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

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

I just decided to take up Japanese myself, under the influence of How to Learn Any Language and your example. What manga do you recommend as reading material, and where should I get it?

[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]

Whatever keeps your interest. Oh, and "juvenile" enough to have the pronunciation guides displayed alongside the kanji.

I had languished in Japanese class in High School, barely passing 4 semesters of it. Until a fellow student introduced me to Ranma 1/2. A Kung-Fu, Arranged-Marriage, Magical-Transvestite Sitcom? I was in.

I wore out my little tourists' dictionary in a month. I wound up memorizing the vocabulary so I wouldn't have to break my story-following pace to go look up every other word. I wound up doing live page-turning translations at the school's anime club within the year. I passed the state exam at the end of my third year with a 97%.

While I had 2 years of grammar classes before any of that, my motivation to look past the grammar rules was locked away, fearing the investment reports that were sure to come from Learning Japanese in the early 90's, until all those ballistically launched fiancees caught my fancy.

Even if your goal is more of the "I want to be able to read the signs while I'm there" bent, you should learn the hiragana followed by the katakana sound-grams. Once you do, you'll start to see that half of modern japanese is made of borrowed English. The other 2 halves are borrowed Cantonese-Chinese, and "who came up with this stuff?".

Yes, that comes out to 3 halves. But that's a topic for another day.

[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)"

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Oh, Ranma would be fun. I've seen some of the video version. I think I'm going to go poke around Kinokinuya and see what looks good.

As of tonight (day two), I know ten hiragana.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

My favorite learning set recently was Love, Hina, an ecchi manga about an insecure young man who inherits a hotel that rents out only to college girls. You can find those at Kinokinuya. Hijinks ensue. It was especially useful because it had furugana (next to the kanji, the printer put the hirigana for the word). For the more outrageous and hardcore stuff, I tend to use http://tokyotosho.com, where you can find lots of fanfic (the Japanese fanfic is comics, the ways ours in written) and stuff not licensed in the U.S. (and hence, has no controlling legal authority), but downloading stuff there is painfully hit-or-miss. Fortunately, the loli and guro ("gross") mangas are usually clearly marked and easy to avoid, but the quality of the rest is a real mixed bag.

[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.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Neat, thanks for the info.