Monday, July 5, 2010

S2 Day 3: Conjugations!

It's about time I got down and finally learned how to conjugate things properly. I'll probably compile this into an Anki deck when I stop being lazy, but for now, here it goes.

na-adjectives
好き
positive non-past: 魚が好きタイプ。
negative non-past: 魚が好きじゃないタイプ。
positive past: 魚が好きだったタイプ。
negative past: 魚が好きじゃなかったタイプ。
So in this case, the sentences above describe Type and whether the type is one that likes, doesn't like, liked, or didn't like fish.

i-adjectives
高い
positive non-past: 高
negative non-past: 高くない
positive past: 高かった
negative past: 高くなかった
With these, we can add the conjugation directly to the front of a noun. So 高い男の子 would mean tall boy and 高くなかった男の子 would mean boy who was not tall.

The only exception to the conjugation is いい which means good.
いい
positive non-past: いい
negative non-past: よくない(良くない)
positive past: よかった(良かった)
negative past: よくなかった(良くなかった)
The adjective かっこいい, cool, behaves the same way.

一段動詞 Type II -ru Verbs
見る(みる)
positive non-past: 見る
negative non-past: 見ない

五段動詞 Type I -u Verbs
飲む(のむ)
positive non-past: 飲む
negative non-past: 飲まない

I don't know if I want to tackle memorizing the past forms for the verbs since I feel as if I already have enough to memorize for today.

S2 Day 2: Japanese Learning Communities

I really want to get a study partner (someone who is also natively an English speaker (or even French might be acceptable) and is learning Japanese, so I've been exploring different language learning communities.

Some of the well-kept secrets I found were http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum and http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/.

Other resources I found today were http://jisho.org/ which is an online Japanese<->English dictionary and https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jipdnfibhldikgcjhfnomkfpcebammhp which is the rikai extension for Google Chrome.

I've also been taking a new direction and trying to follow the AJATT way of mastering Japanese by just exposing myself to as much Japanese listening as possible as well as learning as many sentences as possible.

Sentences for today:
ベジタリアンです。だから 肉はだめだ。
I'm a vegetarian, so meat is no good.

この傘は幾多ですか?
How much is this umbrella?

静かな彼女は馬鹿ですね?
The quiet girl is stupid, isn't she?