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#17  Japanese syntax differs from English and other Indo-European languages. In the most simple form Japanese sentences are as follow: topic-commentary The topic is marked off by what we call a particle (think of them like prepositions, but after the word so more like "post-positions"). Then the commentary follows with the finite verb at the end. Example (not using hiragana because I am too lazy to make my keyboard type it). watashi wa daigakusee desu. "Watashi" is "I". "wa" marks "watashi" as the topic (i.e. I am talking about myself). "daigakusee" means "college student" (if I remember correctly and "desu" is a copula verb which equates two things (in other words it translates to "is"). So what I said was: I am a college/university student. As for kanji vs hiragana, you could write it in hiragana instead of using the kanji but it would seem as a less sophisticated way of writing. The difference in homonyms are usually realized through context in writing or pitch in oral. Japanese uses pitch, not tone to put emphasis on the syllables. |
09-22-2007, 02:32 PM
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 | Well yes, its their alphabet. Its like trying to learn English without learning the latin alphabet. Sentences will use hiragana, katakana and kanji all toghether, the sentence 私のなまえはジムです uses kanji for "watashi", hiragana for "no namae wa", katakana for my name "Jimu", and hiragana again for "desu" which finalises the statement. If your looking to be able to understand japanese games you should remember they are written for native or at least someone who can understand Japanese in a passing day living in Japan. I can read hiragana and katakana and a few kanji and I do lessons at university but I'd not be able to play a video game in Japanese. |
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09-22-2007, 02:37 PM
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| Cid's Knight  | Those involve "glide" rules. You take the root sound ("chi" and "ji" in this case) and then add a small "y" character next to it to produce the sound. So "chu" is chi+small yu, and the same with ju. If you wanted cho, it'd be chi+small yo. This works for basically all consonant+i characters. |
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09-29-2007, 06:58 PM
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