Fun (?) with Japanese

[ysobel]

Four is shi, except when it's yon. "Four things" is yottsu (the n changes, because fun)
Eight is hachi, except when it's ya or some variant thereof. "eight things" is yattsu.

...fine, except. "Four days" is yokka (again, the n changes into "duplicate the next consonant") ... but "eight days" is yōka, not yaka or yakka.

Whyyyyyy.

(Rhetorical question.)

#

Cuteness: the word/kanji for child is 子. The word/kanji for dog is 犬. The word for puppy? 子犬.

(Not everything makes this much sense. Though I am also amused that unskillful / bad at, 下手, visually "translates" as "below hand". I bet 上手, above hand, is skillful / good at. And volcano is, of course, 火山, fire mountain. ...I haven't figured out why entrance is 入り口 -- enter+"ri"+mouth -- whereas exit is just 出口 -- exit+mouth.)

(And I really really wish I could stop reading letters wrong. Hiragana, not kanji. I keep reading リ as い, confusing こ and に, and a few others trip me up... and I'm way more solid on hiragana than katakana, which has シ ツ ソ ン (shi, tsu, so, n). And kanji are just as bad; it took me a while to figure out the difference beteeen 右 and 石, which is kind of important since one means right (not-left) and the other means stone.)

Comments

[undomielregina]

If it helps at all, you see “yon” for 4 a lot more often than you see “shi,” because “shi” is considered unlucky since it sounds like “death.”

[ysobel]

Yeah, i discovered that ... it really threw me because at one point when I was in junior high I was taught one through ten in Japanese -- ichi ni san shi go roku shichi hachi kyuu juu (although it was taught with English-word mnemonics for the first bit, itchy knee sun etc, so I'm sure my pronunciation is horrible) -- and then I started duolingo (which I've paused the Japanese part of while focusing on kanji) and got ichi ni san *yon* go roku *nana* hachi kyuu juu, and went wtf at a friend who knows Japanese. But unlearning stuff I've memorized (back when it was easy, lol) is harder than if it were a blank slate.

This whole thing of kanji having multiple pronunciations just kind of weirds me out sometimes. I mean, I know why it happens, but it's just ... odd.

Then again, as a speaker of English, which has things like -ough being any number of pronunciations, I don't have much room to complain. ^_^

[mathemagicalschema]

I was trying to type up an explanation and found this wikipedia article explaining much more clearly and accurately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word

is that helpful?

[ysobel]

Yes, only there's no way I'll remember all that, haha. And it doesn't really explain why eight changes from ya- to yō, but there probably isn't a good why, and one of my friends pointed out that Japanese has more exceptions than rules.

I was going to be all o.O that the Wikipedia article gave 一月 as hitotsuki, when wanikani gave 一月 as ichigatsu ... but then I realized that hitotsuki means one month and ichigatsu means january. So yay for that, but boo for another reading (and wait, if you say something like "I'm going on vacation in 一月" does that mean in January or in one month? Aaaaargh lol)

Basically, if I try to think of totalities -- how many kanji there are to learn, how much vocab, how many exceptions there are to memorize, whatever -- I get overwhelmed and want to hide. Because that makes sense. But as long as I only do little bits at a time, I'm okay.

[krait]

How cool!

I know exactly three kanji, so you're already ahead of me. :) (Mine are 'watashi' and the na + mae that comprise "name".)

I'm so much better with hiragana than katakana! I don't know why this is yes I do, it's the fact that katakana all looks alike, as witness the Dread Four but it's been frustrating me this week. Especially 'nu' - why can I not remember this ONE katakana?! If I can manage the bizarre, completely-unrelated-to-its-hiragana-counterpart stickpile this is 'ne,' why can I never remember 'nu'? So irksome.

Now I want to call puppies "dogchild" because that is really adorable.

[ysobel]

私の名前は ... です! ;)

(My name is ..., in case you didn't figure that out.)

Wanikani.com is really good for learning kanji, if you're interested. I mean, 私 and 名前 and 何 (the third being nani, "what") I got from other places, but with WK I've learned ... maybe 70 kanji, with 135 vocabulary words from them, in a month. And WK is free for the first three levels (I'm halfway though level 3).

I used https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/ for learning katakana (same people that dio wanikani). The mnemonics help. Even if ヌ looks more like a wonky 7 than a plate of noodles. (It helped with ne, definitely, and their hiragana versuon helped with ね vs れ vs わ.) I did make a few changes -- with hiragana, め I did as "you get your noodles ぬ but they aren't as curly so you're disappointed, meh", and with katakana I preferred a couple other visual mnemonics, titanic for タ and wine glass for ワ, and for both I remembered ke, け and ケ, as looking like the word "it", which oddly helped because 上げる (kanji for above + kana) is transitive, to raise something, whereas 上がる is the intransitive to rise, and same with 下げる and 下がる (to lower something vs to drop; the kanji means below), and so the transitive versions all had the "it" kana, which is super convoluted and probably doesn't make sense outside my head.

But anyway. Yeah.

One of the things that I like about the tofugu site, in addition to the mnemonics, is that it has worksheets (google docs that you can either print out and fill in by hand, or copy/save and fill in by computer ) and links to resources for testing yourself.

I'm still slow with katakana, but I can at least sound it out.

[krait]

Haha, yes, that is the only "real" sentence I can write! Though I shorten my last name when giving it in Japanese, because otherwise it's an unwieldy pile of nonsense. I always get indecisive about whether to write it lastname-firstname, or firstname-lastname, though; is there a standard, for foreign names, or is it more contextual (what the person talking to you would expect), do you know?

I am generally really bad at mnemonics for Japanese; I make up some of my own, but a lot of letters are just "it's That Thing with an extra bar/squiggle," where That Thing is a distinct-looking letter. (In katakana, TA is just 'KU with an extra bar' for me! But I seem incapable of remembering that NU is just SU with an extra bar.) I do think of the hiragana KE as "lt" (Ell Tee/lieutenant) and the RU/RO pair as "curly three and plain three". :D The kanji in the second half of NAMAE is "the TV" because it looks like an old TV set to me.

For some reason I don't have trouble with hiragana NU/NE/NO/RE/WA, maybe because they're just so much fun to write. :D I definitely have favourite and least-favourite kana; I wonder what other people's are, if they have favourites? I should take a poll or something.

I will check out tofugu and wanikani; thanks for the recs!

I need to figure out how to type Japanese letters the better to complain about them so that I can ask questions and explain things better. :D