Postby jim.schuler » August 24th, 2015 4:29 am
Hello,
First, I wish you luck with the job. I hope you get it and I that you have fun with it.
I'm also a beginner with Japanese, so that everything I say with a grain of salt. But, if you haven't done it yet, I suggest you sign up for the 1-week trial of the site and go through the first few lessons of Beginner Season 1, which covers introductions.
Now, on to your introduction:
Konnichiwa Minna-san!
You will want to say Hajimemashita for a first meeting. That translates to "Nice to meet you" (this is based off the verb Hajimeru, which is "to begin") "Konnichiwa Minnasan, Hajimemashita." Or "Minnasan Hajimemashita." Or just "Hajimemashita."
Watashi wa Trigg Matthew des
It's "desu," but yes, you pronounce it as "des." "Trigg Matthew" will need to be converted into katakana and pronounced that way. I see Matthew converted to Masshuu. Trigg might be Torigu.
Watashi ha suki hon, anime to bideo geimu.
There are a few things here. You don't need to say "Watashi wa" again. (You actually don't need to say it the first time, but in this situation it's probably more polite). A lot of Japanese relies on context, and it's already understood from the previous sentence that you are the topic of discussion. Until you introduce another topic ([Something] wa), you don't need to say it. (By the way, for now, don't bother learning how to say "you" in Japanese. Do your best to go without it, as it's often considered rude to refer to someone as "you," instead of by their name.)
The next thing is, Japanese doesn't follow standard English Subject Verb Object order. Instead, it's Subject Object Verb. Let's do some surgery, and I'll talk about the rest:
Hon to anime to teribe geemu to ga suki desu.
Books and anime and video games, are liked (by me). The "to" particle is "and," but it needs to follow every item in the list. This is also used for comprehensive lists of things. If you instead wanted to say "Books, anime, videos games, and the like" it would be hon to ka anime to ka teribe geemu to ka....
The "ga" particle just indicates that those things are the subject of the sentence, which the remainder will apply to. Since suki itself is not a verb, but an adjective, you need the desu, which functions as "is/are" here.
Whether or not these are the proper words to use is beyond my capability. I just checked jisho.org for "video game" and apparently the Japanese base their word off of "television game" instead (which makes me think you can further cut it to tebe geemu). And that might be the wrong word for book in this context.
Watashi wa tanoshinoshitemasu goruden weiku, comiket anime expo, eto taberu daifuku ichigo.
From the last sentence we did, you can probably get pretty close to the right structure on this one:
Gooruden Uiiku to Komiketto to ichigo daifuku wo taberu koto to wo tanoshimi ni shite imasu.
Note to self: when saying "first," make sure to stretch out the "o" lest you instead yell "Strawberry!"
"Wo" is like "ga" in the last sentence. It's marking the object that is the subject of the verb. And I might have gotten the last "wo" wrong. It could be a "ga." But Jisho.org's sample sentence has it preceded by a "wo," so that's what I'm going with. The "koto" here is turning "ichigo daifuku wo taberu" into a noun so that it can be the object for "tanoshimi ni shite imasu."
And again, I can't tell you if I have the right words for Golden Week or Comket or daifuku strawberies.
If you want to try your hand at the rest, I will try my hand at (poorly) correcting them. The worst that can happen is you get it wrong. You will want to look up the -te form of verbs for "reviewed and improved."
