Parksey wrote:StayDead wrote:Oh woops, tenteisei
I'm quite pleased that I was able to pretty much read that quickly when you posted it in hiragana. I must be getting somewhere, though I have the individual vowels, the t-ones and the s-ones nailed down. I have the first "block" of hiragana memorised fairly accurately (I count the first block as up to "n"). That's memorised as in I never get any wrong on that flash game - I still get muddled sometimes when written them all down from scratch on a blank page, though when I see the symbol I immediately get it.
Grats! You're getting there! I'll try and help you if you need it, but I'm far from good and there's people a hell of a lot better than me on the forums, but I'll do my best to help if I can.
This will put me approximately on the same level as a three year old Japanese child. And Stay Dead's blog baffles me - I'm hoping I'll be able to work it out soon, though. It seems pretty impressive that he can write that after six months self-teaching.
Well, I'm slowly getting better as each day passes, so thanks. ^^
Is it meant to say "Welcome"? I have it down as "yo-u-ko-so-u" and Google tells me this is welcome but with a different spelling.
I've seen it written both ways, I'm pretty sure either way is fine.
Anyway, how do you know whether to write a word in hiragana or kanji? Chris mentioned "watashi" as a word that could be written in both, though obviously some will surely have consonant and vowel sounds not present in hiragana so it'll obviously be kanji then.
You don't, but most of the time it doesn't actually matter, some words you'll just naturally know to put in Kanji, generally vocab words like 猫(ねこ)Cat, 犬(いぬ) Dog, 鳥(とり) Bird. Will all be written in Kanji usually, but I think it's fine to write them however, it's like some words such as これ to give one example are often written in kana alone rather than Kanji. I think Chris can probably explain more about this though as he actually lives in Japan (I think?).
Also, I've noticed in Busy People, that the Westerners have their surname translated. For example, the Japanese probably don't have the sounds for "Smith", so it gets put in katakana as "Sumisu". What I don't understand is how they come about translating the surname into that particular word.
I'm pretty sure it just comes down to what they can write it down as in their alphabet, like Sumisu as you used as the example kind of sounds like Smith if you say it.
And the bit at the end of StayDead's blog - じゃあね。- means "see you again", right?
Yup, I think it can mean a various number of Goodbyes, but they all add to the same thing of saying bye.
http://jisho.org/This is a really good Dictionary to get started with once you start learning Kanji, or even before as you can type in English words and get Japanese words and so on.
http://ichi2.net/anki/Is a really nice free flash card program, you can either create your own or use sets you can find around the net, I'm using it for my Kanji at the moment, but you can use it for Kana, Grammer, Kanji or whatever really.
Hope that all helped ^