Japanese From Zero Book 3 Chapter 4 Reading Comprehension

More reading and writing comprehension practice from Japanese From Zero Book 3 Chapter 4.

My English translations are still rough, but it is the best that I could do.

１。今日、私　は　友達　と　三上けん　の　コンサート　に　行きます。
1. Today, I and a friend will go to Mikamiken's Concert.
２。私　は　三上けん　の　歌　が　大好き　です。
2. I love Mikamiken's song.
３。CD　が　全部　欲しい　です。
3. I want all of (her) CD's.
４。三上けん　は　ファン　が　とっても　多い　から、三日月前　に　チケット　を　買いました。
4. Mikamiken has a very large amount of fans and because of that I bought tickets 3 months before.
５。チケット　は　五千八百円　でした。
5. The ticket was 5800 Yen.
６。友達　は　高い　と　言った　けど、私　は　高くない　と　思います。
6. My friend said it was expensive, however, I do not think it is expensive.
７。コンサート　は　九時　から　です。
7. The concert is from 9 o'clock.
８。私達　は　八時　から　会場　の　前　で　待ちます。
8. We will wait from 8 o'clock before the concert.
９。友達　の　家　から　会場　まで　車　で　一時間、かかります。
9. From my friend's house to the concert by car takes 1 hour.
１０。友達　は　家　に　六時五十分　まで　いる　と　言いました。
10. My friend said he will be at home until 6:50.
１１。私　は　友達　の　車　で　行きます。
11. I will go in my friend's car.

Questions about the above text:

１。今日、私　は　どこ　に　行きます　か。
1. Today, I will go where?
Mikamiken's Concert

２。なぜ、三上けん　の　コンサート　に　行きます　か。
2. Why will I go to Mikamiken's concert?
Because they are a fan.

３。いつ　チケット　を　買いました　か。
3. When did you buy the Ticket?
3 Months before.

４。チケット　は　いくら　でした　か。
4. How much was the ticket?
5800 Yen.

５。誰　が　チケット　は　高い　と　言いました　か。
5. Who said the ticket was expensive?
The friend.

６。私　は　チケット　が　高い　と　思いました　か。
6. Did I think the ticket was expensive?
No

７。コンサート　は　何　時　から　です　か。
7. From what time is the concert.
9 o'clock.

８。私　は　八　時　から　九　時　まで　何　を　します　か。
8. I did what from 8 o'clock until 9 o'clock?
Wait for the concert.

９。友達　の　家　から　会場　まで、車　で　どのぐらい　かかります　か。
9. It takes how long to go from the house to the concert?
1 hour.

１０。友達　は　家　に　何　時　まで　います　か。
10. The friend will be in the house until what time?
6:50.

If you spot any issue with my English translation, please feel free to correct me.

Japanese From Zero - Book 3 - Chapter 3 - Reading Comprehension

Still working my way through Japanese From Zero - Book 3.

This is the reading comprehension test from chapter 3, I added the English translations:

1. 私の名前はよしえです。
1. My name is Yoshie.
2. お母さんの名前は静かです。
2. My mother's name is "Quiet".
3. 英語で静かの意味は「quiet」です。
3. In English Shizuka's meaning is "Quiet".
4. でも、私のお母さんはとても煩いです。
4. But, my mother is very noisy.
5. 朝から晩まで煩いです。
5. From morning until the evening (she) is noisy.
6. 皆さん、聞いてください。
6. Everyone, listen please.
7. たとえば朝の会話はこれです。
7. For example this is a morning conversation.

お母さん：よしえ、起きて。もう、八じよ。
My Mother: Yoshie, get up. It's 8 o'clock you know.
よしえさん：ええ、もう八じ？会社に遅れる！
Yoshiesan: Eh, It's already 8 o'clock? I am late for the company.
お母さん：朝ごはんを食べてね。
My Mother: Eat breakfast!
よしえさん：時間が無いからもう行く。このリンゴは車の中で食べる。
Yoshiesan: Because I don't have time I must go already. I will eat this apple in the car.
お母さん：ダメダメ、ミルクも飲んで！
My Mother: That's not good, also drink the milk!
よしえさん：はい、はい。行ってきます。
Yoshiesan: Right, right. I am leaving.
お母さん：行ってらっしゃい。
My Mother: See you later.

Below are the questions about the text above.

1 よしえさんのお母さんの名前は何ですか。
1. What is Yoshiesan's mother's name?
静か

2. 英語で静かの意味は何ですか。
2. What is the meaning of Shizuka in English?
Quiet

3. よしえさんのお母さんは静かですか。
3. Is Yoshiesan's mother quiet?
No

4. よしぇさんは何じに起きましたか。
4. What time did Yoshiesan wake up?
8 o'clock

5. よしえさんはどんな朝ごはんを食べましたか。
5. What kind of breakfast did Yoshiesan eat?
Apple and Milk

6. よしぇさんはどこで朝ごはんを食べましたか。
6.  Where did Yoshiesan eat breakfast?
In the car

7. よしえさんは何を飲みましたか。
7. What did Yoshiesan drink?
Milk

8. 「行ってきます」は英語で何ですか。
8. In English what is "Go and come back"?
I'm leaving

9. 「いってらっしゃい」は英語で何ですか。
9. In English was is "Go and come back"?
See you later.

Well that is my best translation, hopefully there are not too many mistakes.

Learning Japanese with Super Simple Nihongo

Often when I am trying to learn Japanese, I watch videos.

This is good and bad.

The good side is that I can often pick up new words and sentence structures, and it helps with my listening comprehension.

The bad side is that often the conversation is too advanced for me.

The main problem for me is that the conversations are too fast.

The speed issue is a little difficult to deal with, however, with YouTube I can at least press the pause button and use rewind.

Even with pause and rewind sometimes I still cannot tell exactly what words are being said.

So I was very glad to have discovered a Japanese language video series specifically aimed at young Japanese children called "Super Simple Nihongo".

As the name suggests it plays songs and stories that are spoken or sung in very basic Japanese language and grammar.

The content of the videos are generally spoken very clearly and slowly and often use a lot of repetition.  The speed and repetition are incredibly useful in picking up new words, or words that are easy to confuse in Japanese.

One extremely useful feature of the videos is that they are subtitled in English and Japanese.  All you have to do is click the YouTube close caption button and select which version of the subtitles you want to see.

Being able to switch to Japanese subtitles really helps, as being able to see and hear the original Japanese can really help to clear up confusion.

Super Simple Nihongo has a large collection of videos and they are well worth a watch.  Just be prepared to allocate a lot of time.

I recently listened to the Japanese version of "Hickory Dickory Dock" and it will leak into your brain very quickly.

Just for my own amusement I decided to translate the words:

ヒッコリー[hikkorii] = Hickory
ディッコリー[dikkorii] = Dickory
ドック[dokku] = Dock

ネズミ[nezumi] = mouse
蛇[hebi] = snake
リス[risu] = squirrel
猫[neko] = cat
サル[saru] = money
ゾウ[zou] = elephant

登る[noboru] = climb (up)

一[ichi] = one
二[ni] = two
三[san] = three
四[yo] = four
五[go] = five
六[roku] = six

時[ji] = o'clock/hour
だよ[dayo] = it is you know
えー[eeh] = erm/er
駆け下りる[kakeoriru] = climb down
チクタク[chikutaku] = tick tock

So should I ever need to burst in to nursery rhyme when in Japan, I can!

Thank you - Super Simple Nihongo!

Japanese Font with Included Stroke Order Numbers!

One of the "fun" things about learning Japanese is discovering that just as in English the various Japanese characters also have a specific set of rules which must be used when writing individual characters.  The way in which characters must be written is often called "Stroke  Order".

In English since we have primary characters consisting of 26 upper case and 26 lower case characters, the total amount of work we must do to memorise stroke orders with English characters is minimal

In the Japanese writing system there are 3 sets of characters which they must learn to write, and each different set of characters has their own distinct stoke order rules.

The 3 sets are:

Hiragana: 46 primary characters
Katakana: 46 primary characters (excluding special case characters)
Kanji: 2136 primary characters (minimum number)

Hiragana and Katakana are collectively called Kana character systems.

The number of Kana characters are not so large and so memorising their stoke orders is not very difficult

In the case of Kanji however, the situation is vastly different.  With a minimum of 2136 characters, each character having a specific stroke order, it can quickly become a very difficult task to memorise all the different Kanji and their specific stroke orders.

Thankfully, there are some shortcuts we can take to make the task a little easier.

The main shortcut being that Kanji are often constructed from small patterns of strokes which are generally written in the same way.  These repeating stoke order patterns are called Radicals.  These Radicals have a number of uses, the main one being to make memorising and writing of Kanji easier (as well as looking up Kanji in a dictionary).

With a complex Kanji, if we can break it up in to the Radicals it is constructed from then memorisation of stoke orders may be easier.

Even with the help of Radicals, learning Kanji stoke orders can still be difficult.  One solution to this problem is to get a Kanji dictionary.  Kanji dictionaries list lots of information about a specific Kanji, one of those pieces of information being the stroke orders that a particular Kanji has.

Unfortunately with there being such a large number of Kanji, these Kanji dictionaries tend to be big and bulky in paper form.

Fortunately we now live in a time when we have access to electronic computing devices which are very powerful.  As a result there are a large number of Japanese Kanji dictionaries which can be installed on your smart phone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer, tv, smart watch, (insert Internet of things device of your choice here)...

So finding a stroke order for a specific Kanji is not as difficult as it used to be.

However even with the modern technological computing power at your fingertips, if you are trying to learn to read/write in Japanese and you come across a Kana/Kanji who's stroke order you do not know this can cause problems.  Because at that point you must: stop what you are reading/writing, scamper off to your dictionary of choice, look up the Kana/Kanji you are interested in, memorise the stroke order, and then carry on with your previous activity.

The above process is somewhat time consuming and it may well break your flow of concentration.

One particular tool that is available to mitigate this issue are special display fonts which you can install on your computer or use in a web browser.  These fonts have tiny little numbers displayed next to each of a Kana/Kanji's strokes which indicate the stroke order used for a particular Kana/Kanji.  As a result if you forget the stroke order of a Kana/Kanji you can just zoom in on the Kana/Kanji and see the stroke orders.

Here is an example of one such font, and how it is displayed when zoomed in on it.

Stroke Order Font displayed for Kana and Kanji.

You can download this font using the link below.

https://sites.google.com/site/nihilistorguk/

Installation instructions vary on how to install fonts on different computer platforms, so please do a Google search for more information on the specifics of installing new fonts on your platform of choice.

Stroke order in English is generally not that important.  If the resultant English written character is neatly written and looks visually correctly formed, it really should not have any great impact on reading or writing it.  This unfortunately is not the case with Japanese writing.

Stroke orders for Japanese Kana/Kanji are extremely important, especially if it is written quickly or by hand.  As often the only way to identify a particular Kana/Kanji is by examining the stroke order.

Also if you are looking up a Kana/Kanji in an electronic dictionary, you will often find that the electronic lookup methods require you to know stroke order to reliably look up Kana/Kanji.  Even if you visually write a Kana/Kanji that is completely legible visually on a computer, without the correct stroke order the computer may be more likely to select the wrong Kana/Kanji!

A good example of this is Google's Japanese Hand Writing Keyboard or Google's GBoard with Japanese Hand Writing support enabled.  If you write with correct stroke order these hand writing keyboards are extremely accurate. In fact you can write Kana/Kanji so badly visually that even an experienced Japanese teacher may not know what you wrote, but Google's keyboard will know, because it can keep track of stroke order.  Google's keyboard will still be very good even if you don't know the correct stroke order, but you will have to be sure to write the characters more accurately in terms of shape for Google to make an accurate guess as to the Kana/Kanji you are writing.  Even then without good stroke order Google will guess wrong a lot more often.

It is worth pointing out that Google has one of the most advanced Japanese hand writing recognition systems available.  It will try extremely hard to recognise what you are writing, a lot of other Japanese hand writing recognition systems will not be so forgiving and will be highly inaccurate, if you do not use correct stroke order.

So in short, go learn stroke order.

Japanese 原稿用紙 (Japanese Writing Aides)

While writing my previous post on translating a simple hand written Japanese letter (here), I was chatting to a Japanese friend.  I mentioned that I found it very difficult to write in vertical Japanese writing style.  My friend told me that I should not worry and that I would soon get used to writing in the vertical style.

I have no doubt that this will turn out to be true.  To prove the point my friend mentioned that Japanese have their equivalent of lined practice writing paper, which they use to practice their vertical writing skills.

Update: There sheets can also be used college students and various other purposes.

These writing sheets are called 原稿用紙[げんこうようし/genkouyoushi]. See picture below.

Japanese Children's Vertical Writing Practice Sheets - Genkou Youshi

With these sheets you start writing from the extreme righthand topmost position and characters get written down the sheet and then you move leftward by one column and repeat the process.

If you want to practice writing using 原稿用紙 then the link below has various examples and formats that you can download in pdf format.

http://www.sousakuba.com/genkouyousi/

It should probably have been obvious to me that the Japanese would have their own methods of helping themselves practice writing and keep things formatted, just as we in England do with Lined Notebooks for horizontal writing practice.

They also support horizontal writing though they are generally used for vertical writing.  They allow writers to practice the writing of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, depending on the format used.

They will certainly be useful to me when I get around to doing some writing practice.

If you wish to get more information on 原稿用紙 see the Wikipedia link below.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Genkou Youshi

This was a short post but, I thought that it would be useful to highlight these sheets.

My writing is so bad that personally I need all the help that it is possible to avail myself of!

Catch you next time.

Japanese From Zero - Book 3 - Japanese Letter Translation.

It's been a while since I had time to post anything on my blog.  So with this post I hope to fix that issue.

I am still busy learning Japanese (very slowly).  So far I am still enjoying learning.  I have been reading through the Japanese From Zero Books series.

So far I am finding them very good.  I have read through Books 1 and 2 of the series.  They taught the reader Hiragana and Katakana, some very basic grammar, and a collection of vocabulary words.

Both books 1 and 2 followed the same format and were very clearly written.

I am currently working my way through Book 3 which moves on to teach even more grammar and vocabulary to the reader, but also starts the process of introducing Japanese Kanji to the readers.

So far I am enjoying Book 3.  As I was reading through it one of the tests of comprehension and understanding was to read Japanese vertical text, written in a hand written style.  I am more used to reading computer based font styles, so it took a few minutes for me to get used to the slightly different display styles.

So for fun I decided to translate the Japanese letter into English as best as I am able.  See below for a screen shot of the letter that I had to convert.

Japanese From Zero - Book 3 Translation Exercise.

Below is my English translation of the Japanese letter above.

0. To teacher Makami.
1. Hello, long time no see.
2. Is everybody well?
3. Everybody here is well.
4. Today Las Vegas is very hot.
5. Yesterday was also very hot.
6. It was our first time in Las Vegas.
7. (We) came from Japan 3 days ago.
8. It took 11 hours by plane to get up to Las Vegas.
9. My mother shops everyday.
10. The day before yesterday in the evening, my elder sister and I, at a shopping mall bought a cute mini-skirt and shoes.
11. (They) were very cheap.
12. My father likes to gamble a lot.
13. I don't have much money and because of that I do not like it.
14. (We) return to Japan tomorrow.
15. Well, please take care of yourself.
16 From Kudo and Mariko.

Okay, so that is my best effort at a quick translation.  I am not sure if I got it all right, especially line 16, but never the less I do like the translation tasks.

Later on it Book 3 it will ask me questions that I have to answer from the letter. So I can only hope my translation abilities are good enough to be able to answer the questions.  I may update this post with my answers if I get time.

I will try to post more often on my blog in future, but for now, I will consider this post complete.

Please feel free to comment on my post and correct any issues you find.