Newnonimous

Come on, you didn't know that? Heh, well doesn't matter anyway takes more memorization to learn kanji than the other symbols.

SylverScaile

No kidding. considering (IIRC, the chinese characters incorperated in), there's something like 3000 of them! (atleast it's not the 6-9k it used to be)

Lowrider

ill see what i can do about languages corner.

Cuz' you can't, you won't and you don't STOP!

Ugetsu

@Sylver, you're talking "kana" -- the syllabary. I'm talking "kanji" the Chinese characters. Most of the kana have only one reading except that -ha gets pronounced -wa and a few others have alternative readings.

SylverScaile

That's about what I was figuring.. Like I said, just couldn't remember the names of the others.

nitrogen

I'm here, Ugetsu. I was away for a week attending a meeting and adding a short holiday, but I'll come and visit more often.

Well, I learnt Spanish and now have to learn French because I live there for the moment. The male/female things are annoying and can only be learnt through memorisation. But it stops at having objects/subjects feminine or masculine. In Japanese - to my knowledge - they use different words for if something refers to a male or female. Ugetsu pointed out the word for virgin, which is different for males and females. And also age comes into play. Younger sister 妹 (imouto) and older sister 姉 (nee), just to give an example. The hierarchy and gender play an important role, not to mention the suffixes like 'くん’ (君), 'ちゃん', ’さま' (様) and so forth.

That said, neither Germanic nor Latin languages have any grammar in common with Japanese. My wife tried to teach me some Japanese grammar and I quickly got lost.

I have a large PDF of a book on Japanese grammar (18M). I might upload it somewhere and then you lot can download it and study it at your own leisure. I might need myself to since I am considering applying for a job that is advertised in Japan.

What are you talking about? I am doing all this in Linux! :P

Getting back to the language: Sayo must be snickering at us. Where is the master to teach us?

Ugetsu

"Onee-chan" older brothers show up a lot in Sayo's translations -- the Japanese seem rather fascinated with the theme of incest...

nitrogen

Do you mean お姉ちゃん or お兄ちゃん?

Ugetsu

Well, I said "brother" so you know the answer @Nitro. But for the benefit of the Japanese nubes, notice that YOU CAN FIGURE THIS OUT. The first word お姉ちゃん has the symbol for woman in it, on-na 女 so that's the word that means "sister." The second one お兄ちゃん contains kei or kyou　兄 a mouth on human legs, which contains the meaning "brother." The two words sound similar, and Sayo doesn't translate the term. @Nitrogen, did I screw up, or are they pronounced in a very similar way?

Anyway if you look at the raws you will see ちゃん "chan" on every page, since that is how kids refer to each other, Rinchan, Kurochan = りんちゃん　黒ちゃん

nitrogen

Well, they are pronounced differently. The problem with all of this is that English pronounces the vowels 'a', 'e' and 'i' completely different to most languages. This is a major irritant for when I try to teach native English speakers another language. In these other languages - Japanese included - the vowel 'a' is pronounced 'ah' like in 'car' but longer, while the vowel 'e' is pronounced such as in 'hem' while the vowel 'i' is pronounced like in 'knee'. So お兄ちゃん is pronounced 'o ni- chan' with 'i-' meaning a long 'i'. The older sister お姉ちゃん is pronounced 'o ne- chan' with 'e-' meaning a long 'e'.

Did that make sense?

The pronounciation can be found here Hiragana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (which I am sure you already checked :P )