Japanese Vocabulary

N

Nimravus

Joined
May 16, 2003
Messages
276
For those who wanted to know how to pronouce SEKI

SAYKEE

Pronunciation
A = ah, as in Bahamas
E = ay, as in okay
I = ee, as in bee
O = oe, as in Joe
U = ooh, as in too
Y = ee, as in bee
AI = eye, as in pie
EI = ay, as in say
EN = en, as in ten


http://aikido.ncf.ca/Glossary.html
 
Hajimemashite.

Anyone who learned Japanese have any study suggestions for me? I'm 4 weeks in to Elementary Japanese I and struggling.
 
Yon'de, Kaite. Read, write. Repeat that a few times, just read the phrases, and write them down. The repetitiveness will make it stick. After you memorize basics you can start forming sentences. Wakarimasu ka? At least this combo worked for me.
 
Congratulations on any of you second language folks -- it' takes a lot of brain "retooling" to get fluent in another language. Especially those of you that have English as your second language.

Good luck on the Japanese. I've tackled German and Spanish, (both fairly unsuccessfully :D ) but never even thought about trying Japanese.
 
Ya know what's funny? I'm half Japanese but Japanese is the language I'm least able to speak. I know basic words of Serb/Albanian and Spanish. We moved to Alabama in the early 70's and my mother quit teaching me Japanese because she didn't want me to have an accent. Just never picked it back up. May have to try soon.
 
Originally posted by BadBamaUmp
Ya know what's funny? I'm half Japanese but Japanese is the language I'm least able to speak. I know basic words of Serb/Albanian and Spanish. We moved to Alabama in the early 70's and my mother quit teaching me Japanese because she didn't want me to have an accent. Just never picked it back up. May have to try soon.
Click to expand...

You know what's funny, I'm the same way. I'm Filipino but I can barely understand my language. Personally, I just think Tagalog is a fugly language, I mean, there are words that come out like magpakkapacgal, it's like you're choking.
 
If you were fluent in Tagalog the military would pay you well as a linguist.

"Magpakkapacgal" I uttered that word just now and a swarm of bats flew through my office and a black cat sauntered up and hi fived me. :eek:
 
Haha, stumbled across some weird chant eh?:D

"Tabako o kaimasu" sounds alot better than "meron bang sigarilyo".:D
 
Originally posted by Don Rac
Yon'de, Kaite. Read, write. Repeat that a few times, just read the phrases, and write them down. The repetitiveness will make it stick. After you memorize basics you can start forming sentences. Wakarimasu ka? At least this combo worked for me.
Click to expand...

That's exactly how the military taught us Russian. Constant repetition. Going around the class, each student repeating the next phrase, over and over again:

ya rabotayu v laboratorii
ty rabotayesh' v laboratorii
on rabotayet v laboratorii
my rabotayem v laboratorii

By the time you go through a few minutes of that, you've got verb patterns and vocabulary built in, almost reflexive. The more often you do this, the better your brain learns to work with the technique.

Read it, write it, say it out loud.
 
What's Tagalog folk music like? I know that my mom and her friends meet once a month and sing Japanese folk music. It's a serious martial art. I mean the weird notes and chords they make are some sort of sonic weapon. I'm going to take a tape of it to Natwick for some of their directed energy weapons studies.
 
"Magpakkapacgal" I uttered that word just now and a swarm of bats flew through my office and a black cat sauntered up and hi fived me.
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LMAO :D :D

That was funny as hell. Is anyone else visualizing the cat from Sabrina Teenage Witch? :D

Chris
 
So you're fluent in Russian Esav? I tried to learn that from a friend who was Russian, but I couldn't "get it" right, I guess I need an actual classroom.

Tagalog folk music, hmm... Well if you mean around the Manila area, it's heavily Spanish inspired, guitars and everything. If you go to the Igorot area that I'm from, the Spanish didn't get us quite easily, but then good ole America did, so we still have our old traditional dances. There's war dances and such, and it's not really singing, but gongs, drums, and in the war dance case, alot of shouting.

Well, chotto gakkoo e ikimasu. (going to school) Don't you just love college?:)
 
I still read a bit, and understand it spoken, but I never had much opportunity to speak it. I did my spying from a distance.

One of my teachers complimented me on picking up the Russian accent so early in the course and I told him I just pronounced Russian the way my grandfather pronounced English. But it is a rough language to learn. The alphabet isn't bad but the sounds are obscure, the pronunciation is slurred as bad as English, the words are nothing like ours, even if you can trace a few back to common roots, and the grammar is very much like Latin only more archaic.

At least with Japanese you know you're up against a completely different linguistic experience. I mean, four different writing systems, theoretically possible on the same page??? Ouch. Chinese is much easier.
 
I took a job with a very large Norwegian company and since I would be flying over to their main offices once in awhile I decided to learn the language to help me "fit in". What I didn't know was that there is a modern and a "older" version. I learned the older version for my visit only to discover english is spoken more than the native language and virtually nobody used the version I had learned. Oh well. BTW they must have 10,000 ways to prepare salmon.
 
If it helped you read the signs, it was a good idea! :D

Some countries complain when English becomes that popular.
 
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