また、猫。。。

 今日の単語で文法でした。。。

「私のゆべは食べなくて下さい！」

へんなしゃむは、私のゆべを食べたいんでした！毎日、よくない猫です。

しゃむの、タイ

For some reason, we never did learn the negative te form in class, even when we learned more uses for it than just sticking things together, only the positive… we’re great at asking people to read things, but not at asking them not to (when we find them reading our diary) - or to eat things, but not to eat, not so much ;)  Hooray for Japanese being an agglutinative language built up from building blocks and following patterns… the past plain form and the te form follow each other very closely…and in the negative too! :D

新しい漢字の中で、手話が一番好きです！英語で、‘sign language’ です。漢字は、手　‘hand’ 話　‘talk’。すごい！It’s too perfectly appropriate.  Naturally, it’s one of the unshaded, you don’t need to learn this reading of 手 examples in the kanji section for chapter 11*.  So, naturally, it’s the one my brain thought was the most interesting…  Possibly because I already knew 手と手紙と上手な。It was the two onyomi examples that were unfamiliar, although I suspect I was probably already supposed to know 歌手（かしゅ）- singer, since we have done 歌を歌うlast semester at JCCC, and it was probably the standard example for onyomi… and I seem to recall hearing it during at least one round of the karuta on Saturday at the 25th Heartland Japanese Language Contest, perhaps in the finals for N4…?  I like that one too - a person that hand makes a song is a singer, but 手話　（しゅわ）is just so appropriate & perfect that it has to win for favourite new kanji.

* In case anyone is confused, because I was studying at JCCC & that has Nakama for Elementary Japanese 1 & 2, and therefore, I have already done chapters 1 - 12 of Book 1 (version 3 ;)), the Intermediate 1 class clashed horribly with work, so I couldn’t take it this semester (that would have been Nakama Book2, probably chapters 1 - 6, but I haven’t looked at it).  I did consider getting the textbook and studying ahead to make it less hard to handle the material when I did the class, but there would be no one to practice with, and I might get an important grammar point stuck backwards in my head, and it’s hard to unstick.  

But I also realised that it wasn’t just one semester that I was missing, it was summer too, because they only run Elementary 1 in the summer semester, they aren’t daft enough or cruel enough to try to inflict the higher levels of a 5 credit hour course on people in the shortened summer semester… And that is a ridiculously long gap to not be studying new material and coalescing and retaining old material.  So, after looking around, I decided to study online with the Washington DC Japan America Society, and I did their online self assessment/placement tests & I’m doing the winter semester with them now, & I will register for the spring semester when that opens soon (& early enough to get the early registration discount this time ;)) & then I’ll only have a couple of weeks off between courses between semesters (assuming that JCCC does their fall semester like they said they would, with an evening zoom class for Intermediate 1.  At the very least, zoom would make it more accessible and less time dropped out of work to make up for mature students & enable those with immune issues to attend despite the ongoing plague situation…).  

If they don’t do that, then I’ll have to work out some other way to continue my studies at that level - I have enjoyed the challenge and the level of material that the college courses offer.  And I like JCCC, and they are amazingly cheap for what you get if you live locally.  Hugely good value for money.  If I were to shift to KU, it would be much dearer, and still have the issue of scheduling, plus a 45-60 minute each way trip to Lawrence for lectures probably… Although I may have to look at that soon, as JCCC only goes up to Intermediate 2 & KU goes beyond that and has a whole degree (degrees plural) … it’s going to be expensive and difficult to coordinate :(.  But really, really interesting if I can pull it off!

Anyway, that long digression was me explaining that I’m currently doing chapters 10-12 in Genki 1, because that is the set of textbooks that WDCJAS uses for their language school at this level & we’re now on chapter 11.

Some of the grammar, I was ahead on, having done Elementary 1 & 2 at JCCC & all of Nakama 1, but there’s a lot of vocab and kanji in Genki 1 that isn’t in Nakama.  Genki goes hard on vocab and kanji - theoretically, you can take JLPT5 after you finish book 1.  Nakama doesn’t cover all the kanji needed for that in book 1.  There’s also some bits of grammar that Genki 1 has in it that Nakama 1 does not, so I picked the last of the courses that target Genki 1 after doing the self assessment tests, to let me catch up on bits I have missed and still learn some new stuff, not just trying to cram kanji and vocab into my brain (although that’s more than enough some days). 

So I’m trying to work my way through the early chapters, for anything I have missed, and also do the reading/exercises/vocab grammar for the current chapters.

Genki has some things to recommend it over Nakama (it does a good explanation of the devoicing rule really early, which should head off advanced students still saying desu, masu, and suki… maybe), it does a good explanation of the different types of kanji origins, in one block, whereas Nakama drip feeds it to you, and I felt like they never really covered the complex/compound ideophonetic etc types. And in Chapter 11, we actually cover the thing that made me wave my hands in the air and go take a proper course, because it was impossible to google on particles and wa, ga, wo, and negatives and find a rule for the rule I had made up in my head from observation that in Japanese, unlike English, if something is in the negative, it doesn’t have to be considered the direct object anymore, because you aren’t doing something to it, and you can use wa instead… my first tutor session at JCCC, I asked the tutor that (it wasn’t in the book, or certainly not in chapter 1) & she said yes :D.  Chapter 11 in Genki also has a decent explanation of what the difference in flavour is between ni & niwa, which I’ve never really gotten before.

It has some downsides, but I’ll save those for another post…