Learning Japanese - Day 9

nekonicku
Jun 15, 2016
4 min read

I was right, having my lesson today really did help rejuvenate my interest in learning Japanese!

Today's lesson was mostly revisiting things from last week, using Rosetta Stone at first. Then we went on to reading some sentences he used to use in school lessons when he was teaching kids at school. These sentences included Kanji as well as Hiragana so it gave me a good understanding of how different Kanji can be pronounced differently depending on the usage. For example. one of the sentences read:

I visited Mount Fuji -

私は富士山を訪れました

わたしはふじさんをおとずれました

Watashi wa Fujisan o otozure mashita

Watashi - I

Wa - indicates that the sentence is about whatever comes before it, in this case, I (me)

Fujisan - Hopefully doesn't need an explanation... 🗻 The Kanji for Fujisan consists of the Kanji for Rich, Scolar and Mountain. Maybe not a great example because it can also be called Fujiyama >.< (the Kanji for mountain has two readings, San or Yama)

O - を marks the direct object in a sentence. The direct object is the noun which receives the action of the verb.

Otozure - Visit. Actually the word for visit on its own is Tozureru but because it is past tense, the Ru gets replaced with the ma from mashita...

Mashita - Places the verb in the past tense and finished the sentence. Kind of like saying "it was" or in this case "I was"

Just to confuse things even more, when used as particles in a sentence (but not as part of words) は (Ha) and を (Wo) are pronounced Wa and O respectively when used as particles...

Now compare that example to this one:

My Name is Mr Yamakawa

私の名前は山川さんです

わたしのなまえわやまかわさんです

Watashi no namae wa Yamakawa san desu

I won't go through all of it but you can see that now the Kanji for mountain has a completely different pronunciation. Here it is pronounced "Yama" not "San"

and the kanji for river 川 here is pronounced as Kawa

So you can see how people might have trouble trying to pronounce someones name if its written in Kanji!

名前 - Means Name

Generally Kanji have one reading for if it is on it's own in a sentence, and one for if it is grouped with other Kanji (which join to form a new word)

Heres an excerpt from a good website I found regarding the subject:

"WORDS WHICH CONTAIN ONLY ONE KANJI (i.e. 水, 日, 大きい, 辛い) use the KUNyomi.

PROPER NOUNS use the KUNyomi ...usually. (田中 is Tanaka, 裏山 is Urayama, etc.)

JUKUGO (compound words i.e. 種類, 漢字, 哲学, etc.) use the ONyomi.

HOWEVER ...jukugo which have hiragana in 'em (i.e. 手取り早い, 人当たり, あざ笑う) use the KUNyomi, not ONyomi.

The Japanese have a word for these hiragana letters that dangle off of the ends of jukugo: OKURIGANA (literally, 'letters which are sent out from the kanji') . Please learn this word."

-read the whole article here-

Also, helpfully he told me something I didn’t know, some Kanji actually have parts of other Kanji inside to help wit the pronunciation of that character, 語 "Go" as in at the end of Nihongo （Japanese Language) can be seen to be pronounced as Go because it has the Kanji for 5 ("Go") inside it 五

Then after reading some more sentences from his book we went to look through the second session in Rosetta Stone. This was mostly a re-cap of things I already knew such as Tondei - Fly/jump (literally meaning take off) which confused me the first time I saw Hikooki (飛行機) next to Tondei (飛んでい)... Planes don't jump!

Aruite - (to walk)

私は歩いていきます。

Watashi wa aruite ikimasu.

I will go on foot.

Young

Wakai

若い

Tachi

plural (group)

たち

and a few new ones including Swimming, Riding, Reading and Following etc.

Swimming

水泳

すいえい

Reading

I am reading a book

本を読んでいます

Hon o Yondeimasu

Hon - Book

Yon - Read

imasu - I am

For practicing writing Kanji, I have been given a squared notebook, I've been told that when I write a Kanji, to fill one square. It helps to get the sizes right and make sure the Kanji with many different particles all fit together properly and don't get mistaken for belonging to another one next to it.

My Tutor seems like a really nice and interesting guy as well (and extremely intelligent!), before I left he showed me his library. He has shelves upon shelves full of Japanese textbooks, and another bookshelf full of books for all different languages, he can speak at least 5 fluently and taught them all at some point.

He also has a whole shelf full of folders containing hundreds of different sheet music files, he also teaches clarinet, piano, flute, saxophone and more, after a quick tour of his library, and a look at some other Japanese study books and a Kanji Dictionary, he took me into the living room and showed me some of his instruments. He played a few of his favourite songs on the piano for me before I left too.

Already looking forward to next Wednesday!

Although, if I learned one thing today, it's this!