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Not the slightest clue what りょうこ is supposed to mean, but “study” is 勉強 (べんきょう). 練習 works too. As does 復習.
You’ll want an を in there somewhere, too. And maybe a の depending on where you put the を.
For the fun of it, here’s an example of things being dropped in casual speech: 行かなきゃ is an abbreviation of 行かなければ, which means “if you don’t go”. On its own, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but it’s actually a kind of verbal shorthand for 行かなければならない, which means “you must go” (or literally, “if you don’t go, that’d be bad”). If you forget the grammar it represents, though, and you’re presented with 行かなきゃ, you’ll be left going “Do go? Don’t go? Must go? Musn’t go?”
な regularly comes between nouns and bits of grammar – in past tense it’s だった. It conjugates exactly the same as the な ending on な-adjectives, basically. It’s not like some ancient grammarian went “wait, that looks like it says “student’s”, better stick something in the middle there” – it’s what nouns do. Not all of the time, though (and I struggle to remember sometimes what sort attachments nouns need in certain situations).
Love to be able to give a better explanation than “it’s just grammar, learn it” but I can’t, unfortunately. Sounds like a job for Etymology Man!
Yeah, that’s basically it. IME’s being funny on my computer at the moment, otherwise I would have answered sooner. Casual speech tends to leave out all sorts of grammar bits – however, it’s kind of important to know the grammar that’s being left out first, so don’t concentrate too much on being casual until you’ve learnt how it works in the first place. =)
No, I found that out by looking up “Dallas, Scotland”. Because “Dallas” sounds rather like a Scottish place name.
That there also seems to be a Dallas in Australia was a complete coincidence.
Fortunately for you, the original Dallas is in Scotland – you can just go there instead. =)
If you made flash cards for that font, would you really get much benefit?
Yeah, but you’re also not going to see much benefit from ignoring it either. =P
さ, ふ, り, む, そ and な also have slight variations between typed and handwritten styles. Mostly down to which strokes are joined up and which ones aren’t.
Just to confuse matters, it’s fairly common to drop particles in casual speech, usually starting with the は. You’ll usually find it’s replaced by a comma (or a brief pause, in speaking). But yeah, in polite speech, the は stays. =)
Also, particles modify the word that comes before. That is, を designates the object of the verb, but doesn’t do anything to the verb itself.
…on question 8 the hundreds section should have a one since it’s a big number. Thus 五万四千一百二十五.
[citation needed]
I remember my friend learned that the word “zeroth” is in fact a word in Physics class with the 0th law of Thermodynamics.
In a sense. It’s way, way more recent than first, second, third, etc – those were all invented before the year 1000, while zeroth arrived at around the turn of the 20th century. It’s even more recent than nth, which was coined around 1850 or so.
No real difference, just one is an い adjective and the other is a な adjective (but one that’s always pre-nominal). You’ll also find 大きい and 大きな.
There’s historical reasons behind it, I suspect.
Says ナッチ.
I do hear you on pixel-limited computer fonts, though. Been a struggle reading the furigana in 二ノ国, but I’m getting the hang of it now.
The fact that they are “unusual” means you’re not going to have to see them all the time, so they’re not something you need to specifically practice.
Actually, they’re pretty much all over the place. A-like so.
Saw ads on the side of a bus when I was in Japan that had a character with two little horizontal lines next to a vertical line with a slight hook, and I was staring at it going “… is that supposed to be シ or ツ?” In hindsight, it was probably シ, and those are tricky to tell apart anyway, but still. Don’t underestimate ad designers’ abilities to come up with new and fascinating fonts. =P
The grammar dictionary describes は like this:
In contemporary Japanese, は is used, in general, to mark information which the speaker assumes to be part of the hearer’s register. In other words, when は marks X, the speaker usually assumes the hearer knows what X refers to. Thus, noun phrases which can be marked by は in ordinary circumstances are as follows:
- Common nouns whose referents have already been introduced into the discourse linguistically or extra-linguistically. For example:
昔々、一人のおじいさんが住んでいました。おじいさんはとてもやさしい人でした。 (Once upon a time, there lived an old man. The old man was a very gentle person.) - Proper nouns. For example, アメリカ or スミスさん.
- Nouns whose referents can be uniquely identified – that is, they are one-of-a-kind. For example, 太陽 (sun) or 空 (sky).
- Generic names. For example, 人 or 車.
It is noted that は never marks WH-words such as 何 or だれ, thus だれはパーティーに来ましたか is ungrammatical. This is because WH-words do not refer to a known thing and, therefore, their referents can never be in the hearer’s register.
More specifically, は marks a topic and/or a contrastive element. When は is used as a topic marker, as in XはY, X is something the rest of the sentence (i.e. Y) is about, and the focus falls on Y or part of Y (cf. が). The topic Xは normally appears at the beginning of the sentence.
It then goes on to describe は as a contrastive marker, but that’s only going to add confusion, so I won’t go into it here.
The grammar dictionary’s description of が basically just says “it marks the subject, unless it’s being replaced by は”.
The copula is the verb that goes where no verb is needed. As an added bonus, it can also be dropped completely in casual speech. So yeah, sometimes you wind up getting sentences with no verbs.
- Common nouns whose referents have already been introduced into the discourse linguistically or extra-linguistically. For example:
