Nowling JCCC Nihongo

Duolingo is really useful for reminding you to study every day, but it can be rather half baked sometimes, since it barely explains anything.  Ages ago, we met 半 （ はん) when we did about time, and it seemed to appear on its own, as half an hour, so you might have a phrase like 四時半 & it would mean 4:30, half past four...  So in the current lesson in Duolingo, part of Food 3, we got an example item, and it had 半分（はんぶん）and I was left wondering why what looks like, to me, half a minute, is now half & why wasn't the previous half used... So off to Jisho I went (I love that site), and I searched on both han and hanbun (being lazy and not fighting with keyboards to get hiragana),  and it came back and told me that 半分 means half and is a noun and that 半 has 4 meanings - half, semi; half-past; odd number*; han (unit of land area, archaic). So at first glance,  they are both half - but the 4 meanings for はん on its own have notes with them - for half or semi- meaning, it...

The feels when… you are running through some flash cards for chapter 6 vocabulary from Nakama (thanks to the JCCC student on discord that created them on Quizlet btw), and a card comes up and you look at it and read it in your head and try to remember it and then read it out loud and it still doesn’t jog your memory. Finally you turn the card over to see the meaning and it says “laundry”. And you have a feeling of familiarity from originally learning that vocab of joking that you were crap at remembering the laundry*…  And then you suddenly remember that the laundry has been sitting in the dryer for 2 days 🤦 So the word of the day is definitely せんたく。 * And housework in general, so there may be an update to this post when I hit the cleaning card… although the fact that I have said it in English there probably already tells you the outcome… ;)

  昨日、ニ百日間から日本語を勉強しました！ 秋です。夏のじゅうぎょうは六月から七月まででした。 来週の月曜日からJCCCの日本語のじゅうぎょうがはじまります。そして、秋です。。。

For suggesting these two videos this morning (and ask it to go give Facebook’s algorithm a few pointers… ;)). The first is by Dogen, and I’m subscribed to their channel, so maybe it doesn’t deserve mad props for suggesting it, but it was a perfect video for the morning. Foreigners versus Coffee… And I just love one of the comments too (I screencapped it). Admittedly, a month or two ago, I wouldn’t have understood it, despite knowing the kanji for store and for inside/middle.  I may have been horribly close to becoming one of the Japanese learners who only reads (there’s another Dogen video for that). I’ve experienced some of this video in Paris (only obviously with regards to French, not Japanese :p) - when I flew to my French exchange’s wedding, I had to catch a metro from Orly airport to Gare Du Nord, then a train to Auxerre…  This was the summer that I left university and I hadn’t actually done any French since leaving high school*, so while I waited in the long line, I was...

 I just answered (or tried to answer ;)) a question on Quora about Japanese… 🧐😆. Admittedly, it was a simple question but still, I survived Elementary Japanese 1.  That doesn’t exactly make me an expert… Although, I do have to say that before the course, I only knew about flipping the verb to negative, I didn’t know about conjugating adjectives to a negative form, despite having the inflections link of jisho.  Other languages, you conjugated your adjectives to agree with the noun they went with, and that helped you keep track of what meant what in the sentence.  Latin, you can put words anywhere in the sentence and still work out what it means because of the case that they are in and which adjectives match which nouns, etc.   But none of them conjugated an adjective to mean it’s opposite or indicate when in time the adjective applies/happened. That’s verb stuff! 🤣. Some seriously overachieving adjectives in Japanese.  It’s also a little amusing that I’m ...