This is very basic vocabulary that you can use for making simple A is B and A does B sentences after the first lesson. They are all written in hiragana and romaji. Please use hiragana if possible (if you can use any kanji or katakana where appropriate, of course feel free to do so).
This is the last in my nano-series (heh heh) on all those sentences that end in various na, no, ni, combinations.
It can really feel like kana-soup at first can’t it?
Actually they are very easy and self-explanatory once you understand how they really work. The real problem is that because the standard “Western Japanese grammar” texts never explain a few basic facts about Japanese structure they can seem difficult and confusing when they really aren’t.
This is a short lesson on the pronunciation of う and ふ.
And it introduces a very special guest!
I think it matters on more levels than just pronunciation. Thinking that ふ really is “fu”, for example, is one of the things that confuses learners about Japanese structure itself.
Because we need to have a firm grasp of the kana-row relationships in order to grasp the way words are manipulated (or “conjugated” as Western grammar arbitrarily and confusingly designates about half of the process while leaving the other half undesignated).
So I think it will be helpful in more ways than one.
An unusual lesson this time as I was really not well enough to record a normal one and I didn’t want to leave my dear viewers without one. I hope you enjoy Chibi-sensei’s teaching.
I guess the people who find me strange will find her stranger – but that can’t be helped.
And for the people who do like me it’s a little chance to meet the family!
Lots of love to you all – haters and fans alike. But especially the fans – thank you so much for your constant support. It means so much to a poor sick doll!
Godan and ichidan verbs (so-called u and ru verbs) are one of the few areas where Japanese can seem as painful as a European language.
All ichidan verbs end in る (ru) but so do a significant number of godan verbs. So it really is true that you have to know them on a case-by-case basis. And for once even Dolly doesn’t have the One Logical Ring that binds them all.
But wait! Put away those word-lists. There’s still a much smarter way to learn which is much simpler and more effective than rote memorization.
Dolly explains all in this eye-opening seven-minute video.
Japanese sentence-ender particles are rooted in Japanese culture and ways of thinking.
Luckily these cultural implications are easy to understand at a basic level, and once you have that information the particles become easy to understand and to use.
This video goes over the commonest sentence ending particles and shows why they are used, what they imply and how to use them.
Most textbooks and schools teach desu-masu Japanese (teineigo) from the beginning.
This is a bad idea because desu-masu is not basic Japanese structure and it leads to a number of confusions about what basic Japanese structure really is. You can easily learn to put basic Japanese into desu-masu form once you have learned it. But learning that form first is learning upside-down.
This video shows exactly what goes wrong when you learn desu-masu first and how to avoid it.
Japanese learners can feel confronted by a vast array of strange sentence endings – n desu, na no desu, na n desu etc.
Complicated as they may feel they are actually very easy once you know how they work. However there are two little facts you need to know that the textbooks don’t tend to tell you.
Once you have them, you can understand all these endings and a lot more with no difficulty at all.
I hope you will enjoy this video that explains everything you need to know about n desu, no desu, na no desu and all their happy and much-simpler-than-they-seem cousins!
NOTE
In the video
母が来る haha ga kuru
Is translated as “mother is coming”. I think it is clear from context but I should state that this means “mother is coming” as in “mother is coming tomorrow” or “mother is coming later today” – not “mother is (now) in the act of coming” which would be
For the present Alice in Kanji Land is only available from Amazon. This is the US link; the book is also available from Amazon sites in other countries.
Alice in Kanji Land gives you a new, fun, and scientific way to learn kanji.
Up until now kanji books have used methods dating back centuries.
Alice in Kanji Land brings kanji learning into the 21st century, teaching kanji in the form of a narrative structurally linked to an SRS deck (included free) that will cement the kanji into your long-term memory with an algorithm based on the brain’s learning process.
It also teaches kanji not as abstractions but as part of the organic whole of language, making them easier to grasp and retain.
Using Alice in Kanji Land in conjunction with the deck (about 15 minutes per day) you will not just learn all the kanji needed for JLPT level 5 (all first-grade kanji and a substantial portion of second-grade kanji) together with quite a lot of vocabulary.
You will also learn
The radicals and underlying construction principles that will make it far easier to learn more kanji in future.
The ways in which kanji fit together in themselves and the ways in which they align with other kanji and kana to form words.
The principles behind the ways they are pronounced in different circumstances.
Learning kanji not as abstract isolates but as part of an organic whole turns an exercise in brute-force memorization into something more logical and easily graspable.
And if this all sounds a bit abstract – well, actually it’s fun. This is an Alice book after all…
Kanji as Character and Adventure
The age-old technique of making kanji into story-pictures is brought up to date by integrating it with an Alice in Wonderland storyline that makes encounters with the Kanji memorable and engages the emotional responses as well as intellectual ones (extremely important for memory).
We chose Alice not just because she’s cute. Also because the crazy logic and punning nature of the Alice books is exactly suited to the kind of thinking needed to make kanji mnemonics.
You can read the story without putting too much effort into memorizing the kanji.
Because the Alice in Kanji Land SRS deck will handle memorization for you.
The back of each card has extensive reminders of the story’s mnemonic elements in the notes after the answer. So you can refresh your memory by reminding yourself of the story as often as you need to.
After a while the story will drop into the background and the words will become second nature.
In accordance with our philosophy, there are no “abstract kanji” cards. The front of every card is a real word that has been introduced in the book, incorporating one or more kanji also introduced in the book.
The back of the card gives you the meaning and pronunciation of the word on the front. The word is spoken aloud by the card (well, you know how cards are in Alice) as well as being written.
Below the meaning and definition are notes reminding you of the mnemonic elements of the story. You can use these as much or as little as you need them.
In this video Cure Dolly herself explains Alice in Kanji Land and how it brings kanji learning into the 21st Century
This really is the game-changer in learning Japanese.
No ni and na no ni are frequently found in Japanese.
