writing in japanese
August 4th, 2005 by heatherin a previous post, TelimTor suggested in the comments that i could write in japanese. seemed crazy to me at the time. but now that i’ve got a whopping 15 hiragana characters down, (the unvoiced, vowels, k’s and s’s) i can start taking notes in japanese. now that is fun.
(in mac, i clicked on the flag near the clock- and went to “international” i activated the japanese input methods available, and the kana palette. hey presto, i can type!)
あお- blue! (yay! i just typed that!)
えき- station (woo-hoo! to switch between hiragana or english input i just have to toggle by pressing apple + spacebar!)
あおえき= blue station. whoah. i don’t even know if i can say that in japanese yet, because i have no clue where adjectives go! how great!
あか - red!
いし- stone! (hey that’s cool, for し you can type both ’si’ and ’shi’ and it gives you the little hook you need)
i am so not going to get bored of this.
かさ- umbrella, how about あかかさ? a red umbrella!
oh goodie. i can’t wait until i can make sense.
wait a second! just one second… i’m so confused.
i went to check in the translation tool online at http://dictionary.com/ and red is 赤い … not あか … and blue is 青い not あお … what’s up with that? is this some kind of kanji bait-and-switch?
grr… i just hit a learning wall. *grimace*
August 5th, 2005 at 10:44 am
if you press space after typing the word, it gives you the “kanji version” of the word, which is the one that appears in the dictionary.
August 5th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
ah-ha! excellent! thank you. i see a whole menu of stuff actually.
i really need to get a dictionary too!
August 6th, 2005 at 6:28 am
I’m glad to see your spirits are high after getting some characters under your belt. It’s very satisfying
As for 赤 「あか」, that is the pronunciation of the kanji by itself, but the full word for red is 赤い 「あかい」. The same goes for blue, which is 青い 「あおい」.
And here’s a quick little grammar tip: if you want to say “adjective describing noun”, just say “adjective な(na) noun”. So for your example of blue station, you would say
青い な 駅
あおい な えき
Hope that helps,
さよなら!
August 6th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
I don’t think ‘adjective な noun’ tells the whole story.
い adjectives like あおい and あかい go straight in front of the noun. A red umbrella would be あかいかさ or 赤い傘 in kanji).
The other type of adjective is called a な adjective. ゆうめい (meaning famous) is a な adjective. A famous park would be: ゆうめいなこうえん or 有名な公園 in kanji.
I’m sure I’ve seen な adjectives described somewhere as ‘pseudo adjectives’, but I can’t lay my hands on the reference just now.
August 7th, 2005 at 9:59 am
I’ve posted on my website a couple of pdf files that show how to use i-adjectives and na-adjectives. These are things I began putting together when I first hit adjectives a few months ago, trying to get my head around how the two types work. They’re on the Files page of www.earthcallingdavid.com.
Best regards,
David
August 8th, 2005 at 12:02 am
It’s not a kanji bait-and-switch, exactly. While it’s true that everything one is able to say in Japanese CAN be written using hirigana, that’s just not how the Japanese do it. They use kanji. Virtually any Japanese that you might ever want to read is going to involve the little buggers. You can’t get away from ‘em.
I’m currently working my way through ハリーポッタと賢者の石 (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) for reading practice. I have enough context and vocabulary to work my way through the text with only three or four lookups per page, so it’s not an unbearable slog for me. So that you can see what I mean about the whole kanji thing, here’s a selection of the text:包みをここで開けないように。中身は新品のニンバス２０００です。あなたが箒を持ったとわかると、みんなが欲しがるので、気づれないように。今夜七時、クィヂィッチ競技場でウッドが待っています。最初の練習です。
Somewhat approximately, the selection above reads: “Do not open the package here. Inside is a brand-new Nimbus 2000. If it’s known that you have a broom, everyone will want one, so don’t let them find out. At seven o’clock tonight, Wood will be waiting at the quidditch field, for your first practice.”
This is a children’s book and that’s what, five sentences? In those five sentences, there are fifteen kanji-using words employing some twenty-two kanji characters. As I said, you can’t get away from ‘em… might as well get started learning ‘em.
Best of luck!
August 16th, 2006 at 3:42 am
as mentioned by others, there are two adjectives; i-adjective and na-adjective. i-adjective is where the word end with hiragana i. for i-adjective, you say (i-adjective) + noun. for example: aoi kasa (blue umbrella) .
na-adjective is where the word has no hiragana but only kanji, for example kirei, yuumei etc. for na-adjctive, you say (na-adjective) + na+ noun. for example; kirei na ji (neat writing), yuumei na kashu (popular singer).
there are of course exceptions, for example, ookii maybe be used as i-adj and na-adj.