I am trying to learn Japanease in my spare time..because it sounds cool.
I was just wondering if the structure of japanease senctences were identical to ours?
[by the way] Does anyone know where I can get a japaneas font?
Thanks in advance,
Earlwood
As far as fonts go, you'll need a couple of fonts. First, there is Kanji which are the pictoral representations of numbers, colors, objects, etc. You'll need a font w/ Hirigana also. Hirigana is similar to English in that it uses vowels. Each symbol is not a representation of a symbol, though. Instead, each represents a phonetic. Finally, there's Katakana which is used for spelling foreign words. Katakana is difficult because it is based upon how the Japanese would interpret the pronunciation of a foreign word. If I haven't scared you off yet, you can probably find the appropriate fonts by googling for their various names.
Quote from: earlwood on Wed 31/12/2003 07:59:18
[by the way] Does anyone know where I can get a japaneas font?
If you are not talking about funny fonts and just about normal fonts to write on your pc, you should check this blue little box on the status line of your windows xp, which probably says "EN" as long as you are typing English. Using it, you can install the Japanese writing support in windows xp, which will be supported by most software, as Word, Outlook, Internet Explorer, ICQ...
For the structure of the sentences: You cannot really compare it to English. First of all, the word order in a basic sentence is different. While English is a SPO-language (Subject, predicate, object), Japanese always puts the predicate (that means the verb) at the end of a sentence. Second, Japanese is an agglutinative language: While European languages inflect words to show their function within a senctence (like Peter becomes Peter's in English or Kinder becomes Kindern in German), Japanese "glooms" post-preposition behind a word. Also most of the verbs can be build by glooming certain parts on them. When understanding the concept its pretty easy, because there is almost no irregular verb or noun to remember in Japanese. The writing and reading will keep you busy for a long time, but the grammar is so easy and logical, its a big surprise sometimes.
I have been learning Japanese for 6 years now. I have been able to have simple conversations after one year and to be more or less fluent and read and write normal emails after thre years. Having a book-or-newspaper-reading-ability though took me 6 years (yes, I just finished reading the first book :) )
So don't give up and enjoy, its a good thing to learn !
And it sound really cool when it is spoken. ;)
Geez, looks like I can't rely on google to teach me this one...Totoro, how did you learn?
I hit a lot of g's when I type randomly.
Japanese is the easiest language in the world to read (if you ignore the "pictorals" -- are they called kanji or is that the general name for all japanese "letters"). Hiragana and Katakana take some getting used to but are based on simple phonetics. a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, etc. There is very little variation and where there is, the variants are made very explicit. Every vowel sounds the same under any circumstances and there are usually no stresses (though a common word like "desu" which goes at the end of most sentences is often shortened to "des").
Sounds are almost always a consonant and a vowel, and the vowels always sound the same. "a" sounds "ah," "i" sounds "ee," u sounds "oo," e sounds "ae," o sounds "oh."
So Katakana is pronounced: Kahtahkahnah, while hiragana is pronounced: Heerahgahnah. If there were sound a word as iegoure, it would be pronounced eegohooreh. Once you know which katakana and which hiragana symbol goes with which sound, you should be able to write and read easily. The pictoral symbols are more difficult, but if you learn some basics, you can figure out what the more complicated ones mean (sometimes), though generally it involves a lot of memorization. For example, the word for "fire" looks kinda like this: /^\ (though imagine that as three brush-strokes, with bits of curves, not straight lines). It looks, when brushed, like a little fire. River is three lines like a river would look from above: /|/ (not quite accurate, but you're recognize it when you saw it). I forget book, though it is spelled "hon" which also means source or knowledge, but if you combine that with sun (a line in a box, simbolizing the rising sun), you get Nihongo or in rough english translation "land of the rising sun," the Japanese name for Japan. In other words, the language builds fairly readily and is based on simple, repeatable rules.
However, the grammar is basically a bit backwards by English standards. It is again simple, but hard for English speakers to wrap their head around. Or perhaps just ditzy teachers.
O, I C, so now "U" is da nu TXT style spelling?
Also, there should be a ? where I ask whether kanji is the pictorals or not. I now supect that Yak is correct.
ROXXXORRR MY SOXXXOR!
Kanji is the pictoral and hiragana and katakana are referred to as "Kana" in general. And Japanese is definetely NOT the easiest language to read, because you cannot ignore Kanji. Apart from children books, all Japanese texts will contain lots of them.
How did I learn Japanese... I first tried it on my own for some months, but did not really have enough self-discipline. Then I went to Japanese class once a week in my hometown. I did that for about 18 months. Then I spend one year in Japan learning Japanese 4 hours every day. After that I went home and started to study at Japanese department in my university. I also did some part time jobs translating Japanese, so I cannot really regard Japanese as a plain hobby anymore.
What general is a good advise if you don't want to take the classes: Use the internet! There are many friendly Japanese people who would love to help you study, but be careful not to get to lazy and just talk to them in English. There are some nice pen-pal sites especially with Japanese people, for example the one at www.japan-guide.com
And it seems like some people can get NHK Japanese lessons (NHK is the national broadcast service of Japan) via "ceratin sources" from the internet. I don't know them myself, but maybe you could check those out.
Don't the sentences go down instead of to the right and use funky little line pictures as words?
Quote from: Robert Eric on Wed 31/12/2003 18:55:35
Don't the sentences go down instead of to the right and use funky little line pictures as words?
They can go down, but they also can go to the right. At the internet for example, all Japanese is written from left to right as we "longnoses" are used to do it ;)