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!

More hiragana

I may as well add the hiragana that is almost identical to the ones I've learned except with two little sticks on the top right hand side... they're the voiced equivalents of some of the voiceless consonant hiragana that I've learned: t changes to d, k to g, and s to z. There are a few exceptions, which I'll point out.

が - ga

ぎ - gi

ぐ - gu

げ - ge

ご - go

ざ - za

じ - ji

ず - zu

ぜ - ze

ぞ - zo

だ - da

ぢ - ji (limited use, same sound as じ)

づ - zu (limited use, same sound as ず)

で - de

ど - do

Well that was easy!

More numbers

Hooray! I now know not only the number for one hundred, but also the number for one thousand! I can count!

one hundred - hyaku

two hundred - nihyaku

one thousand - sen/issen

two thousand - nisen 

Also, the word for Japanese currency (yen, in English) is en in Japanese, and just gets tacked on to the end of the number word: ichien, juuen, nihyakuen, and so on.

Hiragana of the day: na な and ni に.

Numbers and hiragana troubles

I haven't been taking a break, I've just been learning numbers and practicing hiragana! I have to say, trying to read things in hiragana currently is extremely frustrating. I only know about half the characters, so I have to guess based on the words I already know, and since my repertoire of words is quite small, my guesses are often terrible. Not that I've been trying to read anything actual, just stuff in my textbook, but I think I'm going to give up for a while on that and wait until I know ALL my hiragana before trying to read.

Of hiragana, I currently know 20 characters, my most recent two being te て and to と.

Japanese numbers are confusing... not only are there two completely different sets of numbers to count from 1 to 10 (one Chinese-based and one Japanese-based), there are two different words for some numbers depending on context within the Chinese-based system. 

0 - zero/rei

1 - ichi

2 - ni

3 - san

4 - yon/shi

5 - go

6 - roku

7 - nana/shichi

8 - hachi

9 - ku/kyuu

10 - juu

To get to 19, you just add numbers to the end of 10: juuichi is 11 (literally ten one), juuni is 12 (ten two) and so on.

You count tens by adding a number in front of 10: nijuu is 20 (literally two ten), and anything above that follows the same pattern as the teens: two ten one, two ten two etc etc. (nijuuichi, nijuuni).

As far as I can tell, this pattern continues all the way to 99. I haven't learned the word for 100 yet... that will be next!

Random words and some numbers

So apparently this every day thing isn't going so well, but I haven't given up altogether!

The words of today:

keiko - practice

eiga - movie

rei/zero - zero

ichi - one

ni - two

san - three

And today's hiragana is tsu つ.

Up next: more numbers.