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Learn Japanese with JapanesePod101.com! Your friend asks you in Japanese, “What do you think of the idea?” Your answer, in Japanese, is tentative and slightly irritated, although not at your friend. “I don’t know. It seems simple enough. The students make their own lunches five times during the year. Why the hassle? It doesn’t make sense to me. How many days a year are the students in school?” Your friend offers an uncertain Japanese answer, “I’m not sure, maybe 180?” You correct him in your irritated Japanese, “Not really, more like 210 days. For them to make their own lunches only five days in all that time is less than one time in two months. Surely this is a trivial thing.” Your Japanese friend begins to understand why your attitude is different than that of others. He explains in Japanese, “Ah, maybe you don’t quite understand the cultural thing. Traditions here go back thousands of years. We don’t change things easily or quickly. Having our kids make their own lunches five times a year might seem like nothing to you, but it makes Japanese households very stressful five times a year. Do you understand?” You’ve studied enough Japanese language and culture to understand what your friend is saying. “Yes, I can see that. Thank you for making me understand…now you just have a few more households all over Japan to go.”

Learning Japanese with JapanesePod101.com is the most fun and effective way to learn Japanese! This Japanese Lower Intermediate lesson reviews the Japanese causative that you’ve been studying for the past few lessons. You’ll have a deeper understanding of the Japanese permissive, coercive, and the emotional forms of the Japanese causative. Visit us at JapanesePod101.com where you will find many more fantastic Japanese lessons and learning resources! Leave us a message while you are there!

learn Japanese, causative


This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Lower Intermediate Season 4 . 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.

25 Responses to “Lower Intermediate Lesson S4 #24 - Munch on the Idea of Japanese Lunchbox Day!”

JapanesePod101.com says:

みなさん, Did your school offer a school lunch, or did you take a lunch to school everyday?

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Steve says:

小学校にはうちのお母さんが昼ご飯を作ったけど、弁当じゃなくてサンドイッチだった。Peanut Butter + Honeyが日本にあまり人気じゃないね~
高校までには学校の食堂でランチを買った。金曜日はChicken Burgerの日で、とってもうれしかった!
大学には、そこで食べなかった。。。

でも今はお弁当です :)

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Naomi says:

Steve-san
そうですね。Peanut butter は日本人はあまり食べないですね。
でも、わたしは大好きです。 :razz:
Peanut butter + Honey は知りませんでした。おいしそう~。今度作ってみます!
あ・・・でも・・・太りそう・・・ :lol:

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Steve says:

でもそれより、Deep Fried Baconを心配していいんだと思うね  :eek:

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Jessi says:

私もpeanut butter+honeyのサンドイッチが大好きです! :mrgreen: 食べたくなりました。。

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Naomi says:

Steve -san
Deep Fried Bacon…知りませんでした。 Google で、写真を見ました。
おいしそう!!!これは、本当に太りそう :lol:

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Richard says:

Once again that was a really good lesson. Asking for listeners to complete sentences in the dialog is such a powerful way of teaching - far better than just repeating parrot fashion. If anything I’d like to see more of this in the lessons. The grammar content was really useful too. I really should use the passive and causative passive more when speaking Japanese…why do I always avoid it? Maybe I find the verb conjugations too difficult when speaking at normal speed.

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Jessi says:

Richardさん,
Thank you! I know what you mean about not using the passive/causative passive while speaking - it can be hard to come up with it on the spot and it seems easier to just find another way to say it :lol: That’s why we need practice!! :grin:

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Jacki says:

Peanut butter が好きじゃない。 Balogna とチェーズ食べた。今日はroast beefとチェーズ食べた。おいしいよ!毎日はぎゅうにゅを飲む。
あ。。。のどが渇いた。しつれいします!

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Mayumi says:

Jacki-san,

Bolognaとチーズのサンドウィッチですか?おいしそう~ :wink:

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Okie says:

涎が出て来た~! ピーナツバター と ベーコン のコンビについて考えが止まりませんよ!
子供時代ずっと、毎日母は私のランチに作られましたけど、母のランチよりスクールのランチのほうがおいしいそうでした。。。フライドポテト とか、ピザとか。。。
家で ジャンクフード は禁じられました!かわいそうね! :cry:

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Jessi says:

Okieさん,
ピーナツバターとベーコンですか?!一体どんな味がするんだろう。。 :shock: :lol:
I know what you mean about school lunches! They had all the kinds of (unhealthy) foods kids love! :lol:

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Tachikoma says:

Hi everyone, I have a few questions about this lesson!

Firstly I should say that I find one of the voice actors really tough to follow. He’s the guy who spoke the line “:わたしは、さんせい。こどもにじぶんでおべんとうをねんに5かいつくらせるんでしょ。” He’s been voicing JPod lessons for a long time and I’ve always struggled to understand him as he talks very, very quickly and tends to slur words together quite often. I usually need the transcript to work out what he’s saying!

That aside, I have questions!

1 - What does ‘daiji sa’ mean? I know ‘daiji’ means ‘important’, but what does the ’sa’ on the end mean?

2 - The way this sentance - “でも「べんとうのひ」のよさをしっかりせつめいして、ほごしゃをあんしんさせればいいんじゃないかな。” was read totally threw me. It’s said with “しっかり” as two seperate words “shi”, and “kari”, with a *long* pause between the sylables. Is this normal?

3 - “もたせる” is a causative veb, but what was the original? The translation is to ‘think of’, but isn’t that “kangaeru”?

4 - After dialogue banter - “toujou jimbutsu” means “characters entering the scene”?

5 - Jessi said “shougakusei ha, itsu mo kyuushoku wo tabeteiru kara, dialogue de, nen ni gokai bentou no hi wo tsukurou to iu koto wo hashi atta n’desu ne”. What does ‘nen ni’ mean? And please Jessi slow it down a notch, Yuichi and Mayumi speak at just the right speed.

6 - The vocab was (again!) missing many words which were in the lesson specific vocab list. Of the 15 listed, you guys only mentioned 6 of them in list form, then went on to add another in depth. That might be a new record…

As general feedback, I found this lesson pretty difficult. There were several words which, as far as I could remember, were new, and unexplained in the vocab list. Words like ‘ichibu’ threw me at first too, until I could get access to the dictionary and work them out. The line by line was a life saver, but even then the amount of new words made this pretty challenging. Also a comment for Jessi - you are talking quicker and quicker these days, now far ahead of Mayumi and Yuicihi and aproaching Sachiko levels at times. As Sachiko needed to be played at half speed to be understood by humans, this isn’t great news! Please slow it down a touch! Thanks!

As general feedback, I found this lesson pretty difficult. There were several words which, if they had been introduced before, I had forgotten them, or they were just new and unexplained. The line by line was a life saver, but even then the general difficulty level of banter has been rising considerably lately and is now well outside my comfort zone. In a way that’s good, but it also means I miss big chunks of the after dialogue banter completely, and as they aren’t transcribed it’s tough to work them out manually. If you go much futher at this rate, you’ll lose me completely. :(

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Tachikoma says:

Sorry, I posted a WIP version of my post at the end there too. Oops!

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Kat says:

Tachikomaさん、

First of all, はじめまして :smile:  I’m Kat, a new member of staff at JapanesePod101.com. よろしくお願いします!Now, I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can!

Thanks for your feedback on the lesson, and on our voice actor. You may find him a little difficult to understand (I used to find men much harder to understand than women in Japanese; possibly because 95% of all Japanese language teachers are female…?), but that’s the best possible preparation for actually coming to Japan and interacting with ‘real’ Japanese people! (Although having said that, no language course in the world adequately prepares you for Old Man Japanese… :shock: )

1. ‘Sa’ is a sentence ending particle meaning ‘y’know’ which you definitely don’t need to panic about: it adds no extra meaning to the sentence and is basically just a habit of speech. It was originally masculine, but now some women use it too. You can also use ’sa’ in the middle of sentences (girls in particular do this nowadays) and it acts as the equally irritating Japanese form of ‘like’. For example: なんかさぁ、昨日さ、先生に怒られてさ、ちょーむかついたんだけどさぁ! ’Like, yesterday, I like totally got yelled at by my teacher, and I was like SOOO annoyed, by the way!’ (Disclaimer: For example purposes only. PLEASE do not talk like this in Japanese! :shock: :mrgreen: )

2. しっかり is an adverb meaning ‘properly’ or ‘thoroughly’. The spelling is correct. What word were you thinking of…?

3. The sentence ending in もたせる was 自分の食べるものについて考える機会を持たせるのは、本当に大事なことだと思うよ。 持たせる is indeed a causative; it’s the causative of the verb 持つ (もつ), which means ‘to hold’ and more broadly ‘to have’. So the literal translation of this sentence would be: ‘I really think it’s an important thing (本当に大事なことだと思うよ) to provide [children] with opportunities to think about their own food [自分の食べるものについて考える機会を持たせるのは]. Do you see how 持たせる、 which literally means ‘to make [someone] hold [something]’, has been translated as ‘provide’ (or in the dialogue translation, as ‘create’)? You’re literally ‘making children hold thoughts about what they eat’ - or ‘providing them with opportunities to think about what they eat’.

4. 登場人物 (とうじょうじんぶつ) means just ‘characters [in a scene/play]’ or ‘dramatis personae’, if you’re familiar with that phrase; it can also encompass the meaning of ‘characters entering’, yes, as 登場 literally means ‘appear’ or ‘come on stage’.

5. ねんに (年に) means just ‘in a year’. So Jessi said 年に五回、

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Kat says:

5. ねんに (年に) means just ‘in a year’. So Jessi said 年に五回、 which means ‘five times a year’.

6. Noted. Sorry about that, it must have been frustrating for you - we’ll definitely have a look at the vocab issue. I’ll also pass on the message about Jessi’s speaking speed - although as I mentioned before, it’s good for your comprehension skills to practice listening to native speed speech, even if you can’t quite catch it all yet. Listening to artificially slowed-down speech is indeed easy and comfortable, but if you get too used to that speed, then it will cause problems for you later on… :sad:

Anyway, I hope I answered most of your questions (and sorry about the split post!). Please let me know if anything else needs explaining in more detail :cool:

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Tachikoma says:

Hi Kat,

Thanks for that. The question I had with ’shikari’ wasn’t the meaning, but the way it was said in the dialogue. If you have a listen you’ll hear that the word was split into two, which made it sound like two unique words, not one. I was wondering if that was normal or just the voice actress doing something weird.

Speaking speed is an int eresting one, as my experience with real Japanese speech is (as you would expect) limited. Still, I’d say 99% of the comprehension problems related to speed (rather than unknown vocab/grammer) I’ve had have been from a few JPod voice actors! Would you say Mayumi and Yuichi speak artificially slowly?

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Naomi says:

Tachikoma -san
Thank you so much for the feedback.

You spelled “shikari” but it’s actually しっかり”shikkari”.-I’ve also checked the PDF. It also said しっかり “shikkari”
I think we’ve explained it in a different lesson, but some people put a slightly longer pause at the small つ part to add emphasis.
I don’t think the voice actor is doing anything weird.

Regarding speaking speed, I personally didn’t find Jessi’s speech was fast at all, it’s quite a natural speed in a conversation. Some people speak faster than the others.
Yuichi and I (by the way, I’m not Mayumi. I’m Naomi) are language teachers so I have to admit that we speak like teachers-we speak more clearly. However it doesn’t mean we speak artificially slowly.
It’s just that you probably wouldn’t speak like you normally do in front of the microphone or in the classroom.

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Tachikoma says:

Thanks Naomi, and many appologies for calling you Mayumi! I can only assume I was thinking of soneone else when I was typing!

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Shimewaza says:

Tachikoma-san,

Basically, everyone at JPod is speaking artificially slowly. If you’ve not heard full speed native Japanese, check out some of the TV clips over at YouTube. The situation gets even more dire when, for example, you are in a tiny dive bar in Osaka trying to understand the drunken ojisan speaking to you in Osakaben over the din of the other customers :lol: It takes a lot of time, patience, and practice to accustom your ear to full speed native Japanese but it can be done.

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Kat says:

Tachikomaさん

Sorry for the late reply! I would agree with Naomi that rather than speaking ‘artificially slowly’, the native Japanese speakers here at JPod speak very clearly - much more clearly than a lot of people will do you the favour of speaking in ‘real life’! It also helps that most of our teachers here are female: I don’t know about you, but I have always found and continue to find women far easier to understand in Japanese than men!

Shimezawaさん

Very, very good point! The 漫才 (manzai) comic dialogues are excellent practice too! :mrgreen: Old-man Japanese is the bane of my existence… I actually used to have a part-time job in an izakaya in Yokohama, which was the best way bar-none (no pun intended, groan) to acclimatize myself to native-speed (slurred, drunken, slangy…) Japanese :mrgreen:

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タネ says:

I’m not sure Tachikoma-san got an answer to what “daijisa” means. True, “daiji” means important, and the “sa” here changes that to a noun, so daijisa means “importance”.

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タネ says:

This lesson does have some difficult words, but I found the challenge really fun. I found, unlike most of the Lower Intermediate lessons, that I had to listen several times to really feel positive that I could piece together the sentences correctly. Repeated listening really helped! The kanji were hard, too.

BTW, I like the beta versions of the practice section in the Premium package.

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Nick says:

I absolutely love this series and in particular listening to Naomi, Jessi, and Yuichi conversing back and forth. I love the explanations in Japanese for japanese words and situations, and the additional exposure to spoken japanese beyond the dialog is great for me. I am grateful that they are speaking so clearly that I am able to understand some of the words without looking at the pdf. I know that soon I will need to focus on listening to even more native speakers, but at least I am getting some exposure from these lessons. Thank you so much for putting so much into the lesson. I am glad that you three are working together to do this. It really makes me look forward to the next lesson. I just wish I had someone here close to home to talk to in Japanese to help me practice.

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Jessi says:

Nickさん,
Thank you so much for your nice comments - we loved reading them! :mrgreen: :dogeza: Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy Season 5 as well :grin:

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