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New Youtube Channel to Learn Japanese

hanaflow3r

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7 Nov 2017
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Here I am years later still trying to learn Japanese. But now I'm ready to put in the work that is needed. I am going to be documenting this process through youtube and teaching what i am learning here is a video about -i and-na adjectives. I hope to get support from this forum in my learning journey thank you!!! here is one of my videos
 
I hope that you are posting this to invite helpful critique, and not just to pad your view count. As such, a few points:
  1. At 0:17, you mistakenly said that these differences are used to conjugate verbs, when your video is about adjectives.

  2. as you mentioned, the "i" is pronounced [ i ], not [ ai ]. As such, they are called "i-adjectives," not "ai-adjectives." Stop thinking about romaji in English.

  3. Pronunciation is generally good and clear, but your American stress accent is very apparent, particularly with words like 立派な (rippa na), 便利な (benri na)、and 静かな (shizuka na). Also, 汚い (kitanai) is an i-adjective, not a na-adjective. You also pronounced "kawaii" in a way that sounded more like "kowai," and you had a small pause that made "shoujiki" sound like "shoujikki." Know that as a moraic language, each kana is given equal time when spoken, so even a slight pause like that can change the word completely.

  4. When they're nominalized, it's 大きい→大きな (ookii→ooki na) and 小さい→小さな (chiisai→chiisa na), not "chiisai na." Note that the word-final い is dropped. You wrote them down correctly but you mispronounced "chiisa na"
If your goal is to talk about the difference between the adjective types, you can give some examples, but you spend too much time listing vocabulary instead of ensuring that you've succinctly explained the underlying concepts of adjectival conjugation, and HOW those two kinds of adjectives are conjugated differently. It's not even apparent that you are aware of this, as there are no examples of anything other than the plain form in your video.

If I were trying to introduce this concept in a way that was helpful, I would probably first acknowledge the different kinds of adjectives, and then focus solely on one type, then save the other for another video. I would also take a very small number of examples, and demonstrate how they are actually conjugated in different ways.

They say to teach is to learn twice, but you must also make sure that you have a solid foundation in these things to be sure that you aren't teaching things incorrectly. It's equally important for you to at least acknowledge in your videos and titles that you yourself are just a student, and that you may be mistaken about things. To someone who knows this is clear, but to another beginner, they are in danger of learning incorrect things from you. Exercise caution when you present yourself as a teacher.
 
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Also be careful when pronouncing what we as English speakers might think of as elongated vowels or double vowels. That and ignoring the sound change represented by a small っ are a couple of really common errors among English speakers when we start learning Japanese. I believe that it is largely due to us feeling silly or self-conscious about it, but they are important distinctions in Japanese and their presence or absence can completely change the meaning of a word.

Specifically, things like "chiisai" and "yuumei" are examples of what I'm talking about.

ち / い / さ / い four beats
ゆ / う / め / い four beats

You have to hit them all. You can't just scrunch the adjacent identical vowels (in romaji, anyway) together.

We have a Learning Japanese section and we welcome you to join us there for anything we can help you with.
 
Your right i did notice that i made a quite a few mistakes in this video i shouldnt of uploaded it thank you for helping me. I used to be better at Japanese but after taking three years break I'm very very rusty.
 
I have changed the videos to Japanese Practice instead of lesson. And Please help me in the future. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu (i think lol)
 
I have changed the videos to Japanese Practice instead of lesson. And Please help me in the future. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu (i think lol)
Yes that is correct. Don't take the critique/corrections as discouragement, just a warning about how you present yourself and the information that you are still absorbing yourself. Mike's recommendation to use the learning Japanese board is an excellent one.
 
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