Category Archives: Beginner

Begin the journey to mastering your 気

Posted on by

「気」 is a kind of energy embodied by your mind and spirit… or so they say. Personally, I really don’t believe in all that mumbo-jumbo but we still have to deal with it because it’s often used in everyday Japanese to describe your mind-set or feelings. In fact, the characters for your emotional feelings 「気持ち」 means 「気」 that is held” and your physical feelings 「気分」 also contains the same 「気」 character.

I’m going to go over some of the most useful and basic ways to use your 「気」 and I don’t mean fireballs and kung-fu moves. Rather, I’ve compiled a list of common expressions that you can use to describe your 「気」. Though making a list of expressions is not usually not my kind of thing, these are so useful and simple (and for some reason often neglected in the classroom) that I feel it’s worth the time to list and describe them. Also, these kinds of expressions are very hard to find in the dictionary unless you almost already know what you’re looking for.

「気」 with verbs so basic, your grandma can use it

Putting aside the image of your grandma firing off hadokens, here is a list of 「気」 expressions with the most simple and basic verbs. I’ve tried to interpret some of the literal meanings as a aid in memorizing what all these kinds of 「気」 means.

  1. 気にする – Means to worry about something. It is almost always used in the negative to say, “Don’t worry about it”. The meaning is similar to 「心配しないで」 except 「心配」 involves actual worry and anxiety. 「気にしない」 means don’t even bother paying attention to it or wasting your 「気」.

    １）　気にしないで – Don’t worry about it.

  2. 気になる – Similar to 「気にする」 except instead of bothering about something, it’s becoming a bother. In other words, it’s something that is niggling your subconscious and making you wonder about something.

    １）　彼女の歳が気になる。 – I wonder what her age is. (lit: Her age has been bothering me.)

  3. 気がする – Your 「気」 is acting up and alerting your senses. As a result, you have a feeling of whatever you attach 「気がする」 to.

    １）　もう終わった気がする。- I have a feeling that [it] already ended.

  4. 気がつく （気づく） – Your 「気」 attaches to you making you regain consciousness in the literal sense or in a figurative sense of just waking up and smelling the coffee.

    １）　気がついたら、もう９時になっていた。 – When I came to my senses, it had become 9:00 already.
    ２）　彼は全然気づいていない。 – He doesn’t realize (or hasn’t noticed) it at all.

  5. 気をつける – Attach your 「気」 and always keep your wits about you. In other words, be careful.

    １）　気をつけて！ – Be careful!/Take care!

  6. 気をつかう – Use your 「気」 to pay attention to or attend to somebody. A good host always uses her 「気」 for her guests and their needs.

    １）　気をつかってくれて、ありがとう！ – Thanks for caring about me!

  7. 気にいる – This is a curious one as it uses the not-so-common 「いる」 reading of 「入る」. It is usually used in the past tense as 「気に入った」, literally meaning something entered your 「気」. This essentially means it came to your liking. It’s a shorter, easier, and more casual way to say the same thing as 「好きになった」. If you use a Japanese browser, you might also have noticed that the bookmarks are called 「気に入り」.

    １）　これ、気に入ったよ。 – This has come to my liking.

    (Thanks Florian for suggesting this one be added to the list.)

Conclusion

I’ve tried to keep my list short and simple to prevent this from becoming a monster list with too much information. However, if you’re in the mood, you can scroll through a huge list by going to WWWJDIC, search for 「気」 and set the checkmark for “Starting Kanji”. You’ll get all sorts of useful expressions like 「気が強い」、「気が向く」、「気が散る」、etc., etc. Someday, you can become a master of at least talking about your 「気」 without even having to work out!

Repeat after me, there is NO such thing as a subject!

Posted on by

One of my biggest pet peeves in the field of Japanese as a second language is the 「が」 particle being called the “subject particle”. This misleading terminology comes from my second biggest pet peeve, which is educators trying to artificially tie Japanese into English language concepts. I think one of the problems is that Japanese teachers, especially native speakers, really don’t understand their own language from a conceptual point-of-view and more importantly how it logically differs from English.

I can illustrate how stupid it is to call 「が」 the subject particle in the following simple dialogue.

Ａさん： 原宿に行こうよ。
Ｂさん： なんで？
Ａさん：　クレープが食べたいから。

Looking at the last sentence, if 「クレープが」 is indeed marking crepe as the subject, we can only assume that Ａさん wants to go to Harajuku because the crepe wants to eat. But that doesn’t make any sense! In reality, 「クレープ」 here is supposed to be the object of the sentence, the subject being Ａさん, who wants to eat crepe.

The most simple conclusion, if you insist on thinking in English, is that the 「が」 particle can either represent the subject or the object of the sentence. But why would you use the same particle to represent something completely so different as the subject and the object? And to make things even worse, consider the following dialogue.

Ａさん：何か食べようよ。
Ｂさん：クレープはどう？
Ａさん：クレープはあまり食べたくないな。

If you throw in the fact that the 「は」 can also be the subject OR the object, it’s no wonder that Japanese particles seem so confusing! It’s natural that students can never figure out the difference between 「は」 and 「が」 because it seems that either can be used to indicate the same things in English. This is where Japanese teachers should really beat into their heads that the concepts they’re looking for such as the subject does not exist in Japanese.

The subject traditionally indicates who or what is doing the verb in the sentence but 「は」 only indicates the topic. For example, 「今日は忙しい」 doesn’t mean that “Today is busy”, it means “As for today, [I, he, she, we, they] is/are busy.” Only when we translate into English are we forced to create the subject by context. In this case, the translation might be “I’m busy today.”

The 「が」 particle also does not indicate the subject, it only identifies the unknown. For example, 「クレープが食べたいから。」 is identifying that it’s because crepe is the thing that he/she/we/they wants to eat. In English, the subject would be “it” as in, “It’s because I want to eat crepe”. But because Japanese doesn’t even have a subject, there is no need for such a construction.

This is why I’ve been calling the 「が」 particle the “identifier particle” for the longest time, and you should too because that’s what it does. There is no such thing as a subject in Japanese so it makes no sense to have a “subject” particle. (Please feel free to do the double quote sign while saying “subject” in “subject particle”.)

For further reading, I highly suggest this blog post: 「日本語に主語はあるのか？」.

Part 2 on the non-existent 「たい」 form rule

Posted on by

In the previous post, not only did I to get away with being too lazy to finish what I was writing but I managed to make it an excuse for more comments. I’m a genius! The only downside is the increased pressure to actually come back and finish what I started. (As you can see, I easily managed to withstand the pressure for almost a full week.)

Rule? What Rule?

Getting down to business, I noticed that a couple people commented that they did not know there was a rule saying that you can’t use 「を」 with the 「たい」 form. You’re right, there is no rule! Forget I said anything! (Waves hand) These are not the rules you’re looking for… this is not a real post.

Gah! They’re all the bloody same!

There were some people that said they couldn’t tell the difference between 「を」, 「が」, and 「は」, so let’s take a look each example sentence from the last post.

１） 続きを読みたい。
２） 続きが読みたい。
３） 続きは読みたい。
４） どうでもいい。

The way I see it, ２） and ３） are nothing special. They just go back to the original question of what the difference is between 「は」 and 「が」. In my very first post, I mentioned that the 「が」 particle is used to identify something unknown to the speaker or listener. So ２） is simply identifying what somebody wants to read. It’s like saying, “Oh you want to know what it is that I want to read? Well, it’s 「続き」”. A more literal translation would be, “「続き」 is what I want to read.” When people say that 「が」 places emphasis on 「続き」, that’s just another way of saying the same thing. The problem with the word “emphasis” is that you can emphasize anything by saying it with a heavy accent. With 「が」, it may seem like emphasis is being added to the thing you’re identifying but that is just a side-effect of the true meaning of 「が」.

As for ３）, the 「は」 particle indicates that we are talking about 「続き」 as a topic. 「は」 works well for situations where you want to discuss, describe, or talk about a specific topic. For example, 「続きは読みたいけど、まだ読めない」 talks about 「続き」 as a topic; saying that you want to read it and that you can’t yet (because I’m writing it right now).

Finally, we get to real question, “When or why would we want to use 「を」?” The answer is so simple, you’ll want to ask for your money back. (I’ll do that as soon as I get some money to begin with.)

Use 「を」 when you don’t want to use 「が」 or 「は」.

「を」 is very neutral and simply says, “this is the object” without all the extra nuances of 「が」 or 「は」. If I say, 「りんごを食べたい」, all I’m saying is “I want to eat an apple.” There’s nothing else to infer. The apple is the object of my desire and that’s it. With 「は」, you are inferring, “Well, on the topic of apples, yeah, I want to eat it. Maybe not other stuff but apples, sure. As long as we’re talking about apples, I feel like it’s something I want to eat.” With 「が」, you are inferring, “You know what it is that I want to eat? Apples. Yeah. I thought about all the other stuff but no, an apple is what I want to eat.”

Thinking about these distinctions can make you feel confused and make Japanese seem complicated. Often times, one or more particles will make sense but can’t be used in other situations. Context will sometimes clear up which particles you should really be using. However, when the context is vague enough to allow multiple choices, it’s really important to get a sense of what each particle is really saying in order to decide how you want to come across to other people.

As for ４）, c’mon, let’s be nice. You wouldn’t be reading this if you really thought that, right?

Conclusion

In reading the comments, it was obvious that some of you knew what each particle meant. Some of the answers are not exactly how I phrased things but describing these particles perfectly in English is impossible because the words don’t exist. So as long as you have a feel for how each particles work, that’s all that matters in the end.

And finally, yes Laura, I do have a girlfriend. What a strange question. Why do you ask?

Ssh, don’t tell anyone but… you can use 「を」 with the 「たい」 form

Posted on by

I remember reading or hearing a long time ago that you can’t use the object particle 「を」 with the 「たい」 form of the verb. (If you are unfamiliar with the 「たい」 form, click here.) Now that’s complete rubbish but I can see where the logic came from. When a verb is converted to the 「たい」 form, it becomes an adjective describing that somebody or something wants to do the verb. Grammatically, it conjugates and works just like any other adjective. Subsequently, because the object particle describes the object of an action, it doesn’t make any sense to have an adjective have a direct object, ie “Bob big apple”. So in conclusion, using the object particle with the 「たい」 form is grammatically incorrect because the 「たい」 form is an adjective. You should use 「が」 or sometimes 「は」. So all was well, and we could flog students for making that mistake in peace.

But reality tells a different story. Maybe it was modern Western influence on the language or maybe some crazy grammar-fanatic educators forgot to check reality when creating the rule. I’m not an expert on the history of Japanese linguistics so I don’t really know. But whatever the case, all I know is that people today use the 「を」 particle with the 「たい」 form all the time.

I can already see the next question about to come out of your mouth. You want to know what the difference is between using 「を」 and something else right? Well, I’m going to see if anybody is still reading this blog by letting you peeps try to figure it out in the comments. I’ll write the answer in an another post.

Here are some example sentences for you to chew on.

１） 続きを読みたい。
２） 続きが読みたい。
３） 続きは読みたい。
４） どうでもいい。

Tae Kim’s Language Studying Tips

Posted on by

Now that I’m studying Chinese from scratch, I’m back to where I was when I started learning Japanese six years ago. (My god, has it been that long already?) It’s great because it really reminds me of what it was like to be completely lost in a new language. In fact, I think foreign language teachers should study a new language every now and then to really see what it’s like to be the student.

Anyway, since this is a blog about Japanese, I thought I’d share with you some common ideas and strategies I found to be effective in learning a new language whether it’s Japanese, Chinese, or any other language. While some of these ideas might seem obvious to those who have studied foreign languages, I mention them here because it is very easy to forget and to fall back into bad habits (including myself).

Language is drawing a line in the sand near the tide (TM)

Ok, I didn’t actually trademark anything but that’s how clever I thought the title was. We should spread the phrase by saying it was first said by a wise Chinese monk or something. The conversation would look something like this.

Some Dude: Hey, can you teach me Japanese?

You: I would but “Language is drawing a line in the sand near the tide”.

D: Huh?

Y: It means that you must constantly be studying a language in order to learn it. If you stop, it’ll all just fade away.

D: Isn’t that like, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”?

Y: Not exactly. What I said was first said by a wise Chinese monk.

D: Whoa… that’s deep.

Don’t fall for the “Master Japanese in just XX days/weeks” gimmick. Learning a new language is a long-term commitment. It’s different from learning how to ride a bike or how to whistle. No matter what your goal is, whether it’s native level or just some travel phrases, if you don’t keep practicing, you will forget.

You only truly learn a language with continual practice. It’s like biking up a series of hills and plateaus. As soon as you stop learning or practicing, you’ll start to slowly roll back down. Once you’ve reached a plateau (long-term memory), the knowledge will fade less quickly but if you ignore it long enough, you will eventually slide back down, eventually going back all the way to the beginning, leaving all your efforts in vain.

Even native speakers often complain of how they’re forgetting their native language once they stop using it. What chance do you have of retaining a foreign language then? Of course, by now, your native language is deeply rooted in your long-term memory so it’ll soon come back as long as you don’t neglect it for too long. However, new, short-term memory of a foreign language doesn’t stand a chance.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you have to study every minute of every day. It doesn’t have to be a big commitment just a consistent long-term one. In fact, I would advise going your own pace rather than trying to study too much at once and burning yourself out. It’s a marathon rather than a sprint… a very long marathon that never ends.

In my case, while I had the opportunity and luxury to study and practice Japanese virtually every day with native speakers during college, I’m taking a more conservative pace with Chinese due to the constraints of my full-time job. I usually only study during my commute once every couple of days, probably no more than 2 to 4 hours a week. I also spend about 3 hours every Sunday with a native Chinese speaker practicing for about an hour and a half in exchange for teaching English. Even though I only spend a total of about 3 to 5 hours a week studying Chinese, I am fairly satisfied with my rate of progress. The most important thing is to keep at it with consistent study and practice.

You have to grab language by its horns

During my college days, I spent my first trimester of Japanese doing what every college student is supposed to do: go to classes, do the homework, and study for tests (all at the last minute of course). If you do just that, you might do ok in class (I got a B+), but that doesn’t mean you’re learning the language! No matter how great the teacher might be, the classroom format is simply not enough.

The biggest problem with the classroom format is that you never use the language for your own purposes. You are always being told which grammar to use, what vocabulary to memorize, how to say something, etc., because after all, that’s what teaching is. With homework and tests, you have to come up with the “correct” answers as well. The only difference is that it’s done at home instead. Unfortunately, while there are a whole lot of wrong answers or things that make little to no sense, there are no right answers to good communication. But with classroom material, you never learn how to express your own thoughts and feelings in the way you want to express them. If you never get the chance to make the language your own, it always feels like a language that is… well foreign.

At my school, the Chinese students were required to meet with a language tutor every week, which I think is a great idea. Unfortunately, meeting with a language tutor was optional for us Japanese kids. I did it anyway though. It was great. I got to meet and talk with fellow students who also happened to be Japanese. They got paid, I got practice, learning how to say what I wanted to say, and we had a great time overall (or at least I did). As a bonus, all of my tutors happened to be female and some were even cute! I can’t believe most of my fellow classmates didn’t even sign up. If you would turn down a great opportunity like that, it probably means you’re doomed to fail for reasons I will describe at the end.

Now that I’m out of college, I no longer have such a wonderful opportunity to practice Chinese but I did manage to secure a tutoring session once a week by hanging out at local international events. Although it’s free, I have to teach English in exchange and she is at least over 15 years older than me but she’s a nice lady so I can’t complain. The moral of this story is that you should take advantage of the resources available to you to make opportunities for speaking the language.

Practicing [A] doesn’t improve [B]

The fundamental reason why it’s absolutely necessary to go out and actually use the language for your own means is because practicing one thing doesn’t automatically improve something else. This may sound obvious but many students learning Japanese are under the illusion that taking tests, answering questions in class, and filling in worksheets will somehow magically enable them to learn how to read, write, speak, and hear Japanese. This is not the case!

If you’re wondering why you can hardly speak Japanese after taking Japanese classes for so many years, ask yourself this, “How many hours did I spend speaking Japanese? How many books have I read? How much Japanese have I written?” You need to ask yourself the same type of question for each aspect of the language because practicing one thing doesn’t automatically improve something else. It might help but each aspect of the language is only improved by actually practicing and refining it in the real world.

If you want to improve your reading skills, go read some books. If you want to improve your writing, find something to write about. Speaking and listening often go hand in hand so go find somebody to talk to if you want to improve those skills. It seems obvious but many students at my school couldn’t understand why they weren’t improving even though they haven’t spent a single minute outside of class speaking Japanese or even meeting anyone who can speak Japanese. They also haven’t read a single book, magazine, comic, short story, anything, much else write something on their own. All I can say is, “What do you expect, man?!” Of course it’s not completely their fault. After all, none of us were required to do any of those things for class. So, unless you are in an immersed environment such as living in Japan, you have to motivate yourself to go out and use Japanese.

Input before Output

Those who are new to learning languages might be under the mistaken impression that languages make sense. You might think that if you learn the vocabulary and grammar, you can string the vocabulary together with the correct grammar to make sentences. This might work to some degree for some languages, but with Japanese, it’s almost guaranteed to not work. Japanese is not a language you can figure out with logic, which is why finding somebody you can ask questions and learning vocabulary with context is so important. Take a look at what might happen if you try to figure things out for yourself.

Method 1: “Figuring it out”

You) I want to say, “I miss you,” to my girlfriend so let’s see… according to my dictionary, “miss” is 「欠ける」 so “missing” is 「欠けている」. Great, now I just need to make “you” the direct object with 「を」 particle and the verb goes last so “I’m missing you” should be 「私はあなたを欠けている。」 Great!

What a disaster! While the sentence is grammatically correct, it doesn’t make any sense and worse, it’s kind of insulting because 「欠ける」 means something is “lacking” with a very negative connotation. Now, let’s see what would have happened if you were smart enough to learn from example.

Method 2: Asking a native speaker

You) I want to say, “I miss you,” to my girlfriend. How do I say that?

Native Speaker) Well, we don’t really say “I miss you,” in Japanese. We usually just say we’re lonely or “I want to meet you”.

Y) Oh, how do you say that?

N) “Lonely” is 「さびしい」 or 「さみしい」. “Wanting to meet” is 「会いたい」.

Y) Great, can you write the kanji for me?

N) Sure.

Awesome. Now that you are able to express your dire need and endless love to your girlfriend, hopefully next time you meet, she’ll be all over you like hot butter and syrup on a pancake. Way to go!

Of course, in real life, things don’t always go so smoothly. You might not know enough of the grammar or vocabulary to understand the answer. You also need to go home, sit down and study the grammar and vocabulary using textbooks, workbooks, dictionaries, the grammar guide, whatever you prefer. But the important thing is to get input first before you try coming up with your own output. And even then, it’s a good idea to get somebody to look at your output to make sure it’s correct.

Learning old material with new material

Now that I talked about what you need to do, let’s look at some ideas on how to go about it.

Generally, you need a lot more input before you can generate output of similar quality. In my case, I usually have to see something about five or six times in completely different contexts before I can internalize it enough to use it myself. Of course, it all depends. Fundamental concepts and conjugations require a lot more exposure and practice than simple vocabulary.

So the best way to internalize material is by running into it here and there over a long time span. You can optimize this by overlapping new material with old material. This is called pipelining in computer chips and is used extensively to increase the performance of your computer. You can do this too by learning new material even if you haven’t completely memorized the old material. When old material shows up in new material, you will start the process of internalizing the new material while you’re reviewing the old material.

What you should never do is stop learning new things because you haven’t completely mastered something else. You might hear people say, “Oh no, I can’t learn the next chapter because I don’t completely understand the last one.” or “I’m not going to learn that because we haven’t gone over it in class yet.” or “Learning that now will just confuse me.” This is pure bollocks because looking at just one thing over and over doesn’t increase comprehension. You need to look at it in different contexts, used in different ways for different purposes. You need to look at all the angles before you can say you really understand the material. And if you can start learning new material at the same time, that’s another bird with the same stone.

You shouldn’t underestimate your brain’s ability to absorb new material. You might hear a word and think, “Oh, I’ll never learn that” but on the contrary, you’re already learning it! If you ever thought, “Hey, this word sounds familiar. Where have I heard it before?” you’re closer to memorizing it than words you’ve never heard before. If you do this often enough, you’ll be remembering words you don’t even remember learning! This is essentially how you learned your native language. Let’s take a look at the continuation of the previous dialog asking how to say, “I miss you”.

Y) Is 「会いたい」 an adjective?

N) It acts like an adjective but it’s the 「たい」 form of the verb 「会う」, which means “to meet”.

Y) Oh yeah, I remember! We learned that form in class last week. What was the conjugation rule again?

N) You change the 「う」 to 「い」 and add 「たい」.

Y) Ok, got it.

See? In that short exchange, you managed to review the 「たい」 form while at the same time learning 「会う」. The next time, you might learn, for instance, 「飲み会」 and you can use that opportunity to review and reinforce 「会う」. Keep repeating the cycle and you’ll start making all sorts of connections and memorizing things left and right in no time.

It’s the attitude that counts!

In the end, the thing that matters the most is your attitude. If studying or practicing Japanese feels like a dreadful chore, you are doomed to failure. I can attest to this because I hated learning Spanish in High School and the only Spanish I know now is, “Donde esta el bano”. But hey, you’re in luck because Japanese is much more interesting than Spanish!

Nevertheless, if you somehow find that learning Japanese is boring or a chore, you need to incorporate things into your study that will make it fun right away! In my case, I enjoy reading, playing games, drinking, and eating so I study by doing those things in a way that incorporates Japanese such as reading Japanese novels. (And all my games are strictly for “educational purposes”. Honest.) I also enjoy hanging out and chatting with friends so making Japanese friends and hanging out with them improved my speaking and listening skills. And if I can get drinks and food into the mix every so often, even better! (Fortunately, many Japanese people love to eat and drink.)

To give you another example, I don’t particularly like watching TV that much but a friend of mine does and that’s how she learned Japanese; by watching a lot of Japanese TV. It must have worked because her Japanese is quite excellent.

Whatever floats your boat, you should incorporate it into your studies to make learning more enjoyable. For example, lots of people on my forum are learning Japanese with anime because that’s what they enjoy. This is great because it often leads them to explore and become interested in other areas of Japanese lifestyle and culture, which in turn increases the incentive to learn more Japanese.

Also, I think it’s pretty much a given that we all enjoy making friends and socializing so that’s one activity we can all do. If there are very few or no Japanese people in your area, you might try finding a conversation partner online, study abroad, or just move! C’mon, get out of that rural backwater and go someplace more international!

If you’re socially inept, making friends while learning a foreign language is perfect for you. It levels the playing field because it’s hard to be suave when you can hardly speak the language. Hey, that’s a great strategy for getting a girl, I bet. Cleverly hide your lack of social skills with your inability to speak the language. I don’t know how wise this is for serious relationships though…

Which is harder? Japanese or Chinese?

Posted on by

This post doesn’t have anything directly to do with Japanese. It’s more like a personal blog entry, just to talk about the things on my mind lately. You see, I have spent a lot of time writing about Japanese in trying to convince the Internet that it is actually a very easy language to learn in many respects. The grammar rules are very consistent and logical, and kanji can really help you speed up your vocab memorization. But is Japanese actually easy, relative to other languages?

About a month ago, I started doing language exchange with a Chinese person every Sunday. It’s quite interesting because I teach her English, she teaches me Chinese and all of this is done in Japanese. It works well because she is quite fluent having lived in Japan for many, many years.

Now, Chinese is supposed to be like the holy grail of foreign languages, image-wise, for us Americans. Or maybe it was Japanese? Well, we probably don’t even know the difference. Anyway, if you tell your friends and family that you’re learning Chinese, they’ll probably go all “ooh”, “ahh” and “damn, you’d have to be some kind of a freak genius to learn that”.

Chinese characters don’t impress or scare me though, having learned Japanese. In fact, I was actually wishing for Chinese characters when I was studying for the GRE because all those stupid English words started to look the same. And on top of that, now that I’m studying Chinese, I can’t help but get the feeling that Chinese is like the easiest language in the world. Of course, I’m still a complete beginner but from what I can tell, Chinese is just so much simpler than Japanese.

Of course, comparing the difficulties of two languages will always be impossible because so many things depend on the person learning the language. But still, it’s fun to try because it usually brings out heated arguments and one-upmanship, which is basically the whole point of the Internet. So here we go.

Conjugations

Because Chinese has nothing but Chinese characters, there are no conjugations of any kind whatsoever. This means that you miss out on all the fun you get to have with okurigana.

For instance, if you want to negate something, just add 「不」. It doesn’t matter if it’s an adjective, verb, or noun. It’s almost too easy.

Chinese
好。- Good.
不好。- Not good.

In contrast, Japanese has separate rules for two types of adjectives, nouns, and two types of verbs. You also have two exception verbs and two exception adjectives. English is probably even worse because you need to match the right tense to the subject and other stuff I probably couldn’t even explain.

This tacking on character trick works for all sorts of things that would be complicated grammar in any other language. You want to say something is “too much”? Just add 太. So since “small” is 小, too small becomes 太小. You want to say, “not too small”, just add 不: 不太小! You want to say that you’re in the process of doing something? Add 在. With Chinese, using a character based writing system actually makes sense! You can’t make this stuff any easier folks. You don’t have to conjugate and then conjugate the conjugation, and then conjugate the conjugated conjugation like you do in Japanese.

Language gone wrong

行きたくなくもないけど、行けなくならなかったら、行かないよ。
– I wrote this and even I don’t know what it means.

Still, I’m expected the other shoe to drop as I learn more Chinese. There has to be a price to pay for not having conjugations. For example, I’m already confused about 了 because it supposedly expresses a completed action but I see it in non-completed actions as well. I’ve also seen past actions without 了. I don’t get it.

Tones

A number of people have told me about how tones are so difficult in Chinese. I don’t really remember what they said, but I vaguely remember something about my mom being a horse or something. Pretty rude, if you ask me.

Now that I’m actually learning them, I don’t think tones are that difficult. I mean there’s only four and I have a sneaking suspicion that the second is pretty much the same as the third. I heard that Taiwanese has 7 tones. Now that sounds difficult. I don’t even know how that is possible. Is tone 7 like the chromatic scale or something? I can hear the teacher saying, “No, idiot! Your tone is completely wrong! It’s supposed to be a harmonic minor, not melodic! And the third is flat!”

Anyway, I think having all the tones laid out in advance makes things clearer than Japanese in many ways. Japanese people have this strange belief that Japanese is completely flat but in reality, if you don’t get the intonation right, you sound like crap. If Japanese is completely flat, how come you can get an accent dictionary that shows the pitches for each word? With Japanese, the only way to get that perfect native intonation is to just imitate native speakers. Not very helpful, I know, which is why Chinese is easier to understand because it’s all laid out for you.

Even so, to make the comparison fair, I need to mention that tones in Chinese can sometimes change. I’ve figured out that while 不 is usually fourth tone, if the next character is fourth tone too, it changes into the second tone. I don’t know if this is a rule, just something I’ve noticed along the way.

不知道。- bù zhī dao.
不是。- bú shì.

Kanji/Hanzi

Aaaahhh, kanji, my favorite topic. With a language like Chinese, it actually makes sense! Kanji is great as long as you don’t totally f***k them up like the Japanese did.

I think a small number of characters have maybe a max of 2 readings. Even then, it’s because it means something completely different like 觉, which is “jiào” when it means “to sleep” and “jué” when it means “to think”. Let’s compare that to Japanese, which for instance has like a million readings for 「生」. What the hell, 「なま」 doesn’t even originate from Chinese! Why the heck do you write it with a Chinese character?!

Chinese is so much simpler that it wins hands down over Japanese here. It’s not even a contest. The only beef I have with Chinese is simplified, traditional, blah blah, blah… just pick one! Don’t make me have to learn both! The Japanese government can successfully mandate a new set of characters and they don’t even have a real army. Why can’t you?

Counters

Whoever invented counters should be shot. They add nothing useful to the language yet is such an enormous pain in the ass. It’s like a disease that somehow managed to permanently spread itself through all of East Asia. The worst part is, all the counters, for some reason, are all completely different for each language. For clothes, it’s 件 for Chinese and 着 for Japanese. It’s insane.

Still, if I had to compare, I would say Japanese is worse because they have all those crazy irregular readings like 「ついたち」, 「ひとり」, and 「はたち」. But then Chinese has 两, which is not as bad but still really annoying. I can never tell whether its going to be ニ or 两.

Conclusion

I haven’t seen too many comparisons of Chinese and Japanese, probably because the extremely small number of English speakers who know both probably aren’t wasting their time with blogs. So, while I am still completely new at Chinese, here are my thoughts on the topic. If you are trying to decide which language to learn, maybe this will help you decide.

In my opinion, Chinese is really easy and approachable for beginners as long as you’re not tone-deaf. I can say with confidence that it’s a lot easier than Japanese in the beginning. There are so many traps that you can fall into with Japanese in the beginning that just doesn’t seem to exist in Chinese. Common pitfalls include learning only hiragana/katakana or even just romaji, overusing the topic particle, learning the polite and dictionary forms backwards, thinking that 「だ」 is the same as 「です」, etc., etc., etc.

With Chinese, while you have Pinyin, I think Chinese teachers are much better at making sure students learn hanzi. Plus, I haven’t seen too much regarding politeness levels outside of 你 vs 您 (so far). I doubt that Chinese has about 10 different ways of saying “sorry” like Japanese. （ごめん、ごめんなさい、すまん、すまない、すいません、すみません、申し訳ない、恐縮です、恐れ入ります）

Still, I’m going to hold off on making any definite conclusions because I have the sneaking suspicion that Chinese seems easy only in the beginning, kind of like my experience with Spanish. If it’s one thing I learned, it’s that there’s no free lunch in language. If one thing is easy, it’s going to make something else hard.

How come they never teach 「何で」?

Posted on by

Ｉ don’t know how far Japanese language education has progressed in recent years, but back when I was a student, we were taught to use 「どうして」 for “why”. This was great until I went out into the real world and found out that people used another word that I was never taught: 「なんで」. Huh? What the-? Why wasn’t I taught the real deal instead of being handed down a second-rate word that nobody uses? Why eat a California roll when you can have real sushi?

Now that I know some more stuff (you know… stuff… and things…), I can think of two reasons: 1) 「なんで」 is a bit informal and would not be appropriate in some written contexts, and 2) 「なんで」 has some “issues” and they didn’t want to confuse the poor students (we were confused enough as it was).

Only in Japanese, can you write paragraphs explaining the word for “why”

I can understand why you would rather teach 「どうして」 as a teacher. It’s perfectly normal Japanese and you can use it just about anywhere in any context and be “safe”. The only problem is that Japanese people don’t use it that much. Why? Probably because 「なんで」 is shorter and easier to say.

Unlike 「どうして」, you have to be a little more careful when using 「なんで」. First of all, it’s more for conversational Japanese so you don’t want it use it on, for example, official documents. In this sense, 「なんで」 is kind of similar to “how come” instead of just “why”.

Second, things can get kind of confusing because 「なんで」 in kanji is 「何で」 and 「何」 is the kanji for 「なに」. 「で」 is also the particle for describing means. You can see the problem this overlapping might cause.

スパゲッティは、何で食べるの？
-A: With what (by what means) do you eat spaghetti?
-B: Why do you eat spaghetti?

The sentence above can have two meaning and there is no way to tell without any context. The dictionary says that 「何で」（なんで） means “why”. But if you write it in kanji, it looks identical to 「なにで」. There’s even a Japanese page with a survery of 「なんで」 vs 「なにで」. In general, 「なんで」 means “why” and 「なにで」 means “by what means” so when you want to make things absolutely clear, you should write it in hiragana.

In terms of ambiguity, 「どうして」 also has the same type of issues because 「どう」 means “how” and 「して」 is the te-form of 「する」.

どうしていいか分からない。
-A: I don’t know what I should do (how to do so that it’s good).
-B: I don’t know why it’s good.

The first translation is more likely, but the second interpretation is possible as well. There’s no way to tell for sure without more context. (Aren’t you glad you didn’t pick an easy, sissy language to learn?)

Because two just isn’t enough

「何故」 is yet another word that means “why”, which we need because… I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason. 「何故」 is more formal than the other words for “why” and has, I feel, a sharper sting to it, if that makes any sense. It’s more suitable for when you want to ask hard-hitting questions such as, for example, a narrative for a documentary. As a result, you don’t hear this too often in regular, everyday conversations.

一体何故、こんなことになったのでしょうか？
-Just why, exactly, did this happen?

Conclusion

Now that you know all the ways of saying “why” in Japanese (minus local dialects I’m not aware of), you can ask questions like the following in a variety of ways.

Why, Lord, why, is Japanese so complicated?!!

There, aren’t you happy now?

Beginner Lesson #3: Adjectives and the 「の」 particle

Posted on by

Beginner Japanese Lesson #3: Adjectives and the 「の」 particle (length: 28:56) and original lesson details.

Here is the recording for the third beginner Skype lesson. You can subscribe to this podcast with iTunes from the following link:

Subscribe to this podcast with iTunes

This time, you can tell it’s spring because of the background noises from the birds. Sorry about that and the big delay but I’ve been too lazy for various reasons. Details of the next beginner lesson and lesson date will be posted afterwards in another post. (For those of you who asked, yes, I’m still planning on doing more lessons.)

Lesson Notes

To add to the previous lesson, the topic particle is not the subject like in English. There is no such thing as a subject in Japanese.

It is only the topic and doesn’t have to be directly related to the rest of the sentence.
For example, 「レイさんは、学校です。」 doesn’t have to mean that the Ray-san is a school.

Adjectives

So far, we have learned how to use 「元気」 to describe how you are doing. I managed to cleverly hide the fact that 「元気」 is an adjective. Actually, 「元気」 can also be a noun but so far we have been using as an adjective as a description of your well-being.

There are two types of adjectives: na-adjective and i-adjectives.

Na-adjectives are almost the same as nouns as we have seen with 「元気」. The difference is that you can directly modify a noun by attaching it directly in front of the noun with a 「な」. (Hence the name)

Examples
１．有名な人 – famous person
２．便利なところ – convenient place

The other type of adjective are called i-adjectives. They are called that because they end in the hiragana 「い」. Unlike the na-adjectives, they do not need anything to directly modify nouns. Just attach them to the front of the noun.

Examples
１．広い部屋 – wide room
２．面白い人 – interesting person

You may have noticed, some na-adjectives end in 「い」 such as 「きれい」. You should pay careful attention to them. 「嫌い」 is another example of a na-adjective that ends in 「い」.

Negative Adjectives
As we have seen, the negative for na-adjectives is the same as nouns. Just add 「じゃない」.

The conjugation rules for i-adjectives are slightly different from na-adjectives and nouns.
For the negative tense, you first need to remove the last 「い」 and attach 「くない」.

For the polite form, add 「です」 at the end for both i-adjectives and na-adjectives.

※Important Exception: いい、かっこいい

The original version of いい was よい. As a result, all conjugations are based on よい and not いい.

The 「の」 particle

One of the main functions of the 「の」 particle (besides many others) is used to show ownership, same as the English word, “of”. However, the order is the possessor followed by 「の」 followed by the possession.

Examples
Xさんの部屋 = room of Xさん

Beginner Lesson #3: Lesson Description + Signup Page

Posted on by

やっとできました！第3回目のレッスン！

Here are the lesson details for the third Skype Lesson.

You must have a microphone and headphones to participate. Please do not use speakers because it will echo back into the mic and create a very annoying echo. Having a fast connection also helps with the latency.

Important: The lessons will be recorded and posted on this site. If you do not want to be recorded, please do not participate in the lesson.

Lesson 3: A first look at adjectives and the の particle

Overview
In this lesson, we’ll learn the two different types of adjectives, their characteristics, and the differences in rules for conjugation. We’ll also learn one of the main functions of the 「の」 particle, which is to show possession. Finally, we’ll put these two things together to ask each other about people and places in our lives.

※This lesson will be recorded and posted on this site along with my notes.

Lesson Date and Time
※I have work Sunday so I’m changing the lesson date to Saturday morning for this lesson only.
Time: Sat 9:00 am, Tokyo Time (No DST) (convert time)
Date: May 6
Length: 30 min to 1 hour
Participants: Joao Paulo, John, Raize, Rossine

Prerequisites
1. You must have a microphone and headphones. Please do not speakers.
2. You must be familiar with the contents of the previous two lessons.
3. You must know hiragana.
4. Though useful, knowledge of katakana is not neccessary.

Lesson Preparation
You must be familiar with hiragana.
・Hiragana Link 1
・Hiragana Link 2

You should also become at least somewhat familiar with the following vocabulary and expressions before the lesson. I also recommend that you study the kanji by using an online kanji dictionary as I described in lesson 2.

This lesson’s vocabulary is chock full of adjectives so good luck!

Vocabulary

  1. どう – how
  2. どんな – what kind of
  3. ところ – place
  4. 私【わたし】 – I, me, myself
  5. 人【ひと】 – person
  6. 友達【ともだち】 – friend
  7. 日本語【にほんご】- Japanese language
  8. 家【いえ or うち】- house
  9. 部屋【へや】- room
  10. 元気（な）【げんき】- lively; spirited
  11. 上手（な）【じょうず】- skilled; good at
  12. 静か（な）【しずか】- quiet
  13. 有名（な）【ゆうめい】- famous
  14. 親切（な）【しんせつ】- kind
  15. 便利（な）【べんり】- convenient
  16. きれい（な）- pretty; clean
  17. いい – good
  18. かっこいい – cool; handsome
  19. かわいい – cute
  20. 大きい【おおきい】 – big
  21. 小さい【ちいさい】 – small
  22. 広い【ひろい】 – wide
  23. 狭い【せまい】 – narrow; cramped
  24. 楽しい【たのしい】 – fun
  25. 面白い【おもしろい】 – interesting; funny

Expressions
１．なるほど。 – I see.
Lesson Notes
Rules for making negative state-of-being for i-adjectives
1. Casual: Drop the last 「い」 and attach 「くない」
2. Polite: Drop the last 「い」 and attach 「くないです」

Resources
Adjectives Explained

Beginner Lesson #2: Negative State-of-Being and Referring to people

Posted on by

Beginner Japanese Lesson #2: Negative State-of-Being and Referring to people (length: 42:21) and original lesson details.

Here is the recording for the second beginner Skype lesson. You can subscribe to this podcast with iTunes from the following link:

Subscribe to this podcast with iTunes
The echo is gone only to be replaced by equally annoying static. It gets better later on but if anybody has any ideas on where the static is coming from or how to remove it, let me know. Those of you who are signed up for the third lesson, make sure you are familiar with the contents of the first two lessons.

On another note, please don’t sign up and then not show up. It’s not fair to the other people who couldn’t participate.

Details of the next beginner lesson and lesson date will be posted afterward in another post.

Lesson Notes

In the previous lesson we talked about tones and how to practice them by mimicking Japanese speakers. Another way to practice tones by yourself is to get some sort of audio material, record yourself and compare the pronunciations.

However, be careful to find a good model because the degree of change in tones depends on the gender.

Females tend to have more drastic changes, and pronunciations are clearer, making listening comprehension easier. Males have much less variation and pronunciation tends to be more muffled making it more difficult to understand.

In the last lesson, we also learned how to say, “I’m doing good” using 元気 but not how to opposite, “I’m NOT doing good.”

Rules for negative conjugation
1. Add 「じゃない」 for casual
2. Add 「じゃないです」 for polite

Politer and former forms such as 「じゃありません」 or 「ではありません」 exist but for conversation, these two are fine

・Saying different degrees of 元気

1. まあまあ – so-so
2. とても
3. あまり – Can only be used with negative
4. 全然 – Mostly only used with negative

As before, the negative also works with nouns such as 「日本人じゃないです」.

・Getting somebody’s attention
In Japanese, we almost never use the word “you”. Instead, we usually refer to people by their name or title. And only when necessary. A important principle in Japanese is that less is better.

Today, we will learn the polite name suffix which you probably heard of already: さん.

Now that I have your attention, how am I going to tell you what I’m going to talk about?

Answer: the topic particle

・What are particles?

One or two hiragana characters that define the role the sentence is playing in the sentence. It comes after the word that it applies to. There are many different types of particles but we’ll just cover the topic particle today.

When the other person has no way of knowing what you are going to talk about, the topic particle is like picking a topic from a bag of the topics of the universe. You can only hold one topic at a time, to change the topic, you have to put the first topic back in the bag and pick out another one. Once a topic is out of the bag, you can but you don’t have to repeat it (and often don’t).

The topic particle is a haragana 「は」 and attaches to the end of the topic. It is read as /wa/ and not /ha/.
It was also in the expression 「こんにちは」 and 「こんばんは」 from the last lesson.

Ex.
Xさんは、元気ですか？
元気です。(same topic) Yさんは？ (changes topic)

This is why context is so important in Japanese because people don’t repeat things that were said previously and subject/objects aren’t required.

・Kanji
Now that we are learning more and more vocabulary, you’ll want to start learning Kanji to help your memorization.

Example
16 小学校【しょうがっこう】 – elementary school
17 中学校【ちゅうがっこう】 – middle school
18 高校【こうこう】 – high school
19. 大学【だいがく】 – college

All use the kanji for school: 「校」. Also, if you know the kanji for small, medium, large, you can easily learn elementary, middle, and college by reusing 学校 and 学. Same goes for 高校 using the kanji for high and school.

Let’s use kanji to easily learn 4 new words (purposely not on the list). We learned 学生 in lesson 1. It uses 生, the kanji for life so with 学 (study, learning) it becomes student. How would we use the same 生 (life) kanji to say elementary school student, middle school student, high school student and college student?

Learning these characters will help you learn other words like 予備校, 校庭、大事, the list goes on and on.

・How to learn Kanji
When learning a kanji for the first time, practice the correct stroke order and count. You can look online for most characters by using the Kanji dictionary at WWWJDIC by clicking the sod link. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show the stroke direction but it is top to down for more vertical strokes and left to right for more horizontal strokes.

You’ll notice that there are readings in both katakana and hiragana. The katakana reading is called 音読み and is written in katakana because it’s a Chinese-derived pronunciation. (Though the actual Chinese pronunciation is probably very different) Words such as 学生 that are a combination of characters usually use this reading.

The other hiragana readings are called 訓読み. Originally Japanese words that was latched onto the Chinese character when they imported them into their writing system. Verbs, adjectives, and single character words usually use this character.

Some characters can have only one, both, or multiple such readings. Don’t worry about them until you actually learn words that use those reading. Learning just the readings doesn’t help as much as learning actual words with the readings along the way.

Again, because, there are so few sounds in Japanese, so many words look alike and you really need the visual aspect as a memory aid to keep tham all seperate.