Nowling JCCC Nihongo

  As I walked upstairs, I remembered that it is also someone’s birthday today, the person that the Nijikaewa group will be visiting later, for a combination house warming and “friendsgiving”.  I tried to remember the phrase in Japanese for “happy birthday” and got as far as たんじょうびおめでとう. I had a feeling that I was probably missing a particle or a helper verb to make it polite, so I thought “I’ll look it up in google translate, after all, even google translate can’t get something that simple wrong…”. I guess the title should have come with a spoiler warning, because it did.   I typed “happy birthday” and it translated it as just たんじょうび (admittedly with the correct kanji for it and with romaji for the kanji)), but that’s just birthday.  To force it to translate happy birthday correctly, I had to change it to “happy birthday to you” when it finally coughed forth “お誕生日おめでとう”. I had missed an honourable お. Given its poor performance on the translation of happy birthday, I’...

 猫は、私の手があるので、しゅくだいとべんきょうは、むずかしいんです。。。 とてもかわいい、ですね。

今日の天気は、午前六時に、晴れで、気温が23Fぐらいで、 体感温度(たい かん おん ど) 16Fで、 とても寒かったので 、今朝、家の隣の公園で散歩（さんぽ）しなかったんです。 先月、たくさん日は、早く寒かったんですが、今月、たくさん日は、遅く暖かかったんです。今日は、晩秋の寒そう、ですね。   What's that quote about climate is what you expect and weather is what you get?

Having done the correct format for dates, both months and days of the months, this week was very timely, as the Duolingo lesson today had the wrong furigana, but the correct audio (which is often a miracle - their most frequent flaw is to have the wrong audio for a symbol, particularly annoying when they show four new kanji & ask you which one is x - and you tap each of the kanji to hear the sound, and none of them is x... And it doesn't seem to mater how many times that you report that the audio is wrong, it does not get fixed). I sat there for quite a while looking at the kanji symbols with their furigana and the word pieces*, and going "nothing there sounds remotely like shiga...? shinga..? shika...? shige...?" and replaying the audio to be sure exactly which pronunciation I was hearing (since I initially assumed I must be hearing wrong, and the answer really was down there...)., and then instead of looking at the text to choose from, I just listened to the sentenc...

 Posts that I still need to make: 1. About the Ethnic Enrichment Festival 2.  A very bad joke/pun I made up while at the ethnic enrichment festival 3. About volunteering for the HOAJAS Kansas City Japan Festival 4.  About the festival itself 5. About AWA (Anime Weekend Atlanta), which i both volunteered at & copresented 4 panels at. 6.  Strangely enough, the flight to Atlanta…when I thought that all I would have had to do with japan/japanese was the fact that I was reading papers to help prep for 2 of the panels and that I had brought some manga with me to read if I had time. 7. One about traveling back from atlanta, but only because I had to get up at 3:45 to get to the airport, and it is earlier than the example early time in sensei’s conversation practice examples… I was so disappointed that he didn’t ask anyone what time tanaka-san got up.  I was going to say “waaaaa! Osoku, ne” instead of the usual hayaku… :D 8. My three steps forwards post, which I sta...

This was written on October 25th, regarding the previous night's JCCC FL171 Japanese class ... and that morning's Duolingo daily practice (to keep that streak going, and a good discipline to practice daily). It was a perfect storm, because by chance, the lesson that morning had a word/phrase in it that it hadn't for a while, and that combined with an aside, throwaway, comment from the prior night's class to make me realise something. Duolingo screenshot of a correct answer for hearing the phrase in Japanese "My uncle and aunt" [in group terms] "live in Kyoto" - which includes the word すんでいます The comment was made during the vocab section of class, not even the grammar section, a week after being introduced to the te iru form, and showed why it is 住んでいます and that I've been using the ている form for ages and haven't recognised it or known why - although I had started to wonder and to feel as if there should be some particles or as if something was ...

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 ...