battousai (no - as far as i know)
is a made up word, is sort of a nickname, since kenshin is a expert in battou
IIRC the author even mentions that in one of the manga volumes
-sai what does it mean in Japanese?
We used -sai to suffix ages, like juu-roku-sai or juu-nana-sai. I'm sure it does have other uses though. Desu is (is/am/are).
Ame o kudasai!!! (please give me a piece of candy)
Ame o kudasai!!! (please give me a piece of candy)
The grammatical patterns aren't that difficult, since they are, for the most part, guided by rules. There are also verbs that are always exceptions, and there are numbers, that always are odd with certain counters(like 20 years old- hatachi, eight years old- hassai, etc..) The best thing to do, is what I am not currently doing: practice, and practice a lot. Use flashcards if that is useful, I know of Japanese majors who still make flashcards to pick up no vocabulary and kanji. Although one thing still somewhat remains, romanization sucks, learn at least kana, since blueEbola's sentance can also mean please give me rain. Just like you can say, "I ate with chopsticks", and "I ate with a bridge" using the same romanization.
Quote:Original post by Valderman
Christ, I sure hope Japanese turns out to be easier than you guys are making it sound when the time comes for me to take Japanese classes... =\
Most of it is very simple. More than any other language I know, there is a sort of underlying order in the chaos, so that you can understand almost all of the grammatical constructs in terms of a few simple core rules.
The only real problem I've had with the grammar is the goddamn number system. Worst. System. Ever.
it is such a complex language.
i think i'm gonna be taking a couple of years of Japanese.
learning on my own is not progressing as i hoped.
i think i'm gonna be taking a couple of years of Japanese.
learning on my own is not progressing as i hoped.
Quote:Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
it is such a complex language.
i think i'm gonna be taking a couple of years of Japanese.
learning on my own is not progressing as i hoped.
I learned almost everything I know about Japanese on my own, but I will be taking a class next year (skipping to 3rd year Japanese, w00t). If you get the right books, it's not difficult to understand, but a class is always useful for speaking practice. If you're interested, don't give up on picking up stuff on your own just because it seems complicated. That's what makes it fun, after all. [grin]
Quote:Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
so what books did you get/use?
At the moment, my favorite self-study book is "Colloquial Japanese". It's not very colloquial, and it's very fast-paced, but it presents the concepts so logically I can't help but love it. There are tons of dialogues, too, and only a tiny fraction of it is romanized. Quite a number of kanji are introduced as well.
It's possible, though, that my positive impression is due to the fact that I already knew a fair bit of Japanese when I got it...
Colloquial Japanese is to Japanese texts as SICP is to Computer Science texts.
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