Nowling JCCC Nihongo

I came across an interesting article in my online peregrinations and perambulations this morning - it was talking about the current and historical use of ぜんぜん with positives, not just negatives.   At the time that we were learning about it, we were told that for it and あまり, we needed to always use a negative verb, they were a bonded pair. Later, when I learned that you could conjugate adjectives to be negative, I wondered if they could go with a negative adjective and a positive verb* or only with a negative verb.  Then I wondered about if they could go with negative adjectives, could they go with a positive adjective (one not in its negative form) but that itself has a negative connotation - such as わるい.  It's bad.  It is itself a negative concept, and is the antonym, the inverse of いい/よい.  If they could go with よくない, why not with わるい and a positive verb? Of course, all those ponderings were predicated*** upon the issue of could they go with negative ...

  昨日、家のとなりのこうえんで、うんどうをして、時々走りまして、時々散歩をしました。昨日は、七時ごろ、遅かったので、昼で、新しかったです。そうして、木のはっぱの色を見たので、写真を取りました。 すぐ冬だので、秋が嫌いですが、紅葉の時は、きれいなんです！

I’m still doing Duolingo - partly out of stubbornness, because I want to maintain my streak & hit a year - I’m on 262 days now, so I have a bit to go, but it is also a good reminder to keep studying. However, unless I forget to do my lesson and notice just before midnight*, I don’t just do the straight lessons.  I’ll make sure that I read all the bits out loud for practice speaking, and often, I will add onto the sentences, alter them, or reply to them.   I noticed quite a while ago that speaking a language seems to use a different part of my brain than just reading/translating it does.  The main reason that I noticed this was that I would quite happily befollowing along in the lesson, both last semester and this, and know all of the words and grammar that was needed when the sensei called on another student, but then when I was called on to speak, my brain would go completely blank, and the words weren’t there. Initially, I assumed it was some sort performance issue ...

  Guess which grammar form we learned today?  And to celebrate, I’m actively, currently, drinking a beer… Although, obviously, there was a slight pause for the photograph taking. But blog posting and beer drinking can be done concurrently… 今日は、「ている」ぶんぽをしりました。 「ている」ぶんぽを三時間しっています。

This follows on from me tagging a friend in Facebook with an apostrophe-related meme… She has apostrophe problems and we tease her about it occasionally.  I hadn’t for ages, so when this image came up, I couldn’t help it. I neglected to suggest that she learn Japanese and communicate exclusively in that instead - no apostrophes!!! すごいですね。A missed opportunity, obviously.  In revenge, I mean, in return, she asked for help with an issue currently plaguing her (she works in healthcare).  “Question - in the phrase "surgical fellows weekend", would fellows have an apostrophe.  The group of surgical fellows are going for a weekend away together for training.”   Another friend answered far more clearly and helpfully than I would have and even shared a useful link… “you could make the case either way. Without the apostrophe “fellows” is functioning as an attributive noun, with the apostrophe it’s a possessive noun. https://getitwriteonline.com/possessives-vs-attributive-...

 So, Monday night, I managed to spoonerise for the first time in Japanese.  For those not familiar with the term, it’s named after a Victorian professor at Oxford university, the Reverend Doctor Spooner, who was famous for it. It’s when you swap the starts and ends of words over and get a new sentence you didn’t mean, like this one of the good doctor’s: Sir, you shall leave Oxford on the town drain!! (Instead of the down train, presumably said when expelling a student). Mine wasn’t that funny, I only half spoonerised really, because it was one word. I said しんしゃ、and I meant to say しゃしん… on the other hand, it did turn a relatively normal, boring sentence about taking photos into something more like grand theft auto… 🤣 so maybe it was that funny after all.  I do find myself wondering after typing this up if spoonerisms are things that tend to happen more when you know a language well and your brain just makes a look up error as it goes to grab vocabulary, because it’s not p...

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...

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。。。