Here's what I wrote in my moleskine today:
Yesterday, I learned three Nihongo words, or "Nihongo no words" if you wanted to codeswitch
no, or の seems to be a particle denoting possession, like "me of book" to describe a book belonging to me. "watashi no book" is better though :-)
I also learned ta, or た which means many,frequently,and also(though the non-hirigana is different I'm sure) rice field. I am imagining た to mean something like "vast expanse containing many things, like grains of rice in a field" this may be wrong, but it's only the beginning of the evolution.
The last word i learned is ha, or は. I am least clear on the meaning of this word, but I understand it is to be a topic marker. I'm assuming this either means that it is a particle used after a word to denote what we are talking about(ex: he は ran) or it's used to refer to the implied topic (ex: は exciting desu)
I'm using mnemosyne to study Nihongo. It's a very cool [flash card] tool. simple, question, answer, link images and sound to both questions and answers, vise versa option, categories, system to refresh you on old material and not overwhelm you with new material. it's worth checking out unless you're not interested in learning or retaining.
I'm using wikipedia, wikiversity, some other site, and google image search for word meanings and previously mentioned other site for pronounciation. forvo too. I'm using wordfreq_ck [from this place] for a word list. It's some overhead, but, it's fun, it's how i learn new English words, and the different angles only help me better understand a word's greater meaning.
I'll be at 10 words/day soon, then it's just a matter of continuing for a year until I reach a critical state to start devouring wikipedia.jp. That's the intended goal. After that, it's ez-mode for my personality.
[apparently は is ha or wa in romanji, so I kinda already knew that word. My thanks to Rebecca]
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3 comments:
Good luck. I spent several months learning a very small bit of vocabulary last year.
But the kanji...whew...forget it. There's so many kanji that they don't have an unabridged dictionary of it all. It's so much tougher for me to wrap my brain around that!
"Ganbatte" - there is your new word for today.
You are right は is used for simply marking the subject. Imagine that in English we actually wrote like this:
Charles subject is studying Japanese.
replace "subject" with ha, and you have the same thing.
Learning vocabulary is most important in the early phase. But if you want to learn to communication I suggest after you have a 40-50 word vocabulary - start trying to connect them in meaningful ways (grammatically correct).
I suggest listening to the podcast Japanesepod101.com to help you learn Japanese. Check out the beginner series when you are ready to start learning grammar.... (let me know when you do, and I'll hook you up with a 1Month premium subscription)
I'm fighting with grammar and vocabulary. My grammar is getting better, but lack of a full vocabulary is killing me. Using those flashcards is a good idea - i may try that program (looks like we can exchange the "cards"?)
one last thought... whats up with the moleskine craze? I'm tempted to get one myself after hearing burn talk about them a month ago...
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