Nowling JCCC Nihongo

This is a somewhat unusual blog in that all the content is going to be in an attached PDF - because I needed to lay things out with tables and I didn't want to spend ages fighting with the blogger interface nor handcoding it in html to do so. As I update the details in there, I will re-upload the PDF to keep it current and will add a comment here that it was updated (& maybe an additional cute cat picture too).  The cat picture is relevant to the text (if you read far enough), but it's also standard cat tax for reading. Numbers Blog PDF

  Nope, wrong Moe. も as in the Japanese particle, used in the sense of "also, too".  Current rules for usage are that it replaces the は particle of the thing you are talking about, and apparently it can be tricky for some English-speakers to get the order right because of it coming after the topic.  It sounds like when you get excited and say "me too!" in English, that comes afterwards too.  "Me too, me too, I'm the same!!" "Form of..." "...being better at Japanese!" "...getting my assignments in on time!" ふたつね。ふたつ！

 If I tell you that this post was brought to you by the assistance of tippex (white out for the Americans) because I didn’t want to restart my chart a second time, you will understand that I really prefer hiragana to katakana.  My mind just works better with the hiragana forms.  They are clearer and more distinct to me & some of the katakana are just plain evil - the sa symbol is stolen from se in hiragana, and obviously done just to confuse learners… Likewise, I have issues with the shi/n/so/tsu group - in many fonts, I find it impossible to tell whether something is shi or tsu without having them side by side to tell which has the more upright angle of the ticks - a little like being able to tell whether something is a coyote or a wolf when they are side by side, but not separate.  The odds are that in this location, it’s a coyote, but what if it’s just a really unusual word and it is tsu? Mixing my metaphors there, but you get the idea. In addition to having t...

First off, sorry I can’t give everyone a link to the podcast I’m talking about. I have Japanese Pod access through Hello Talk, and it doesn’t let you share the link outside the app. It’s like they’ve never heard of free advertising!  But I digress - something regular readers of this blog will be all too familiar with!  Come for the Japanese, stay for the digressions… I finally got to go out and do some exercise this morning - a walk in our local park before it got too hot to move. I used to have a rule that I could only listen to my audiobooks when I was out exercising as a way to motivate myself to exercise more. That’s not been an issue lately, but I did want to catch up on my Japanese Pod sessions, I’d skipped since before MomoCon because of time and travel and getting sick and then the habit is broken…  When I’m out driving, I often listen to it instead of a book - but you can’t check the vocabulary and the kanji or other kana for what you’re hearing when you’re drivi...

Since I had to double check the spelling for that title, I am starting to wonder if.I am losing my English at the same rate that I am acquiring Japanese... For more information about this post, please visit https://theglobalseal.com/self-assessment - this is a site that as some questions to hel you work out your current proficiency level in several axes of proficiency at a language, which rather reminded me of another Dogen video, where he lists the seven types of Japanese learners.  I forget the full list, but I know one was only learning it to understand anime, another could only read it, but not speak it, and another could only speak it, and not read nor write it. So these categories of self assessment seem like a good way to avoid some of those traps (understanding anime is a bonus, the whole process of learning is exciting and interesting with little nuggets of truth and enlightenment and joy along the way.  And of course, the tearing of the hair and rending of the cloth...

  I have to say that the hardest part of this assignment was working out how to create a YouTube channel (despite having used YouTube for years, I only saw the YouTube studio for the first time two weeks ago at MomoCon, and that was being run by someone else in an already existing channel…), and then to make my new channel private.  Then realising that I was that awful person who had shared a vertical video, instead of landscape & deciding to leave it… Hopefully, the technology will be the easiest part next time. The main reason that the technology was the hardest part was because I started learning Japanese in late January, both by apps like Duolingo, some useful YouTube channels, books, and later, a conversational Japanese course through JCCC.  Chief amongst these for this topic was also a really interesting (to me) video on YouTube by ジョオジさん of Japan From Zero, where he talked about the various ways to introduce yourself and how most non-native Japanese speake...

 https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/5509/ - a free resource of stories by reading level, in Japanese, and for anyone wishing to follow the subject of this blog post.  This a story set at level 0 for difficulty/skill, with lots of detailed large pictures. Just from the pictures alone, you can tell that the story follows examples of everyday life in Japan, with people boarding a bus to go somewhere, a near accident with a cat in the street and the bus, and bruised toes from luggage shifting inside the bus.  Then at work, encounters with colleagues, not all positive, including getting given tons of work, spilled coffee and someone asleep at their desk, then someone with really nice cookies, and finally someone trying to leave the office to head home, and a rapid sprint for the bus home, which is all too familiar to many of us, only to get there and find out that it is out of service. On the second reading, listening to it, we learn that Miki is taking the bus to the office, an...

 Met with Lauren on Zoom, chatted about where when we have group work descending en masse would be ok, or people tend to just drop in one by one randomly.  Also remembered to actually ask a question I had had for ages (not as easy to google on as some of them) - in Duolingo they had eventually, reluctantly explained about は as the topic marker、か as as the question marker (although wider reading showed other uses/more subtle shades, and a deep dive on particles via a google search got a better label for it of “the unknown particle”、が which Duolingo seems to describe as a topic marker but for more surprising news/information (anything related to language always seems to be surprising on Duolingo - if someone’s mother speaks Korean, its always ごが)、and finally をwhich Duolingo said was for the object of an action.  Really important to know if Sakura is eating sushi, or if you picked up a horror book by accident and it is the other way around…   But every time that a sente...

  I had the advantage when I came to learning Japanese that I had learned another language with a non-roman script before, although that was a long time ago in high school.  I learned Classical Greek which used the Greek alphabet.  It was in high school, so I had the support of school language classes to do it, rather than working on my own.  It enforced discipline and practice.  It was also very different in that it was an alphabet, rather than a syllabary.  Japanese is very different in that style - each symbol is a sound. When I learned to read in England, we learned the letters in alphabetical order, and had pictures of things that began with that letter, such as “a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat”.  That last one in particular really does not help - if you try reading it out loud, you will notice that you have just said “see is for cat”, which is a hard c or k sound.  Makes things much harder for children to grasp.  This...