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Yesterday we learned the words for family members, today it’s time to learn how to talk about them! For diplomatic purposes we only cover the positive words.



This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 3:53 am and is filed under Beginner Season 1 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

32 Responses to “Beginner Lesson #22 - Describing the ‘Fam’”

JapanesePod101.com says:

ピーター, 返事をありがとう! I understand where you’re coming from and you make a good point. As we progress in our studies, I guess we’ll all come across the details like that which make our Japanese more natural :) ありがとうございます。

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Rafael says:

Hi. Good idea speaking about geographical names. What about killing three birds at a time by teaching names? Osaka, Suzuki, Hiroshima, Tanaka… are written like that in many western languages and it always was a bit disheartening to “discover” that one has to learn all those names again. Any help to do it is always welcome (by the way, we kill two birds too in Spain but we do it with a gun. I wonder what´s the origin of that saying and why it is used worldwide)
Take care

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piculum says:

Hello. Another interesting show today.

Anyway, I’ve got a little idea. You could make a lesson with some basic phrases related to Japanese. For example, we don’t even know how to say ‘I’m learning Japanese at japanesepod101′ (I know that, though, but anyways). :)
And in any situation, simple phrases like ‘I don’t fully speak Japanese’, ‘I speak a bit Japanese’, even the (un)popular ‘Do you speak English?’ and so on might come in handy.

Just a suggestion, though.

And keep up this great show. :)

Cheers.

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Joey says:

I noticed that there were two lesson 21’s, is this supposed to be lesson 22?
Thank-you guys for another great lesson today!

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japanesepod101.com says:

ネイザンさん、ご理解有り難うございました!Thank you for understanding! Also thank you for the post! Please keep them coming!!
What did you think of the Seinfeld analogy?

Rafael-san. Doumo. Thanks for posting. Yes, this proverb is used widely through out the world. A quick, and I mean quick, search of the internet turned up this:
3-to kill two birds with one stone

KILL TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE - “Achieve two objectives with a single effort. It would be remarkable indeed if someone slinging a stone at a bird got one bird, let alone two. Ovid had a similar expression in L*tin nearly 2,000 years ago. Related phrases were in English and French literature by the 16th century. Thomas Hobbes used the modern version in a work on liberty in 1656: ‘T. H. thinks to kill two birds with one stone, and satisfy two arguments with one answer.’” “Dictionary of Cliches” by James Rogers (Wings Books, Originally New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985).
http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/28/messages/640.html

However, I wouldn’t rule out a Chinese origin, as it one of the oldest “surviving” languages.

Piculum-san 久しぶりです! How are you? Great to hear from you! Feedback is noted, and we’re working on it. Please keep the posts coming.

Joey-san! Thanks for the post, and for pointing that out! You’re right. Just changed it. Please keep the posts coming.

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chanun says:

Great show as always minasan :grin:

We have that saying too in Thai language. It’s basically one bulltet, two birds.

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Peter says:

Osu Chanun-san! Great to hear from you! Interesting, very interesting. I might have to seriously investigate this.
:grin:

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Lisa says:

Hello! I just thought I would drop a note saying how great I think your podcasts are. I’ve been to Japan a few times before, and after a few years of not having to sutdy for trips I really wanted to brush up on my Japanese, perhaps study it for a while and learn to speak it better. Since I drive two hours everyday I figured it would be beneficial to listen in the car to some Japanese CDs or something. I must say, listening to your podcasts is so productive while I’m driving. I’m picking up so much already.

On thing I noticed… this might sound a little strange, but the conversations in English on the podcasts carry a Japanese rhythm! I thought that was very interesting. :smile:

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Kazunori Sakai says:

一徳(かずのり)です。お元気ですか?
来週またお会いしましょう :oops:
では良い週末を :razz:

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Mark says:

Hey thanks for the great podcast!!! I really like the way you explain the casual more natural way of speaking which you hear everyday. Its so hard to find a text book which explains the finer points of an informal conversation. Youve already cleared up lots of minor troubles and misunderstandings I had. I also realised that I had been mispronouncing words too!! So thanks again, your podcasts are really helpful.

Just found the new transcripts for the last few lessons, theyre excellent!

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hongalisa says:

いつも、いろいろ教えてくれまして、本当に、本気で、まあじで感謝! :grin: 大好き!! :lol:

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MintyFresh says:

To expand on Joey’s comment. The pdf for lesson 22 is labeled as lesson 21 in the header.

Keep up the great work.
Minty.

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Peter says:

Minty-san!! Thanks for the sugoi itunes review! It was monosugoi!! We loved it here. Thanks for the info, I ll fix it today!

Please keep the posts coming!
Yoroshiku

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Craig Stewart says:

dont stop what youre doin- i love your podcasts. i wish my college lectures were this fun :wink:

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Peter says:

Craig-san,

Thanks for the awesome post! It is posts like this that really make our day! :lol: Please keep them coming.

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Akvile says:

Hello, I’ve got a small question: is there some general word in Japanese for brother/sister which would not indicate their age compared with that of the speaker’s?

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Tintin says:

Yes, they are kyoudai(brother(s)) and shimai(Sister(s)) (兄弟 & 姉妹)

If you said I have 4 brothers, you’d say : yonin kyoudai ga imasu.
4人兄弟がいます。

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polo says:

hi all

i gotta say this but sakura-san, you have really a lovely voice

watashi ga dai seki des

polo

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Kimiko says:

Just joined - great stuff. Better than a college class that I took. Love it.

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JapanesePod101.com says:

poloさん、

>>watashi ga dai seki des

be careful how you pronounce that, SEKI means cough… “atashi wa dai-seki desu sounds something like “i’m a big cough.” lol.
i think you mean, watashi wa daisuki desu. :razz:

Kimikoさん、

thanks for joining! i’m sure we’re all having more fun! this language gets a bad rep for being difficult… it’s just not true! :cool:

both of you guys and everyone else, check out the whole site we’ve got loads of helpful stuff in the learning center, and the recent lessons are getting really good again!

marky

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Kennerz says:

I would just like to point out that Kyodai means siblings incase your interested!!!

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Ashurii Arekusandora says:

Piculum-san,
If you’re still there, lol, a way to say “I can’t speak Japanese real well” would be “Nihong go wa amari umaku hana semasen”

A big arigato to JapanesePod101 who helped me with that!! :dogeza:

Hope that helps!!!
Ashurii

Oh, and also, if you want to be very polite put a “Watashi wa” in front.

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Carla says:

Konnichiwa mina

In the audio, Peter mention that the answer for “Ohayoo Sapporo” would be here. Can someone help me, where exactly is it???

Also I didn’t got if it is “isseki nicho” or “isseki nichoo”. It is funny, when I listened to the meaning of this I noticed that in Portugal we have a very similar expression too, but we say “to kill 2 rabbits with only 1 blow with a sheherd’s crook”

Doomo arigatoo

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Alexandre says:

I can’t help notice that the pronunciation of g between vowels is actually to “ng”. In this lesson, for instance, Sakura says “isognashii”. It’s not something I’ve noticed in other methods before, but perhaps I simply didn’t notice. Is this standard or is it a regional accent of some kind?

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markystar says:

carlaさん、
sapporo is a city in the northernmost island of japan, hokkaido.

一石二鳥
isseki nichou

Alexandreさん、
this questions up a lot, there some discussion about it in the forum and various places on the site, but i’ll try to give you a quick answer.

that pronunciation is regional, but it’s from tokyo, which is considered standard japanese. while i don’t hear a lot of people use it in daily conversation, people who have excellent pronunciation tend to use it. it’s also the standard for NHK news anchors, so you’ll hear it in a lot of official announcements too, like on the trains.

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Alexandre says:

Just the answer I was looking for, martystar-さん!
ありがとう!

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Jet says:

Hi.. I’m confused about the “yokute” rule. According to the pdf, there are some irregular words like “kakkoii” that changes to yokute instead of just the kute. Are there more words that share the same rule with the irregular words?
Thanks..

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Jessi says:

The reason “kakkoii” becomes “kakkoyokute” is because it is actually too words: kakko + ii. It’s the same “ii” that means “good”, so it conjugates in the same way. So in other words, only “ii” changes to “yokute”. :smile:

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Jet says:

Thank you so much Jessi..

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おう says:

私の家族は七人です。父は楽しいです。母は優しいです。兄は忙しいです。姉は美しいです。妹は可愛いです。弟は面白くて格好いいです。

一石二鳥です。

また今日ね。

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Amnesty says:

Hi Japanese Pod no Hito!

I am a total newbie to Japanesepod101 and am exploring all around. I have been learning Nihongo for about 2 years off and on and I want to really ramp it up now, so this site seems ichiban to me!

I just had a quick but quirky question: these beginning lessons have been on the site for many years — so with regards to the comments section, how does it stay current? I mean, my understanding is that a year ago, and a year from now, anyone could log on to this website and listen to lesson 23 and then comment on it. But the comments tonight look current. Maybe they aren’t?

I think one important thing for me about a website like this would be to be part of a group of people who are all learning at a similar pace and meeting up on these conversation boards. A community that is working together (in a general way) works great for me online. (Though of course this is an individualized lesson plan — I just like the idea of once in a while coming on the boards and seeing names i recognize and helping each other out…)

So is that the way this works, or are the above comments from many time periods?

Thanks for answering this odd question, just very curious how it works!

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Jessi says:

Hello Amnesty-san :)
Welcome to the site!! :mrgreen: Thank you very much for leaving a comment.

Like you said, these lessons are from a few years ago (first published in 2006), and the comments at the top tend to be from around that time (oldest comments are at the top, with the most recent at the bottom). But we constantly have new listeners posting questions and comments on old lessons, and we do our best to respond to everything that we can. :D We use an RSS feed to keep up with comments, which means we see all comments posted on our lessons no matter how old they are.
So please feel free to leave comments/questions on any lesson!

I also recommend that you check out our forum, where we have a lot of active users:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/forum/

Thanks again, and enjoy the site ;)

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