Sometimes, it takes only one.

[elfs]

Studying kanji is a pain in the neck, especially since my practice material of choice is hentai manga. But sometimes, all it takes is one ideogram to make all the difference. Today, I learned one, and whole pages started to make much more sense to me. That one is 私, watashi, the first person singular. "For me," "to me," "by me," "I want," "I did," tons of meaning I'd never quite grasped. The other kanji that really made it easy to speed ahead that I experienced recently was 何, nani, meaning "what," but it wasn't nearly as effective as 私 in making manga make sense.

Comments

[woggie.livejournal.com]

Thank you for spelling out the words you're learning which have meaning to you. They help me too.

Nani in particular is something I hear in anime all the time, but I didn't know what it meant until now.

I'll have to listen for watashi. I'm sure it's there, and I'm just not picking it out because I'm not parsing the sounds correctly.

[outward-vision.livejournal.com]

Keeping in mind a recent post (http://elfs.livejournal.com/585136.html), also keep an eye/ear out for these variations of announcing oneself:

boku: "for boys"
atashi: "only used by girls"
watak-shi: "I bring the burden of formality"
ore: "I'm young and a badass, so I don't have to give a crap about formality"
washi: "I'm old, and life's too short for too much formality"
watashi: "I am normal(passive/neutral)"

[elfs.livejournal.com]

You'll probably hear boku a lot. That's the way boys say "I" when talking among themselves. (One of the recurring gags of Girl Meets Girl is that the main character, who was recently turned into a girl by space aliens, still refers to herself with boku, resulting in much confusion.) Girls often say atashi. There are other forms, but they're less common.

Other terms you hear a lot: anata and omae. The latter is more familiar, less formal, than the former, and a character's transition from one to the other is used in anime to signal his or her acceptance of others as friends or compatriots.

Oh, and if any of these words has -tachi attached to the end of the, it's plural. Watashitachi is "we", and "anatatachi" is "you all."

Minna means "everybody." It doesn't need a plural form.