Mina-san, we hope you enjoy today’s lesson. Today’s and tomorrow’s lessons should come in really handy! Understanding what the voice mail voice says!

Everyone at the studio, Peter, Natsuko, Take, Yoshi, Chigusa, Sakura(did I miss anyone here?)
You guys are awesome! Honto ni sugoi!

I’ve been learning japanese for 2 years now, and this is absolutely the best I’ve come across.

I’m currently at intermediate level, but I still learn many things from your beginner lessons. Keep the good work!

Moshi moshi

Hope everyone had a great day! No time to listen to the lesson yet though.

Vicky-san, Liz-san, Daniel-san, doko desu ka???

Hello again, I’m interested in the use of “da ze”, instead of “desu”. Can anyone explain this? Is this only used by male speaker?

Also is there any other gobi(I think this term is mentioned in Tae Kim’s Japanese tutorial, not sure if it’w widely used) that is used by male speaker only? I’ll be interesting in learning those

thanks!

The rain has taken my energy, so it has taken me this long to post.

Also, although it’s my day off, I’m tired because I had busy day at school yesterday, and was up late the night b4 trying to finish my podcast.

Peterちゃん、

I noticed you refered to the females in the story as “girls”, but the males as “gentlemen”. Hmm… You probably couldn’t get away with that if Takaseさん was there, could you?

Oh, btw, thanks for the comment you left. I look forward to hearing your feedback on my podcast. And, also to coming down to the office and fulfilling my mission for Our Vickyちゃん。 Because all I hear is “Take Take Take… blah blah blah…”

-Daniel B

皆さん今晩は!　I don’t post or read comments here too often, so I dunno if this was posted already. It’s a nice flash card program called JFC that you can use even when you don’t have internet access.

http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/japanese.html

It’s a free program for Japanese flash cards called JFC, and you can make your own lists in Notepad or any other text editor. I tried copying and pasting vocab from the first page of the cumulative list, and it actually worked. Well, you need a Japanese space (or something…) to separate kanji from kana and romaji and so forth, so the English and romaji are showing in the same section, but still, it’s working well enough for me, since I’m not working with romaji. I’m no PHP guru, but think it would be pretty easy to make a .jfc file generator. Or at least a .php file so that people could copy everything nicely into Notepad and save it as a .jfc file. I’d even try to make one myself if I had access to the vocab database. (Yes, that was my subtle way of asking, “PLEASE MAKE SOMETHING LIKE THIS, JPOD CREW!!!111one”　 )
有難うございます!
-Justin

robaato-san,
Welcome back! Yes, isn’t this site amazing? It gets better all the time. I’m a beginner, but here’s a suggestion about your question: go back to the beginning and listen to only the dialogue of as many Beginner Lessons as you can. That would be a way of quickly reviewing the material becuase you could bypass the vocabulary and grammar discussions. And, you could look at the pdf for each lesson, too. I’ve noticed that the dialogues usually start about 1:30 into the podcast, so fast forward to that point. The lessons have not passed Intermediate yet, believe me. Ganbatte!

ぜ and ぞ are essentially the same but ぞ is even stronger.

Daniel B-san, don’t forget OUR Jason-san!!!

Alanさん, you can’t use もっと like that, nor can you put anything between て and いる like that. I think the most natural place to put it would be right after は. But even if you did that, it wouldn’t say what you want. It just says “I’m studying more.” You need to use one of the “must do/neccesary” constructions:

もっと勉強する必要があります。
もっと勉強しなくてはなりません。
もっと勉強しなければなりません。

Hi Everyone there, Peter, Natsuko, Take, Yoshi, Chigusa, Sakura! Great cellphone lesson keep it up!

Jean-Michelさん,
Let me take a shot at this and people can correct me if needed.
The の is a nominalizer that turns the proceeding part into a phrase. e.g.
Nominalizing　particle の (来る)の(が遅い)
The かな just means “I wonder” Here it is from JDIC
かな (prt) (1) I wonder (sentence ending prt);
I don’t know if there is any special relationship between でしょうか and かな other than they have similar meanings.
Hope that is right.
ジョン

Jean-Michelさん,
I put the question to an acquaintance (American guy) in Japan. Below is his response.
ジョン
I’ll happily take any excuse to take a break from studying for the KanKen.

I don’t have a complete answer for you, but I can give you some thoughts - hope that helps. That’s all i get from learning through exposure - more feelings and instincts and less formal answers.

I’ve seen the の used in formal sentence structure, but I’m not super clear on it’s point. Sorry!
I always see かな　or かなぁ as somewhat of an introspective remark - more accurately put as “I wonder…”. I don’t think of it as calling out for an response from the listener. でしょうか seems to ask for a response. I’m thinking that this might be because you don’t really do much ‘musing’ when you’re speaking in a formal situation. The latter translates in my head as more of a ‘…., you know?’. I’m about to write a letter to a couple of friends who are beyond me in Japanese - I’ll pass this along to them as well.

m

ps: the tilde means..kind of, like a drawn out syllable. Go back to the ‘i wonder…’, and translate the whole sentence “I wonder if they’ll really come…’; already, it’s a statement that lacks confidence in the truth of the subject matter, and so you don’t put it so curtly - you kind of leave it open.

Jean-Michelさん,
It is really no bother. Personally, I try to answer these questions because I usually learn something in the process. I think the same is true for my acquaintance. We are all learning.
ジョン

tryllid-san,

When you say “moshi Jon ga kitara, watashi wa kaerimasu,” it is clear that you are not sure if John is coming or not. So, “moshi” clears up the ambiguity as to whether you are sure or not of his coming. I think it’s still ambiguous as to whether it means that you are leaving because you don’t like him or you are just saying that you are leaving when you come.