Food and shopping vocab

Two days in a row! Hooray! I am being good about learning my vocabulary right now... though not so much with the grammar. I am being lazy with that... I learned question words but not how to use them. That will be my project for the weekend. 

My food words:

pan - bread

sakana - fish (there's a restaurant in Calgary called the Sakana Grill... now I know what that means!)

maguro - tuna (good for using in sushi restaurants! not that I eat tuna...)

asagohan - breakfast

hirugohan - lunch

Random (shopping-related?) words:

hana - flower

bara - rose

casa - umbrella

And my question words:

nani - what 

doko - where

dono - which

Also, my hiragana of the day are ま and み (ma and mi). 27 unique hiragana characters down, 13 to go! Getting closer.... And I think, the more hiragana I learn, the easier they become to learn. :)

Hiragana fun and random stuff

I learned FIVE new hiragana characters today! They were actually remarkably easy to remember, though again, I write like a two-year-old. 

ha - は

hi - ひ

fu - ふ

he - へ

ho - ほ

I really have no idea what fu is doing in there, but sure, why not? は and ほ are easy to remember because they're almost the same (as long as I remember which is which! ha comes first...) へ is just plain easy, ふ is oddly easy to remember (it's very distinctive) and ひ looks like a happy face.

My words of today were:

akarui - light

kurai - dark

nani - what

kutsu - shoes

mise - store

depaato - department store

booshi - hat/cap

Apparently Thursday is a good day for learning Japanese.... I feel all educated today. HA! Or maybe it's just that my guilt kicks in only once a week. 

Adjectives!

I am excited because today I get to add adjectives to my collection! Apparently these are all i-adjectives (as opposed to na-adjectives), and I think there's some difference in how they are used, but I'm not quite sure what yet. All i-adjectives end in i, but it must be preceded by a, i, u, or o, never by e. 

From my textbook: "I-adjectives change their forms depending on the tense or whether they are affirmative or negative. In the present affirmative, however, there is no change of form, and the i-adjective is followed by desu. Unlike the copula desu "to be", the desu used with i-adjectives does not conjugate."

(Side note: Mandarin does not use copula for adjectives, only nouns. This is a significant difference between Chinese and Japanese and in this case, the Japanese way actually makes more sense to an English speaker. Not that Chinese and Japanese are the same at all, except for their stolen writing systems. But still.)

My words:

takai - expensive

yasui - inexpensive

ii/yoi - good/okay/nice/fine

warui - bad

ookii - big

chiisai - small

Sentence examples:

Takai desu. - It is expensive.

Ookii desu. - It is big.

Hooray simplicity! At least for now...

Also, I have finally learned all of the hiragana from chapter 2 of my textbook! Hooray! The last holdouts were ぬ (nu) ね (ne) の (no).

の is really easy because it's absolutely EVERYWHERE (and marks possessive!), but ね and ぬ are had to draw and remember. Again with the feeling like a child who doesn't yet know how to form letters.... I kind of wish I had one of those books with the dotted lines so you can get the spacing right and then maybe some hiragana to trace over before I move on to writing them myself...

25 unique hiragana now live in my brain!