Japanese Language

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choco

6:59 AM

@snailboat 理解するまで2~3分かかったｗ

4 hours later…

Flaw

10:54 AM

Q: 5 sentences in Japanese(Past Tense)

I translated 5 sentences and I'd like to get some feedback. Are they correct? 1/ Yesterday I went to school. きのうぼくわがっこうにいっきました。 2/ Did you eat any oranges? あなたわオレンジをたべましたか。 3/ No, the cat wasn't under the table. いええ、ねこわつくえにのしたにわありませんでした。 4/ Excuse me, where was the big building...

I think this is off topic

we're not a proofreading site

Flaw

11:11 AM

along with this and this

3 hours later…

oals

2:20 PM

Hm. Another question about "how do I choose between the on and kun reading"

This is the third question from the same user.

Flaw

the 国 question?

oals

Yes.

I should perhaps pen a catch-all question that you can dupe these questions to.

Flaw

"How to choose between on and kun readings"

oals

I was thinking that there was some book series that taught kanji without teaching the basic rules of picking a reading, and some students were being left in the dark about it.

But if the questions are all from the same user...

Flaw

Is it particularly meaningful to remember if it's on or kun?

oals

2:29 PM

I think it's easy to remember, since on readings can only be one or two syllables in length

and the second syllable is always ク・チ・ツ IIRC

...or キ

So it takes very little mental capacity.

I've certainly memorised which ones are on and which ones are kun, and it does help a bit in guessing the reading of an unknown word.

Flaw

I think I learn the word first, as I would any vocabulary from any language. Then learning if it's on or kun comes after the fact

oals

I may have gone about it in a backwards order.

I made an effort to learn a word only after I recognised its kanji.

Flaw

Then after getting a large sample pool, I intuitively assign on or kun to new words based on induction from the data pool.

oals

Excluding very common words, of course.

Flaw

I don't think there's a "backwards" or "forwards", it's just different for different people probably

oals

2:34 PM

e.g. the kanji 勉 is pretty rare and probably only the 500th kanji I learnt, but I certainly did learn the word 勉強 before learning the kanji.

My plan for learning Japanese included reading loads of text and just ignoring the words I didn't know (or the kanji I couldn't read). It gave me a pretty strong command of sentence structure.

Anyway.

Here's one earlier question where a solution was 'learning about kanji readings'

Q: How does one keep from being confused about the pronunciation of 地下鉄？

[地下鉄]{ちかてつ} How does one know the "hiragana spelling", i.e. the hiragana representation of the word is ちかてつ but not other forms involving misspelling one or more of the following か vs. がて vs. でつ vs. づ or ず , especially when the pronunciation of か, て, つ in the word in reality is affected ...

pronunciation

That user is Chinese as well.

Flaw

Hm, I thought it might help

the question seems more about 連濁 though

oals

He was confused about where 連濁 happens and the answer is "at kanji boundaries, and very rarely on On readings"

Well, "an answer", not "the answer"

or conversely, "mostly with Kun readings"

Anonymous

3:14 PM

That one is kind of about their inability to perceive the contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants

oals

3:52 PM

That, too.

It's probably not an easy task to learn a language which has sounds that sound the same to your ears.

I recall hearing an American complaining how he could not distinguish between sous-dessus and sous-dessous in French.

/y/ and /u/, respectively

oals

4:08 PM

Hm, the kanatype insensitivity question is borderline offtopic ... but I'm interested: when would one choose to not mix hiragana and katakana? (i.e. kanatype sensitive.)

I guess I'll have to wait for the answers to find that out.

7 hours later…

Anonymous

11:18 PM

I don't know. I think it's kind of borderline, so I can see why people might want to close it, but I'd also be okay with leaving it open.

Anonymous

I'm also not really sure why you'd want to sort hiragana and katakana separately.

Anonymous

So I guess I don't know the answer.

Anonymous

@oals Yeah, just think about how many more sounds English has than Japanese!

Anonymous