Japanese, lesson five

[janestarz]

Since I skipped Japanese last week I dreaded I would be behind. The third part of the grammar was in chapter eight, and because of general blahness and a headache I wanted to skip. NoKey went on ahead and only gave me the stencils he received for me yesterday in the subway, while we were already underway...*sigh*. Then again, we didn't do any homework last night either.

Ogata-sensei believes we should get started on hiragana as soon as possible. He wrote down 'watashi wa, anata wa, kare wa' and then some in hiragana, which I only could read because I know how 'shi' and 'wa'^*) look.
He then proceeded with 'kore', 'sore', and 'are'.
^*)Actually, 'wa' as a particle (subject marker) is written 'ha'. I have no idea how to write watashi except for the last syllable, 'shi'.

If I may believe NoKey on this, this lesson was not much different from the one before that. We practiced a lot, sentences like Uijl-san, anata wa kuruma de uchi ni kaerimasu ka? (Uijl-san, did you go home by car?).
We're stuck on vocubulary and verbs at the moment. Though words like yūbinkyoku (post office) and meishi (businesscard) haunt me at night.

New vocabulary:

Japanese	English
sukoshi	a little bit
itsu mo	always
tokidoki	sometimes, every now and then
zettai	never, not if I can help it
jitensha	bicycle
takusan	a lot
kakkoii	cool!
fuku	clothing

We're also learning new verbs.

Verb	Present, aff.	Present, neg.	Past, aff.	Past, neg.
Hanasu, to talk	Hanashimasu	Hanashimasen	Hanashimashita	Hanashimasendeshita
Miru, to see	Mimasu	Mimasen	Mimashita	Mimasendeshita
Kiku, to listen	Kikimasu	Kikimasen	Kikimashita	Kikimasendeshita
Taberu, to eat	Tabemasu	Tabemasen	Tabemashita	Tabemasendeshita
Nomu, to drink	Nomimasu	Nomimasen	Nomimashita	Nomimasendeshita

Pretty easy, because the regular verbs all work the same. Only from the base verb, you need to know the first one to know how they mangle it. After that, you're fine. See hanasu -> hanashimasu. We also learned kau -> kaimasu (to buy) and yomu -> yomimasu (to read). We also wrote down motte imasu, which is an irregular verb, and we are only allowed to mangle the noble tongue by using the present affimatives and negatives.

We can now construct 1337 sentences like:
Anata wa Nihon go o hanashimasu ka? (Do you speak Japanese?)
Watashi wa kōhī o nomimasendeshita (I did not drink coffee.)
Watashi wa hon o takusan motte imasu (I have a lot of books.)
Watsahi tachi wa terebi o motte imasen (We do not have a television.)
NoKey-san wa kinō midori no hon o yomimashita (Nokey read a green book yesterday.)

But the word for today is tokidoki! Singit!

Comments

[tommycee.livejournal.com]

it sounds fucking kakkoii :)

i'm very impressed. a friend wants me to help her learn Hindi and new languages are fascinating... but also: time consuming.

[janestarz.livejournal.com]

Japanese is quite satisfying and easy to learn, if you don't count the writing system. The kanji are a nightmare, and currently I'm trying to get hiragana down - I've just made cards with all the scribbly lines that are supposed to be phonetic sounds from the language. Once you've seen a few, you've seen 'em all.
But Hindi sounds fun, although the writing will drive you mad as well, methinks.

[janestarz.livejournal.com]

Indeed.
Just you wait until we're in that nice Sushi bar near your new home (!!) and I order something in Japanese...ne?