Lesson 3 exercises

A. 

1. Kutsu wa yasui desu yo.

Shoes are inexpensive, you know.

2. Doko no depaato de kaimashoo ka.

At which department store should we buy it?

3. Nani o nomimasu ka.

What will you drink?

4. Yamada san wa gakusei desu kedo, Suzuki san wa gakusei ja arimasen.

Mr. Yamada is a student, but Ms. Suzuki is not. 

B.

1. Enpitsu wa hyaku en deshita.

The pencil was one hundred yen.

2. Unagi wa sen'en deshita.

Eel was one thousand yen.

3. Booshi wa nisen'en deshita.

The hat was two thousand yen.

4. Kutsu mo nisen'en deshita.

The shoes were also two thousand yen.

C. 

1. Moo gohan o tabemashita ka.

Iie, kore kara tabemasu.

2. Kore wa nisen'en desu.

Kinoo sen'en deshita yo.

3. Kore kara nani o shimashoo ka.

Depaato e ikimashoo.

D. Antonyms

1. akarui / kurai

bright / dark

2. chiisai / ookii

small / big

3. ii / warui

good / bad

4. yasui / takai

inexpensive / expensive

E. 

1. Ookii uchi desu ne.

Your house is big.

2. Hiroi ima desu ne.

Your living room is wide.

3. Akarui kitchin/daidokoro desu ne. 

Your kitchen is bright.

F.

1. Doko e ikimashoo ka.

Where should we go?

2. Nani o tabemashoo ka.

What should we eat?

3. Dono depaato ga ii desu ka.

Which department store is good?

The book I stole these exercises from is listed in the first post. Hooray for finishing a chapter!

Verbs and the 'like' adjective...

My words of the day today:

yoofuku - clothes (This one makes sense to me because 'clothes' in Chinese is 'fu'... they're kind of similar.)

kookyuuhin - quality goods (This word totally doesn't exist in English... it sounds really slow on my recording because of the long vowels.)

shimasu - to do

dekakemasu - to go out

And the strange ones:

suki - to like 

daisuki - to like very much

Obviously, this phrase words as a verb in English and is translated as a verb, but it is used as an adjective in Japanese, so I think a more exacted translation would be 'liked' or perhaps 'beloved' in a weaker way... as in:

Kookyuuhin wa suki desu. - Quality goods are well liked; or, I like quality goods.

The word itself is easy to remember because it's one of my friends' nicknames! The usage will take a while to get used to, I think.

I haven't forgotten my hiragana! My words of the day in hiragana are:

ゅぉふく- yoofuku

こうきゆうひん - kookyuuhin

します - shimasu

でかけます - dekakemasu

すき - suki

だいすき - daisuki

Also, I think that 'dai' means 'very' or 'big'. It sounds like the word for 'big' in Mandarin (da) and it's the prefix in 'daigaku', which means 'university', which could be like a big school... It works for me, anyhow... :)

I'm learning again! Hooray!

A few vocab items

Wow, an entire month with only one post... with any luck (and a little determination), December will be better... I just need to get back into good habits. 

I think most of my previous vocabulary is still firmly entrenched in my brain. I'd thought that some of it might have disappeared due to lack of use, but I reviewed my little book today and didn't get stuck!

My new words and phrases of the day:

tatta - only

totemo - very

demo - but

tokoro de - by the way

itsu ka - sometime, someday

Demo is confusing me a bit because I've already learned a word for 'but', and it's kedo. But apparently they are used differently... kedo is a particle, demo is not. Kedo goes at the end of a phrase, demo is a conjunction used at the beginning of a sentence. I think this explains why Japanese people sometimes end up with phrases like this:

The lunch is expensive. But the breakfast is in expensive.

...which, in Japanese, looks something like this:

Hirugohan wa takai desu. Demo, asagohan wa yasui desu.

...which is perfectly acceptable. 

Also, through random readings about ESL learning and teaching, I've discovered that learning opposites at the same time can result in confusion... which I suppose I would have realized myself if I'd actually thought about it. I'm having troubles remembering telling words like 'akarui' and 'kurai' apart (bright and dark). In the future, I'll try to learn half of the pair first, and then add the second half later. 

Disappearing act...

Oh with the disappearing... So I went to Calgary for a weekend, then started school again (which occasionally requires some brain action) and work got crazy and blah blah blah.

I didn't forget about my Japanese learning altogether, though! While I was away, I learned almost all of my hiragana characters, and am in the process of practicing them. 

Here's what I added to my repertoire:

ha - は

hi - ひ

fu - ふ

he - へ

ho - ほ

ma - ま

mi - み

mu - む

me - め

mo - も

ya - や

yu - ゆ

yo - よ

I'm still working on the r- line... ra ら ri り ru る re れ and ro ろ. I keep forgetting wa わ and recognize but can't always reproduce the particle o を, but n ん is easy!

Still plugging along...

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!