Maybe I wouldn’t think this was all so weird if I knew what you people were talking about. All this “queens and drones and Terrans” business.

. . . WELCOME, HASHI.

@Lemur:「明日の百より今日の五十」means basically “Rather than 100 tomorrow, 50 today”. Which makes sense in terms of that whole bush thing. It makes a lot more sense than the English version, which I had to google because I had no idea what it meant.

@Mister
「日本語を勉強するのを去年の９月始めた。」
「にほんご　を　べんきょう　する　のを　きょねん　の　くがつ　はじめた」
literally: studying japanese, last year’s september, i started

Something to that effect, I believe, Mister. I may have gotten the “去年の９月” part wrong, but I think the rest is sound. Other, more intelligent people may say I’m absolutely wrong, though. In your second sentence, though it’s completely okay. This is because 「朝ご飯をたべる」and 「始めます」 are separate sentences combined to make one. In that sort of format, it’s perfectly acceptable, but in other instances using は, が, and を multiple times in a sentence seems weird to me and I haven’t seen it.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 11 months ago by  Swoosherz.

Typically I’m too lazy to lazy to reply to introduction threads, but your name is Marcel (the shell).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF9-sEbqDvU

Well, obviously with the iPod and iPhone if you go into “Settings” you can change the language, as well as add two Japanese keyboards. I don’t really have a lot of other technology than that, so . . .

I’m not sure how to explain the structure as a whole, so I’ll try to break it down in two parts:

The first being the sentence without parentheses:

っていますは「と言います」と同じ意味です。
“っています” has the same meaning as 「と言います」.
Literally: As for “っています”, 「と言います」is with the same meaning.

Kind of. It’s hard for me to explain grammatically because I don’t really know many of the technical terms.

Then for the parentheses:
漢字で書くのを忘れていました。
What’s going on here is the “nominalization” of a verb phrase, which is the term I’ve seen thrown around.
漢字で書く (to write in kanji) のを (the の makes it function grammatically as a noun so you can modify it, を makes it the object of an action) 忘れました (I forgot).

So, all together it means:
“っていいます” (I forgot to write it in kanji) has the same meaning as “と言います”.

As a side note, the 「って」 is just a coloquial way of saying 「と」.

I hope I did at least a decent job of explaining. :/

In addition to that, 「だ」is integral to a lot of grammar formations that cannot be interchanged with 「です」. So, marking them as “formal” and “informal” is really not the right way to go about learning them. In the beginning it’s fine to label them as such, but once you start to get further you’ll start to realize that they really are, as Crumb said, completely different.

I’ve finally kicked myself back into gear when it comes to studying. Over the past few days I’ve done like a million missed Anki reviews. I did at least 2,000+ on Saturday, and the average few hundred more everyday since. All this while my computer has had a dead hardrive — a testament to how amazing iPods are. So, while I can’t get Japanese podcasts on my iPod without my computer, I still have my music . . . and Tae Kim, Anki, an English-Japanese dictionary, Japanese-Japanese dictionary, 2 kanji games and 2 other kanji apps. I feel very set.

I kind of want to do more Anki reviews right now. :(

TESTING. D: