しゅくだいができません…

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Duolingo gets worse (two peeves in one!)

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The new interface has particles attached to words a lot of the time… but they have attached them to the front of the next word, not the word they belong with/are marking… OK, if it is a transitive verb, you could argue that the を that goes on the verb’s object* is only there because of the type of verb it is**, so it should be on the front of the verb, but… Sugawara sensei drilled us endlessly that if we really absolutely desperately must pause after a word, to gather our thoughts or whatever, if we were going to pause after a word, to say the particle first and then pause, so particles obviously belong with the word that comes before them, the word they mark; &  Some verbs are complicated enough that they can be generating multiple particles - verbs to give and to receive tend to generate に &/or から as well as the を particles, for just one example; &  You can have other words after that を or が particle and before the verb, like adverbs, or numbers and counters and ...
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Schrödinger's Japanese…

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Photo by  Jelleke Vanooteghem  on  Unsplash For anyone thinking that I am saying that Schrödinger is Japanese, it could not be further from the truth. I'm referring to the state where two opposing or paradoxical things are true at once until they are examined...   In this case, I was at home, sitting on the couch, and I heard my wife approach the front door and start struggling with her keys to try to get the door open. So, I leapt to my feet, and called out 「ちょうとまってください！」as I dashed towards the door to help her.   I realised that I had been studying Japanese too much, because I had called out to wait a little please in Japanese without thinking about it, to someone who doesn't speak Japanese... It had the desired effect anyway, as my wife heard me call out and figured out that I was heading to help her.   It is Schrödinger's Japanese though because I also realised later that I had used ください, not くれませんか, which I should have used, as I was s...
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Surviving JCCC FL170 May have gone to my head…

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 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 ...
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