ひとり

The “sh” sound in the recording is a microphone artefact. That said い sounds can often get compressed (especially as the English-speaker’s gut feeling is to put the emphasis on the first syllable, but there’s no such emphasis in Japanese).

Looks like that might be a holdover from an older version of the page – Koichi now teaches verb groups later on, when he introduces causal verbs:

http://www.textfugu.com/season-5/dict-verbs/3-2/#top

(Honestly, I’ve never liked calling them “group 1″ and “group 2″ because I can never remember which group is supposed to be which. I learnt them as う-verbs and る-verbs, respectively, and in Japanese they’re called 五段 (ごだん) and 一段 (いちだん) respectively.)

Non-grammar-heavy, but not strictly correct explanation: に indicates the direction of the verb. In the same sense as 公園に行った means “I went to the park”, お父さんに貸した means “I lent it to my dad”.

Grammar answer: に marks the indirect object of the sentence – the indirect object is an entity that’s indirectly affected by the doing of the verb, for example, as in this case, the benificiary of “giving” and “recieving” verbs. Remember, を marks the direct object, which is the entity to which the verb is done. So in this case, you’re lending the money (= direct object) to your father (= indirect object).

Yay! But when did you create unproductive discussion?

1. “Well, firstly”
2. “Try”
3. “Well, firstly, please try having a look at this”
4. I’ma say level 7. =P But seriously though, it’s honorific-form sonkeigo. Definitely upper-level formal.

That’s because when you were a baby, you thought like a baby. You just needed to be told “this is how it works, take my word for it” and you learnt the rules later. As adults, it’s much more helpful to understand the actual grammatical concepts, even if you don’t use the words themselves – though the words help heaps too (try grouping verbs into “transitive” and “intransitive” as concisely as just using those words themselves).

Mind you, if anyone did call baby-you “Mister-chan”, I feel a little bit sorry for you. =P

Aye, I normally just say は=topic and が=subject, but since Koichi hasn’t got the faintest idea what “topic” and “subject” mean, it’s sometimes a little risky to use that explanation here. =P

My name’s Joel and and I have a picture of a cat as my profile – you can’t really miss me. =P (Mind you, it’s a different cat than the one I have here, I’ll grant, but still…)

Well you, Michael, are not an outstanding sir. =P