If you sound native, people treat you like you’re native.
I have people stopping five minutes into a first conversation and go… wait… you’re not Japanese.
Me: Uh, duh.
Them: But you’re speaking Japanese.
Me: Yeah, we’ve been talking for a few minutes now. You just realised?
Them: OMG you can speak Japanese!?!
It’s like the voice overrides the face for a few minutes there, until their brain catches up and makes the connection.
When I was living there, I felt like an outsider the first couple of months, but as my language improved I began to feel like a Japanese person… to the point where me and my classmates would stop and stare at a foreigner walking by, and only maybe would twig that Hey, I’m a Foreigner Too.
You need to be really, really accepting and really, really adaptable though - because differences of sight and sound are easier to overcome than differences of mind and culture.
Did anybody ask him or contract with him to do those translations?
I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and assume that you aren’t trolling. Here’s what a typical Forumosa veteran might say: sounds like someone’s sour grapes because he smelled funny and therefore couldn’t get laid.
But,wait… scroll down to the bottom for the answer.
And i know some guys who … oh my good! They’ll die one day without realizing that Japan wasn’t really for them and that they wasted a whole life here.
So, here’s a typical Yuli comment: there is a saying i learned in Germany: “wie man in den Wald hineinruft, so schallt es heraus.” It encompasses both the meaning of 好有好报 and 恶有恶报, and the commentators at “goodreads” seem to relate to this idea: goodreads.com/book/show/1762 … y_Business
For someone with so much second-hand experience of Japan like you have, how could you have missed this one?
[quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]ある = to have, to be (an inanimate object)
ところ = a place
ある ところ (together): in a place (that there is); somewhere[/quote]
Interesting.
Makes sense since it’s syntactically just like Chinese – VO opposed to OV.
Any ideas on how I could go about finding definitions for such words (besides here )?
I started using a Taiwanese textbook (《大學日本語》) and it was awful. (I don’t understand how people can make such bad textbooks, but that’s a different post). But, I did find a podcast for learning Japanese. It’s not free – 4$ US a month – but good. So my plan of action is to use that until I get a footing from where I can move out on my own into other texts, such as folk stories, songs, and maybe even manga.
@tsukinodeynatsu: I agree with your take on language textbooks. My Chinese textbook made very simple things sound as complicated as string theory. I was keen enough to seek out other resources. I’ll do the same for Japanese.
Thanks again for the advice!
And @Shuiping: good job posting something not only completely unrelated to the original topic but also pretty stupid.
Don’t go down that road, it’s not going to get you to where you want to be.
First of all, Chinese 有所 does not mean the same as Japanese あるところ, even if you write it 有る所.
Next, verbs appear before Japanese nouns that are not the objects of said verbs for the same reason they do that in German (if you want to check out something more accessible for a native speaker of English): to modify nouns like adjectives do. But there are some differences between how German and Japanese do this - let me show you:
German:
verb modifying a noun: liegen; present participle used as adjective: liegend
use case endings (declension) to indicate the desired meaning (and grammatical function)
noun: Bleistift
de[color=#0040FF]r[/color] auf dem Schreibtisch liegend[color=#0040FF]e[/color] Bleistift [subject]
de[color=#0040FF]s[/color] auf dem Schreibtisch liegend[color=#0040FF]en[/color] Bleistift[color=#0040FF]es[/color] [genitive/possessive]
de[color=#0040FF]m[/color] auf dem Schreibtisch liegend[color=#0040FF]en[/color] Bleistiftcolor=#0040FF[/color] [indirect object]
de[color=#0040FF]n[/color] auf dem Schreibtisch liegend[color=#0040FF]en[/color] Bleistift [direct object]
Japanese:
verb modifying a noun: 置いている → used in that form throughout
use particles (が, の, に, を）to indicate the exact meaning
noun: 鉛筆 えんぴつ
pseudo English:
verb modifying a noun: to lie; present participle used as adjective: lying (no declension)
noun: pencil
The on-the-table-lying pencil [subject position] [color=#00BF40](is very expensive).[/color]
The on-the-table-lying pencil’s [genitive] [color=#00BF40](length is not known).[/color]
[color=#00BF40]Give these items[/color] to the on-the-table-lying pencil [indirect object position]
alternatively:
[color=#00BF40]Give[/color] the on-the-table-lying pencil [indirect object position] [color=#00BF40]the other items.[/color]
(sorry, these sentences make no practical sense…)
[color=#00BF40](From here you can see)[/color] the on-the-table-lying pencil. [direct object position]
real English:
The pencil that is lying on the table [subject position] is very expensive.
etc., by analogy
That is to say, what German does with case endings (declension) [color=#0040FF](marked blue)[/color] and Japanese with particles [color=#FF0000](marked red)[/color] is done in English by positioning the expression in context[color=#00BF40](marked green)[/color]: as you know, in English subject and object positions are fixed… but nothing of this has to do with SOV versus SVO structure of sentences.
Just a little happy excursion… anyway, you can learn characters and pronunciation on your own and gradually pick up things from children’s books and manga and listening to the radio and watching TV, but it takes so much more time than it takes anybody learning in a strucutured way - and if you have THAT time, then why not take a course anyway? You would progress much faster with a correspondence course, or a self-study guide, or an instructor.
Don’t go down that road, it’s not going to get you to where you want to be.
First of all, Chinese 有所 does not mean the same as Japanese あるところ, even if you write it 有る所.[/quote]
Not? My Japanese teacher told us that this construction with ある was taken from Classical Chinese, so that they wouldn’t have to put some more レ点 in there.
Nice post. I like your cross-linguistic approach. Are you bilingual (German - English)?
I actually don’t have that much time. I’ll be busy again in a few weeks. Taking a Japanese class is basically impossible now, unless I enroll in a buxiban, which I’m not going to do. I can audit a Japanese class at my university next year. But I’m going to get started now, regardless.
I know what you mean by a structured approach and I agree. Japanesepod101 is the podcast I alluded to above. So far it’s much better than the textbooks I have access to here. When I get back to Taipei and school, I’ll check out Nakama, which seems to be a standard. Like I said above: “my plan of action is to use that (podcast) until I get a footing from where I can move out on my own into other texts.”
Right now I’m learning basic introductions: 初めまして and what not through a structured series. I’ll continue on this track.
Yuli’s… gosh… quadrilingual? I know she at least speaks Japanese and English to an incredibly high, almost-native (or native) level. I think she’s got a few other languages on there, too, including Chinese.
Her post up there is something you will NEED for learning Japanese. Print it out and glue it to the front of any workbook you’re using. Those are the type of little things that you need to memorise, so stick it where you can reference it constantly until you remember them.
Not? My Japanese teacher told us that this construction with ある was taken from Classical Chinese, so that they wouldn’t have to put some more レ点 in there.[/quote]
It is from Chinese. Or at least there is something in Chinese which is exactly the same. Stick ‘有’ in front of ‘人’ ‘地方’ and it’s the same as the Japanese ’ いる人’ 'ある所’ etc.
There isn’t really an equivalent for ある日、ある時、ある時代 etc… (basically anything to do with time). In Chinese you usually need to say a ‘before’ instead. But then the Chinese 以前 And the Japanese 前に are quite different.
Note that 有一天 means いつか Not ある日
Yuli, Japanese courses are the devil. Every class I’ve been to has pretty much been an excellent example of how to confuse students, or scare them off. I did a distance course for a little while in high school, and that was quite good… but by the time I could already speak Japanese, so don’t quote me on that.
Pitch is important and you should think about it right from the start. However, finding proper information about it is very difficult and the only info you’ll find in English is very sketchy. Homonyms per se are the least of your problems, because whether words have pitch or not changes how entire sentences are pronounced, not just the words themselves. For instance, certain verb ending are pronounced differently whether the verb had pitch or not.
If you ignore pitch, you’ll end up with a vocabulary of hundreds or thousands of words, and THEN you’ll realize you should have learned the pitch as you went along because learning the pitch of all these words and relearning to speak is not exactly easy or efficient.
For instance, grammatical endings such as -te, -ta or -nai carry their own pitch features which may or may not change the pitch of the previous verb, depending on whether it carries pitch or not. taBEru becomes TAbete, but suru becomes shite iru (realized shiTE IRU, the default pattern being that the pitch rises after the first syllable). -eru (-seru, -saseru, -rareru, -reru) become -Eru, but only when the verb had pitch – MIru becomes miSEru (but MIsete), while suru (realized suRU) becomes sareru (saRERU).
The good news is that once you understand the system, you can predict the pitch of entire sentences – provided you know whether each word has pitch or not.
From what you can see on the forum though, the quasi totality of students simply ignore pitch. I suspect the main reason is that it’s not written or taught anywhere. If you don’t care about pronunciation, feel free to do the same. But would you recommend someone learn English without learning the appropriate stress? I personally care about pronunciation, so I think pitch is important.
[quote=“arekkusu”]
From what you can see on the forum though, the quasi totality of students simply ignore pitch. I suspect the main reason is that it’s not written or taught anywhere. If you don’t care about pronunciation, feel free to do the same. But would you recommend someone learn English without learning the appropriate stress? I personally care about pronunciation, so I think pitch is important.[/quote]
Actually, you are right. I mostly ignore it, because I cannot find any written stuff on it, and my hearing is not good enough to actually realize what is different in which word. I can hear that it is different, but I have no idea how to pronounce it.
But, one problem with pitch is that it is different in any region. Of course, that’s true for the entire language, but learning pitch just by hearing some people… I haven’t chosen a region yet, which dialect I want to learn more thoroughly. I think, in future one should at least try to sound more or less native to at least one region, preferably the region where you have the most contact with. I don’t like Tokyo, though, so it get’s even harder to find some stuff. Kansai is also not really my favourite (all these arrogant Kansai people ).
[quote=“arekkusu”]Allow me to chime in with a different answer.
Pitch is important and you should think about it right from the start. However, finding proper information about it is very difficult and the only info you’ll find in English is very sketchy. Homonyms per se are the least of your problems, because whether words have pitch or not changes how entire sentences are pronounced, not just the words themselves. For instance, certain verb ending are pronounced differently whether the verb had pitch or not.
If you ignore pitch, you’ll end up with a vocabulary of hundreds or thousands of words, and THEN you’ll realize you should have learned the pitch as you went along because learning the pitch of all these words and relearning to speak is not exactly easy or efficient.
For instance, grammatical endings such as -te, -ta or -nai carry their own pitch features which may or may not change the pitch of the previous verb, depending on whether it carries pitch or not. taBEru becomes TAbete, but suru becomes shite iru (realized shiTE IRU, the default pattern being that the pitch rises after the first syllable). -eru (-seru, -saseru, -rareru, -reru) become -Eru, but only when the verb had pitch – MIru becomes miSEru (but MIsete), while suru (realized suRU) becomes sareru (saRERU).
The good news is that once you understand the system, you can predict the pitch of entire sentences – provided you know whether each word has pitch or not.
From what you can see on the forum though, the quasi totality of students simply ignore pitch. I suspect the main reason is that it’s not written or taught anywhere. If you don’t care about pronunciation, feel free to do the same. But would you recommend someone learn English without learning the appropriate stress? I personally care about pronunciation, so I think pitch is important.[/quote]
I agree. I’m glad you wrote this. It’s preciously what I was thinking when I first started.
I can hear pitch differences in my Japanese recordings. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening, though, and it doesn’t help that pitch variations are lost when the teachers speak slowly. To approach this in a more systematic way, I’ll use a dictionary that indicates pitch accent with recordings. I will eventually correlate the mark (written form ) with its value (spoken form). I’ll also pay attention to the interactions of pitch within a sentence, as you mentioned. It would be best if I found a descriptive analysis of the system, though, so I know what to look for.
I’ve been working on 失礼しました. Last night I was practicing before I went to bed. I thought I was stressing れ in 失礼しました – a vestige carried over from English. I looked the word up this morning and got: しつれい2. The third syllable should be spoken at a high pitch (, correct?). I went back to the recording, and れ is said at a higher pitch, but it also sounds like it is “louder” or “more pronounced” then the other syllables. Any thoughts?
… to a certain extent. Nobody suggested that it is not, but it is by far not the first thing a new learner need to worry about.
All i suggested in the face of is that a person who can’t get enough input of spoken Japanese is better off ignoring pitch accent and adopting a “flat” intonation. You can get by nicely with such an “almost no pitch” pronunciation, provided your vowels are “straight” (like Italian vowels), that means, not diphthongs and not reduced. A much better choice than ignoring pitch accent is to learn it by imitation from spoken input - and it seems, the OP is fortunate enough to have access to that.
Sanseidou’s “大辞林 第二版” - online at excite.co.jp/dictionary/japanese/ - shows pitch accent, and it would certainly be interesting to see whether there are bilingual (such as J-E) dictionaries that show it too (i haven’t seen one yet).
I agree when you say “not written”, because it can’t be written any more than English intonation can be written. But “not taught”? I’ve met a good number of people who learned Japanese in university and spoke it very well (with pitch accent, not flat). I think that in order to learn to speak Japanese most people would need a competent teacher (second choice: an audio course) and just a ton of good quality input of the spoken language - and then they would listen and listen and listen…
I fully endorse this…
This too: the perhaps biggest obstacle to (non-Chinese) foreigners learning Japanese are the kanji, so i’d suggest that (even if one has no opportunity to hear much spoken Japanese) it would be extremely useful if the OP studied the meaning of kanji before he goes to Japan - he’ll find life so much easier that way once he gets here.
That’s useful. And the critical word is “hear” - i am glad you’ve found a suitable audio source. My suggestion, considering what you wrote about your situation (time, etc.) would be to learn 1) the basic rules of grammar, especially concerning particles, and 2) kanji. Reading is vital, i’d say: if you can read you’ll be able to access all that good stuff that is on the internet, including colloquial vocabulary from blogs, manga, etc. But to learn to spoken Japanese you need input from, and exchange with, Japanese speakers. Since you can’t have that right now, do the next best thing: listening (it seems you found a good source of material for your situation, and you can also add radio programs to that).
An aside about myself: i may have mentioned already (in some other thread long ago) that i went to university in Canada. I had learned English pronunciation, intonation, and vocabulary mostly from radio programs and from reading books (English in school was mostly boring and not enough, anyway), and it turned out i had no problems understanding the teachers and doing the tests, etc. But i had a strong accent, since i had hardly any speaking practice, and my friends also teased me, “you talk like a book” (meaning i was not used to colloquial speech and so even in conversations about daily life activities i would use formal language - not that i recall any of the details, but i can easily imagine: “Did you get the peach yoghurt?” “I have to apologize, i was unable to procure the kind of yoghurt you requested - the stocks at the store appeared depleted.” :roflmao:). Needless to say, those obstacles to normal communication disappeared in time, thanks to the daily immersion, my friends’ patience, and - not to forget - the fact that i had a good foundation to start from (i think it is much harder for someone who only knows colloquial speech to learn formal speech in a real life environment, since exposure to the latter is much more limited).
And, by the way, i don’t speak Chinese at all (that is my next project), but i can navigate Chinese websites and communicate via e-mail. I find written Chinese very accessible - as a first approximation i think of it as “a special kind of Japanese with German grammar”.
Not? My Japanese teacher told us that this construction with ある was taken from Classical Chinese, so that they wouldn’t have to put some more レ点 in there.[/quote]
It is from Chinese. ][/quote]
Of course! A substantial part of our grammar and vocabulary - and the majority of the kanji - derive from (several varieties of) old Chinese. Let me clarify: i only had two - perhaps tangential - narrow points of disagreement: the meaning of 有所 is different in Chinese and Japanese (as they are now - i don’t know about the past meanings) and 有所 is not the kind of item with which we define Chinese as VO (SVO) language and Japanese as OV (SOW) language. Nothing else to argue about today…
Ouch. I’m glad to know you managed in spite of all that…
What kinds of course did you try? University? Language school? State run? Private? In which country?
I taught myself, in Australia, using manga and songs and an extremely unhealthy dose of subtitled anime. I got a tutor for a little while, and we used Japanese for Busy People, but I was probably at an intermediate level by this time. Then I went to Nagasaki (Prefecture, not city!) for 10 months on a high school exchange, and was pretty much fluent by about half-way through.
You were right in what you said re: learning informal and then progressing to formal ---- obviously I learnt very informal first. When I first arrived in Japan I had to really make an effort to speak with ‘desu’ and ‘masu’ instead of ‘da’ and ‘ru’. I was a lot better by the end of my ten months, but spending time in Nagasaki meant that I pretty much only spoke Nagasaki-ben, and I could only speak standard Japanese when I spoke keigo O.o; Even now, I understand the southern dialects without putting any effort in, but for standard or anything north of… say… Yamaguchi I need to be paying attention. And I can’t speak with a Tokyo inflection. (I used to work for an old guy from Osaka (I think) who was the most bad-tempered boss I’ve ever had. My southern Japanese proved great, though, because when he got mad at all the other waitresses they ended up crying, but when he went off at me I couldn’t understand him at all so I was fine (you know how old people mumble when they’re mad? He mumbled in a dialect, and it just ended up sounding like an angry bee))
So, Archy, pitch is important. But if you’re likely to need to come into contact with any other dialect of Japanese other than standard, I would advise you to avoid putting too much effort into pitch other than a hearing/reproducing level. Plenty of people (native Japanese speakers included) can only recognise and produce the Tokyo dialect (and Japanese dialects are not just words, grammar and verb-endings, but pitch as well!) and can’t even understand the others; people who learn to speak a dialect can generally understand their dialect, Tokyo dialect, and can make an educated guess at other dialects, too. If you do go outside of Tokyo studying pitch too intensively will actually hold you back, as the pitch where you live will be very, very different.
Thanks yuli and tsukinodeynatsu. I’m starting to get a better idea regarding pitch; I won’t ignore it but won’t focus too much on it. I’ll spend more time with other areas.
Sounds good to me
About particles, I’ve been listening to the radio and watched a movie, and noticed that pauses in sentences often occur after particles. Is this so?
The embarrassing truth about my handle: I once read a Pokemon fanfiction (I was 12… gimme a break) and the characters kept summing dragons by saying ‘water deynatsu’ or ‘fire deynatsu’ etc. So I assumed the Japanese for dragon was Deynatsu. I also liked Sailormoon at the time, and of course her surname is ‘Tsukino’ which meant ‘of the moon’… and being 12 I just put them together
I was so proud. My first composition in Japanese and I couldn’t speak it!!! Of course it was totally wrong and Deynatsu isn’t a word at all, but at the time I was very happy with it. Afterwards it just stuck XD
When I made that comment I was thinking of 有地方.[/quote]
I’m sure there’s a technical grammar term for this, but to me the 有 in both the Chinese and Japanese form of this acts more like an adjective than a verb.
[quote]
About particles, I’ve been listening to the radio and watched a movie, and noticed that pauses in sentences often occur after particles. Is this so? [/quote]
Like yuli said, trust your ears! A lot of the beginners textbooks put spaces after the particles, I guess for this reason.
Learn the verb forms and the changes ASAP. Like the particles, if you know them they make learning SO much easier. They’re not difficult, either; once you get your head around them it’s easy. All of the verbs follow the rules and there are only two exceptions in the entire language (which is kinda stereotypically Japanese )
It’s true that pitch changes from region to region. However, I don’t see the problem with starting out with Standard Japanese pitch – which everyone will understand and admire as they hear it on TV all the time – and then, if need be, moving to the pitch of different dialects. I’ve seen tables before that showed that if you find such and such pitch pattern in Tokyo, you’ll hear this other equivalent pitch pattern in Osaka, etc. There are predictable differences by which knowing the pattern in one dialect gives you the pattern in another. In any case, if you’re going to care about pitch at all, you’ll have to concentrate on one dialect to start with, and the Tokyo dialect is by far the easiest to access in terms of audio and video material.
しつれい has a high pitch on the second syllable, which means that you will get the following: shiTSUrei shiMAshita. -MAshita is always HLL regardless of the verb.
You probably thought the stress was on rei because you assumed – as most English speakers would – that a longer syllable is necessarily a stressed syllable, as is the case in English. But Japanese doesn’t have stress: it’s a system of low and high syllables (morae, to be precise) and length does not affect height.
If a person never hears it or never speaks it, then obviously, pitch is not a big issue. But if you care about your pronunciation in the least, you should learn how the pitch system works. If you don’t know whether a word has an assigned pitch, you can assume it doesn’t, but that doesn’t imply that the pitch will all be flat. Knowing the pitch of verb endings, for instance, will allow you to determine the pitch of most verb phrases even if you don’t know the verb’s pitch per se.
Let’s take a made-up verb – chikusu. Here are the possible patterns and their realization:
no pitch (0): chiKUSU (default pattern: first syll is L others are H)
pitch:
on 1: CHIkusu
on 2: chiKUsu
on 3: chiKUSU (in isolation 0 and 3 sound the same, but the syllable after 3 will be low)
If we use the -te form followed by iru, we only get 2 possible pronunciations, despite there being 4 different pitch patterns:
chiKUSHITE IRU
chiKUshite iru
This is because the -te ending is a -3/0 morpheme – the downfall will occur on the 3rd syllable from the end (2 before the -te) if there is pitch, or will have no effect if the verb has no pitch. If you don’t know whether the word has pitch, you can assume pattern 1. -ta is the same. -tari is -4/-2, -nai is -3/0, -MAsu and -MASEn are -2, -MAshita is -3. And so on and so forth.
I fully endorse this… [/quote]
First, you will NOT pick them up just by listening, unless you have some previous understanding of how the pitch system works and you actually listen for pitch. I’ve yet to hear a non-native use correct pitch without having specifically worked on it.
As for concentrating on standard pitch making it harder to understand other dialects, that’s nonsense. If anything, it’ll help you determine right away what dialect you are dealing with. As stated above, there are certain predictable patterns to the pitch of various dialects, provided you know one already.
Here’s what a typical Forumosa veteran might say: sounds like someone’s sour grapes because he smelled funny and therefore couldn’t get laid.
).
Nice to know i’m not the only language otaku around here. 
