Food & meals

Hello!

This vocabulary post will be on the topic of meal times, and a few food items as well. This will probably be part of a series, since this list doesn't include things like side dishes, et cetera. I want to keep the lists manageable =) Thanks to http://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com for the original (and more extensive) vocabulary list. 

またね！(later!)

Grammar post #1: Subject and object indication

After watching lots of Tokyo Ghoul studying hard, here's another post at last. I decided to first look into subject and object markers in order to make better sense of sentences. Let's begin:

• が (ga) = Subject marker
• を (spelled "wo", pronounced "o") = Object marker

Here's a quick example to show what's what: 

The dog         ate          a bone.         

(Subject)                     (object)                         

I'll be using an example from the folks over at www.japaneseprofessor.com to clarify how these topic markers are used in Japanese. 

こどもが	テレビを	みた。
Kodomo ga	terebi o	mita.
Child (subj)	TV (obj)	watched.

"(The) child watched TV."

 In the table above, you can see that "child" followed by the marker "ga" indicates that the child is the subject of the sentence. What is the child watching? TV! Tv is the object of the sentence, and we can tell because it's followed by the marker "o". 

Now, the funny part is that we can change the order of the words that come before the verb (in this case, "mita"), and the sentence will still have the same meaning. This is shown below: 

テレビを	こどもが	みた。
Terebi o	kodomo ga	mita.
TV (obj)	child (subj)	watched.

We still know that it's the child who watched the TV, simply because of the markers that follow the words. The English equivalent of this sentence would be "(the) TV (is) watched (by the) child". What is the child watching? TV, just as in the last example. 

That's it for this post, in the next grammar post I'll continue with topic indication. Again, credit goes to www.japaneseprofessor.com for explaining this topic. What you see here is basically my abridged version of their work. :)
またね！(later!)

Fruits & Vegetables

Hello!

I'm updating this blog less than I should so far...But now's the time to get it on track and update it regularly :) For this post I wanted to make a short vocabulary list. I like the idea of starting with vocabulary early, since I find it one of the most (if not the most) fundamental parts of any language. After all, even if your grammar isn't great, you can usually communicate by stringing together some basic words to bring your message across. My first vocabulary list will have the names of a few fruits and vegetables. There will be future posts about actual food and meals, and of course many other topics!

When it comes to the kana, there's only two loan words on the list, which are orange (オレンジ) and banana (バナナ), which explains why they're spelled in katakana.


I hope to will add one vocabulary list per week besides other types of posts, along with some notes on the words or topic. But for now,

またね！(later!)

First post! The Japanese writing system

Yay, the first post of my new blog! I've already been practicing for a little while before deciding to start writing here (I know hiragana, and a few kanji; still need to memorize katakana properly). But what are hiragana, katakana, and kanji exactly? Well, these are the three building blocks of the Japanese language. Below is a short description of each:

Hiragana: The characters used for words that don't have their own kanji, or for grammatical parts in sentences. Hiragana is commonly held as the best place to start learning Japanese, since you can always write words in hiragana if you don't know the kanji for them yet.

Katakana: The characters used primarily for loan words and names from other languages. It's not as common as hiragana and kanji, but still a need-to-know. This is the second step to take on when learning Japanese.

Kanji: Chinese characters that were adopted into the Japanese language. There's a HUGE amount of kanji; thousands upon thousands of them. Kanji consists of smaller parts known as radicals (which could be seen as the building blocks of some kanji characters). Kanji also has two different readings: kunyomi and onyomi. Kunyomi is the Japanese reading, and onyomi is the original Chinese reading of the kanji. That's a lot to take in, isn't it?

When Japanese words spelled in the Roman alphabet, that's called Romaji. This makes it potentially easier for foreigners to understand since they don't need to take Japanese characters into account, but they still need knowledge of how the language works and its vocabulary. Although I couldn't share most or all kanji without handing someone an enormous dictionary, there are many charts available to study hiragana and katakana, which are the first steps on the journey to learning Japanese. Here are charts from the site www.freejapaneselessons.com:

Hiragana: http://www.freejapaneselessons.com/printable-hiragana-chart.pdf
Katakana: http://www.freejapaneselessons.com/printable-katakana-chart.pdf



This is it for now, but I'll do my best to update twice a week.
またね！(later!)

P.S.: I am by no means an expert, and this blog just follows my journey to learn, and showcases stuff that I've come across or find useful to know when it comes to Japanese. I'll always do my best to give credit where due, but please let me know if I can improve anything :)