半時間でとても暗雲になった。見ることに外に行った。速く雨来た。始めることを見た。空で荒波のようにだった。ホースのようにビルを打撲したことを始まった。落雷して、電力は躓いた。傘を取り出して、駐車時ょに歩いた。雨は凄まじゃかったで、電光があった。水害を思って、家に変えるのために向けて、屋根の溝を見た。無がったから、正そうとした。落雷があって、指は電撃を感じた。直撃じゃなかったから、呆れた！溝を放置して、アパートにかえた。何がつけれことを要ったことがあると思った。雨と雷を聞くように窓を開けた。

Within a half hour, it became very dark out. I went outside to see. Quickly, the rain came. I saw it begin, blowing in waves in the sky. They began to thrash the building, and it was as if someone had turned a fire hose on us. Lightning struck and the power flashed. I got an umbrella, and walked to the parking lot. The rain was fierce, and there was lightning. I turned to go in, thinking of the flooding that would occur, and saw the water gushing from the gutter spout. It was misaligned with it's drain, so I tried to fix it. Lightning struck, and as it did, I felt a tingling in my fingers touching the gutter. I was amazed, because it wasn't even a direct hit! I left the gutter not quite aligned and returned to the apartment wondering what needed restarting. I opened the windows to listen to the rain and thunder.

責めてください!

Studying Japanese Grammar...In Japanese!

文法 (ぶんぽう) - grammar

This sort of definition has been filling my head and my notebook for the last few days. This started when I decided I needed to study something that I would like to be able to talk about, rather than random general stuff like the smart.fm lists, and decided I'd like to be able to actually discuss the Japanese language with Japanese in Japanese. I often break my flow and retreat to English to mention some part of speech. But now I have a notebook that has four pages so far filled with Japanese grammar and general linguistics definitions.

I started here at wa-pedia. Not a place I frequent; it's just where my google search for "japanese grammar in japanese" led me, several pages down. I started reading the article and saw a lot of juicy, meaningful words and started writing things down and just looking up anything I didn't know. I've so far gotten through the 動詞 (どうし) - verbs and am looking at the adjectives. I tell you, some things are frustrating and damn near impossible to find. I'll highlight some of the more difficult to find words for us later.

I eventually ended up at the Wikipedia article on Japanese grammar and found that the two were nearly identical. This rather disappointed me because Wikipedia's technical articles tend to be among the less useful ones for the layman. Though the page at wa-pedia is slightly different, and a bit more language-learner friendly, it may still just be an older version of the same page.

However, it is still immensely enlightening. Learning the grammar of the language inside out rather than outside in is very satisfying and clears up lots of potentially (or actually) confusing areas. It is simply a mistake to view a language in the terms of another language's grammar. Unless they are very similar it will simply not work well at all. And learning grammatical terms in that language, you have something to talk about!

Kanji jisho with stroke animation

I found a new kanji dictionary online that may not be as smooth as jisho.org, but that has flash animations of all the kanji, along with pictures of the printed style and typical handwriting. I haven't really looked for one with this type of functionality before, so it'd be nice to find a better working one. This was the first thing I found after about five minutes of looking.

Yamasa Online Kanji Dictionary

I've been using it to look up the stroke order of the kanji in smart.fm's Japanese Core 2000: Step 3 (which is hard as hell btw). It makes it a lot easier, and I will probably keep doing it. You can follow the animation in the air with your finger, and not waste the paper actually writing it down. I didn't realize I had the stroke order in so many kanji and radicals wrong. It's a good thing I don't ever actually write Japanese.

Ok, I was once again browsing through comments on smart.fm and I found something cool.

forum.koohii.com

It's a tiny little language-learning forum, much like thejapanesepage.com once was. These kinds of places are awesome. There's resource lists, etc. I just like that it's fairly new and not ruined by weeaboos and elitists. I haven't looked at it much, but it seems like something to keep an eye on.

I already have a set of resources that I use, so it seems like the best idea is to find those that work for you and stick with them. Taking a look at new things is good, but you can't spend too much time doing that, cuz you'll never really move forward. I stick with smart.fm and readthekanji as my spaced-repition software. I use jisho.org as my online dictionary. They seem to really work for me. I also have a teacher, watch as much anime as I can, and am pushing through One Piece vol. 1 every now and then. Looking at anything else just makes me panic over how much there is.

Ok, back to study...

Lessons from Noo-sensei

I'm in Japanese 102 at West Virginia University, taught by Asoko Noo. Today, we finished going over body parts, switched ja and dewa, and learned right and left and possessive pronouns. That was actually a lot of information. Probably the most informative day of the semester so far.

Ok, so first, one of the Graduate Teaching Assistants, Kataoka-sensei, reviewed what we'd already gone over for the last renshuu mondai ("last week problems"). She was even more energetic than Noo-sensei. Spoke very fast, which was a nice change. But she only went for about 10 minutes.

After that, we started on body parts. The first group, in bold is what she actually went over and expects us to learn for the test. The rest is for our own reference. I almost put the kanji and kana in, but I figured I'd stick with what she was presenting for now.

body	karada	hand	te
head	atama	finger/digit	yubi
hair (on head)	kami no ke*	stomach	onaka
eye	me	back	senaka
ear	mimi	leg/foot	ashi
nose	hana**
tooth	ha	toes	ashi no yubi
mouth	kuchi	waist	koshi
tongue	shita	knee	hiza
face	kao	thumb	oya-yubi
neck	kubi	index finger	hitosashi-yubi
throat	nodo	middle finger	naka-yubi
shoulder	kata	ring finger	kusuri-yubi
arm	ude	little finger (pinkie)	ko-yubi

* Kami here means hair, and ke means fur. It's redundant for clarification.

** When saying “hana desu” the pitch stays up for desu. If the pitch drops back down, you're saying it's a flower.

The sort of drills she does for this is:

Noo: "Kore wa nan desu ka?" (gesturing)
Class: "Sore wa atama desu."
N: "Kore mo atama desu ka?" (different gesture)
C: "Iie, sore wa atama ja arimasen."
N: "Dewa, kore wa nan desu ka?"
C: "Sore wa me desu."
etc...

And she does this for the whole class, speaking with us, then student only, then one on one. This is where we really learn it. Because it's so easy, she switched dewa with ja and vice versa. Ja is the contraction of dewa, and they are interchangeable, but we've been practicing as above for over a semester, so it hangs you up a bit.

Then we learned migi and hidari (right and left). She combined this with body parts for practice. Ex. "Kore wa watashi no migi no te." There's also the "possessive pronouns." That seems like a BS definition to me because they're not really pronouns in Japanese. She's also separated them from "possessive adjectives" which are exactly the same in Japanese and I don't know the different in English either. These both consist of placing the particle "no" (の) between a word and the word it "owns" which follows. I find it easiest and least confusing to think of の as "apostrophe s". It works even for things that wouldn't come across like that in English because the meaning is essentially the same. One thing belongs to another. It works in the same order too.

This was a much bigger day than the rest because so far it's been little more than counters, which kinda suck. It was fun too, because she thought we looked sleepy, so she had us stand up and do the gestures for body parts at her prompt.

If there's anything not understood, I strongly recommend Tae Kim's for grammar, Jisho.org for definitions and kanji, and smart.fm for practice.

Also, at one point someone left -san off of the name of the imaginary person we were using for a drill, and the nihonjin TA's busted out in laughter. It is really amazing what a difference it makes to them.

So I'm studying on smart.fm and I check the comments and I see someone asking for a kanji reading app. I add the one I recently found and find awesome, readthekanji.com. They charge past JLPT4, but right now they're giving lifetime accounts away for only $10. I'm a huge cheapskate (とてもけち) but even I thought it was worth it. High quality, very engaging, almost totally customizable quizzes, and cool progress tracking.

Checking out the others that were posted among the comments, I was not so impressed. The first one, http://www.japanese-kanji.com/ just wouldn't work. I don't know if it's my browser, (Chrome on Ubuntu 9.04) or a problem on their end, but it didn't work for me.

The second, http://www.nekopy.com/study/kanji/index.html looks interesting. It's entirely in Japanese, but since it's a kanji learning site, it uses very little kanji. It's not hard to figure out. You have six levels of kanji study (かんじべんきょう) and kanji games (かんじゲーム) to go with them. The games are actually like nothing I've ever seen before. You are given a partial kanji and five other partial kanji and you have to pick which option goes with the one you are given. Another game gives you a word/pronunciation/reading/whatever and you have to pick the kanji. Another gives you the romaji around the kanji, instead of for the kanji itself. The next gives you six kanji and you have to make a two-kanji combo word, and then enter the reading (よみがな) if you mess with that option. The fifth shows you a 3 kanji in a specific order for a few seconds, then rearranges them and has you put them back in order. I don't know if these are words or not. The next just has you choose the stroke order of a given kanji from the options. This seems like a good tool, but is inaccessible unless you know hiragana and the english meanings.

I still think readthekanji comes out on top. I don't see why they can't be add or user supported like smart.fm, but the small bit that I paid was worth it to me. Forcing you to memorize how a kanji or combo is read in a sentece (and many others) forces you to really use it as a language. I turn off the english display in the quiz or course, to prevent it being a crutch. It displays that in the answer, along with progress in the combo and all individual kanji in it.


Well, that's my discovery of the day.