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 ...

 I have a weakness for puns (many people that dislike puns would go so far as to call it a character flaw), but I particularly like multi-lingual puns and multi-layered ones.  Before I started this course, I had already created one - when we got our kotatsu, the cat took it over regularly, making it an interesting experience to sit down and start to extend your legs under it, for fear of encountering “The Claw”… I started calling it both the ねこたつand the “catatsu”… multi-lingual puns for the win! During the course, I created another one - we were labeling items with the colours they had, and no one had yellow.  I was wearing a shirt with the colours of the nonbinary flag on the crescent moon on it, with a purple background and shared that it had yellow (and white and black and…).  After the class call ended, I looked down at my shirt & thought “It really is a colourful shirt, isn’t it?” And then my Brian instantly responded “Of course, it’s non binいろい!”  Mult...

I still remember when I was really new to reading things, and I knew maybe ~10 kanji at the time & was stunned when I visited a friend and we were watching a youtube video & she paused on a clip & said that she really wanted to know what manga that was from but they hadn't given a title & I was able t tell her that the two kanji were mountain & rice paddy, yama and ta or da, but that I didn't know any anime or manga with that in the title - and she was able to take my tiny start at reading and realise that it was Kase-san and Yamada :D. Without my initial forays into kanji, she might never have known.   The week before that, I had been impressed at recognising the kanji for shiro/shiroi on the wrapper for the soundtrack for Aquatope on White Sands... when I knew what the title was, but was still surprised to actually spot it/see it - and the symbol for small showed up in the symbol for sand, so I had to go to jisho and look up sand to see w...

 It’s oh-dark thirty and I’m at the airport about to board a flight to DC… and I have my elementary Japanese 1 written final tonight so I’m going to be studying all the way there… I may have misplaced my common sense!

 All of the following images are fair use/royalty free and come from Unsplash.  But there's several ways that a car could be bright - from the well polished seriously reflective chrome so beloved of 50s cars, so streamlined and with so many fins that they looked like land sharks with chrome teeth, to the ludicrously bright paints modern chemistry can produce, to the modern headlights that have even moved beyond halogen, and can probably dazzle aliens several light years away if you forget to dip them... particularly bad for those of us with cataracts - the star filter effect extends well beyond the car's physical presence, even on relatively dim lights. Look how bright that mint green is on that car!  The whole car is such a bright colour! Followed by a bright solid orange, with a seriously bright chrome logo on it.  Shiny and chrome, as they said in Mad Max. Then finally a car with teeth... of chrome, anyway.  Fierce and bright with reflective light. The corvet...

 My apologies for the scrunched nature of the first page, it was in great condition until I decided to take a photo of it and the cat decided to help… ありがとう、猫ちゃん…^ - ^ The reason for the mysterious lack of kanji in this kanji poster is quite simple… they were stolen by kitsune! never there, as this is a kanji reading poster… which still could be confusing, but it is rules for how to read/pronounce kanji, not a poster of kanji to read… I started it in chapter 4 and kept adding to it   I did it in pink (which I don’t like, sorry Lewis-san ;)), so it would stand out from my other notes to grab and add another rule  quickly if one came up.   Hands up anyone that took way too long to realize that kun yomi/ on yomi is from よむ?  Despite it literally being labeled as the “kun reading “ and the “on reading”, I hadn’t made the connection, probably because I knew the word in romaji before I knew the verb, so they lived in different places in my head. Which is a nice (...