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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 6:22 am and is filed under Beginner Lessons. 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.
44 Responses to “Beginner Lesson #43 - Speciality!”
steve says:
March 7th, 2006 at 6:36 am
Ummmm! This as nothing to do with today’s lesson, Rather it is related to the JCC podcast on Ume Blossom…..But I have managed to get hold of that small story…well to be more accurate the blog from my friend about how her daughter brought home some Ume Blossom still on it’s twig. I had to ask for it as it was from her old website, which she no longer has….but thankfully she saved it…so anyway…this is it:
================================================
An Ume Twig in Her Hand
I am so sensitive to the cold weather and I feel I have had enough of it this winter; I cannot wait for spring to come. My most favourite season in Japan is spring; every guidebook about Japan would recommend you to travel during this season.
The flower, which tells us spring is drawing near, is ume (Japanese apricot) blossom. It has a moderate and mild atmosphere and also, an excellent smell.
One day, my younger daughter came back from school as usual…but with all smiles, she then stretched out her hand to me proudly. There, in her hand, was a little ume twig. ‘I found this beside the jungle gym at school.’ she said.
Ume is a very common tree in Japan and we can find it everywhere…even just across the street from my house, there are lots of ume blossoms.
However the little twig in her hand looked very special, in the respect that my daughter brought it for me. She must have walked down the street with the twig, waited at the bus stop with the twig and swung into the bus with the twig…Thus it is now on the table in my house and giving off an excellent fragrance.
I think I will be able to enjoy this lovely stuff for a little while… I feel like it leads me to the feast of spring. Yes! That is exactly what I am looking forward to…There will be sakura (cherry) blossoms all around. Really, I can hardly wait for it.
================================================
Well, I hope you enjoyed that.
Now I will listen to the new podcast 
O-genki de
Steve
Fabi says:
March 7th, 2006 at 6:58 am
おはようございます。
A really good lesson today, It was really on my level of Japanese!
By the way, did you know that your sponsors title (!?) “Erklaren” (or better: Erklären) is a German verb? “Erklären” means “(to) explain” in English.
See you soon tomorrow!
Fabi
Chad says:
March 7th, 2006 at 7:08 am
Just curious, is there a reason why the beginning of the mp3 filenames went from 100 (Survival Phrases #12 - Fast Food) to 079? They seemed to be on a sequential streak for a while. Also, is “Elementary lesson” the same as “Beginner lesson”? I’m not picky, just trying to retag for my mp3 player.
Piet says:
March 7th, 2006 at 7:37 am
ありがとうございます。 I have one small question about today’s lesson. As a beginner, I only run into 得意 and 苦手 recently. My text book explains both 上手 and 得意 mean “is good at”, but the latter also means “likes”. Same for 下手 and 苦手 (”poor at” and “dislikes”) What’s not clear from my text book is whether e.g. 苦手 has two different meanings, or whether it means “poor at it and dislike it”.
Jonas says:
March 7th, 2006 at 8:02 am
Steve-san: Great story! Almost makes me want to have kids (someday… in the future )
Fabi-san: Good to hear you liked the lesson! I was aware of the meaning(I had german for 4 years, 2 in junior high, and 2 in sr. high), but I don’t know about Peter.
Chad-san: We are in the middle of moving into a new filenaming standard, so please bear with us for a bit longer! Yesterdays lesson should have been named 078(oops!) and tomorrows will be 080.
Piet-san: Your textbook is correct. “nigate” can be used in two ways; “Unten wa nigate desu” - I’m poor at driving
“Sakana wa nigate desu” - I dislike fish
Hope this clears the matter up
Jonas
japanesepod101.com says:
March 7th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Today’s location is Roma・ローマ! 
Hello to all our listeners in Rome and Italy!
Torino, o-tsukare sama deshita!・おつかれさまでした！・お疲れ様でした！
Peter says:
March 7th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Steve-san, yes, thanks for the story! Great reading! Please keep them coming!
Fabi-san, thanks for the post and nice blog! I liked the sushi place on your trip! Thanks for the translation. Apologies regarding the pronunciation, as I know I am not even close! 
Gevorg-san actually taught me the pronunciation, but I haven’t tried it yet. Maybe this week!
Chad-san, yes, we’ve almost ironed out all the kinks, just a day or two longer.
Piet-san, I think Jonas-san explained it quite well. It’s one of those words that used both ways, and is used on a regular basis. We’ll look into this further for you.
Alexander says:
March 7th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Very good pod today I enjoyed it
And I wonder if that was on purpose said, or just taken out of context:
Natsuko: “We’re friends.”
Peter: “Your acting is improving.”
That’s cold, dude!
Gevorg says:
March 7th, 2006 at 9:44 am
こんにちは 皆さん !
It’s Gevorg again !
As promised, I will write my French Review now. Please feel free to publish it if you have an iTunes account ^^. But make sure there is only one person copying this review. You don’t have to mention my name in it or something. Here goes:
Bonjour tout le monde !
Si vous avez envie d’étudier le japonais, vous êtes tombé à l’endroit idéal !JapanesePod101.com vous permet d’apprendre la langue japonaise d’une façon chouette et humoristiques. Les blagues de Peter, les commentaires agréables de Sakura, Natsuko, et Hatsumi vous amuseront sans doute ! Dabord on vous introduit la conversation du jour entre deux locuteurs natifs, ensuite on vous donne le vocabulaire du leçon. Tout ce qui vous reste est de les retenir ! En plus, on peut télécharger des documents du leçon du jour avec les mots Kanji expliqués en Hiragana et Katakana.
Alors, très recommandé et plaisir garanti ☆!
Yay. Sorry it took so long, I had to get it Spell-Checked by my French Teacher. Are there already French Reviews of this great show ? I hope to be the first one… ^^. I haven’t listened to today’s Podcast yet, but I’ll be sure to put some comments after I did !! I still have some work for school ^^, I have to finish that first ^^.
See You Soon !!
Gevorg☆。
Rhonda says:
March 7th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Is it just me, or is the description of today’s lesson above the same as yesterday’s?
It certainly could be me, I’m tired. 
Tech Guy says:
March 7th, 2006 at 10:25 am
Rhonda,
Must be you Rhonda! I see a completely different description….
All kidding aside, thanks for bringing this to our attention. I’m going to have to whip my Japan-based counterparts into shape 
Tech Guy
pearl says:
March 7th, 2006 at 10:48 am
Yay! after 43 lessons, we finally learned the word for “Chinese” 
BTW, it’d be great if you could continue to put the romaji pronunciation next to the kanji characters (otherwise the temptation to read them as Chinese is too great!).
penelope says:
March 7th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Hi everyone, I really enjoy the lessions- they’re so much fun.
Gevorg, en français, c’est “LA leçon” (je sais, encroyable…) et tu veux dire “…façon chuoette et humoristiQUE”. Ah oui, et c’est “tomber DANS un endroit”.
Sorry - seems I have my nit-picking day today… 
Oh yes, as I don’t know ANY japanese besides what you guys so kindly taught me (and I’m only since yesterday looking at the strange symbols… oh boy… ) I would like very much to add my request to pearl’s: yes yes yes pleeeeaaaase go on with the romanji pronunciation, at least ’til I get a clue on what’s going on…
Thanx so much for the fun lessons… gambatte?? is that right???
Gevorg says:
March 7th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
Whoa, that many mistakes ?!
I even had my French Teacher Spell-Check it ! This means she stinks at her job. Yeah, I don’t know why I wrote “humoristuque” with an -S at the end. I wasn’t thinking, I’m sorry.
Gevorg says:
March 7th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
By the way; My good friend Courtney-Chan who also listens to your podcasts ^^, would like to know how to install Japanese Input System on her PC…
I don’t know since I have iBook @_@. Can anyone help… ^^ ?
マービン says:
March 7th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
hi Gevorg
since you didnt say what OS i assume its Windows IME is what you want.
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/user/IME_Paper.mspx
also see the “related links” on that page for how to install.
Nathan says:
March 7th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
Steve-san,
Good story Makes me wanna go play on the jungle gym
Penelope-san,
Gambatte is correct in the traditional Hepburn system. In the revised system, it would be ganbatte. がんばって = ga + n + ba + small-tsu + te.
Gevorg-san,
Here is another guide that I usually use:
Rhonda says:
March 7th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Good to know that I haven’t lost my mind. ha! 
Can someone explain the difference between とくい and じょうず？
I’ve heard that you can’t (well, shouldn’t) use じょうず when you are talking about yourself and that you use とくい instead, but that when you are talking about someone else’s strengths, that you can use either.
Would this be a correct assumption? Scary things, those assumptions.
JP says:
March 7th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Hi Steve-San,
Nice Story…
…soshite… kyou no kaiwa ga suki desu.
instead of nigate, can we use joozo janai? how different are they in-terms of context?
Natsuko says:
March 7th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
こんにちは、なつこです！ おひさしぶりです！
Hello, everyone! Thank you for all these great posts. The numbers are quite overwhelming (more than 50 a day?!) 
and I have to try to catch up, but I always enjoy reading them.
Please let me introduce my ideas for 得意, 苦手, 上手 and 下手.
As Piet-san and Jonas-san mentioned, 得意 and 苦手 both have two meanings (good at/not good at; like/dislike), but maybe 得意 is less used in the meaning of “like.”
I have an impression that 得意/苦手 are words implying your feeling of confidence, while 上手/下手 only describes the skill objectively.
I think that is why you usually don’t use 上手 to describe yourself, as Rhonda-san pointed out.
I hope this will explain a bit about these words…
Umm, 日本語はむずかしい:???: Although I’m a native Japanese speaker, I’m always learning something new from these japanesepod101 lessons!
Jonas says:
March 7th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Rhonda-san: My initial thoughts on that question is that you are right. But I did some research, and it seems it is no 100% clear answer. Going into details around this would be something suiteable for an “advanced” class(not that it is that difficult, but going into details like this isn’t very beneficial on a beginner level), but I’ll try to explain what I found out.
1) じょうず shouldn’t be used about yourself, except, in a sentence like もし私は「なになに」に上手になったら、「なになに」. In english; If I became good at “somethingsomething”, then “somethingsomething”.
(You don`t say 「得意になる」)
2) You usually don’t use じょうず when asking someone if they are good at something.
JP-san: See my comment above. same applies for the negative form. And when saying “i dislike blablabla”, you definitely don`t want to use jouzu jyanai, but instead tokui dewa nai
(semantically, jyanai = dewa nai = dewa arimasen = jya arimasen)
Jonas
Jonas says:
March 7th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Oh, I used these pages as a reference;
http://nihongo-online.jp/bbs/artview.cgi?id=20&mode=view&page=0&num=459&sort=1&back=tree
http://pro.tok2.com/~nhg/qa/keiyoushi-3.htm
ilya says:
March 7th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
ありがとう
This lesson is simply great!! Now when the boy and the girl are going to work together it may be a reasonable idea to apply Pickup Lines #1 but what can happen next? I mean if they want (or don’t want) to have sex? Can you post the lesson for that or at least as close to that as possible?
This should be especially important because the straight phrases can be very crude so please explain us what to say!!
Nathan says:
March 7th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
Natsuko-san, Jonas-san,
Thanks for that information! And the articles, as well! Very interesting. I think maybe just to re-word what has been said, using 上手 with yourself can sound pompous. To put it in perspective, it might be similar to the difference between saying:
*I am an excellent painter. (上手 - perhaps not so bad by American standards, but still obviously more haughty)
*Painting is my strong point. (得意 - a more humble way of saying you have skill at something)
At least, it seems that might be the case
ilya-san,
Jonas says:
March 7th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
ilya-san: see Nathan-sans comment
Nathan-san: Kinda, yeah… Only that Americans say those things, when Japanese people don’t (But I’m sure they think it!). There is an expression in japanese (covered before?) that goes like this; 「自画自賛」、「じがじさん」which means to “Praise your own picture” (self-praise) that i guess can be applied in this situation
Jonas
Kerry says:
March 7th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Hi,
Thanks Japanesepod101 Crew! As I struggle to keep pace with the wealth (an volume) of posts you guys keep turning out I find my brain filled to the brim!
I was trying to get through all of the podcasts as they were published but in order to assimilate it all I think it would be an 8 hour day for me. So, I will take a different approach and just take 2 lessons a week and try and learn (and practice) them completely.
(jikan to ‘memory power’ ga hitsuyo desu!)
With this in mind, I went back over some of the old lessons and found that the PDF documents for Lesson 28 / News #5 / Survival Japanese #6. Could someone please repair the links as I don’t miss one little scrap of wonderful Nihongo! 
If you guys are in Chiba-ken for a JCC field trip let me know!
Kerry in Chiba-ken
Tech Guy says:
March 7th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Hi Kerry,
… I went back over some of the old lessons and found that the PDF documents for Lesson 28 / News #5 / Survival Japanese #6. Could someone please repair the links as I don’t miss one little scrap of wonderful Nihongo…
We fixed the broken links. Thanks for bringing them to our attention. We are in the process of completely overhauling our file naming system. We apologize for any inconvenience as we work out any kinks with the new naming convention.
Stay tuned for a blog entry later on in the week explaining the new naming convention for files.
Thanks as always for your support,
Tech Guy
penelope says:
March 8th, 2006 at 1:10 am
Nathan: thanks so much! ありがとう
I’m still rather lost with the strange signs, but I’ve set up my mac now to write (and COPY!!) also in japanese, that should help a bit. Hopefully.
steve says:
March 8th, 2006 at 2:15 am
Hello.
Has anyone ever seen this site? -
http://www.eva.hi-ho.ne.jp/su-ta-/indexste.html
It as 4 cameras placed inside a sushi shop in Tokyo. One of the cameras is close up to the action of sushi making.
thuy says:
March 8th, 2006 at 2:35 am
mina san hajime mashite!douzo yoroshiku
i’m a new member
i’ve a test in japanese lesson ( tomorrow ) !~so difficult haha
Gambatte 
Thuy —Vietnam
steve says:
March 8th, 2006 at 4:33 am
Thuy-san.
All the best and good luck for your Japanese test tomorrow…..and welcome to this site
Steve
Jon says:
March 8th, 2006 at 6:29 am
I’m still very impressed by the quality of the shows! This is just the right material for me.
I just found a great resource with animations and audio resources of mukashi banashi (old stories). )I don’t think it has been posted here before).
It is easier to follow than most other material I have seen. Besides, some of the movies have japanese subtitles.
The site requires flash player.
Jon
Nathan says:
March 8th, 2006 at 7:13 am
Jonas-san,
Good point.
Penelope-san, JP-san,
My pleasure
Steve-san,
Very cool, thanks for sharing! I love sushi
Thuy-san,
Let us know how you do! I’m sure you’ll ace it
Jon-san,
Cool site! I’ve got a few different mukashi banashi links stuffed away somewhere, but I like this one, too! (By the way, I think you may have forgotten to close your HTML tag )
Peter says:
March 8th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Alexander-san, so good to see you catching all our jokes!
Gevorg-san, thanks! That was great!!! Really appreciate it! Keep the great posts coming.
Rhonda-san, thanks!
Tech guy- thanks!
Pearl-san, any other requests? Let us know and we’ll get on it!
Pearl-san and Penelope-san, all the romaji is there, right? It should be, and don’t worry we won’t stop.
マービンさん、great to hear from you! How have you been?最近元気ですか？
Rhonda-san and JP-san, did Natsuko, Jonas and Nathan clear things up? They did for me!
Ilya-san, thanks for the post!
Nathan-san, Natsuko-san, and Jonas-san, as always thanks!
JP says:
March 8th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Hi Peter,
It did(after me re-reading it several times)
Thank you guys!
I learn much in this post as much as in the podcast.
Mata Ne.
Prem Keswani says:
March 8th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Hey JPOD101 team..
Again a helpful pod from you.
i was a aware of the words 上手
and 下手..apart from this…today`s
two words are very informing…
最近not getting time to read the blog.
Felt good to hear the pronunciation of
Hinzu-Go…didn`t knew this….Thanks for that…
Hindi…Just an info that, apart from Hindi and
English language there are almost 15 more
official languages . You can find in all
17 languages script written on Indian
Currency notes..
Just check out if you happen to see….
steve says:
March 9th, 2006 at 7:28 am
Prem Keswani-san
Aapka kyaa haal hai?
Sorry I am not very good at romanised Hindi. But my wife is from Pakistan…actually her mother is Indian and her father is Pakistani….Well that is how it would work now as the met before the split in August 1947.
Oh well.
Bye for now
Steve
Hoan says:
March 11th, 2006 at 1:51 am
Dear Peter-san, Natsuko-san, Sakura-san and ALL!
I discovered this site yesterday (March 10, through the Japan Times article), and have been going back through the Beginner lessons ever since!!! (not that I don’t have other things to do!). I lived in Japan for three years, back when, and have forgotten most of the Japanese I painfully acquired. I have been chastising myself for not trying to keep up. So this is really a great discovery for me: a most pleasant way to relearn Japanese.
Thanks, and keep up the good work!
Hoan
Chao Thuy!
Dear Gevorg-san,
Please forgive my editing your French review. Your text is REALLY good, but as a native speaker and editor, I am itching to add my two-cents’ worth! (unfortunately my e-mail program doesn’t do accents)
Best of luck with your study of both Japanese and French!
Hoan
Bonjour tout le monde !
Si vous avez envie d’étudier le japonais, vous êtes tombé SUR l’endroit idéal !JapanesePod101.com vous permet d’apprendre la langue japonaise d’une façon chouette et HUMORISTIQUE. Les blagues de Peter, les commentaires agréables de Sakura, Natsuko, et Hatsumi vous amuseront sans doute ! D’ ABORD on vous introduit la conversation du jour entre deux JAPONAIS, ensuite on vous donne le vocabulaire DE LA leçon. Tout ce qui vous reste est de les retenir ! En plus, on peut télécharger des documents DE LA leçon du jour avec les CARACTERES Kanji PHONETISés en Hiragana et Katakana.
Alors, très recommandé et plaisir garanti ☆!
SkyDiver says:
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Where is the informal PDF? The one in the regular PDF is useless since it only features Kanji (I can read them, but I’m sure a lot of people who are using this lesson don’t) and it’s not even complete?? And why is 明々後日 （しあさって） not featured in the vocabulary section 
Arnold says:
February 24th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Hi JPOD101.
I’m not sure if this message will be received since the podcast is quite old, but I’ve tried downloading it a few times but it seems the file is no longer working properly. Its a short file and only the intro plays. Can you please re-upload it.
Thanks
Eran says:
February 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Hi Arnold-san,
I tried here and the podcast downloads for me in its entirety… We have been experiencing some issues with our media host provider where by some audio files are getting chopped early. You may want to try and download it from another computer or give it a day or two and try again. If you continue to experience the same issues, please email us at support[at]japanesepod101.com.
Thank you,
Eran
Hoosier says:
July 20th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Dear Peter,
I know your tired of seeing my name but…
Can you say,
“Konya, Isshoni ego benkyou shimasu ne”? with Ne at the end?
Thank you!
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