Japanese Lesson 6: Declarations – “This is a blog.”

Objectives:

• to learn how to declare a state-of-being
• to learn its negative and past forms
• to learn their polite forms and understand that です is not a declarative
  

Introduction

So far, I have gone over hiragana and katakana, introduced kanji, and shown some basic sentence structure. If you still don’t feel comfortable with them (especially with hiragana), I suggest that you go back to those lessons again. You should also be using rikaichan and perapera-kun for easy reference.

This time I will show you how to declare things into a state-of-being. You already know that this is achieved with the だ particle:

• これはペンだ。 (About this, (it) is pen.)

However, how can we declare things in the past tense? And how can we declare that something is not (negative)?

Japanese Lesson 5: Basic Grammar Particles (だ、は、が、も)

Important: Make sure you have rikaichan or perapera-kun (see Lesson 4) handy for this and all future lessons.

Objectives:

• to learn the declarative particle だ
• to learn basic sentence structure particles は、が、 and も
  
• to understand the difference between は and が
• to see the particles from a Japanese point of view

Introduction

Japanese grammar is fairly interesting in the sense that it is so different from English grammar. This difference is often the main cause why English speakers tend to completely mess up when trying to make sense speaking Japanese. Our goal then should not be to think about the English way to say something and then trying to translate it. We should start directly from the Japanese way to say something. Not only is this much faster, but it also gives a greater understanding of Japanese and makes learning new grammar much easier to understand.

For example, in English we say

• I like reading romantic novels.
• Who threw that baseball at me?!
  

In Japanese it sounds more like

• As for the act of reading romantic novels, I like.
• The one that threw at me the baseball was who?

which sounds completely unnatural in English (even worse if I translated even more literally).

Let’s learn what particles are.

Japanese Lesson 4: 漢字 – Kanji

Note: From here on out, make sure you know all your hiragana/katakana. I don’t intend on writing romaji in my Japanese lessons.

Objectives:

• to learn what kanji is
• to understand the necessity of kanji
• to get used to learning kanji

Introduction

If you go to a book store and look for books on the Japanese language, chances are that all the Japanese will be in romaji (i.e. “watashi”, “kyou no tenki wa ii desu”) instead of authentic, real Japanese (i.e. 「私」、「今日の天気はいいです」). Most textbooks do this because they don’t want to scare students with the actual Japanese script. They want to teach students to an intermediate level, and then they’d start using the kana and kanji. Or if the textbook doesn’t use romaji, it probably only uses hiragana. In these cases, the book might be so shallow that it might not even teach basic grammar well. So if you want to buy a book on the Japanese language, beware of these three things:

1. The book does not use kanji at all.
2. The book teaches the polite ways of saying everything before the casual way. (You might not want to buy it if the book teaches ～ます before the dictionary form; it might confuse you.)
3. The book tries to teach how to say various words and phrase (like a traveler’s guide).

What you want is a book that gets you into kanji as quickly as possible (from the very beginning) so that you will learn and grow comfortable with them from the very beginning.

Right now you may be asking, “I got it, I got it — now just what the heck is kanji?” Well, I’ll tell you.

Japanese Lesson 3: カタカナ – Katakana

Objectives:

• to learn katakana and understand its relationship with hiragana
• to know when katakana is used
• to understand the importance of learning katakana

Introduction

The first thing you would notice about katakana is that there are the same number of them as hiragana (both 46). Well, the 46 katakana are essentially identical to the 46 hiragana (except, of course, in appearance). Theoretically, you could write みず “water” as ミズ (since they would sound the same). However, katakana is used for other purposes; its usage is different.

But let’s take a look at the katakana chart, shall we?

Japanese Lesson 2: ひらがな – Hiragana

(If your browser cannot read the Japanese, make sure you set the character encoding to something like Japanese Shift_JIS.)

Objectives:

• to learn things about the Japanese writing system
• to learn hiragana
  
• to be motivated to learn hiragana and get rid of that romaji
• to actually pronounce the hiragana correctly
  

Introduction

One of the largest differences between most European languages and East Asian languages is the writing system. English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian all use writing systems based off of the alphabet. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, however, don’t work that way.

For Japanese, each character stands for a whole syllable (kanji may stand for more than one syllable; I’ll discuss them later). かんぺき (/ka-n-pe-ki/) “perfect” has four characters and therefore four syllables. Korean uses letters and vowels that go together to make a sound. For example – 한글 (h-a-n g-u-l, /han-gul/) “hangul” has three parts making each character and with each character one syllable. Chinese uses one sound per character. 網路 (/wang-lu/) “Internet” has two sounds. Spaces do not exist in these writing systems.

Well, Japanese’s writing system is a bit weird. Japanese script usually contains a combination of hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana (often referred for both as “kana”) are syllabaries, each with 46 characters. (They have the same 46 sounds.) Hiragana is used for traditional Japanese words, while katakana is used mainly for foreign words and often for onomatopoeia. Kanji are Chinese characters that were borrowed into the Japanese language.

In this lesson, I’ll teach you hiragana. (Note that all pronunciations such as /ko-re/ are pronunciations and not romaji. I don’t like romaji.)

Japanese Lesson 1: Starting Off

Many Japanese language learners try to learn but give up after a short time.

In this first lesson of a series that I have decided to begin writing, here is some advice for many of the barriers, traps, and misunderstandings that learners of Japanese fall into while trying to study. This advice is crucial; do not forget it!

I. Japanese people don’t use romaji.

This should be obvious; do not try to learn Japanese with romanized Japanese text. It will become a burden once you are faced with the real deal. I’ve seen numerous books at book stores where I see no sign of any Japanese script in a book that is supposed to teach the language. Romaji is just a way to bypass the reading aspect of Japanese. It’s a way to screw you up. Seriously.

Japanese people would take a long time to understand “Watashi wa Amerika ni sundeimasu.” It would take two seconds to read 「私はアメリカに住んでいます。」

II. Learning random phrases and expressions will not work for any language.

What you need first is grammar. Ah yes, grammar. Something that you don’t even do well for English. (Just kidding.) If you try to learn by just learning “hello”, “good-bye”, “good night”, etc., you will not get anywhere.

III. Japanese is not English.

This is the most important thing to remember. Do not try to translate Japanese sentences phrase by phrase (or word-for-word) to English. You will fail. English is too different and too weird for Japanese. English does not have many words that Japanese has. To think that Japanese can be simply translated phrase by phrase is to walk on the path to failure. Again, what you need is grammar.

IV. Study.

If you don’t, you fail.

With that, let’s begin!

Back to Japanese Lessons