Wally Nes’ Blog

As you may have read earlier. The Japanese Language consist of continuous sentences. One can dissect these sentences by recognizing the particles. These particles are letters and therefor indistinguishable from a letter in a word in plain Hiragana sentences.

Lucky for us . . . .Japanese doesn’t use plain hiragana sentences outside of children’s books.

There’s Kanji.

This takes care of the whole “is this thing a particle or part of a word” and “where does this word end anyway” thing. Well, mostly anyway.

OK, so a Kanji represents a concept in pictograph form. Well, read the wikipedia link I put up, coz I ain’t gonna explain all of it to you.

There’s a few problems with writing with concepts.

今 means now.

But because it’s a concept, you can combine it with 日(day) to form today.
Obviously this example is pretty logical.

But, now I have to learn the hiragana or phonetical form (have to know how to pronounce the damn thing don’t I), the pictogram and the meaning.

Now here’s the sticky bit:

今 is pronounced ima
日 is pronounced nichi
今日 is pronounced kyoo

That’s right. The meaning is clear to me, but I can’t just mindlessly slap the pronunciation of “now” and “day” together and call it today.

Every Kanji has at least 2 pronunciations. The Japanese and “Chinese”(meaning Chinese pronounced by Japanese people . . . think people talking in a language of a country they visited in their youth: very convincing to their peers, but not even close to the original). And there are Kanjis which have 5 pronunciations. The concept is still the same though . . . . Yes, that’s right. With a little practice grasping the meaning of Japanese is far easier than reading aloud what the damn things say.

So there’s plenty of stuff to learn. Obviously with so many different concepts contained within 1 pictogram learning to draw them properly is quite important. 年 and 午being some of the simpler examples but 輸,魚,鳥,馬 and 地震 showing some of the busier Kanji. And with some things requiring 4 or more Kanji to express their meaning . . . well, things have to be done fairly precise.

So we have multiple pronunciations per Kanji. Good for us. Learning to do things properly will keep us off the street. But, even though the Japanese Language consists of more sounds than our alphabet (43 vs 26) one could imagine that with multiple ways of pronouncing the same thing one would run out of space.

The Japanese have a solution for this though. They’ve made things that sounds the same . . . . . have different meanings. Of course! Brilliant!

たかい is expensive
たかい is tall

Oh, they have different Kanji (高値)(高価). But it’s not like people draw those out for you while having a conversation. No . . . . you’ll just have to draw your conclusions from the rest of the conversation. Though I suppose in this case that only conflicts when you’re planning to buy a building.

But in cases of say: “かい”, which has 27 different meanings one can see things start getting a little bit trickier

=======================================================================

Lesson Quote of the day:

Wally: Wouldn’t it be smarter to conjugate from the Dictionary form to this form
As we’ve already done it from the polite form and we should be basing our Verbs and Conjugations on Dictionary form anyway?

Sensei: Yes

Sensei: [verb]-masu?

Wally: . . . .

Sensei: Wally?

Wally: I was just thinking . . . .
Wally: I thought I just asked if it wouldn’t be more usefull to conjugate from the Dictionary form

Sensei: Yes

Wally: And you agreed

Sensei: Yes

Wally: I see, thank you. Nice to see we can communicate properly. The correct conjugation of this Polite form to plain-Negative form is [conjugated verb]-nai

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 7:03 am and is filed under Japanese (Language). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.