Lesson #2 - Verb usage

For those who does not know what a verb is; consider the simple sentence, "A dog bit John". The word bit is a verb.

Some of the interesting characteristics of Japanese verbs are as follows:

• Japanese verbs always goes to the end of the sentence
• There is no need to change the verb gender unlike French which has two genders and German which has three!
• There are three categories of Japanese verbs;
• (1) Irregular (Group 3),
  
• (2) Ichidan (Group 2)
• (3) Yodan (Group 1)

In future lesson, the usage and conjugation of these three categories of verbs will be taught. But meanwhile, you have to know that if you want to search for a verb's meaning in a Japanese dictionary, it is not as straight forward as in using a English dictionary, i.e. you have to first convert the verb into its Dictionary form.

That is why you need to know the rules on how to convert the three categories of verbs into their Dictionary form. Meanwhile if you wish to try converting words back and forth from Japanese into English or vice-versa, try this Google language translator.

Tip #1

Welcome back.

Do you ever ask yourself why you want to learn Japanese? Well, I have checked with my Japanese classmates, and different people tell me different things. For example, some like JPOP, others like Japanese Anime . As for me, I like both :)

I believe in doing the best we can and never give up, which is why ... I urge you ... before you contemplate starting your Japanese lessons, especially if you are thinking of signing up a Japanese Language course, to consider the following:

• Are you willing to spend at least 2-3 hours a week to go to Japanese language class?
• Are you willing to spend money on reference books?
• Are you willing to go on studying for at least 3 years? (this is the least amount of time for you to reach JLPT2)
• Do you have a group of friends or colleagues who plan to pursue the study of Japanese language with you? It's important to have a support network.
• Do you plan to spend about SGD$450/- (USD$280/-) to buy an electronic portable Japanese dictionary?

If your answer is Yes to all the above, then I say, what's stopping you now? Sign up for a course today. Of coz, even if you sign up, this blog will still be useful for you as I will be sharing with you lots of useful tips that your teacher will not teach you heh.

Lesson #1 - Introduction

Japanese is an easy language to pronounce and hear, which is why we keep hearing people utter simple Japanese words like chotto matte, and sayounara. However, most people doesn't pronounce the words correctly, however, lets not go into that at this point. And if you happen to be in Singapore, wasabi is pronounced as wasabe which is totally wrong, but most people think they are right anyways.

Despite that imperfect pronounciation, native Japanese people can still understand you. However, I can't say the same for other languages. The reason is simple, Japanese language in my opinion is a flat language, it sounds flat. Which is why, it can be easily understood even if the speaker does not pronounce the words correctly.

Japanese language employs three different writing systems, i.e. Hiragana, Katagana, and Kanji.
Hiragana looks like this こんにちわ (greetings), while Katagana looks like this シンガポール (Singapore), and Kanji looks like this 勉強 (study).

Katagana are mostly used to write imported words which are originally not found in the vocabulary. Kanji helps to shorten a word into a character or less, instead of using hiragana, example, べんきょうします, is the same as 勉強します. しますdoes not have its Kanji form unlike 勉強 which can be written in its hiragana form as べんきょ.

Unlike Korean, Japanese is easily romanized. Even if you have never spoken or heard Japanese, if you see and try to pronounce the romanized form, you can still be understood. This makes it easy for beginner to pick up.

That's all for lesson 1.

Learning Japanese The Fun Way

Mission Statement
This blog is created for the purpose to helping english speaking people who wish to learn Japanese.


Vision Statement
To create a Japanese learning blog that makes learning Japanese easy and fun.

To share resources, tools, methods, and information on learning the Japanese language.