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readsalotMy first midterm in Japanese 2 will happen tomorrow night. (For whatever reason, this term we have two midterms and a final.) I've been studying all afternoon, and I think that's refreshed my memory of the topics from the earlier parts of the class enough that I'll be ok, but I'll only know for sure when I get the graded test back. Sigh. I'm fine on the kanji we've learned, and I know all of the vocabulary and how to do all of conjugations we've been learning, but I'm still weak on some of the particles.
Amusing linguistic note: it seems that the writing style you first learned really does shape the way you think about sounds. Before I explain more, you have to know that each hiragana character is a single syllable, and the characters are usually shown in a grid, like this partial one:
(If you want to see the whole thing, go here)
Now, one of the conjugations we recently learned was how to turn "u"-type verbs (as opposed to "ru"-type) from their plain present forms into their plain negative forms. This is done by turning the "u" ending into "anai". So, for example, "yomu" (read) turns into "yomanai". However, sensei didn't use the explanation I just gave; she said that you have to think of the hiragana chart of characters, find the column that contains the last character of the verb, and then change that character to the one in the first row of that same column and add "nai". To most of us in the class, this seemed to make the conjugation more difficult than necessary, because instead of having one rule (turn "u" into "anai"), there were 8 rules (turn "ku" into "kanai", "su" into "sanai", etc.) When someone asked her about that, and other people in the class offered the explanation I gave above, she said that she couldn't understand it that way, but if it worked for us, fine.
Amusing linguistic note: it seems that the writing style you first learned really does shape the way you think about sounds. Before I explain more, you have to know that each hiragana character is a single syllable, and the characters are usually shown in a grid, like this partial one:
| sa | ka | a |
| shi | ki | i |
| su | ku | u |
| se | ke | e |
| so | ko | o |
(If you want to see the whole thing, go here)
Now, one of the conjugations we recently learned was how to turn "u"-type verbs (as opposed to "ru"-type) from their plain present forms into their plain negative forms. This is done by turning the "u" ending into "anai". So, for example, "yomu" (read) turns into "yomanai". However, sensei didn't use the explanation I just gave; she said that you have to think of the hiragana chart of characters, find the column that contains the last character of the verb, and then change that character to the one in the first row of that same column and add "nai". To most of us in the class, this seemed to make the conjugation more difficult than necessary, because instead of having one rule (turn "u" into "anai"), there were 8 rules (turn "ku" into "kanai", "su" into "sanai", etc.) When someone asked her about that, and other people in the class offered the explanation I gave above, she said that she couldn't understand it that way, but if it worked for us, fine.
