住んでいるのが好きです is a fragment of a sentence that is incorrectly constructed - the correct way to say "I like living in [place] would be 住むのが好きです. But why is this?
In the present tense, the usual way to say "I live in [place]" is to use the state-of-being 〜ている, e.g., 私は日本に住んでいます。By that logic, "I lik...
there are plenty of free options too if you'd prefer that, though they'll be a little less reliable and force you to be a little more disciplined in making sure you get everything
I'm not american, I've only stayed there for a year or so, but I always wonder if those sort of situations are not wildly exagerated.. Besides, aren't a lot of asian americans today second generation imigrants? Then it seems like a perfectly fine question to ask where they descend from, that's just showing interest. But of course I understand it may get annoying when it happens a lot.
@gibbon Asians in particular seem to be a bit sensitive about it, for reasons that I do not fully understand. It is normal conversation between white Americans, for example... we'll outright guess at each other's family history and start a small conversation about it.
Middle-easterners and hispanics don't seem to mind too much. It's obviously a bit dumb to open a conversation with an African American on the topic though >.<
@Choko No... I don't like Genki. I think it's grammar explanations are shallow, and the kanji-inclusion is forced and useless. The "quality" of those explanations is the reason that A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is considered 'essential' to 1st year learners instead of a good resource.
Actually, my biggest problem with Genki is simply that it gets recomended to self-learners all over the place, where it's rather obviously designed for classroom use.
If you're just dipping your toe in the language... Gakken's Japanese For Everyone is probably a better starting point. The problem there is that if you want the audio, you're pretty much going to need to buy ebay bootlegs
I've learned kana through self-learn (though I have since either forgotten or partly mixed up quite a few katakana and some of the similar-looking hiragana, because of under-use)
I never studied the kanji's listed by the chapters in genki, so I wouldn't know about that.. but I think the grammar explanations were very helpful. Much more so than any other text book I've seen at least. And of course it's going to be different from a grammar dictionary though, it "has" to be less dry, and genki did I great job of that I think.
@jkerian I'll have to look that up, I'm now getting back into learning the language, after focusing on my studies a bit more the last months. I've got to refamiliarize myself with the kana a bit, since I seem to mix up or just straight up have forgotten part of them
I actually like JSL... and there's no denying the flaws there. (Odd romaji, vocabulary that's getting noticeably old), but the explanations are excellent.
@AsadaShino "student interaction" is usually a code word for "we make the students role-play"... and if you're not putting together the stories in whatever textbook you use, you won't learn much, honestly
I'm scanning through the new one right now... looks like it's the usual "End of every chapter activity"... I think there's a law somewhere that all Japanese textbook put that in as the last thing for each chapter
a bit hard to tell, since amazon keeps cutting me off mid-chapter, but that's what it looks like
But then... at least the situation with starter Japanese textbooks isn't as bad as the situation for starter C++ books.
@AsadaShino Just the "end of chapter activities" where they split you into groups and have you each talk about the weather, or your favorite sports, or international travel, or "gently correct each other", or practice question/answer/confirmation patterns, or whatnot
One of the better mechanisms for actually learning the language is to put together stories that you want to tell, in the language you're trying to learn
Ahh, I see, that makes sense. I had never thought of that, I should do that to myself then xD I thought of doing that with my parents, but shut that idea down quite quickly because they would not have a clue what I was saying XD
It's not even necessary that the stories be personal... you just need to have some collection of information that you're trying to squeeze into the bits of the language that you can use
The problem with a lot of textbook exercises is that you let yourself conform the story to your knowledge of the language, to make it easier. Trying to actually tell a story puts a stop to that, to some extent... and since that's what you're actually trying to do in real life (communicate via the small straw of your language knowledge), it exercises the right parts of the brain
I had started learning some Japanese last year before dropping it in favor of Mandarin for the time being
I intend to come back to Japanese in a few years
and I was wondering, for anyone here who might have learned both Japanese and Mandarin/Cantonese/Another language using the Chinese characters, did you have difficulty with confusing the pronunciations of the characters from one language to the other?
I'm worried that when I start learning all the on and kun readings, they will interfere with my memory of the Hanzi pronunciations
do you have any advice on the matter?
Anonymous
4:14 PM
@Aerovistae You'll probably notice relationships between Chinese readings and on'yomi
