Daily journal (ganbat2)

こんにちは、みなさん。私はunilang.orgの長年の会員がだ。そこに日本のｺﾐｭﾆﾃｨがあるけどそんなに活発でない。そうだから新しいｺﾐｭﾆﾃｨを探すことにした、jref.com/forum. なるべく日本語を勉強することが出来ればいいんだけど。What I've started below is my very own Japanese journal. I plan to write in it daily and I hope you all are able to help me with corrections. So, without further delay, here we go.

4/26/11
三月二十一日に読み始めたのJapanese - A Comprehensive Grammarと言う日本語の文法書を読むことがちょうどちら終わった。そんな長い本を読み終わるのはほんとに気持ちがいい。650ペ一ジくらいだと思うよ。でももちろん全ての内側にあることがまたよく分からない。私の計画はゆっくり読んだことを分析して分かるとその言葉や発想などを規則的一文で使うことだ。
I just finished reading a book called "Japanese - A Comprehensive Grammar" that I started reading on March 21st. It feels good to finish reading a book that long. I think it's like 650 pages long. But, of course, I don't know everything that's in the book yet. My plan is to analyze what I read slowly and as I understand it, use those words, expressions, etc. in regular everyday sentences.

Darn it, why does my freaking nose keep running? I didn't do anything to make it run like it's running now.
、なんで鼻/鼻水が出りつづけるのは。いまこんなに出るのようが出させられたこともしなかったんだから。

Have you heard of lang-8 (link in sig)? I think it's probably more suited for that sort of thing. Not that people here won't help, but I think you'll get more corrections more quickly from more native speakers at lang-8. This place is better for asking questions about grammar, word usage, general study topics, etc.

Also, if you ever just want to have a conversation in Japanese there are the 一般的なフォーラム for general topics and 日本語の勉強 for Japanese-language-specific questions/discussions.

Anyway, welcome to the forums! And a couple of things I noticed:

である shows up at the beginning, but then you've got んだけど later. The former is formal written language, and the latter is informal spoken language. It's a bit strange to mix them.

読め始めた should be 読み始めた. Likewise with 読め終わる -> 読み終わる. 読める is potential, and means "can read". 読む is the normal "to read" version.

の isn't needed to connect verbs to nouns, so 読め始めたのJapanese - A Comprehensive Grammar -> 読み始めたJapanese - A Comprehensive Grammar.

That's all I've got for now.

Ah, thanks for the corrections, I guess I'll move this to lang-8 then.

On second thought and after receiving my first corrections there on lang-8, I'd rather do the journal here for a number of reasons. Mainly though, because it is sort of like a free-for-all there. One gets feedback but the layout is so different than just an open forum. Also, I am sure the level of input is much higher on sites like this one and unilang. Primarily because they are natives and I assume you all are either foreigners who have gone through the pain of learning Japanese to a extremely high level or natives who are very well educated in English and it's grammar. Very different than "random" users correcting your work.

I do hope it is ok to continue here. Also, I'm not in such a hurry that I can't wait a day or two for a response. This forum seems active enough for me!

Ah, well...

By the way, when writing in Japanese on this forum you have to make sure if you use half-width characters that you have an even number for every 50 (or 25 full-width characters), otherwise you'll end up with mojibake. You can avoid that altogether by using full-width characters exclusively. See your post above (in case you hadn't already noticed).

I'm not sure I understand what you're referring to regarding Mojibake (whatever that is). I didn't notice some typos in my original first post that just seemed to appear out of no-where. When I type in Japanese, I just go to Hiragana mode and click the "KANA" button so I'm typing using the JIS keyboard layout... I was under the impression that I was using full-width characters, or whatever the standard is, automatically.

I do notice that the forum here keeps destroying the spacing in the posts that I make. Quite frustrating.

By the way, can I assume that the remainder of my entry for 4/26/11 is correct then? Or am I awaiting further corrections?

Mojibake is nonsense characters. They're all gone now.

The Japanese text is all full-width; it's the English text and numbers that can be mixed in that cause the problem. For instance, in your first post you have "Japanese - A Comprehensive Grammar" and "650" in half-width characters.

The text breaks disappearing is another issue that takes some getting used to. I copy all of my posts and paste them in the text box when I edit to keep them.

ganbat2 said:

By the way, can I assume that the remainder of my entry for 4/26/11 is correct then? Or am I awaiting further corrections?

Click to expand...

There are still corrections to be made. I just picked what I found obvious (to me). I don't like doing too much, because I feel like native speakers are better at it than I am.

Ah ok. I finally figured out the Mojikabe references you were speaking of. I have fixed that now. Thanks!