Jul 16, 2007

Some thoughts on Japanese

In the majority of known languages there seems to exist within each of their forms of communication a division of it into one that is uttered with a spoken language and its converse skill of listening and comprehending (interpreting the meaning, understanding of the message that is being sent, written language.

In Japanese the need arose in around the year 600 A.D. or so that a system of writing be established to more unitize the many warlords who were scattered across the various districts of Japan. Kanji (plural Kanji) are pictographs, borrowed from the chinese scripts and borrowed their system of writing to an exten. Kanji are capable of relaying and expressing much more meaning than can be gained through description of an idea or object with the phoenician alphabet.

Westerners grow up in a world where our writing system is now such that we write our words alphabetically. a purely due to each kanji's graphical nature. and evolution a much deeper meaning contained within each one. It is usually difficult for westerners to comprehend such a a writing system wherein the words are still more ideographic than Much different than what us who are stifled by the alphabet. Kanji can be written in as many as 1 to 100 strokes of the pen of the stenographer. The simplest kanji are 1 stroke and there are six kanji that can be written in as few as 1 stroke(s)We can see the meaning of things inside the kanji. Therefore from the get go, we should try to ween ouselves from the temptation to look up words in romaji to decipher meaning. We should use a dictionary like sanseidos daily concise.

Week 1 verbs - Drink, Sleep,Eat, go hataraku. Put verbs in all bases. Nouns:coffee;tea;milk; water,coca cola,sake,aquarius,beer,juice.

Adjectives - oishii, sutekina, benri na, okiim nagai samui, atsui, chisaii, mijikai. Grammer masu, masen, masen deshita etc, BII +tai desu = I want to. polite form, lets = BII+masho long o etc
Adjectives- are fun to play with Practice putting the adjectives in front of a noun etc