Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
My boss used to chew on my pens whenever he came over to my desk. Oh, it was completely unconscious, but that doesn’t make it any less disgusting. I got into the habit of hiding all the good ones and leaving just the pre-chewed one on the desk…
No. Which may be why my listening ability is so terrible. =P
I probably should, though, considering my lack of ability is the main reason why I’ve not tried for N4 yet. Or higher. And it’s starting to hinder me in class a bit too…
On an unrelated note: I’ve been trying to work out, is “regiment” supposed to be a pun, or is it just a misspelling? =P
You don’t really need a keyboard. Romaji-based IME works well enough.
If “Kana flash cards” means “flash cards for learning kana”, I reckon focus on those first – you can probably get kana learnt inside of a week, after which everything else gets a bit easier. =)
Welcome! What’s up from Central Valley? Central Heights, I guess. I don’t really know the area. =P
Lyrics, huh? You’re aiming high. I can barely even make sense of lyrics in English. =)
Maybe you typed IMG in caps? Photobucket’s handy copy-and-paste boxes have the tags in caps, but that doesn’t work for another forum I frequent, so I’m always having to re-do the tags anyway…
If Firefox users are filthy, what are IE users? =P
There used to be a search function, but it was always well-hidden, and it became more and more well-hidden with each forum upgrade. I’m yet to find it in the current version…
http://www.jlpt.jp/e/reference/books.html is the list of official books released by the Japan Foundation (who run the JLPT), which may well be the “obvious official resource” you mentioned, but I’m not sure – I bought the N4/N5 Test Guidebook before I did the test, and it was fairly helpful. Not sure where you can buy it in your area – I got mine from Kinokuniya.
So far as I understand, there’s no officially published list of what’s going to be in the test, but many people have made educated guesses. I study with an iPhone/iPad flashcard app called Sticky Study – it’s got decks of kanji and vocab for all five JLPT levels (though aside from example sentences, no grammar, unfortunately).
How can you have not tried inarizushi? Get thee to a sushi train! Or whatever your local equivalent is! (Mind you, I hesitate to suggest it, because it’s possible to do it badly, which might put you off, but there’s not really a way I could make a suggestion with any guarantee, so… try a bunch of different places?)
As for the image, nice try, but it’s just the culinary equivalent of giving an eyesore a paint job. Underneath it’s still the same old inarizushi. =P
Also, I’ve long since given up trying to work out which tags need to be in UBB code and which in HTML, and which just plain don’t work at all…
On a similar note, 休 = break or holiday = a person sitting under a tree. What else would you do with some time off? =P
Well, they were stuck on Ancient Egyptian for a long while. Then they got a lucky break: someone found the Rosetta Stone, which contained the same passage written out in both Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek, the latter of which they did understand. That’s where the name of the Rosetta Stone computer program comes from, incidentally.
As for how you learn a completely new language with no context at all, I’d assume you’d start with concrete things, like “rice”, “trees”, “gold”… “Jesuit priest”… before moving on to slightly more abstract things like “buy”, “sell” and “if you give me rice, I’ll give you gold.” I’d assume they’d also had some knowledge of Chinese, given that Marco Polo had been to China and back at least a century previous.
But yeah, linguists do all sorts of studies in this sort of thing. Also: how to babies learn language, considering they’ve got even less context than explorers encountering a completely new language for the first time? =)
How long do I study each day? Not long enough…
Well, it’s “abstract thing” as opposed to “concrete thing”, not abstract in the sense of giraffes and melting clocks.
One that amuses me a little is 怒る = おこる = to get angry. It’s composed of a woman (女) plus a heart (心) plus “again” (又, though that’s not really a kanji you’ll often find on its own), which quite readily lends itself to a(n albeit slightly stereotyped) mnemonic: “Yeesh, that woman is getting angry over matters of the heart again?”
As an added bonus, the components also hint at the reading: おんな + こころ + ～る = おこる
The main point in that post was not the sentence finishing with “anyway”. Which often happens to be the case for such sentences.
Some research indicates that Dutch and Portuguese loan words tend to date from the 16th and 17th centuries, while English didn’t really arrive in force until post-WWII. So, like I said: historical linguistics.
German loan words, incidentally, tend to come from around the time of the Meiji Restoration – late 19th to early 20th centuries.
Well, it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that English behaves similarly. </self-referential comment> =P
For this bit of grammar, the literal translation is something like “it’d be bad if you didn’t do it”.
