Sentence Check

[nekojita]

Unfortunately 勝へ私は速く走らなければ is also wrong, grammatically. へ cannot indicate purpose. (Also 勝 is rarely used standing on it's own for "win" - 勝ち maybe).

I personally would go for a different conditional and the negative potential: 速く走らないと勝てない .

Mike was blunt, but he's right. Learn to walk before you run. The sort of grammar mistakes that you're making indicate to me that you need to go back and review the basics before mucking about with conditionals. i.e. do you understand why the way you used から in your first attempt was wrong?

You also need a better dictionary or to learn to use it better. You cannot simply take whatever word it first gives you when you plug in the English you want - you need to at minimum make sure it's the right part of speech, not archaic, and check a couple of example sentences.

Genki is a very good series and worth looking into. In terms of online stuff, there's always Erin's Challenge (WEB版 エリンが挑戦！にほんごできます。｜Global Home ).

 

[Mike Cash]

Reviewing my participation in the thread, I honestly don't see any place where I didn't offer sound advice or where what I said could reasonably be construed as being a "dick".

The errors present were of such a nature that it looked like he just pulled practically every element out of a dictionary and by rooting around through Tae Kim. It was the typical sort of post we so often get from people who haven't yet learned A, B, C and who get their a$$es on their shoulders if we don't humor them by explaining D to them....and it is IMPOSSIBLE to convince them that putting the cart before the horse isn't conducive to a positive Japanese learning experience, as so many aspects build on what what came before. I was trying to be kind and gentle by simply suggesting a GOOD textbook (and drill materials) rather than hurt his feelings by pointedly going through his sentence and showing how jacked up his understanding of the most fundamental beginner's stuff was. He wants his errors pointed out, but when I did list them rather than taking it to heart or asking constructive questions about the errors I listed for him and how to fix/avoid them, he just calls me a dick and tries to kick me out of his thread.

OP, it's nice that you went through Human Japanese. I'm not familiar with it, but all I can conclude is that either it is a worthless piece of crap you should get your money back for or you did just as poor a job of reading the explanations in it as you did of reading the explanations in Tae Kim. How many times was it necessary in this thread to ask you to go back and READ the explanation?

You seem to think you have absorbed all the "basics" from Human Japanese, but what we have seen from you in this thread makes it questionable whether you understood any of it, as you have applied practically nothing correctly. I realize you've probably invested quite a few hours studying Japanese so far and it quite naturally hurts your pride to be told you need to get a proper textbook and start over at Lesson One, but that is simply the unvarnished truth of the matter. Get over your wounded pride and hurt feelings. None of us are too good to go back to the beginning and make sure we have the basics down as well as we should. When I recently decided to go back and do a thorough kanji review to fill in the gaps and knock the rust off, I started right back with the first grade elementary school list that I first learned in 1985 and worked my way on up. It didn't hurt me to go back and redo stuff I thought I had learned perfectly thirty years ago (I found some things I have been doing WRONG for thirty years) and it sure as hell won't hurt you to go back a few days or weeks or however long ago you started this and make sure you're starting off with a solid foundation.

You want to have hurt feelings, that's up to you. But there was no malice in anything I said to you and nothing wrong with the advice I gave you. I will do everything I can to help you or anyone else in any way I can, but the one thing I refuse to waste my time on is answering cart-before-the-horse questions.

If you're short on coin, I will repeat: some unscrupulous people have scanned Genki into a pdf file and placed it on the internet. I wouldn't be surprised if the workbooks and audio have been similarly illegally pirated and made freely available to anyone with access to a search engine.

 

[lanthas]

Human Japanese is a desktop/mobile application that serves as a short appetizer to the language. It isn't, nor does it claim to be, a resource for learning Japanese to a usable level. Grammatically it doesn't go beyond the <stem>たい form; the dictionary form of verbs, let alone any kind of conditionals, are not shown. (I went through it myself before starting on Genki)

 

[Mike Cash]

Human Japanese is a desktop/mobile application that serves as a short appetizer to the language. It isn't, nor does it claim to be, a resource for learning Japanese to a usable level. Grammatically it doesn't go beyond the <stem>たい form; the dictionary form of verbs, let alone any kind of conditionals, are not shown. (I went through it myself before starting on Genki)

Thanks for that. It explains a lot.