アムステルダムのあいさつをありがとうございました。　japanesepod101はアムステルダムにもよく聞こえます。　

Hello…Sorry to be a pain…but I have notice what I think is a mistake in the translation.
in the PDF is says:

Natsuko : The truth is I don’t watch sports nor play sports.
Takeya : But because I like you I am here.

I think it should be just Takeya-san saying all of the above.

Takeya : The truth is I don’t watch sports nor play sports. But because I like you I am here.

Sorry, if I am wrong.
Steve

A nice podcast. I have notice that when it comes to saying soccer, in Japanese it is said as Sakkaa…which is interesting as it is almost an American way of saying Soccer…I guess that is possibly because in the USA they use soccer where as we tend to use football. You see, if I did not know how to write soccer in katakana I might end up spelling it as: ソッカー (sokkaa) instead of サッカー I am NOT being picky…I just found it interesting.
Anyway, I like the way you teach verb conjuctions and a helpful hint about going back from ‘u’ to ‘i’

O-genki de
Steve

p.s.
I Hope you chaps gave the girls plenty of white chocolate

Steve-san - Yes, a lot of words in Japanese which come from English are actually the American-English way of saying things. For example, the word camping; キャンピング (kyampingu) rather than what I would prefer; カンピング (kampingu).

For anyone I’ve confused, please note that キャンピング is the correct way of saying the word, just that in a perfect world (for British English speakers) it wouldn’t be! :p

Nice bonus track in the informal stream. I knew the sweet Natsuko was too good to be true –the “real” Natsuko emerges! (joudan dayo! )

Oh my gosh!! So many racists here!! Why do you hate us Americans so much??!?!? Oh my gosh!!

Just kidding, of course I don’t think anyone will take offence to talking about differences in lexicon of various forms of English.

Thanks for another great lesson!!

I would love to go to Amsterdam sometime…with a last name of Van Buskirk, seems like I should.

It will have to come after I go to Japan though. After all these Japanese lessons (and hopefully by this time next year, I will have passed JLPT 4 (or 3??), I should make a point to go as a reward.

一級は一番難しいですね。
それでは、二級は二番難しいんですね

nathan-san, haha. I guess I’d rather be number 1 than number 4!

nathan-san a question, 難しいん. what is the ん for? muzukashiin?
ps thanks for making me look up and learn some new kanji

I’ve seen that muzukashi on some import fighting games I had! (for the cpu difficulty).

still takes me a long time to read hiragana.
its like:
それでは,
so….ne..or is that wa.. no it’s re…….de……..ha… i mean wa……..
haha.

might actually start some hirigana flowing together practice. Anyone have any tips? I know them in my head but the recall is slow. to be fair i have done absolutely no practice with trying to flow it together, so any suggestions on what worked for people would be cool

Vicky-san,

Hisashiburi desu ne! Welcome back! How have you been? How was your birthday??

Jay-san,

The ん is actually the particle の used as an explainer. It’s very useful, and quite common. Check this out:

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/particles3.html#part5

As for getting comfortable with hiragana, it just takes time and practice. Find any chunk of hiragana you can and just read through it. Don’t worry about getting the meaning so much as reading. Maybe read through all of the hiragana transcriptions in the supplemental material

ahh ok, thanks for the explanation/link.
hmm I do read through the transcripts in hiragana, I think I need to devise a new method of quick recall. I’m gonna look into it I think. Let you know what I find.

Nathan-san, yes it made a sense. Thank you for mentioning, I totally forgot about the soup that you do eat soup on your birthday.

Like always, I will do my best!!!

Question….I don’t know what’s difference using Ka and Ne the end…
I asked same question in class, maybe you can explaing a better way???

Vicky-san,

‘ka’ is like a normal question ending.
eg.
what are you doing?
do you understand?
where is the bathroom?
what shall we eat?

it needs an answer of some kind.

‘Ne’ is not really a REAL question. its almost like a rhetorical question, or a statement.
eg.
This is good, isnt it? (or even just, this IS good)
Isn’t it nice weather we’re having?

it doesn’t require an answer, but it requires..something..

This is what I have gathered from it’s usage. I could be off a little

OH and happy birthday!

Jay-san,

Sorry, I cross-posted with you

JP-san,

I have a Friendster account, but I don’t use it at all. I think I’ve logged in once. Are you asking permission or a technical question? If it’s technical, I’ll find out for you. Let me know

よ (yo) is a sentence ending particle used to say “hey, this is new info”. It’s emphatic, and it assumes that the other party doesn’t already know the information, so you only want to use it when you know they don’t. It’s generally out of place when dealing with superiors (and out-group). It’s often described as being like the exclamation mark, but it’s more complex than that.

魚が好きですか。(sakana ga suki desu ka)
Do you like fish? (lit. “fish liked?”)
好きですよ。
I sure do! (lit. “liked!”)

Here, the first speaker isn’t confirming a suspicion, he/she is genuinely asking whether the listener likes fish. The listener knows that it is a genuine question, and so gives it that extra emphasis. It kind of says “pay attention, because this is something you don’t know”, which is where the emphasis comes to play - an attention grabber.

You can also combine よ and ね to stack the effects. In this case, ね always comes after よ (ですよね).

As the conversation becomes less formal, よ can tend to move away from the “something you don’t know” use and more toward pure emphasis.

Hi !

You’ve got a new listener from Brussels ! …

(oups … where is it again ? … ha yeah … in Europe, some miles away from London but on the continent this time ! … do you remember this strange tiny country called Belgium … yes right … the chocolate and bier country… that will reminds you of ‘Godiva’ … ! It is valentine’s day 365 days a year here)
But I am not here to talk about my country … ( by the way am I the only one from here? )

I was writing this … ’cause I would like to congratulate the team … and mainly Peter for giving so freshly his enthousiasm to us all … cast after cast … and also the rest of the team for giving them so seriously in this work … the team is great ! …

So please continue to teach us !
Peter san … Oshiete kudasai !

Virtually yours.

Philippe.

Vicky-san,

오늘 정말 아름다워 보이시네요.

Oh wait, that’s not right I wish I could properly say what I want to, but don’t worry… it’s not that hard and I’m sure you’re doing fine! Just let me know if you’re getting caught up somewhere and we’ll work it out

Philippe-san,

Welcome to the community! Good to have you with us

Nathan-san, 정말 한국말 할줄 알아요?
Maybe you can help me with my new job…

Nathan-san, watashi wa graphic designer (Japanese???) desu.
But, I’m doing something else too. If I tell you, I have to kill you…..Kidding….

Nathan-san, got msn or ichat id? There is any other way I can contact other people???

I don’t think it’s good idea talking at here…

phew~~ i finally caught up with all the lessons! i’ve spent the past couple of weeks just chasing the lessons from page 1. japanesepod no mina-san, hontou ni arigatou gozaimashita!! you have given me hours of fun learning. i especially enjoyed your banter among yourselves. your teaching method is just great, giving lessons on ordinary japanese-speak besides the formal ones. previously in language school, we were frustrated that after months of lessons, we could not understand what the japanese around us were saying. also, before we could get to the end of a sentence, they already knew what we were going to say! and i was so scared by all those words dressed in tuxedo! thanks for de-mystifying all that n giving us great stuff like the magical wa!
btw, we have mos burger here in singapore too, so anyone passing by here can grab one without having to go to japan.
also, macdonald’s has come up with a similar thing called the FAN-tastic, FAN being the same sound as rice in chinese.
well, ijyou desu

jayさん、
when i first read about JLPT i looked up the requirements for level 1, thinking it was the easiest. but then again its logical. levels of proficiency, the kyuu（級） are counted backwards. In Judo the beginners get 9th kyuu, the white belt, highest is 1st kyuu, brown belt, then comes 1st dan, the black belt.

如何してインフォルマル・レッスン・ノートに振り仮名が有りません

I was told that you cannot use はtwice in a single sentence.

In general you usually won’t have multiple はs in the same sentence, but there’s no rule against it. 実（じつ）は is a little different since the whole thing is really more like an expression by itself. From exposure, I’ve developed kind of a sense of when multiple はs work, but unfortunately this is something we never really covered in class. So I can’t give you any hard and fast rules. I can give you an example though. This is from an autobiography we had to write for our last Japanese class where I actually use it 3 times including 実は. Translation follows:

実(じつ）は、私の心音（しんおん）のせいで、かんごふは私が生（う）まれる前（まえ）は、私が女（おんな）の子（こ）だと思（おも）っていた。
Actually, because of my heart sounds, before I was born (my Mom’s) nurse thought I was a girl.

This is a true story, btw.

And yes, I realize 看護婦（かんごふ） is an outdated term for “nurse” since it implies that the nurse is female. We learned the gender neutral version, 看護士(かんごし), later.

JapanesePod101に本当にありがとう！　僕はオーストラリアで、高校で日本語を勉強している。そのような会話練習は僕の日本語を手伝った！次のPod楽しみに待っているよ

夏子さん酷い…かわいそう、武也さん

You’re very welcome. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a more detailed explanation other than that though. は and が are certainly interesting little particles, but the details and subtleties of what exactly they do in a sentence can be a bit difficult to understand, especially for beginners. Heck, I still sometimes have problems really wrapping my brain around them. So for the time being, I would say in general there is one は per sentence/clause, but don’t freak out if there are more. Don’t worry about the details with that too much. Yet.

I have a question…It may have been covered before. But the Japanese word for Thank you ‘Arigatou’ does it by any chance have it’s roots in the Portuguese ‘Obrigado’ I know that Japan ’shut’ itself of from the rest of the world for nearly 300 years, but it still had trade links with Portugual during that period….or be it a very limited one. I think the Portuguese were only allowed to port at Nagasaki.
It may be a stupid question. So if it is…I am sorry.
O-genki de
Steve

Jason-san.
Thanks for the information on Arigatou in Kanji. I seem to learn something new everyday here….for example, I never knew there was a kanji for arigatou.
I only asked because of the similarity to ‘Obrigado’ It is pronounced it a similar way to Arigatou…apart from the fact that, of course, instead of ‘A’ it is ‘Ob’ and instead of ‘tou’ it is ‘do’

And one more for good measure:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/afaq/arigatou.html

JP101 Team,

Please check the last comment here:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/2006/03/04/japanese-culture-class-9-japanese-plum-blossoms/

Also, I’m not sure if Gevorg-san saw this (last comment):
http://www.japanesepod101.com/2006/03/07/beginner-lesson-43-speciality/

Now I’m really off

Hi everyone,
I liked this lesson a lot, it’s so funny to hear yo guys talking (and Sakura laughing - it’s so cute and always makes me laugh, too, so I’m always in a very good mood )

For Jay, I’ld have an idea… probably I should be the last to give advice here, as I really started like 2 weeks ago learning some japanese… but maybe you just try it:
I downloaded all the pdf files from the lessons ( I didn’t find a smart way to have them all in one go, so that takes some time, which you use to listen to other lessons ).
Then I went to David Hallgren’s great webpage (David: どうも　ありがと　ございます, this is really a useful thing! ) stamped the hiragana chart and did the test page. After a couple of runs, you won’t do much errors any more, and it’s really quick.
Since a couple of days, I read the pdf files while listening to the lesson, and that works just great!
I don’t know if that’s Ok, but I kind of don’t “read” all the words sign after sign, as I did the first runs. It’s as if you recognize in the pdf the words you already know “in toto” as they are spoken. It gets kind of automatic, you don’t think of every sign one by one.
I don’t know if that’s a sensible way to learn, but for me it worked just fine - new words blend rapidly in. Maybe you just try and see what happens?

On the other hand, what do you do for kanji? ? I don’t know, of course, nothing about them! What is a good way to proceed – stop everything, learn 2000 kanji and then go on? Or do a bit of kanji everyday? Or are there a couple (100, 200, 500???) you really should know and study first, and then do the others by and by? How do you study? Is there a trick for the pronunciation, I mean can it be inferred from something? (Don’t laugh , Ok, you are probably LOL by now…)

THANX for any help. I promise, as I learn more, I will ask less dumb questions in the future… the very far future, that is.

Saluti to everyone
さるち, now that’s a nice new word for you japanese-speakers, huh??

Penelope-san: I don̈́’t think we had time to answer your mail, so sorry about that. If I remember correctly, you asked about learning kanji there too. I’ll answer here instead.

This is based on my own experiences, so other methods could work better for you. Learning methodology is partly an individual thing.

Learn kanji as you go. For the first 6-12 months of studying, about 15-20 kanji per week should be good(Reading and writing). Af ter that, learn how to write about 25-30 per week, and around 50 for reading. You will notice that the more you learn, the easier the learning will get. Many kanji also has similar parts, that can hint towards their on-yomi reading. That is, their “chinese” reading.

The most important thing is to do it at your own pace. And go back and repeat! Repetition is key when it comes to remembering stuff. Interval repetition works very well. This means to study a lot in the beginning, and then repeat with longer and longer intervals.

If you on top of this is able to practice what you learn in real-life situations, like writing a letter etc, learning 2000 kanji should go really smooth!

Hope this helps

Jonas