Learning Japanese - Day 2

Had a two hour lesson after work today, this lesson focussed on some basic sentences. We used a program called Rosetta Stone which shows a Japanese sentence and you have to match what is in the sentence to a picture. It seems like a great way of learning as there is no direct translation happening, instead, you simply match the Japanese to the image.

It's something like this but the version I'm using is much older...

So far I've learned things like　飛行機の下にいる男の子　which means... There is a boy under an airplane...

Hopefully I don't have to use that at the airport! :O

None of the words make much sense to learn but it's good to see how the kanji works with them, for example let's break this sentence down.

飛行機 means Plane - (Pronounced ひこおき Hi-ko-o-ki )

の is a particle which denotes the subject of the sentence. In this case the subject is the plane as we are saying the boy is under it... (Pronounced no)

下に means under, いる means "it is" or "is" when added to the kanji for under, so 下にいる means "is under" (Under pronounced - したに　Shi-ta-ni - 上に (Over) is pronounced - うえに　U-e-ni )

男の子 means Boy, using the kanji for Male (男) and Child (子) (Pronounced - おとこのこ o-to-ko-no-ko)

Then, you have to read the entire sentence backwards, else it would end up saying A Plane is under a boy, not A boy is under a plane...

I managed to find a screenshot of the boy in question and the version of Rosetta Stone we're using (think its from 1997! So old! So... 古い!) Just without the Romaji above the images (Romaji being the english phonetical spellings of the hiragana and kanji.)

Of course, I've also learned how to say "There is a ball on top of a boy!" and "A girl is riding a horse!"

The point really is to get you used to seeing the kanji and hearing the language and being able to figure out what it means by using images. For example, now I know that 下に means Under - 上に means on top of.

Also

馬 - Uma - Horse

犬 - Inu - Dog

猫 - Neko - Cat

日 - Nichi - Sun

本 - Hon - Book

門 - Mon - Gate

中 - Naka - Middle

正 - Sei/Shoo - Horizontal Line?? Why?

子 - Ko - Child

立 - Tatsu - Stand

夫 - Slash - Otto

一 - Ichi - One

Theres a lot more than this but it takes a while to write them out in kanji...

Anyway I've promised to fill up a notebook with these Kanji plus a few more before next weeks lesson! I will post some photo's of that notebook before next Wednesday! Let's see how many I can remember by then!

There was a lot more I learned or began to learn such as how to refer to plurals of an object, how to say something is close or far away, how to say if someone is running / walking etc, but it's getting late and my brain hurts, so let's leave the rest for another day!

Thanks for reading,

おやすみなさい！

寝

#LearningJapanese