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Want to learn Japanese

lucky7456969

後輩
10 Aug 2012
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Hi, I am a Hong Kong Chinese whose name is Jack. I learned Japanese in my secondary school which wasn't that thorough.
I've learned basic hiragana, katagana, some kanji and some really really basic grammar.
My friends told me to join a class, but I want to learn really pure native Japanese. Any good people willing to help?
Thanks
Jack
 
Let's start with namae, sometimes 2 japanese names with same kanjis sound different, why?
And sometimes when 2 words are consecutive, how do you dismantle the meaning of each word?
 
"音読み 訓読み" "On yomi Kun yomi" for starters. Most kanji have several different ways to pronounce them. As for names, you will just have to ask the person how it is pronounced. Names in particular fall under the common practice of "ateji" ,"当て字".

You can get the jist of the meaning by looking at the two kanji separately, but in the end usually when several kanji are put together they form a "word" (Don't know if I can say this) with a particular meaning, so it is pretty hard to split them up and get the meaning for that conjugation of kanji
 
Thanks Dave, in the same way as chinese, but when one japanese word (i mean hiragana) is divided into letters (like english), 2 words with 2 different sets of letters sticked together, it is really difficult to see where it starts and where it ends.

How do I determine when to use hiragana, katagana or kanji to describe something?
 
Good idea, actually I learned some when I was young, studying in Australia up to Year 11. Due to time constraint, I want to learn the way it is now:(

My teacher came from 京都. She is very nice and she loves painting a lot, especially painting rural areas.

She taught us very conventional Japanese with masu, mashita. I learned katsuta(da) [forgot] on my own, meaning past tense?

But I lost contact with her even from the organization she joined. What a pity. Sigh.
Thanks
 
Thanks Dave, in the same way as chinese, but when one japanese word (i mean hiragana) is divided into letters (like english), 2 words with 2 different sets of letters sticked together, it is really difficult to see where it starts and where it ends.
When I started trying to learn Japanese I thought the lack of spaces betwen words would be a huge problem, but this aspect of the language is nowhere near so hard as I expected. A big help is that the kanji characters help to show you where the word breaks fall, and to distinguish the main "content" words from all the little grammatical words and grammatical inflections, which are typically in hiragana. So, to give a simple example, in 私の両親は愛知県で生まれた, you can tell straight away, almost just from the disposition of kanji and hiragana, that the basic word structure is

私 ・ の ・ 両親 ・ は ・ 愛知県 ・ で ・ 生まれた

Obviously there are many cases where hiragana words abut, and sometimes these can be trickier, but generally speaking the hiragana words are the common ones and so are easier to recognise.
 
Although I've been reading books where for some reason the author/translator decided to eschew the kanji of all the words and ended up with a string of hiragana that was next to impenetrable and had me screaming in my head 漢字使え、チクショウ!
 
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