How is your Kanji coming along? If you are at a stage where you are studying Kanji then it should come as no surprise that the bulk of Japanese script is not actually Japanese, but Chinese in origin. Originally, Japanese was a spoken language without written form. It was only after contact with the Chinese was established, that the Japanese were exposed to the concept of written record. Eventually this lead to the borrowing of the Chinese writing system for recording spoken Japanese.

Because Japanese was originally a spoken language and very different from Chinese, modern Japanese is a hybrid of classical Japanese and classical Chinese pronunciations expressed in Japanese phonemes. This is reflected in the names of the “readings” for kanji: readings that come from classical spoken Japanese are called kunyomi, and readings that come from classical Chinese are called onyomi.

A problem with these readings is that it is not always clear when to use which reading. There are no rules that state that a kanji is read in a particular way when used on its own, or when part of a word. The only real way to make sure you are using the right reading for a kanji when encountered in a context that you had not seen it in before, is to look it up – while sometimes one can guess whether a kunyomi or onyomi is used, it is typically impossible to be certain.

This is a frustrating aspect of learning Kanji. Looking up kanji can be very time consuming and will tempt you to give up reading Japanese altogether. The best way to learn Kanji and vocabulary is in context. Depending on each Kanji, in most cases you will find one “dominate” reading that will appear in compounds (combined Kanji words) a large percentage of the time. More often than not you only need to know one reading for some kanji. This is while trying to memorize several readings for hundreds of Kanji in no context is pointless and time wasting. If you are going to learn Kanji, then try to learn Kanji by reading it in context.

It seems like a lot of people are searching for a hot Japanese woman or sexy Japanese women on the web. If it is your dream to date or marry a Japanese woman, then your in luck. More and more Japanese women are marrying foreigners or looking abroad for love that will bring them the qualities in a partner that they can’t find in Japanese males. Many Japanese women want to escape what they know their own mothers endured – a life of “domestic hardship” serving others. If a Japanese woman marries the oldest son of a family, she is expected to live with that family and look after her in laws. Later when they have children it is her sole role to take care of the children. Then that Japanese woman will have to give up her career and interests and do house work pretty much everyday for many years. As you can imagine, the love dies early in marriages, Japanese woman start refusing their husbands ( have no sex) and then men start having affairs.

Japanese women are looking for men who will be supportive of a wifes’ career and more of a partner in daily responsibilities of running a family. The modern Japanese woman marries later in life, is career focused and is breaking away form traditions and social expectations faster than their male counterparts. Japanese women basically want a life. Yet, Japanese society is still very unwilling to let this happen. The expectation for Japanese women to marry early and have children is still very much alive. Recently, the Minister of Health recently called upon women to perform their duty as “baby making machines” and start producing children to tackle Japan shrinking population problem.

Japanese women age very well. Their diet and active lifestyle (house work and raising children) keeps them slim. You have probably know this book “Japanese Woman Don’t Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen”. Japanese mature woman look years younger and more and more are getting divorced.

An important part of Japanese is being able to use the right level of formality in the right situation. Using formal speech in an informal setting makes you sound strange, and using informal speech in a formal setting makes you sound rude. Japanese formality comes in two degrees.

Firstly, there’s the plain/polite form of speech called “teineigo” which is principally determined by the absence or use of desu and masu. This is the Japanese you generally learn in text books and at private colleges. Secondly, there’s the use of humble and honorific forms of speech, called kenjyougo and sonkeigo respectively, when dealing with vast social status differences between the speaker and listener or speaker and subject. These two ‘degrees’ are independent of each other, in that one can be plain humble or humble polite, as well as plain honorific and honorific polite, should one want to explore the full range of options.

How and when to talk plain or polite, and when to be humble or when to be honorific, depends very much on the concept of in and out group, as well as familiarity. In ones familiar in group, one can talk in a plain and informal manner, while talking to someone who is part of ones formal in group, or part of an out group, typically warrants polite speech. When one talks to someone in ones out group that is of clearly higher social status and you wish to acknowledge this fact, humble and honorific speech is typically used as well as polite form.

As a non-native speaker there will be no expectation of you to speak polite Japanese, by Japanese. However, when you first met Japanese they will most likely speak to you using polite Japanese. In particular, phone calls and talking to staff in any customer service role you will find particularly difficult. You will be lucky if you understand anything at all.

As a beginner you will only want to concern yourself with teineigo – the use of desu and masu. Unless you intend to go to Japan for business and are determined to speak Japanese while doing business then I wouldn’t worry about learning kenjyogo or sonkeigo for the time being.

When students start learning Japanese they often being with Romaji believing it is Japanese. Romaji is the transliteration of an aspect of Japanese into a western writing system. While this sounds useful, because it means Japanese can thus be written in western letters, this is a false assumption, because of the fact that romaji only captures one aspect of the language per romaji scheme chosen. The most important thing to realise is that romaji is not Japanese.

We can distinguish two main functions of romaji, namely phonetic transliteration, and syntactic transliteration. The first tries to mimic what Japanese sounds like to the western ear. The second tries to mimic the order that is found in the kana tables. Romaji can,to a degree, accurately reflect the pronunciation of Japanese, thus making it easy to read as the reader’s brain can instantly turn the words into internally vocalized words. It can also,to a degree,  accurately reflect what the kana is supposed to look like. However, Japanese   with written romaji becomes hard to read because what is written and how it should be internally vocalized are two completely different things.

 
So why use romaji to teach Japanese, when one can use Japanese script instead? I guess the idea is that the phonetic scheme lets non-Japanese readers understand written “Japanese” easily without having to know how to read real Japanese to make sense of it.  However, why would you want to understand written Japanese without having to know how to read real Japanese?
Students of Japanese learn romaji because they don’t really want to learn Japanese or they have the false idea that romaji is Japanese. In the end it is either poor teaching on the part of the teacher or laziness on the part of the student. The idea that kana is difficult to learn is also false. Learning kana, Hiragana and Katakana, is not something that will take months, if one will be studying Japanese anyway. It takes about a week to memorize hiragana to a level that continued practice (which is what someone who’s studying will be doing anyway) and exposure to Japanese texts will perfect for you, even if you don’t really try.
Ideally, students should never be exposed to romaji at all in their educational material, save when the pronunciation for the kana is explained. However, when it is used, it should be remembered that students will understand that Japanese written in western letters does not accurately reflect the way it is written in Japanese.

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You know what adverbs are, right? Adverbs modify verbs. In English, adverbs are words like “slowly” in “John slowly walked down the street.” or “creatilvey” in “My wife creatilvely folded the paper into a crane.”  Students of Japanese tend to learn one adjective, the adjective totemo and then move on Kanji or keigo or something else. I guess the reson for this Japanese adverbs are a little confusing. So let’s learn a few adjectives to put a little wasabi in your Japanese

In Japanese there are two kinds of adverbs. There are adverbs and then modfied adjectives that play the role of  adverbs.The first kind are words that have always been adverbs, and the second are adjectives that are placed in a particular inflection so as to act adverbially. You will understand. In fact you are probably already using these adjectival adverbs.

 General adverbs

The first type of adverbials are mostly quantifiers. Words such as sukoshi, meaning “a little bit”, zutto, meaning “very much”/”throughout” or tokidoki, meaning “sometimes”.

Here is a list of a few more;

Daibu – greatly
Totemo – very
Taihen -  very, awfully

Adjectival adverbs
The second type can be constructed out of either verbal adjectives, or noun adjectives. However, the way they are inflected to become adverbs is different for the two.
 
Verbal Adjectives
Change verbal adjectives to the ku form and  then it can be used as an adverb. For instance, the verbal adjective hayai, meaning “early” can be made an adverb by dropping the i and adding ku, resulting in hayaku. This can then be used with for instance the verb for “waking up”, okiru: hayaku okiru – to wake up early.

Here are a few more;
hidoku – appallingly
sugoku -  terribly, amazingly
yoku – well
tsuyoku – strongly

Noun adjjectives
Noun adjectives can be turned into adjectives by instead of adding na as suffix, adding ni as suffix. For instance, kirei is a noun adjective meaning “pretty”, kireini is an adverb meaning pretty. If we pair this with the verb for “to split”, wakeru we get niwakeru meaning “to cleanly split” (such as a piece of cake spilt among children)

nazen ni – completely
amari ni excessively
migoto ni – astonishingly
hijyou ni – extraordinarily
yakeni – horribly

I hope this helps. Now you should know a few more adjectives than just tetomo.

Can you read Hiragana?

And I mean actually read Hiragana – words, phrases and paragraphs.  Don’t make the mistake thinking that if you can identify Hiragana on flash cards it means you are reading Japanese. So can you really read Hiragana?

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