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Honestly, Google Translate sucks at Japanese. It’s better than it used to be, but it still struggles on kana-only words. Your sentences are fine.
then adds “can’t go” to the end (行かなければいけません).
Psst: while it’s true that いけない is indistinguishable from the potential form of 行く, 行ける is actually also a verb in its own right, meaning “to be good at, to go well, to look good”. いけない means “wrong, not good, of no use, hopeless, must not do”.
at first I couldn’t even tell where words began and ended.
Sadly, this is something you’re going to need to learn how to do fairly soon. Japanese doesn’t use spaces at all.
Well, luckily it gets a bit better – if you apply the 80-20 rule. It’s a rough rule of thumb in practically everything which basically says “80% of the occurrences come from 20% of the causes” and it actually works out fairly well so far as the joyo kanji goes – which is to say, 20% of the joyo kanji comprise about 80% of what you’re going to see out in the wild.
Using that, those figures drop to 6.8 and 16.2 =D
In any case, you’ll start to get a feel for them before too long.
Welcome!
( Seriously how many じょ kanji are there? 0_O )
Two hundred and thirty-four, apparently, though that’s almost certainly catching kanji with じょう as well. That’s nothing, though – しょう has five hundred and twelve. Mind you, if you limit the search to only the joyo kanji, those numbers drop to thirty-four and eighty-one, respectively. =P
It’s fonts. In some fonts, the “volcano” has a hat across the top, in other fonts it doesn’t, which makes it look the same as the “fins” radical. So, they’re both correct.
There’s a number of other characters that differ a little depending on the font, too.
I’m of the opinion that at least some writing aids in memory. It’s one thing to look at a kanji and go “ah, I remember what that means” but it’s a whole other matter to start with a meaning and try to picture the kanji.
Not that I’ve done any writing in a long while…
I kinda mentioned that in a post just recently, actually: http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/help-please-beginner-is-stuck-already/
Essentially, the location (marked by に) is also functioning as the topic (which is marked by は). Which is to say, the topic of the sentence is “at my apartment”.
The topic of a sentence is almost always a word that’s already playing another role in the sentence – when it’s the subject (which is marked by が) or the direct object (which is marked by を), the topic particle は replaces the particles completely and just stands on its own. In other cases, however – such as with に or で, for example – it joins forces and they stand together as a double particle.
Well, 難しく is an adverb, so 難しく食べる would be… eating difficultly? Eating with difficulty? I dunno. Think what you might be after is 食べることは難しい (= (the act of) eating is difficult). Or 食べるのは難しい (= eating (that particular thing) is difficult).
In that sense, yeah, it’s fairly similar to 食べにくい. Up to you which one you find easier. I’d lean towards にくい, though, unless you’re trying to be philosophical.
Yeah, you’ll get a feel for it.
Also, the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is quite handy. =)
Well, it expresses conjecture – “I will probably eat”. It only implies future tense in the sense that it’s a bit weird to be saying “I’m probably eating right now”.
Particles in Japanese are always post-positions (not prepositions) – that is to say, they modify the word that comes before them, not after them. So in それ は しりません, the は is modifying the それ, not the しりません.
は marks the topic of a sentence. Don’t get confused between “topic” and “subject” as Kouichi does – the topic of a sentence is what the sentence is about, while the subject is the doer of the verb. が marks the subject. を marks the direct object of the verb – the thing that has the verb done to it.
Now, here’s the tricky bit: the topic of the sentence can pretty much be any noun or noun-phrase in that sentence, whether it’s the subject, the object, the indirect object, et cetera. most of the time, you’ll generally find that the topic is the subject, in which case, the topic particle は completely replaces the subject particle が. Exactly the same thing happens if the topic is the direct object – は replaces を. (When, say, the indirect object is the topic, then the indirect object particle に joins forces with the topic particle to get には. Don’t ask me why.)
When Michael said they can’t be used together, he meant they couldn’t go right after one another as をは (not that they couldn’t be in the same sentence).
In your second sentence, わたし is simultaneously the topic and the subject, so we use just the topic marker は. にほんご is the direct object, so we use を.
Grammar dictionary says yes, that’s the etymology, but in modern Japanese it’s a conjunction.
Welcome! Where do they live? =)
That’s not the particle の attached to the particle で, but rather the particle ので which means “because”. It basically functions similar to から-as-because, but there’s some differences in usage.
だった is the past tense of the casual-form copula だ.
A more literal translation of the sentence would be “Because today was rainy, I went by car”.
I’ve read the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar literally from cover to cover. =)
You’ll probably find that Genki and TextFugu cover much of the same material…
