-hand, you probably don’t want to actually eat all the garlic chips.
So there you have it. Welcome to the wonderful world of ramen! This post just barely scratching the surface so you haven’t seen nothing yet!