kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1009 of 1702 20 July 2013 at 12:23am | IP Logged |
Doing reviews and for the umpteenth time I'm annoyed at myself (and 日本語) for being dyslexic. A lot of
words I seem to mix up the syllables when I go to reproduce them. This one word that I'm studying at the
moment that's giving me issues is 株. I keep saying ぶか instead of かぶ. There's some other words like this.
And when I do my reviews I always wonder if its worth doing a wrong response or not. For now I'm doing a
wrong response but it gets annoying.
Another thing I'm investigating right now is whether I want to try to learn the kana input method on my phone
or if romaji input is just as good anyway. Checked google and it doesn't really give answers just explains the
two methods and how to use them.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1010 of 1702 21 July 2013 at 1:10pm | IP Logged |
I stumbled on this website (I sometimes ask Google stupid questions like... if Japanese need furigana to read kanji, why do they have kanji at all??)
Kanji Damage
It looks interesting. I like that he swears a lot when he talks about Japanese. Also, he has a system of images to go with the sounds associated with kanji. I'm curious how well it works. I'm reading it over and may try studying it and applying it when I review RTK.. which I would like to start doing again after next weekend.
I was thinking I'd stay away from studying kanji specifically until I get the core 3000 done so I might do that 1st. I just added the 2400 list to my deck today. It's going pretty fast actually despite being very distracted with watching lots of anime.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1011 of 1702 22 July 2013 at 1:35pm | IP Logged |
I'm pretty into this anime railgun s. The series that came before it a few years ago (but which I just watched
over the past few days) isn't as interesting and really doesn't have a plot but the world and characters have a
lot of potential and this series has a good suspense plot going.
Anyway, I was posting because I'm finding I'm understanding better than ever. Anime that is. The core 6000
(I'm workin on the 3000 group at the moment) is really helping. I like that I am now tuning out the English
subs for simpler sentences completely and only read the subs when I need them. Tuning in to the language
is getting easier and easier. With this progress I'm not feeling too motivated to work on my kanji.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1012 of 1702 24 July 2013 at 7:43am | IP Logged |
JANKY SITUATION 1: 150 words all having the same ON-yomi.
Whichever seafaring trader decided to import kanji to Japan obviously couldn't speak Chinese! Duh - Chinese has tones, and Japanese doesn't. The Japanese trader was like, "It all sounds the same - KOU, SHOU, wing, wong, whatever. So let's import something we don't understand!"
And the Japanese land-lubbers for some reason were heard to reply, "Here is a whole new vocabulary that adds nothing to our existing language, and which can't be understood by Chinese either! OK, we'll learn it, but only if we can keep our existing language, so now we have to learn twice as many words for shit we already knew how to say!"
And the seafaring traders were like, "OK deal."
And then, "Hey! Someone's trying to be Catholic over there!"
"That's over the line - let's massacre the whole village!"
That is how Japanese multiculturalism went, back in the day.
JANKY SITUATION 2: Kanji which have two (or more!) ONyomi.
China has hella different dialects. So one Japanese trader would come back from Shanghai, where they pronounce 青い (blue) as SEI, and he'd teach everyone in his town to say SEI. Meanwhile, another Japanese trader would come back from Hong Kong, where they pronounce 青い as SHOU, and he'd teach everyone in HIS town to say SHOU. So there's that.
Bit of cut and paste from the kanji damage website. One wonders, how you can import massive amounts of vocabulary from a tonal language into a language without tones and keep the same sounds but remove the tones. Seriously. It has got to end up being really confusing. I was happy when I found out Japanese wasn't a tonal language but when you think about how much it borrows from Chinese.. you kind of wish that maybe it were.
But they use it and it works for them so.. yeah.
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kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4844 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 1013 of 1702 24 July 2013 at 9:01am | IP Logged |
Hehe... don't know what to say about that, but yeah, seems like Japan did through a lot of work to redo their own language.
From what I've read about Japanese history, Japan has a history of borrowing from other countries, especially nations that are "en vogue", while keeping out anything that was not "en vogue". Japan borrowed kanji and Chinese loanwords from China long ago when that country was popular here, as well as other stuff like Buddhism. Nowadays, East Asia is certainly not "en vogue" here - unless you count the ubiquitous Korean pop singers and groups (which, by the way, sing in Japanese). But American culture certainly is. You find English on TV shows and in J-Pop songs, and the Japanese language is borrowing a lot of English words.
Edited by kujichagulia on 24 July 2013 at 9:02am
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1014 of 1702 24 July 2013 at 4:04pm | IP Logged |
Indeed. Japanese does borrow a lot from other languages that are en vogue. And I have notice tons and tons
of English borrowings, which never fails to amaze people when I tell them that about Japanese. They don't
see how a language written in kanji could possibly borrow from English. Too different of a language heh. I
think Japanese is really similar to English one that. Obviously all languages borrow but we have so much
Latin borrowings that our language looks like a Romance language. Kind of crazy. But Latin wasn't a tonal
language.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1015 of 1702 24 July 2013 at 4:06pm | IP Logged |
I'm switching up my flashcards a little bit again. I altered my Japanese production cards so there isn't any English on side 1. Just the picture.
*edit*
(may as well)
Watching a new anime.. Sankarea. Just starting ep 1 so I might lose interest. It's about some guy that loves zombies and apparently a real live girl zombie shows up at his school. I love this sort of nonsense. (usually).
Oh I am really really enjoying Railgun S. It's the 2nd series in this fantasy world. The 1st series came out a couple years ago but this one is on ep 15 I think and started in the Spring season. Really good plot and a lot more character development than the 1st series had, but it's the same characters. The 1st series was good too but towards the end I was just watching to finish it as opposed to really being excited about the next episode.
Edited by kraemder on 24 July 2013 at 4:15pm
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5979 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 1016 of 1702 24 July 2013 at 7:56pm | IP Logged |
But I do love how borrowings from English take on a life of their own in Japanese! So we have words like コンビニ, パソコン, リストラ, インフラ. And it's not just English, if you think about where words like ピーマン come from.
Anyway, as far as the history of Japanese writing goes, I think it's important to consider that before kanji were imported from China there was no literacy in Japan. The kana developed later using kanji as a basis.
Chinese characters might not be the easiest system to get to grips with, but it must have felt pretty groundbreaking when it first arrived on the shores of Japan. The fact that a lot of mainly scholarly vocabulary was imported at the same time as kanji was adopted makes a lot of sense - as all scholarly books imported from China would have been in Chinese. I guess Chinese had a similar role in the far east to Latin in Europe?
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