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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜

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kraemder
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 Message 1457 of 1702
10 August 2014 at 2:44am | IP Logged 
Thanks Evita. I'll work on learning those rules - I'm sure it'll help a lot.
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kraemder
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 Message 1458 of 1702
10 August 2014 at 5:15am | IP Logged 
@sitzen

I often felt like I was saying 洗濯機 wrong and couldn't figure out why. Thanks for clearing that up.
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vonPeterhof
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 Message 1459 of 1702
10 August 2014 at 10:37am | IP Logged 
Mind if I join in the nitpicking? ;)

kraemder wrote:
One thing that gets me is that when the koreans slow down their pronunciation to help the learner.. they changethe pronunciation. The word for this is a good example. (I'm listening to an episode on it). it's IGO. But when they say it slowly.. it becomes.. I-KO. I've picked up that voiced consonants aren't really used at the beginning of words in Korean but really.. couldn't they make a little effort? Or maybe it's just that hard.
Well, I guess to them it doesn't feel like they're changing the pronunciation, since they're still saying the same phoneme. The voiced/voiceless contrast isn't phonemic in Korean, so [k] and [g] are different ways of pronouncing the same underlying sound, ㄱ, which is contrasted with the aspirated ㅋ and the tense ㄲ. I noticed a similar thing when listening to the Greek Pimsleur course. In modern Greek the consonants /p/, /t/ and /k/ become voiced when preceded by the nasals /n/ and /m/, while the latter two sounds may or may not disappear altogether. Thus την πρώτη, /tin ˈproti/ ends up sounding as either [timˈbroti] or [tiˈbroti]. Naturally, whenever the speakers on the recording slowed down their speech they would pronounce both the nasal consonant and the unvoiced consonant. Normally before starting a new language I read a detailed description of its phonology, so that things like this don't catch me off guard, but I can see how that would be too boring for most people. In that case it helps to pay attention to such "changes" in pronunciation that aren't perceived as such by the native speakers. But then, I would expect a good course to explain the variation to the learner (I think Pimsleur did eventually explain the Greek voicing). I guess that's a possible downside of a course that relies solely on the insights of native speakers.

Sizen wrote:
It would be the same as writing 発表 as はつひょう in Japanese or 学校 as がくこう, but reading it differently because you understand the implicit sound change.
Not really disagreeing here, but that's kinda like things were written before the post-war orthographic reform introduced the miniature っ sign. Before the reforms 發表 was transcribed as はつぺう and 學校 as がくかう. There have been various reforms of Korean orthography bringing it closer to the phonemes of the spoken language, but in the end both North and South Korea decided to use Hangul as a morphophonemic system rather than a strictly phonemic one - so that the spelling could tell both how the word is pronounced and which morphemes it's made up of. I guess it's less necessary for the Japanese writing system, since it has kana for the phonemes and kanji for most morphemes.

Sizen wrote:
Normally it's just "n".
Before m, b, p it becomes an "m".
Before k and g it becomes a soft "ng" sound.
Before any vowels or "y"-line syllables, it almost becomes a "y". (This is supposedly
where the English "Yen" comes from. People misinterpreted 千円 [sen'en] as senyen.)
The "ye" transcription has nothing to do with the realizations of ん; it comes from a time when え was actually pronounced as "ye". The pronunciation has shifted to "e" in most dialects by the late Edo period, but it's still preserved in some archaic transliterations, like "yen", "Yedo", "Yezo", "Yebisu" and "Inouye".

The actual realization of ん before vowels, y and apparently a few other sounds (different Wikipedia pages disagree on which ones) is a nasalized vowel. Also, the "default" pronunciation of ん that only appears at the end of utterances is apparently a consonant different from the な-row initial.

Edited by vonPeterhof on 10 August 2014 at 10:38am

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dampingwire
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 Message 1460 of 1702
10 August 2014 at 4:07pm | IP Logged 
洗濯機 has an apparently perfectly valid pronunciation of せんたっき.

I have to say when I started Japanese it seemed odd that a word like つきます would be
spelled out (slowly) as tsu-ki-ma-su and yet the "u" of tsu vanishes in the pronunciation
(as - mostly - does the "u" of "masu", but that's highlighted really early on). It's just
something you get used to. One of the free lessons on one of the pay-for websites did the
same thing with 女の人, which when said at speed (at least on this one site) seemed, to
me, to finish if しと. I just got a polite are-your-ears-working-properly sort of look
from my tutor when I mentioned this.

To be fair, English must be completely off the scale in comparison.
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Sizen
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 Message 1461 of 1702
10 August 2014 at 7:17pm | IP Logged 
vonPeterhof bringing the knowledge! And a good thing too! My knowledge is almost
entirely based of anecdotal observations I've made, which have only occasionally been
verified by my friends studying linguistics, so I'm grateful that somebody here is able
to give me the true linguistic facts behind some of the bs I say. :)

It's good to know the real origin of the word "Yen". When I was in Japan, I was told
the story I mentioned before by multiple Japanese people, and it seemed logical enough.
I just went with it!

Also, things make more sense now that the name "nasal vowel" has come up for describing
that sound. As somebody with experience with nasal vowels, it's just a teensy bit
embarrassing that I always called it "a weird 'y' sound" up until now.

dampingwire wrote:
One of the free lessons on one of the pay-for websites did the
same thing with 女の人, which when said at speed (at least on this one site) seemed, to
me, to finish if しと. I just got a polite are-your-ears-working-properly sort of look
from my tutor when I mentioned this.


The opposite of this happens in Tokyo sometimes. (At least in my experience) There are
people who will pronounce し as ひ. When I was studying in Shinjuku, I even had the
displeasure of being invited to a ひぎょうひき once. Of course, that was before I realized
it was a 始業式 and that I was obligated to go.
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kraemder
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 Message 1462 of 1702
21 August 2014 at 6:09am | IP Logged 
Sort of an update. I'm watching breaking bad on Netflix on my iPad in bed and felt like updating. I'm doing
some training for work so I'm using that as an excuse to not learn for now. I took several days off totally from
studying but I'm picking it back up and getting caught up on my reviews. I'm juggling Japanese and Korean
and I'm still signed up for the course which will start next week and I'm very excited about that. I'm slightly
tempted to mix in Spanish somehow but I don't see how I can do more than 2 languages at once. I'm still
thinking of attempting the JLPT N2 this December but since I'm doing korean too I know my chances of
passing are going down but that's ok with me. I think for studying I'm going to just take vocab from anime and
so the Japanese online institute courses. It's frustrating bit I've given up on production flash cards for
Korean. They're just too hard. I am doing cards with audio and the Korean writing on side 1. Production in
Japanese is no problem. Back to breaking bad.
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kraemder
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 Message 1463 of 1702
28 August 2014 at 7:25am | IP Logged 
I had my first Korean class today. I have been waiting a while for it to start which is kind of sad that I have no
life and going to class is what passes for a social life for me. But it's all good. The teacher looks really
young. The course is through my local community college so she probably has a graduate degree of some
kind and I'm guessing she's mid to late 20's. She seems kind of inexperienced but also is really nice and well
easy in the eyes. The class has a large variety of people. We did an exercise where we broke into groups
and said hello and my name is such and such in Korean. I'm glad I started already as it's obviously going to
help and there are a few false beginners in the class although if anyone is really good they hid it. I guess I'll
get a better feel for that in the weeks to come. We learned a couple of things in class - how to say I have a
question, I/he/she reads, writes, sees. Goodbye (two, depending on if you're staying or leaving). And hello. I
figured everyone would already be able to say hello and I was right. But after hello we're all kind of shaky it
seems. She finished the class with a short video on Hangul.   Which is kind of lazy I think but it was an
interesting video. The narrator had a British accent and it explained how documents were found in the last
century showing how king Sejol the great (or something) invented it in secret to empower the masses and
how scientific it is etc. and the video showed how a few other languages have adopted Hangul as the official
alphabet for their languages despite having no relation to Korean at all. Sorry they're obscure languages and
I don't remember them.

It's been bugging me that when I try to speak Korean I'll often think of japanese instead (shocking right?) and
particularly just the word すごい. Such a simple useful japanese word. I've noticed a lot of japanese
speakers are interested in the korean language so I thought she might know a bit of japanese too and asked
how to say すごい in Korean. She does speak a little japanese although I have no idea how much. But she
translated it for me. She said that three words come to mind. So there isn't a really nice convenient one to
one translation for it which obviously is what I was hoping for. It's more like translations すごい into English.
You could say great, good, amazing, impressive or whatever depending. But it made me happy to get an
answer.
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kujichagulia
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Japan
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 Message 1464 of 1702
28 August 2014 at 8:27am | IP Logged 
dampingwire wrote:
One of the free lessons on one of the pay-for websites did the
same thing with 女の人, which when said at speed (at least on this one site) seemed, to
me, to finish if しと.

That's interesting. I seem to often hear おんなのふぃと.
I also notice something similar to Sizen, especially with seven (しち - 七). Instead of hearing しちじ for 7時, I often hear ひちじ.   Same with 7月.


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