Learn Japanese FAQ

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Q: Hello Richard! I write to you asking something I’ve been trying to figure out for some time now. How do you say you miss something? I know about 「寂しくなる」for talking about missing a person, but how do you state that you miss an object or action, like “I miss Japan.” or “I miss eating onigiri every day.”? Your help would be much appreciated!   Thanks!  Emily

A: Ooo, I think you might have got me there!   I guess there must be a literal translation, but I’ve never heard it so it’s probably not used very much.   What you usually hear is:  somethingがないと寂しくなる ( something ga nai to sabishukunaru)   If (something) wasn’t there I’d miss it.

On the other hand, one expression that you hear all the time in Japanese but which we don’t have a phrase for in English is 懐かしい – na tsu ka shii.   This is a really cool phrase to learn.  So for example if you’ve been out of Japan for ages and suddenly you return you could say “na tsu ka shii” to mean “I miss Japan, it’s great to be back!”  or if you hadn’t eaten an onigiri for ages you could say 懐かしい to mean “I miss these soooo much!”

Does that help?

Q: When im older i would like to work in japan teaching english but my secondary school does not do japanese GCSE. so how can i get into collage or university if i don’t have the right GCSE. or is it possible to go straight into a college course without having a japanese gcse. – Rachelle

A: For our overseas friends GCSE is the exam you take at 16 in the UK, usually in lots of different subjects.

I do know that many universities and colleges allow you to do Japanese as a module or option without a GCSE (I was offered it myself) but for a full time degree I’m not sure.  The best thing would be to just ask the Japanese department at the college you wish to go to.  If you have a passion for the language and could maybe get yourself up to GCSE level on your own (Grade C isn’t that hard) then I would imagine there would be a chance.  But of course check with the department first!

Q: So I want to learn japanese and I’ve told my parents this over and over. and since my birthday is coming up they’re getting me rosetta stone. Have you used it before? Is it a good program to learn japanese with? – Allana

A: I wrote a review of the Rosetta Stone over on the main GenkiJapan.net site.    I have used it, not for Japanese but for Thai, and it’s certainly not bad.  It’s not as fun as the GenkiJapan games and sometimes it can be tough to figure out just what the meanings are supposed to be.  But if you stick with it and are prepared to put in the hours then I have heard of people getting very good results from it.  The trick is whether you have the patience or not!

Summer means one thing in Japan – fireworks!  These are just the small scale ones in my local town – but still pretty impressive eh? (Click here if you can’t see the video on email!)

Firework in Japanese is 花火- hanabi -　which is really cool as 花 – hana – means “flower” and “火” means “fire”.   So you have “fire flower” !

This is the big finale but I took lots of other clips.  If you’d like to see them let me know on the Youtube page!

Be genki,

Richard

Q: How do you say the word “and” in Japanese? Or is there one? – Taylor

A: Yet another good question.  And this is something I used to make a mistake with all the time when I started, because there are two totally different ways of saying “and” in Japanese and you can’t mix them up!

Luckily once you figure this out they are quite easy though…..

OK, so the first one is like when you say “Cheese and Tomato”   The word you need here is と  always written in hiragana and pronounced “to” ( or a little like a “toe” on your foot)

Cheese is チーズ – chiizu (sounds a bit like “cheezu”) and Tomato is トマト ( to ma to – said more British than American!).

So full marks to anyone who can figure out how to say “Cheese and Tomato”….

Time starts now!

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Yep, it’s チーズとトマト – chiizu to tomato

Dead easy!

The next type of “and” in Japanese is when you join two sentences together.  You can’t use と here.  But there are a couple of ways of doing this.  One is the grammar “tte form” which I’ll leave for another post….  And the other easy way is to say “そして” inbetween the sentences.   The “tte form” is probably better for written work, but when you speak そして　is just fine.

Q: I like the videos and find them helpful. But I think they would be even more helpful if there was the written word above the english word. Cool site! - Allen

A: Hi Allen, thank you very much for the feedback.  It’s a good point and something I hear a lot.  To be honest if I was just in this to make a load of money and become super popular on Youtube then I’d do everything in romaji, because that’s what everyone seems to want.

But…. from experience I also know that as soon something is written in English letters you tend to sound it out like your native language, and it becomes less and less Japanese.  For example し isn’t “shi” or “si”, it’s somewhere inbetween.   Of course you can’t hear this yourself, and it’s not until you get to Japan that realise what’s happening when just get complete blank looks from everyone!

Hence why I’d much prefer it for everyone to learn by just listening to the songs first lots of times to get the sounds right, and then it’s easy to make the jump to hiragana and or katakana.

But … am I just stupid trying to be like Whole Foods?  Or should I just be like McDonalds and give everyone what they want even though it’s not in the slightest bit healthy?  Tough call!

Q: I am learning Spanish in school, but I’m teaching myself Japanese at home. In Spanish class, they teach the students progressively. Meaning alphabet, then greetings, then numbers and colors, basic grammar, and getting harder as you go a long. When you’re learning Japanese, is there a specific order that you would recommend? (like katakana and hiragana first, then numbers and colors, etc?) – Hannah

A: What a very good question!  When I first started the Genki Japan Learning Japanese website I didn’t really think about doing them in any particular order because I never thought it would be so popular.  But it probably is time to think about putting the things into some sort of curriculum order and filling in any holes where I need to make more materials for you.

With just one exception it sounds like your Spanish system is just about perfect, greetings, numbers, colours, basic grammar, etc. etc.   The only exception I would say, and this applies just as much to Spanish as to Japanese, is to keep the alphabet(s) until you have learnt quite a bit of spoken Japanese.  If you do the alphabets (or worse still romaji) too early you run the risk of sounding very foreign when you speak!

So looking at the Genki Japan themes we have so far, the best order for those would probably be:

1. Disco Warm Up (best way to start!)
2. Self Introduction
3. Left & Right
4. Where from?
5. Numbers 1-20
6. Months
7. How much?
8. Colors
9. Learn Japanese cool, useful words and phrases.
10. Who,what,why?
11. Hot, Cold Song
12. Weather
13. Counters & Samurai
14. Mary san’s sheep
15. Katakana Song
16. Hiragana Song
17. Days of the week (good for basic kanji!)

How does that sound?

Q: Do Japanese people really eat horse sushi?

A: Yep!  The video I posted the other day was totally real I promise you!  It’s not everywhere though.  The horse sushi 馬刺し – ba sa shi – in the video is speciality of Kumamoto prefecture in Kyushu.  The only other place I’ve seen it is Gonohe in Aomori.  Mind you you can get horse steak in France!

Q: I’ve been following your posts recently. They turned out to be quite interesting. Your todayś note for example on not knowing how the characters will appear on oneś screen and that you have the kanji as hanji in Google-Chrome made me wonder whether I’ve found the source of why sometimes there are slight differences between how the kanji is written as a(n online) headword and then what comes as a result of a stroke order image series. I wonder if you could sum up some of the major differences. (There are some sites saying there isn’t any.) Is it in the radicals – Tibor

A:  Rather than the radicals, the main difference between kanji (the Chinese characters used in Japan) and Hanzi (the ones used in China) is that at many times people have tried to change them, usually to make them easier to write, and whilst some countries changed together, some did not.

I guess the easiest example of this is the symbol for “east”.   In Japan we write it as 東 reflecting how it was written when it first arrived in Japan a long time ago.  But in modern China they have simplified it to become 东.   e.g. Tokyo is 東京 in Japanese, but 东京 in modern mainland Chinese.

But it gets even more complicated as Hong Kong and Taiwan use “traditional” characters i.e. not the ones of communinist mainland China, but are still sometimes different to how you write them in Japan e.g.  Taiwan is written as 台湾　in Japan (and I think in mainland China), but as 台灣 in Taiwan.

So Japan uses a mixture of traditional characters and some simplified ones!

(Again this is hoping the browser you are using doesn’t mess up the characters!)

Hello,
I am Rebecca, and I am trying to learn Japanese. I am having a hard time because I am learning Spanish in school as well. I am a very busy person, and I plan to move to Japan once I have graduated high school. I am absolutely fascinated by Japan and it’s culture. Is there anything you can recommend for me to do to help me balance both languages at the same time? I want to learn Japanese more than Spanish, but Spanish is required for school. Thank you so much for helping people like me who want to try and learn another language. Especially Japanese, because it gets very frustrating at times! Thank you so much, Rebecca

A: Hi Rebecca,  well done on wanting to learn both!  It is very doable,  most people in the World speak more than 1 or 2 languages, so it’s not that hard – unlike what many people who only speak English believe!

When you study two languages together, it’s the things that are similar that tend to confuse you.  So you should have no problems with the writing, but as Spanish and Japanese sound quite similar then that does bring up quite a bit of confusion.

What I would recommend would be to use totally different websites, CDs and ways of learning for the two different languages.  That should help a lot.

I learnt Spanish using the Pimsleur materials, but then found that if I use Pimsleur to learn any other language I just keep going to back to Spanish!  Similarly I did Italian in my final year of Uni, but when I tried using the same system to start Japanese it just didn’t work.  But now I try learning several new languages at once always in different ways and it seems to be working!

So try using different materials is my top tip.  And unfortunately that means is you are using www.GenkiJapan.net to learn Japanese it’s probably not a good idea to use www.GenkiSpanish.com to learn Spanish!