Week Four

Wow, four weeks already!

This week, we reviewed all of the sentences from the last couple of sessions.  I went over some very important rules about thinking like a Japanese speaker.

-There are no such things as article in Japanese; i.e. a, an, and the.
-"I" and "you" are not used for every sentence.  Once the topic is established, you don't need it anymore.
-"it" has a word, however it isn't translated very often.
-really rolling your "r"s is speaking like a peasnat or mercenary.

I cleared up the colour sentence problem with the following; If you're using black, white, yellow, blue, or red, the sentence is "(object) wa (colour) desu ".  Any other colour uses "(object) wa (colour) iro desu".  The reason behind this difference is technical in its explanation, having to do with the ending of the colours.  I ended up going off on a couple of tangents.  The first was the different forms of "I";

-Female: Polite is "watashi", with friends and family is "atashi", thinking highly of yourself is "watakushi".
-Male: Polite is "watashi", with friends and family (a kind of take-charge attitude) is "boku", crudely is "ore".

We moved on to forms of "you";

-General is "anata".  It's a very direct way of saying you, the equivalent of pointing a finger and saying "you".  It's also the male form of "sweetheart".
-More common (and polite) is using the person's name and honourific.
-The rude form is "omae".

Some other bits of interest include; kimi (female form of sweetheart), "kami" has 3 meanings-hair, paper, and god, (kamikaze literally means god wind), baka kisama (very stupid person).

I showed everyone how to write the kanji for the numbers 1-10.

Next week is the last official class.