Thursday, February 19, 2009

My first kanji!

Okay so this is totally cheating because I learned all these when I learned Mandarin and they all mean the same thing, but here are number from 1 - 10. 
一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九 十

I also learned the kanji for time, or hour (pronounce ji) 時.

For example:
Ima nanji desu ka? いま なん 時 です か?
Juuichiji han desu.  十一時 はん です。
(What time is it? It is 11:30.)

Katakana and some vocab

Hooray! I finished learning my katakana! I now know all of them, so I can read! Slowly... very slowly... and the Japanese habit of not putting spaces between words really messes me up because I can't tell what belongs together, but I can still read. And, I figured out how to type in hiragana and katakana on my computer without having to copy and paste every character... it's much more convenient. However, I'm not always sure whether words that I learn belong in hiragana or katakana (although probably most of them have kanji that I haven't learned yet...) so I'm writing everything in hiragana unless it's an obvious borrowing from English. 

My vocab of a few days ago:
ぎゅうにゅう - gyuunyuu - cow's milk
まけます - makemasu - to be defeated, to lose
かきます - kakimasu - to write
この ごろ - kono goro - recently 
あっけない - akkenai - short and simple
とります - torimasu - to take, get, or obtain

Friday, February 6, 2009

Verbs and such

Some random verbs and things stolen from the university-sanctioned textbook (Genki, found  at http://www.amazon.ca/Genki-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789009637/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233992832&sr=8-2).

yomimasu - to read
mizu - water
maiban - every evening (like konban)
asa - morning
shuumatsu - weekend
konban - evening
doyoobi - Saturday
taitei - usually 
kikimasu - to listen/hear
hanashimasu - to speak/talk