Ever wanted to know how to read numbers in military situations in Japanese? Of course you have. So here you go. But be careful — unlike in English (where military culture has mixed into popular culture more), relatively few people in Japan know these numbers…you probably can’t use them successfully on the phone with a civilian (trust me, I tried…the lady was like “huh?”: contrast this with my experience with American UPS, where no one batted an eyelid when I said things like “zulu” and “niner”). So this one goes out to the geeks and nerds. Enjoy!
0 まる
1 ひと
2 ふた
3 さん
4 よん
5 ごう
6 ろく
7 なな
8 はち
9 きゅう
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Strange that they can’t understand it; aren’t ひととふた used often with counters and in some common words like 二人、一人？
On the other hand, when they’re not attached to those particular counters, they normally have entirely different meanings – 人、双、蓋, for example….
@quend
Like shayd says, perhaps context is key. Like, if I say to you “four score and seven years ago”, you’ll probably get what I mean. But if I go “dude, there were like 7 score and a dozen people at the party”, you might be like “what the old number?”…
Hey Khatz,
I’ve been reading “light novels” lately, namely, 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 and one thing about this is that there are often long, long sentences that just don’t appear in English. I can usually get the gist of one of these sentences after reading it 2 or 3 times again if I don’t get it the 1st; but how do you input these into your SRS?
@Quend
@Jerry
Just keep reading. Don’t worry about the long sentences if you don’t get them. Don’t try to analyze them, just keep going. It’s shocking how much better with no effort at all. If you just keep reading, you WILL understand them soon.
I “second” quendidil’s question. Thanks to the great advice here, my reading ability has been increasing exponentially each month of study that I put in. (I still have no idea what anyone is saying in all the anime I watch, though.) While I’m not reading light novels, I’m encountering a lot of these “never ending sentences” in other formats as well.
I seem to be able to break them into phrases, and I’ll put those into my SRS. I only do this for phrases that I’m (fairly) certain I understand. But even when I do this, I don’t actually “get” the entire sentence. Riding on quendidil’s question, is there a better way to understand the never ending sentence? Nothing in real life matches the tidy grammar book example sentences! For now I’m using brute force, hoping to melt down whatever mental barrier is keeping me from total comprehension. But maybe there’s a better way?
@Jerry
Congrats on the improved reading. As for audio, are you making sure to LISTEN to Japanese 24/7? Do you play music? Look up lyrics and sing along? Do you watch J-dubs of Hollywood movies? Do you rip the audio and listen to them? The cool thing about audio is that you can leave it in the background, so make sure you’re feeding your ears as well as your eyes — you can even do it at the same time!
@Quend
Do you want to check that sentence [deleted due to errors] and re-enter it? It seems like there may be a couple of errors in it…
For example, it feels like 壮 should be そう（然う）・・・I could be wrong, though…
Also 言うまであって — maybe it’s a deliberate twist that the author made, but if you could check that again, that would help.
@Jerry
@Quend
Long sentences used to scare me, too. Jerry’s strategy is correct — break it up into phrases/clauses [along the lines of where you see commas] that you DO understand, and enter those.
OK, but you don’t understand the whole thing, right? Let me hit you with some knowledge that a person named 本多勝一(ほんだ かついち) gave me in his book 日本語の作文技術. Those long sentences are actually part of the beauty of Japanese, not just the aesthetic beauty, but the logical beauty, because it turns out they are very powerful. Here’s why — they make is so that in Japanese entire clauses can be modifiers: this is either impossible or inconvenient in English, but really easy to do in Japanese. For example, here:
子供達の国語力の壊滅的な低下ぶりを目の当たりにした私。
That entire sentence is a modifier for 私.
Modifier→Target
子供達の国語力の壊滅的な低下ぶりを目の当たりにした→私
Of course, there is nested modification.
（子供達の→国語の→低下ぶりを←（壊滅的な■目の当たりにした））→私
The main mental barrier, if there is one, is familiarity. The more used to Japanese and its patterns you get, the easier they will be for you. I could analyze quend’s sentence for you (once it’s confirmed), but analysis never helped me that much in the general case, so if it still gives you trouble, just keep reading more, you’ll get used to it. As I see it, your English-influenced mind is used to looking at the beginning of a sentence or clause for the most important bits. But remember that everything that “matters” (the “core”) in a J-sentence is going to come at the end. So perhaps two more fundamental reasons why these sentences are hard for you now, but will become easier later, are reading speed and your ability to “chunk” Japanese: both of these will increase through more reading. Maybe, right now, your reading and chunking are such that by the time you get to the end of a long sentence, you’ve lost track of what it was all about? I dunno.
>Nothing in real life matches the tidy grammar book example sentences!
Heck yeah! That’s why it matters so much to “keep it real”, just like you’re doing.
Thanks for the reply. I think you’re right about familiarity being my “barrier.” I’m still only five months into serious study. I feel like I’m on the verge of something, like a distant vista coming into focus. I think the “chunking” of Japanese as you discussed in another post somewhere is beginning to happen for me, where I understand chunks here and there. But they’re not all together yet. There’s still so much vocabulary to learn! I’m transitioning to monolingual cards now, and that’s helping a lot. Definitions are becoming easier to read and need fewer additional definitions to make them understandable.
I’m not there with the listening, because I’m not feeding myself much listening material. I put in time each day, but it’s not really enough. My biggest leap with reading are coming because I’m doing that almost at every free moment I get. So I better start taking more of the advice I’m getting here relative to ripping audio and filling my MP3 player with Japanese audio. I’ve watched Cowboy Bebop so many times now that I should have all the episodes memorized! Time to rip that audio track I guess! As always, thanks for the inspiration and advice.
Weird, WordPress swallowed up my last post。
ちなみに「幽霊」の部分は「未来人」とか「超能力者」とかでも置換可能だが、言うまでもなくそんなもんが目の前をフラフラしているような世界はフィクションの世界であって現実にはなく、よってハルヒの悩みはこの世界で暮らす限り永遠に続くことになっている―はずだったのだが、実はそうとも言い切れないので俺も困り果てているところだ。
Oh yeah, and regarding listening, I can now understand most shounen anime without any subs very easily but I still find dramas quite difficult. I understood about half or less of the 1st episode of Tiger & Dragon while for an anime like Claymore, I found that I could understand at least 80% of the dialogue per episode. I think dramas have dialogue closer to real life and can sometimes be mumbled quite inaudibly? While in anime, the voice actors seem to have undergone elocution lessons or something to speak clearly. One thing I noticed in some anime is that some characters almost never use contractions (e.g. L in Death Note).
Solution: Listen to more dramas/movies?
Wow, 80%+ comprehension! Nice job!
Yup, just keep watching and listening more.
>I think dramas have dialogue closer to real life and can sometimes be mumbled quite inaudibly?
Yeah, exactly. A well-written (i.e. realistic-dialogue) drama will be very mumbly.
BTW, Tiger & Dragon has HUGE range of registers and dialogue styles
Ancient Japanese/(Edo Period Dialect and Vocabulary) — Rakugo scenes
Real Tokyo youth speech (no punches pulled, no dumbing down to lowest common denominator) — scenes with young characters
Gangster/Yakuza Speech — yakuza scenes
“Standard” Tokyo dialect, but realistic and not “scripty”/”textbooky” — older people/mixed company
Real Kansai Dialect (not the fake variety show “何でやねん” kind) — Yamazaki (Tora)’s yakuza boss
But that’s part of what makes T&D so cool, and it’s part of what makes the scriptwriter, KUDOU Kankurou/宮藤 官九郎, so cool. So don’t worry about it, just enjoy yourself and keep learning. You’ll have 100% comprehension soon enough.
@Quend
I think the key to this sentence you gave isn’t even target-modifiers, but connectors/conjunctions. At the risk of saying something super obvious, this big sentence is nothing but a half-dozen or so smaller sentences, logically linked by connectives (in bold type).
A: ちなみに「幽霊」の部分は「未来人」とか「超能力者」とかでも置換可能だが
B: 言うまでもなくそんなもんが目の前をフラフラしているような世界はフィクションの世界であって現実にはなく
C: よってハルヒの悩みはこの世界で暮らす限り永遠に続くことになっている
D: はずだったのだが、
E: 実はそうとも言い切れないので
F: 俺も困り果てているところだ。
The overall structure is: “A and B therefore C — (D: or should have been, but actually as it turns out, not C but E), therefore F”.
The が at the end of section A is not working as a “but”, it’s working as an “and”. が can do that in Japanese. So can けど、けれど and けれども and any of their variants (けども, etc). However, しかし、にも拘らず、and とは言え CANNOT do the anding thing, and strictly work as “but”.
On the other hand, the が at the end of section D is working as a “but”.
▲▲▲ので means “because of ▲▲▲”, so ので works like から in that sense.
D uses the fact that Japanese frequently puts the core of a sentence at the END, to completely shift the meaning of the sentence. It’s a tool that comedians, authors and anyone else trying to be funny or interesting does.
Let me know if that helps. If you need more explanation, I’d be happy to give it.
Wow, thanks for that analysis. I sort-of knew that が could be used for “and” but I never new that about けど、けれど and けれども, thanks!
So, would you recommend going to a dictionary and searching for all these conjunctions and memorizing them or just checking on each as it comes along?
Btw did 師匠 say あたし in the 1st episode? or わたし I thought あたし was for females
>Btw did 師匠 say あたし in the 1st episode?
I think he did
>I thought あたし was for females
It generally is, but there are exceptions. In some dialects for example, both men and women use “俺”. As I see it, in general, the thing about male-female speech in Japanese isn’t sooo much that you CAN’T use word X at all because you are gender A, more that you can’t use word X frequently. Again, there is also the effect of dialects, but in ごくせん 2, the character 土屋 says “早退するわ“. So, I guess there is a bit of leeway.
>So, would you recommend going to a dictionary and searching for all these conjunctions and memorizing them or just checking on each as it comes along?
Mmm…it’s up to you. But since they are such useful words, might as well go look them up now. Just do it until you get bored.
OK, this is actually kind of fun, so let’s get into the individual clauses/sub-sentences.
A:
i) ちなみに
ii)「幽霊」の部分は
iii) 「未来人」とか
iv)「超能力者」とか
v) でも
vi) 置換可能だが
(i) just introduces the clause. (iii) and (iv) are tied to (v); (ii), (iii), (iv) and (v) tie together to modify (vi).
B:
i) 言うまでもなく
ii) そんなもんが目の前をフラフラしているような世界は
iii) フィクションの世界であって
iv) 現実にはなく
(iii) is modding (ii); (i) and (ii) modify (iv).
By the way, “そんなもん” in B refers to the original topic in A, that is “「幽霊」の部分”
C:
i) よって
ii) ハルヒの悩みは
iii) この世界で暮らす限り
iv) 永遠に続くことになっている
(i), (ii) and (iii) all modify (iv).
D:
Trivial
E:
i) 実は
ii) そうとも言い切れないので
iii) 俺も
iv) 困り果てているところだ。
(i) is introducing the clause; (ii) and (iii) modify (iv). The そう in E-2 refers to C, specifically to C-4
Not sure where to ask this, so I’ll throw it out here. Khatzumoto, I know that language classes are not highly regarded by you, and understandably because they often become a barrier to effective language aquisition instead of a help. When I say language classes, I’m not thinking about eikaiwa schools, but courses offered in high schools or universities for academic credit where graded evaluation is a given. I would love to hear your thoughts on possibly how a language teacher in such a situation could teach in a way that is complimentary to this approach instead of a hindrance. How could a teacher encourage and facilitate this kind of approach and still take a graded progress evaluation? Any brilliant ideas? Would love to hear your thoughts, and of course anyone elses.
@kurojohn
Wow, that’s a really good (and really constructive) question. I’ve spent so long either ignoring classes altogether or talking about how they suck that I haven’t given much thought to how they might be made to work.
As I see it, language is a very all-encompassing thing. Virtually anything and everything could constitute language practice. Part of the reason classes suck is they’re designed to optimize grading and not learning — to be easy to grade, but not necessarily to be easy to learn. “Why should they be easy to learn?” someone might say? Well, because learning is easy. You take one block of information and tie it to another. It’s easy. OK, but you know that already, so what you’re wanting to know is how we might:
>still take a graded progress evaluation
I think something that takes the SRS into account could be key. The teacher could take a student’s SRS database, and randomly select questions from it to produce a test; the random selection could bias toward older information that’s been reviewed a lot, which is even more interesting because it’s older information that usually trips up students. That way, every student could be tested on chunks of information that they actually were interested in [so, if you like Star Trek, more power to you!], and that connected to things that they wanted to know, because that’s what a language is (or should be) for — doing (reading, watching, listening to, writing and saying) what YOU want.
That test, randomly produced from the student’s own SRS, could take several forms to test different skills. There could be a part that just tests reading comprehension (given a sentence, read it out loud). Another part that tests listening comprehension (teacher dictates a sentence to you from your own SRS collection, and you have to write it down). Maybe a little spoken test where the student just talks about one of the materials that were the basis of her SRS entries (so, say she watched Cowboy Bebop, she could explain an episode, or explain the whole series, and answer questions about it); as a cautionary note, this spoken test shouldn’t be about how well the student knows the material in question — that’s not the point of the test — but about her Japanese: can she talk her way through and/or around a complex situation, with natural pronunciation, usage and cadence? Even if you don’t know the word for “spaceship”, if you can say “a space-travelling vehicle”, or you don’t know the word for “bounty hunter”, but can say “people outside of government organizations who catch criminals for money”…even if you forget something, or stumble, if you break out of that stumble in a Japanese way, then that has to count. The essence of fluency isn’t rote. It’s being quick on the old feet.
The SRS combines a lot of features that students and teachers both love. The teachers love the fact that an SRS rewards a consistent effort — not cramming. The SRS can also crunch out numbers that the teachers can combine in a more or less objective evaluation — number of items, number of kanji (variability), kanji frequency (quantity), average length of items, reps per day, adds per day, etc. Simply put, you can’t much lie or cheat past an SRS because it’s all about long-term effort. Furthermore, the teachers are also freed of the burden of making a test, the SRS randomly (and so, in a sense, fairly) creates a test based on the self-directed work of the student. The students, on the other hand, get freedom to choose their materials: no stupid, expensive textbooks, instead, the teacher could have a recommended list, and even build a library of student-suggested materials (books, comics, videos, the whole gig).
It’s the 21st century. People have access to information, to use a hackneyed phrase, “at their fingertips”. You don’t need a textbook, and you don’t need a teacher to give you information. You don’t need a supervisor sternly watching over you with carrot and stick. BUT, a consultant, someone who can tell you the things you can’t look up, someone to advise you on methods, someone to encourage you when you’re down, this is the kind of teacher that is appropriate to the situation we live in now. The teacher need not teach; the students can teach themselves. The teacher just needs to stand back, guide if asked, and evaluate fairly — almost like an uneven mix of coach, line-judge and referee.
Another thing — I’m envisioning this class having little or no class time. Or, it should only meet for administrative purposes — share SRS items, ask the teacher tough questions, borrow materials, share techniques and experiences. The main learning has to be done by the students in their own time; the students should spend less time with each other and more time with native speakers (whether in real life, or in simulo through audio and video); I think that one should always try to be outnumbered by native speakers. In my experience, anyone who thinks that classtime — an hour every weekday with 20 people who have no clue and one person who doesn’t care — is going to lead to real language proficiency is kidding themselves.
Anyway, thank you so much for that question. If you or anyone else have something that comes to mind, please feel free to add.
Those are extraordinary ideas! Kudos to Kurojohn for coming up with the question and Khatzumoto for the ideas! I’d say you should copyright and use them to found a new-approach language school 😀
Man, I’d support you if you did!
A teacher might also be in a good position to gauge a learners progress in a language. A big motivating factor for myself is knowing how far I’ve come, but it’s often difficult as the person doing the work to see how your ability has improved.