掲示板 Forums - What did you learn today?

I finally unlocked and studied the Beginner Japanese Grammar & Vocabulary Schedules.

Also I played my first Shiritori Cat Game.

i learned some new words and kanji and i can keep a simple conversation going for about 3 - 4 minutes

May anyone be as kind as to tell me a trick that can make the て form and casual form conjugations easy and neither overwhelming nor confusing?! I'm doing N4 already while I feel totally stuck and hopeless about these... 😣😣

Grouping helps. Remembering the groups as a word helps. Casual Past form and て form are very similar.

Casual past form:

Verb ending -> replacement

Ichidan verbs:

る -> た e.g. おしえる -> おしえた

Godan verbs:

う,つ,る -> った (It's helpful to say this group as the word うつる) e.g. しまう ->しまった

ぬ,ぶ,む -> んだ (It's helpful to say this group as the made up word ぬぶむ) e.g. とぶ -> とんだ

く、(ぐ is the same as く, but with the dashes) -> いた (いだ) e.g. つく -> ついた, もぐ -> もいだ

す -> した　e.g. はなす -> はなした

て form:

just replace the た from causal past form with て　(and だ with で)

e.g. とぶ -> とんで

For any follow up, it would best to make a new post rather than posting it in this thread, which is supposed to be for "What did you learn today?"

I learnt about weather terms! あつい、さむい、天気、はれ、くもり etc..

I learned that 好き is the い-stem of the verb 好く, like 休み is the い-stem of 休む. Also, な-adjectives (like 好き) are (half)nouns. Both information together make a lot of sense to me. For reference see this video by Jouzu Juls. (Disclaimer: don't worry if you get confused, just use the information or explanations you understand.)

It works for puppies 子犬 and kittens 子猫 and foals 小馬 as well.

I am learning about the 6 paths in japananse called deva realm, asura realm, naraka realm, human realm, animal realm, and last I am learning. ;)

Today I finally worked out the relationship between the on’yomi for 万 (マン) and 励 (レイ).

It’s complicated, and I’m not 100% confident that I documented it all correctly, but at least it doesn’t seem totally arbitrary anymore.

The key to the relationship between the on’yomi of “myriad” 万 (まん) and “diligence” 励 (れい) is the related character “scorpion” 虿 (たい), but it gets complicated to explain because both the characters and their readings have changed dramatically over time (In all of these characters, 万 is a simplification of the traditional 萬, but I’ll ignore that for the sake of simplicity).

虿 was originally written without the 虫 radical, so it was the same character as 万. The pronunciations in Old Chinese, from approximately 500-1000 BC, are unknown, but comparative linguists have reconstructed them using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as *mlans for myriad and *m̥ʰraːds for scorpion.

IPA uses the following notation (see chart):

• * means the word is a theoretical reconstruction
• m is the consonant in em
• l is the consonant in el
• a is open vowel, felt central-back in the mouth
• n is the consonant in en
• s is the consonant in ess
• m̥ʰ is like m, but voiceless and aspirated
• r is a trill
• aː is like a, but long
• d is the consonant in Dee

The two words were closely related in Old Chinese, (I suppose because scorpions were a big problem and there seemed to be no end to them), and although they have changed quite a bit now as まん and たい, we can still see some similarities: まん still begins and ends with a nasal and has a similar vowel; たい still begins with an voiceless forward consonant and has a long vowel.

Now it’s time to explain how れい came about. The reconstruction of 励 is *m·rads, where m and r are in different syllables. That makes it easy to drop the m, just as たい drops the r. The vowel shifts slightly, but it is still long, and just like in たい, the final consonants are truncated.

That’s it, really. There are three roots involved, and they all evolve like crazy, and in different directions, so it’s hard to put it all together into one simple picture, but I think that’s all the essential points of the story.