CornBurrito
Member
弁当屋さん: What is this exactly? Bento-ya san... From my limited experience this would mean someone who professionally makes Bento. Like パン屋さん meaning baker/bakery.
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The Big Ass Superior Thread of Learning Japanese
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弁当屋さん: What is this exactly? Bento-ya san... From my limited experience this would mean someone who professionally makes Bento. Like パン屋さん meaning baker/bakery.
Zoe
Member
The "ya" makes it a store, the "san" indicates you're talking about the person who runs the store.
Yeah, I've never thought of it as a professional, but yeah, it's someone that makes bentos for sale. It actually is quite a popular thing to do, there are shops/tables with hundreds of stacked bentos around noon for around 300-700 yen so people on their lunch break can buy them to have something quick to eat. Some people even have little spaces reserved to sell their bentos at convenience stores on the outer parts of Tokyo.
弁当屋さん can actually mean the shop itself too, but that gets sorted out from context, as a shop can't make itself a bento.
If I decided to play Persona 3 or 4 in Japanese after having already played through P4G twice and P3P and P3 FES, would it be any help? My thinking is that I'll be able to associate to what I already know and make it fun in the process but I'm not sure if that's useful in any way.
CornBurrito
Member
Can you read Kanji?
I know nothing yet... I'm just starting Hiragana and Katakana. All I know is from hearing some japanese in my life and from associating some words with what I know, like how I know kuma is bear because of Monokuma and Teddie (I heard he's Kuma in the JP version). There's some basic words I've gathered here and there like that, or basic expressions like arigato-gosaimas(sp?) but as far as reading and writing, nothing. I've tried setting my keyboard to Hiragana and Katakana on my Mac and search for words like Marakukaja and Katana and related stuff appeared, but yeah that was just me messing around.
Edit : Alright I've now memorized 19 Hiragana characters. I'll try and finish learning Hiragana and Katakana before trying out some games in Japanese.
You would be wasting your time and you would do better to pick a game that uses kana exclusively or has furigana instead. There are loads on Nintendo systems.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
Is making flashcards to memorize the Hiragana and Katakana an OK way to learn them? And should I focus on learning one before I attempt to learn the next? I'm assuming the answer to that is yes, but I wasn't sure if there was much benefit to mixing them up and trying to make it an all out effort.
Also, is it important to recognize あ vs ア, or is it more important to recognize that they are both "a"?
Also, is it important to recognize あ vs ア, or is it more important to recognize that they are both "a"?
Flashcards are a great way to learn kana and kanji. Learn hiragana this week then katakana the next. Don't overthink it too much, this is something you can do very quickly.
You should learn to distinguish the two. The sound is the same but their usage is different so you can't mix and match.
I guess it works, whatever works best for you, the more experience with them the faster you will learn them, so I'd just jump in. As to your second question, are you asking if it is important to know which is hiragana and which is katakana? If so, then kind of, kind of not. No more so than it is important to know the difference between 'a' and 'A'. Essentially they serve different purposes, katakana is the representation of the sound, and hiragana is used grammatically, however it is not completely unusual for them to share either role.
With time you will know which is which, but until then, the rule of thumb is hiragana is round and flowing, and katakana is sharp and angular.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
Thanks guys. I've got a long-ish flight from Indy to Nebraska on Friday, so I'll spend a chunk of that working on my hiragana. I'll have flashcards available for both and work on them separately for now.
CornBurrito
Member
edit wrong thread.
Alright, thank you ! Is there any way to know which games these are beforehand? Like a resource online that has info for each game or something? I'll try switching Melee to Japanese later to see if that only has kana.
Also, will learning kanji make it easier to learn mandarin or cantonese afterwards if I decide to do so?
There are lists out there but I don't know of a wiki or anything. Mario RPGs, Pokemons and Zeldas are all good picks though. Given you've only just started it's probably a bit too soon to be playing text heavy games in Japanese, I am not sure what you would get out of it at this point.
Yes is the short answer, especially if you use Chinese textbooks written for Japanese people.
Cool I'll try those, thanks again!
AtomskEater
Member
http://jrpgclub.com/community/thread-39.html
I'm not sure how frequently this list is updated, though (the last posts were made late last year) but it might be a good starting point at least.
redhairedking
Junior Member
Also for anyone who is interested, starting on the 20th Best Buy is having a buy 1 get 1 free on select 3DS games and Pokémon X and Y are included in that so this is a good chance to pick up another version for Japanese practice if you don't want to erase your save.
CornBurrito
Member
So the Japanese word for "footprint" is 足あと.
Not sure if my thinking is right, but this seems to be combing the word for foot "足" with the word for after "あと." Literally, afterfoot. I think that's so cool. One of the best things about learning a new language is seeing these connections, even if they might sometimes be wrong.
Another one is お手洗い meaning bathroom. 手 means hand, 洗い means wash. Then the お is just politeness marker. "Honorable hand wash" or something.
Not sure if my thinking is right, but this seems to be combing the word for foot "足" with the word for after "あと." Literally, afterfoot. I think that's so cool. One of the best things about learning a new language is seeing these connections, even if they might sometimes be wrong.
Another one is お手洗い meaning bathroom. 手 means hand, 洗い means wash. Then the お is just politeness marker. "Honorable hand wash" or something.
あと means remains/mark, so it is used in a lot of ways. きず (wound) + あと is scar, そり (shave) + あと is stubble, 筆跡 ふで (brush) + あと is handwriting, 人＋ あと is evidence of human activity, しゅじゅつ (surgery) + あと is an operation scar, つめ (claw, nail) + あと is scratch.
Japanese is highly agglutinative, so get prepared for learning a bunch of these.
CornBurrito
Member
Ah neat. The only use of あと I heard before was to mean "after." ex: 晩御飯のあとで
Is it at all related to the usage you've described? As in the Japanese think of "晩御飯のあとで" being "the period of time when there are only the remains of dinner left" or something like that?
Anyway all this stuff is pretty damn cool.
It means behind, after, remains, mark, etc depending on the context, there are several different kanji used if you want to get into the nitty gritty. Just hearing 晩御飯の後 I would think "after dinner", but I can imagine a scenario* where 晩御飯のあと could mean "unfinished food".
These basic words like あと have lots of generally related meanings, that take on a life of their own in context. I find the verbs like あう, つく, はなす, etc to be the most interesting in their range of meanings.
*I am not a native speaker, I think a survey would have to be taken of native speakers to get a definitive answer on something of this sort.
Brawly Likes to Brawl
Member
Someone just brought my attention to a new text-hooking program:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=122515291&postcount=44
https://code.google.com/p/annot-player/
Apparently you can attach it to emulators so I'm going to test this out.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=122515291&postcount=44
https://code.google.com/p/annot-player/
Apparently you can attach it to emulators so I'm going to test this out.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
The one you will see most is ヲ, the others are pretty irrelevant. I do know a girl who uses ゑ in her name to be cute, by it's not really worth your time. I don't even know how to input those characters on the 10-key input on my iphone.
Aizo
Banned
I learned ヲ when I first learned katakana. It's probably used the most out of all of those, and that's still almost never. I see some people write otaku ヲタク every once and a while, but that's about it. I've only seen ヱ in Evangelion... Just from seeing them written down once, that's likely enough. You'll barely ever see them, and you don't need to know how to write them. It's just a fun little thing to know, I suppose.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
Thanks guys - I made flashcards for all of them, but I'll keep it in the back of my mind how useful/not useful they are!
Any Japanese person would be familiar with them. That's the standard I used to decide whether something is worth learning or not.
It's kind of a shame ゑ isn't used anymore, though. Easily the best looking hiragana character.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
I'm still going to learn them, but I'm more happy to know the lack of use they have now.
I'm finding it difficult to memorize hiragana. It feels so arbitrary memorizing symbols that represent sounds. I feel like that's one of the biggest hurdles I'm going to have. Sure, grammar is going to be tough in a way, but I can hopefully make sense of that one the mess of symbols starts to mean something to me. I plan to start reading anything I can once I know all the hiragana and katakana. Whenever that may be haha.
If you're having difficulty don't waste your time learning obsolete kana.
Also if a deck or other resource isn't working for you find another one.
Zoe
Member
If you're only reading them, that's part of the problem. You should be learning how to write them too, in the correct stroke order.
That's what I did too. I had no idea that flashcards were a thing at the time.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
I made my own thinking it would help - but I think that's more suited for vocabulary versus the basic alphabet. I'll get a notebook dedicated to my learning and focus on writing and learning kana that way for now.
hitsugi
Member
This is how I learned them as well.. I still found katakana to be difficult due to some letters being... the same + 1 stroke, but maybe I also tried to rush it compared to hiragana
Yeah, same with me. Also, I don't see them as much as I do see hiragana, so I still have some troubles with it.
CornBurrito
Member
Also writing words with them is also really helpful. I can recognize kana easily now if I see them, but I wouldn't be able to handwrite them right now because I haven't done so in a couple months.
Gotta brush up on writing everything. Getting too used to keyboards doing the work for me.
I usually sit down and try to write out both gojyuuon tables once a month. I'm pretty quick until I get to ぬ, which I have to think about for a second or so before continuing. I'm fine on the シソツンノ, as every one of them is in my name, so I get to write them quite often. I don't even bother with kanji these days, only kanji I ever write is my address.
flashcards seem a bit slow compared to writing out the kana tables. write the entire kana table. write them forwards, backwards, random rows and columns.
kana is the first hurdle, but only the tip of the iceberg. i'm still not smooth at reading passages, but i find the bigger problem is figuring out where words end and start.
わたしはとてもうれしかったです！
i used to think katakana words were awesome, because they were the first words i could read. but now, i hate them. the transliterations are nowhere near their original forms, sometimes a word could map to number of different words, and sometimes the word could be completely made up without no real mapping.
kana is the first hurdle, but only the tip of the iceberg. i'm still not smooth at reading passages, but i find the bigger problem is figuring out where words end and start.
わたしはとてもうれしかったです！
i used to think katakana words were awesome, because they were the first words i could read. but now, i hate them. the transliterations are nowhere near their original forms, sometimes a word could map to number of different words, and sometimes the word could be completely made up without no real mapping.
Aizo
Banned
Transliterations that bug me are those which could have been done perfectly, if they weren't just transliterated from the roman alphabet. Mexico for example, would be perfect as メヒコ, but instead, it's　メキシコ. Just like Jamaica is ジャマイカ--ジャメーカ would have been great.
Yeah, the problem with katakana transliterations is that it often goes on the pronunciation.
It took me ages to figure out that コヒー was coffee. Or, when for example at tricot's Bitter lyrics, ナイアリズム for nihilism instead of ニヒリズム .
Anyway, I have a question. How can I do a slight "detour" in a phrase to talk about something in the middle of it.
Like "something something I listened to someone new album "name of the album" (which is great btw) and it reminds a lot of something something", or
"something something "name of the album"* something something"
*which is great btw
It took me ages to figure out that コヒー was coffee. Or, when for example at tricot's Bitter lyrics, ナイアリズム for nihilism instead of ニヒリズム .
Anyway, I have a question. How can I do a slight "detour" in a phrase to talk about something in the middle of it.
Like "something something I listened to someone new album "name of the album" (which is great btw) and it reminds a lot of something something", or
"something something "name of the album"* something something"
*which is great btw
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
OK, I've got a notebook and will be learning the basic kana via repetition! I'll work on the additional sounds once I have a grasp of the basics. There's something kind of neat about looking over a notebook full of kana that I can actually read a few of. Baby steps, right? 
AzureSkies
Member
I hate to be that guy, but does anyone have some good suggestions on where to start with learning Japanese?
I've been trying on and off to learn it for years, but I've never really found a good starting point.
I've been trying on and off to learn it for years, but I've never really found a good starting point.
CornBurrito
Member
I really like Genki honestly. It is a textbook/workbook combo but I find most of it written in an enjoyable and easy to understand way.
Also I have a random question for you guys who know Japanese well.
Is this sentence grammatical? I am trying to say "a lot of people work at that restaurant"
あのレストランでたくさん人が仕事をする。
or should it be:
あのレストランでたくさん人が仕事をしている。
Or am I messing up particles? Not sure if it should be 人が or not, or if it should be レストランで or レストランに
ThreePiMatt
Member
Figure I pop in this thread. I'm heading to Japan in a week and a half and I opted to take a semester of Japanese at my community college in prep. Super glad I did. Our teacher has been great, she's a native Japanese speaker but has lived in the US for almost 30 years. Hopefully I do well on my final tomorrow.
At the very least, I was able to flub my way through confirming a reservation at the Fuji mountain hut with someone who did not speak much English.
At the very least, I was able to flub my way through confirming a reservation at the Fuji mountain hut with someone who did not speak much English.
Well, I don't know Japanese well, but I feel that is している and that the particles are correct.
.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
I'd recommend this:
あのレストランでたくさんの人が働いている。
Should have a の after たくさん
Also, when you say 「仕事をしている」 it sounds more like "A lot of people are doing jobs at that restaurant." It doesn't sound like they are necessarily working for the restaurant if that makes sense.
CornBurrito
Member
Ah thanks. I'm working at 101-102 level vocabulary so 仕事 was the closest I had to "working"
Can I ask why it is ている though? My guess is that it is because they work there frequently. So while it could mean "they are working there (literally right now they are working)" it can also mean they are working there (frequently, everyday from 9-5)?
What would it mean if I used 働います instead of 働いている?
Also why is there a の after たくさん? I swear I've seen it without the possessive particle before.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
Question!
I collect Nanoblocks (basically really tiny Japanese LEGO blocks), and the instructions are often entirely in Japanese. Sometimes, though, they are translated (like in the picture below). I'm not concerned about the meaning of the statement below, but I AM wondering what the last symbol in this picture is. I can't seem to find it on my kana charts or in Kanji Recognizer on Android.
I collect Nanoblocks (basically really tiny Japanese LEGO blocks), and the instructions are often entirely in Japanese. Sometimes, though, they are translated (like in the picture below). I'm not concerned about the meaning of the statement below, but I AM wondering what the last symbol in this picture is. I can't seem to find it on my kana charts or in Kanji Recognizer on Android.
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