Transitive/Intransitive flashcards!

So speaking of flashcards, I think I mentioned that I wanted to make some for the transitive and intransitive verbs, because they are really a pain. I really meant to just go get some index cards and write on them, but then I thought why do that when I can make some to print? I am a designer sometimes after all. (Lame confession time: I’m a little sad that Helvetica is not on this computer! I had to use Gill Sans instead.)

So anyway, this is what I came up with.

Pretty simple, really. I used the list from Textfugu because that seemed simplest, and I’m lazy. I imagine there’s a couple different ways these can be used. Regular flashcard studying style, and shuffling and sorting into transitive and intransitive without looking. I didn’t bother with the readings, since it should be good kanji practice as well or something, and I don’t think it fits in well on either side. I suppose those could be written in if needed. They can be put on a ring too, I guess.

I’m actually wondering if I could get sets of these made and sell them. I don’t know to who, but man, everybody hates these words. I’m sure there’s a market somewhere.

A short note on homophones and kanji

Oh, Japanese. Why do you do this to me. Looks like I need more flashcards. More than zero.

On a related note:

I’m back! With studying!

Shock and amazement, I have started to study again! On a whim, I decided to see if smart.fm would actually work on my computer at work, and it did. For a while, at least, then it started logging me out a lot, which was pretty annoying. I’m hoping that setting it to a trusted site might make it stop doing that, but I don’t know. Internet Explorer is shit. But I was at least able to pick up a bunch of my lists, so now I have that to do every day hopefully. I think I can keep up with it if it cooperates, work is dreadfully boring and I have a lot of nothing to do.

Other than that I’ve gone back to the workbook. It seems I left off in the middle of the section on transitive and intransitive verbs. These are really a bitch. I would like to get one of those flash card keyring things to help study those, but I have no idea where they might be found other than a campus store. I’ve never seen them at any more mainstream places, but I guess I’ve never really looked. I suppooose I could just make one myself but ugh, that sounds like so much effort I wouldn’t make it to the part where I actually write stuff on the cards. Well, I guess I should try anyway. Maybe I’ll try to stop by somewhere to get some cards this week. I guess they don’t have to be on a ring, it just seems like it’d be easier to keep track. But I would like them to come smaller than the usual size so I don’t have to cut them down.

In addition to the whole transitive/intransitive thing, I guess I need to figure out a good way to study kanji again. I’m not sure how helpful flashcards would be there, but I kind of suspect writing them over and over again will prove useless. Yeah, I’m still not confident I will get to a point where this language will be useful to me ever.

We are no longer rated G. Oh well.

Okay, I will admit it, I haven’t really been studying Japanese at all for a week or two. I think I might have poked at smart.fm the other day, but that was barely anything. I fail at this, hardcore.

I’m posting today because of another website I found, though. It’s called KANJIDAMAGE, and it, as you might have guessed, focuses on kanji learning. Like Textfugu, it addresses the problem with the traditional method of learning kanji, and agrees that the sensible way for people to learn kanji is from the simplest to the more difficult. This site explains things with a sort of irreverant tone, though, which is to say there is lots of swearing involved.

I remember a time (around high school, I think) that I thought that swearing was just stupid, and that it didn’t add anything to what people had to say, and it only made them look immature.

I was wrong. Swearing is fucking fantastic.

The fact of the matter is that when you think about it, kanji is largely bullshit in the first place, and the way it’s taught in most classes is even moreso. Japanese classes make you learn so much crap that you will never need, and all it does is confuse you later. When you learn the kanji you have to memorize all these different readings, and what the hell for? You’ll never use half of them! KANJIDAMAGE calls bullshit on the system and presents the stuff that might actually be useful to you, with amusing examples and mnemonics to go along with everything. The site has a list of some the kanji you’ll find listed in the dictionary with the same meanings, but tells you flat out which ones you might actually use and which are totally worthless. Yes, they can be vulgar, so if that’s something that offends you, then you might not want to consider it as a resource. But if you’re not going to get your panties in a twist  over the use of the word “motherfucker” and just want to say a big “fuck you” to kanji in general but know you can’t very well do that if you really want to learn Japanese, it’s worth a look. The attitude it takes makes studying kanji less of a stuffy, agonizing affair, and reassures you that you are certainly not the only one who thinks this shit is bananas. Even just reading through the intro and history is really amusing.

To be perfectly honest, even with a new resource, I will probably continue to fail with this whole studying thing. I still haven’t been able to figure out a method that works for me, that I can keep motivated with. I really wish my work computer didn’t suck so much as far as functionality goes, but until I can work up the courage to ask the guy with the admin password to let me put Firefox or Chrome or something on here so I can use add-ons like Rikaichan and make sites that hate IE work, and probably also get some more Japanese input options, it’s what I’m stuck with. I really should get back on that though, since I end up feeling suprememely unproductive at work, and it’s really quite frustrating. Hmmm.

Studying is boring. :(

Due to my inadvisable habits of eating and sleeping very little, today I can barely concentrate enough to transcribe things from the workbook onto paper. Really, the thing is getting quite boring. Well, pretty much all textbooks are full of the dullest examples possible. It would be better if they tried a little harder to make people care. Here’s basically what one of the sections that had fill in the blanks in the middle boils down to:

Yesterday was a special holiday. Last week was busy, but yesterday I was free. At 10:00 I went to the library. It was quiet inside the library room, but a little cold. I read a book for about 2 hours, and after that I walked in the park. I like that park, and I walk there every week. It’s a big quiet park. In the evening, I cleaned my room. My room was very messy, but I cleaned it thouroughly, and it became beautiful. It feels good to have a clean room. That night, I watched TV. Then I did homework.

What a complete and total snore! This guy is a total loser. Yes, it’s pretty easy to read and translate, but I’m pretty sure it’s possible to write something that uses simple grammar points and not have it be completely lame. Textfugu is doing it. Ugh, I don’t even want to bother translating this stuff most of the time, it’s so boring. Yeah, I do still get stuck and I can’t really figure out what the sentence is supposed to be saying, but I’m sure they’re all completely uninteresting anyway. Is it contributing to the fact that I’m kind of slipping as far as the Japanese study? Probably at least a little. Really hard to stay interested in a book of grammar reviw and boring characters.

In the interests of changing things up and keeping myself interested I’m thinking of trying my hand at doujinshi translation again. I’ve done it before, with help from someone who was better with Japanese than I am. It was pretty fun, and I like actually doing the scan editing work as well. It turns out I’m pretty good at tweaking the language so it sounds natural in English, which quite a few scanlations I’ve seen were lacking in. I actually do have one or two projects in progress, so I could easily try to pick those up again. I’ll probably get frustrated and want somebody better to help me out with translation pretty quickly though…I seem to remember being all kinds of stuck. But anyway, I doubt I’ll post much from any projects I do because my doujinshis tend to have…some questionable content that I’m not sure visitors to this blog would appreciate…but then I don’t think anyone visits here anyway, so I guess it probably doesn’t matter! I guess we’ll see though…in any case, I suppose I should not be bringing any material in to work. It’s a good thing I’ve finally gotten something to try to work on actually for the company, though I’m not so confident in my ability to perform satisfactorily. Hopefully this will not prove disastrous!

Do I know what I’m doing?

Another Japanese journal. I wonder how much it sucks. I should probably post this stuff on Lang-8 sometime…hmm.

今、仕事で音楽を聞いている。とうとうラップトップからＰＳＰまでＭＰ３を運べかった。聞き取りのために幻想水滸伝のラジオドラマを聞くつもりだったが、声優は早く話したり、言葉を知ってないたり、文法が下手から、あまり分からなかってしまった。そのことはたぶんまだ難しすぎるだ。より簡単な何かを見つけられるかな。読みことはより易しいだ。十分な時間から、辞書を使える。漢字も有用だ。いつか日本語を聞こえてから分れてかもしれない。今この日本語を書いているは正解かどうか知っていない。これは難しいんだよ。

Okay, with that, I’m done spamming this blog for today. Just a couple more hours until I get to leave.

もう and まだ

Let’s try something new. A grammar lesson post! Though there’s nobody to be taught, really, but oh well. Maybe acting like I’m trying to teach something will make it stick with me more, but I really think I’d be an absolutely terrible teacher. (except for the grading simple black/white papers)

I flipped to a random page in one of my notebooks and found that I had written in red next to the もう/まだ section, I think because this is something I had a l ittle trouble remembering. Probably because depending on which is used and how it is used, there are different things they can mean.

One of the things I think tripped me up a bit in Japanese is negatives. Not the simple ones, of course. It’s the phrases and expressions that need to have negatives in order to convey the meaning you want, and the ones that must always be used with negatives. I think it’s hard to remember those.

もう and まだ are adverbs used to describe whether or not something has happened, or is in a certain state. Well, that’s not wholly accurate. They can be used to express things like “already” or “still”.  See, I really have no idea how to properly explain things!

Basically もう means that the state changes, and まだ means that the state remains. Here’s a table. Or it would be, if I could format it.

• もう with affirmative: Already
• もう with negative: Not anymore
• まだ with affirmative: Still
• まだ with negative: Not yet, still not

So that’s the basics…let’s see if we can come up with some sentences.

もう仕事にいる。 – I’m already at work.

もう仕事にいない。 – I’m not at work anymore.

まだ仕事にいる。 – I’m still at work.

まだ仕事にいない。 – I’m not at work yet.

So, you can kind of see how まだ refers to a state that hasn’t changed. The state of being at work (or not) is something that has been going on for a while, it seems. Once that changes you can use もう, and that will convey that something has changed, maybe whoever you’re talking about thought it hadn’t. 

 あの肉を冷凍庫から出して。　

まだ仕事から出ないが、出来ない。

ええ？いつ仕事をついた？？　

知っていなかった？もう二周前だった。

 You’re on your own with that one. I’m not 100% confident in its correctness, and I always worry that I’m saying something in a way it wouldn’t be said, but I can’t tell if that’s just because I’m never confident in anything I do or if I really suck that much. I’d welcome any input, as well as other examples!

Hitting a rut? D:

I guess I’ve been kind of quiet here…well, there was the weekend, when I don’t really do much as far as Japanese goes, other than poking at a couple of smart.fm lists. But since I’m not working weekends I tend to get distracted by other things like video games (mostly Recettear) and generally just hanging out at home. Well, I guess I only really missed yesterday, so maybe it just seems quiet. Anyway, nothing much has changed, I keep going on with the workbook stuff, doing the exercises and translating them and checking them. Well, I can only check the answers, but not the translation. Well, I think it’s a grammar book mostly meant for actual Japanese people more than for those learning Japanese, so there is that. The instructions are all in Japanese, and there are a few explanations in English/Korean/Chinese too, but for the most part I have to figure out what it’s asking me to do by context. I’m not really sure how useful it is in my studying, actually. The grammar points so far are pretty basic, I guess, but I still keep getting things wrong. Still, it’s somehow rather satisfying checking through it with a red pen and writing how many I got at the top. I’m not sure why that is. Almost makes me want to be some kind of teacher, except haha, NO. Can I just grade papers for one?

I also recently found out about the existence of a Gensou Suikoden radio drama. That, if you don’t know, is basically my favorite JRPG series. It may not have all the fanciness of Final Fantasy, but it’s so much better. I acquired mp3s of it and listened to the first one this morning. It was basically I think the voice actors sitting around talking about it for most of it with maaaaybe 5-10 minutes of actual radio drama. It was kind of amusing, despite the fact that I really couldn’t understand what they were saying. I still have a really long way to go, I think. I wonder if there’s something else I should be trying to listen to. Maybe just some music or something? I feel a little stuck, honestly. As much as I look over these grammar patterns, I don’t feel like they’re sticking well enough that I can use or recognize them easily, especially when it comes to spoken Japanese. I wonder what I should do. I’m really not very good at this self-studying thing, I think. I wonder if I really do need to find someone else to study with…I’m so bad at being social though, damn.

Handy dandy sentence patterns

Copying more lists from the workbook. Actually, JGram was pretty useful on this one. Maybe I’m learning to use it? But I’m still having trouble locating the other patterns, so I don’t know.

dictionary and ない form patterns

• ～と　(cause and effect: if~ then~)
• ～つもりだ　(plan to do something)
• ～ことになる　(it has been decided)
• ～ことにする　(someone decided)
• ～ように（言う） (reporting speech – indirect quotation – say to do something)
• ～ことがある　(there are times when )
• ～ように (in order to )　
• ～でください – only ない form (please don’t do something)

As I go through the examples and practice sentences in here, I feel an inordinate amount of them have to do with not leaving trash around. I mean, yeah, it’s only three of them so far, but they are all pretty much the same sentence: Don’t leave your trash here. No other concept is repeated like this, and I would think they could have tried a little harder to come up with another example rather than be so redundant.

ここにごみを捨ててはいけません。　

こら！ここにごみを捨てるな。　

ここにごみを捨てないでください。

At least I’ll be fully prepared if I ever need to tell someone not to litter.

Went out to the car to mess with My Japanese Coach during lunch. There were onomatopoeia. Apparently ぴかぴか is glittering and きらきら is sparkling, but I’m not entirely sure what the distinction is, because I had always assumed they meant the same thing. Then you have つやつや for glossy, and there’s just all kinds of shiny things all over the place.

I have another chart I’m working on, but I think I’ll put it off for next time, since it’s a pretty big one, and I think my hand is cramping up a bit. Gotta stick around here two more hours though, Boo.

More tables, and some insight (from other people)

I spent the first half of today struggling not to fall asleep, ugh. It was a while before I managed to pull myself together enough to concentrate. I picked My Japanese Coach up again on my lunch break, which reminded me how much I suck at learning vocabulary I’m not likely to need ever. Anyway, here’s a couple more sentence pattern lists.

ます form patterns

• ～ましょう　(let’s do~)
• ～ませんか　(two uses listed here, but I can’t figure out the difference.)
• ～ましょうか　(offer: shall I~~)
• ～に行く • 来る　(?)
• ～たい　(desire, want to do something – used for self)
• ～たがる　(want to do something – used for others)
• ～ながら　(concurrent actions, main action is last)
• ～そうだ　(guessing at likely outcome)
• ～なさい (firm but polite request)

dictionary form patterns

• ～ことができる　(ability, can do something)
• ～前に　(before you do something)
• ～まで　(until something happens/you do something)
• ～ところだ　
• ～な　(negative command)
• ～ようになる　(it has come to the point that~)
• ～ため（に）　(for the purpose/sake of something)
• ～のに (in order to~)

Still trying to figure out what exactly these and the patterns from the last post do. I updated the other one with what I found out. Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar has been useful on that end, but there’s still some things I’m having trouble locating. I tried to find some of them on JGram.org, but I found the site difficult to search.

As a side note, one thing I’ve learned from trying to relearn Japanese basically from the internet is that textbooks and classes have been teaching the language terribly for years. Tae Kim’s site mentioned that they try to teach it in terms of English, and it’s so different that it becomes ridiculous, and you just end up sounding terribly awkward. For some reason they always try to teach you the complicated way to do everything instead of starting with the easier things. (Kind of like what they do with kanji, actually.) It’s like going backwards. There’s no real reason to learn ます form before dictionary form, is there? And so much gets left out of a typical Japanese statement. The textbooks will teach you to say 「私の名前はカトリナです。」 when a Japanese person would never introduce themselves that way; they would simply say 「カトリナです。」because it’s clear you’re giving your name from context. Also, did you know that Japanese people don’t really say 「お元気ですか。」 a lot? But this is a phrase every single English textbook insists you learn, because we think people should have some pointless “How are you?” smalltalk to start a conversation, and that’s the best they could come up with. This is something I learned from Textfugu. Pretty much every traditional textbook has a ton of set phrases they want you to memorize, and they concentrate on those instead of helping you more fully understand how they work, which would be much more useful, and apply to a lot more. Save the set phrases for the tourists who aren’t bothering to actually learn more of the language than they’re likely to need.

So yeah, basically traditional Japanese language classes are broken and in need of an overhaul. I would encourage everybody wanting to learn the language to learn more about these problems before jumping in with a textbook. It’s better to understand how Japanese people actually speak rather than trying to speak Japanese as if it were English.