Nowling JCCC Nihongo

  They have a “review your words” section and this was in it tonight… Seriously, it wants to teach you “half” as “thirty”. There is one and only one specific context where it means thirty but even then, it’s thirty by context, because half is like an operation or a variable in maths - it could literally be any number (except for when it’s explicitly 0.5 ;)). And the one context when it could be thirty is n時半 - n hour and half an hour - which you could call half past n, or, in English, n:30.  But it’s contextual , it’s only thirty because there are 60 minutes in an hour and half of 60 is 30… I’m much more likely to say “half past two” than 2:30**, so 30 for it would never have occurred to me, and certainly not in isolation.  It’s awful!  If you’re going to make it 30, you need counter units, it’s not 30 in a void, it would need 分, you wouldn’t have a thirty in isolation in Japanese. And then you’re at 〜時三十分, which is a stupid mouthful when you could have just said 〜時半...

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 ...