This week’s characters are from the k row (or column, depending on how you write it out ^^;)… and here’s why last week’s lesson is so important – simply add a K sound to each character and you can read them all!

Writing out with last weeks character, you can start to get an idea of how the alphabet is structured:

あ　い　う　え　お
か　き　く　け　こ
さ　し　す　せ　そ

We haven’t covered the third row (s characters!), that’s for next time ^^;  Anyhow, notice how the ‘a’ sound characters line up in the first column, the ‘i’ characters in the 2nd column, etc.  The consonants aren’t completely uniform but the vowel sound in the column is.  As such, given that the third row is s and the first column is ‘a’, yeap, that first character in the third row is ‘sa’.  But again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, back to this week’s topics ^^;

When pronouncing these letters (or sounding them out in your thoughts ^^;) try to stay true to the underlying vowel.  For the most part, Japanese vowels won’t change sounds when followed by other characters or anything, so if you see か, it’s always, “ka”.  This makes spelling really easy, because if you can sound it out, there are only a couple exceptions.  For the most part words are spelled exactly as they sound.

Try to think of words you’ve heard in anime/drama/music/etc as a guideline, although keep in mind some people talk funny on purpose or abbreviate/alter pronunciation for effect.  If you have access to Japanese news, the anchors generally speak “properly”.

Long Vowels
A repeated vowel becomes a long vowel and basically is just voiced longer than normal.  In practice it’s very difficult to tell the difference until you’ve become familiar with more vocabulary, but for beginners it doesn’t hurt to exaggerate the pronunciation to remind yourself that the vowel is long.

The repeated vowel is always one of あ　い　う　え　お but the original sound can be almost any character, as long as it shares the same base vowel.  For example かあ would be kā, きい would be kī, etc. If the vowel sounds of two characters are different, be sure to pronounce each vowel and don’t try to make a diphthong out of it. (well, except for the exception I’m about to go over ^^;)

Fate-mama, or in Japanese, Fate おかあsan

For example, from last week we covered the word おおい.  The pronunciation is just a long お sound followed by い, so ōi.  This example brings us to another interesting point – for え and お, usually long vowels are made with い and う, respectively!  This is why you may see strange looking romanization from time to time – like toukyou (tokyo) or kousaka (kosaka) or ryouko (ryoko).  The ‘ou’ is simply the direct romanization of the spelling in Japanese, and pronounced as a long ‘o’.

So what’s up with the word おおい?  Well, unfortunately it’s an exception.  Most long お sounds are spelled おう but it’s not all the time and you simply have to memorize which words use おお.  On the other hand, when you’re reading, it’s all the same… おお　and　おう are both just long o sounds (ō)

To summarize, おう is pronounced as if it were おお and えい is pronounced like it were ええ.

Reading/Vocabulary Practice!

1. きく、きけ
2. か
3. ここ
4. かこ
5. くうき
6. くう、くえ
7. き
8. あき
9. あく
10. いく、　いけ
11. おか

Answers below the pic~

Answers!

1. きく、きけ – ‘kiku, kike’ this is the verb to listen, hear, or also, to ask.  きく is the basic, “dictionary” form of the verb – basically the present tense, while きけ is an informal command form (can be very rude in some situations).  Verbs will be covered in great detail later, but I figured I’d mention it here because if you watch anime, you’ve almost certainly heard something along the lines of “yoku　きけ!!” (listen up!!).
Some beginning courses don’t introduce you to the dictionary form until later, and instead start you with the “polite” form which would be “ききmasu”, in case きく wasn’t the “to listen” you were familiar with.

きく - to listen!

2. か – simple enough, this is ‘ka’.  It’s also the word for mosquito!  Strangely I still remember where I first learned this word – Love Hina vol 10, keitarou fails in another kiss attempt with naru, apparently the opportunity had come up after he said there was a mosquito on her shoulder ^^;

konata about to deal with a か (mosquito)

か is also a spoken question mark.  For example, ‘tabemasu’ (I will eat) becomes a question with か at the end – ‘tabemasuか。’ (tabemasuka?) (will I eat?)

3. ここ – ‘koko’ – you’ll probably hear this a lot, it means “here”.  Also part of a taunt of sorts ‘ここ made おいde’.  Literally it means, “come here” but usually used to mean, “catch me if you can”.

konata's map. In the upper left it says, ココ which is another way to write ここ　(specifically it's katakana, yet another thing to come later... ^^;)

4. かこ – ‘kako’ means ‘past’.

A scene from benisu's かこ

5. くうき – ‘kuuki’. Translates to ‘air’ or ‘atmosphere’ so you’ll probably hear it a lot in space themed anime/manga/etc.

chikyuu ni wa, くうき ga arimasu (Earth has an atmosphere)

6. くう、くえ – ‘kuu, kue’ is an informal verb meaning ‘to eat’. The regular version is ‘taberu’ which you’ll probably hear more often (and should use unless you want to offend someone ^^;). Most courses don’t teach you these words since they’re really not something you’d say or hear in normal life… but for an otaku, this is bread and butter. Any male protagonist worth his salt will say ‘kuu’! Well, since it is so informal, the characters are generally more rugged or GAR or what have you – Spike from Cowboy Bebop, Kamina from Gurren Lagann – these are the types of guys that definitely would say ‘kuu’ rather than ‘taberu’.

natose wa gohan wo くう (natose eats rice)

Again, くえ is the informal command form, and since the verb is informal to begin with, you have a really rough, potentionally extremely rude command.

7. き – ‘ki’ can have a lot of meanings, the the two you’ll probably recognize most readily are ‘tree’ and ‘spirit/feelings’.  The latter version of the word is used in a lot of idioms, for a example, ‘き ni iru’ (to be pleased with, like), ‘き wo tsukeru’ (be careful), ‘き ni suru’ (to worry, to mind).

き (tree) although in this case you'd more likely hear 'sakura' (cherry blossom/cherry tree)

8. あき – ‘aki’ – fall! Not the verb though, the season.

あきmitai (seems like fall)

9. あく -  ‘aku’ – to be open.  Yet another thing to be covered later, but this is an intransitive verb – that is, it doesn’t take a direct object. … uhh in normal English, well, let’s just give an example.  Since it’s intransitive, you would say, ’doa wa aku’ (the door is/will be open {ugh, yet another note, technically you’d conjugate the verb differently and say ‘doあ wa あいte いmasu’ …but for the sake of simplicity we won’t discuss that yet ^^;}).  The transitive version of the verb, akeru would be used like this, ‘koyori wa doあ wo あけru’ (koyori opens the door).

10. いく、　いけ – ‘iku, ike’ – to go, as in “nihon e いく” (going to Japan) or “うmi ni いく” (going to the beach).  Noticed a pattern yet?  いく is the regular version of the verb, while いけ is the informal (often rude) command form.

sonsaku wa gakkoう e いく (sonsaku goes to school)

11. おか – ‘oka’ – hill.  Randomly thought of this example due to the lyrics from H2O’s OP – 「あおnoおかniwa」 is from the third line of the song, meaning “on the green hill”.

minna wa おか ni あtsumatte いmasu (Everyone's gathered on the hill)

Final quiz! Name all the anime the screen shots were taken from! ^_^

Next time we’ll go over the s, t and n rows.

以上！

さ、勉強しましょう！ Let's study!

These “lessons” will be aimed at otaku, so expect anime/manga/game/novel examples and such. ^^;

Anyhow, the first step towards reading Japanese is learning the alphabet (well, technically it’s a syllabary)! aaand the first letter (or kana) is… あ！　In English it’s pronounced as ‘a’ in father, ‘o’ in otter, ‘a’ in saw, etc. Unfortunately I’m not sure how the pronunciation turns out in other languages/accents, gomen m(_ _)m

Here’s the rest of the vowels:

I think when learning this stuff it’s best to immerse yourself immediately so from here on out, after a character has been covered, I’ll start using the kana rather than the romanization.

Getting right into things, let’s practice!

Read the following:

1. あい

2. いい

3. うえ

4. あおい

5. おおい

6. あう

7. ええ

…

…

…

…

…the answers!

1. あい – ‘ai’ – you’re probably familiar with this word.  Usually when you hear it it’s, ‘love’ or ‘affection,’ though it’s also a homonym for the color indigo.  It can also be a name – i.e. Enma あい

Enma あい

2. いい – ‘ii’ – translates to ‘good’, as in ‘kimochi いい‘ (feels good) or ‘いい tenki’ (good weather).  Or if you see Kan’u you might tell her, ‘いい pantsu’ (nice pantsu)

いい pantsu

3. うえ – ‘ue’ – means ‘above’, like ‘tsukue no うえ ni aru hon’ (the book on top of the table) or ‘うえ no hou onegai shimasu’ (i’ll take the upper one please).  Or, in Shakugan no Shana-tan, 「いいkagen, あtama no うえ de meronpan taberu no wo yamete kure yo!」 (will you behave yourself and stop eating melonpan on my head?)

You may also hear うえ as a suffix when people address someone they respect like ‘hahaうえ‘ (mother).  Love Hina fans are probably familiar with Motoko’s sister, Tsuruko, who Motoko addresses respectfully as “あneうえ“.

motoko's あneうえ

The way I like to think about this is that to praise someone, you consider yourself a lowly being, with a lower social standing. This makes the target of your praise someone who is *above* you, with *higher* social standing, hence adding うえ sort of literally translates to ‘who is above me’. Anime fans are probably familiar with the use of ‘sama’, and yes, the usage is similar – showing respect to the person you address. I believe うえ is old fashioned though, and no longer in common use. I also usually only see it with kinship terms (i.e. haha, chichi, ane (mother, father, sister)), not appended to names, though because I so rarely see it, I’m not sure if it’s technically wrong to do so.

Here’s a close up of the upper right panel above:

Not quite readable (sorry ’bout that ^^;) but the speech bubble on the right is 「あ　姉上 いや　こ　これは　…」 The little characters to the right of the kanji are called furigana, the reading of the kanji usually in hiragana.  We’ll go into that a bit later, but in this case the reading is あねうえ (aneue).  So the whole blurb would be “a- aneue iya ko- kore wa…” (si- sis! err th- this is…)

4. あおい – ‘aoi’　- ‘blue’ as in ‘あおい sora’ (blue sky… also the name of a famous… *ahem* well I’ll you research that yourself if necessary *nsfw, don’t research this in public! the link is to wikipedia so I suppose it is relatively sfw though* ^^;;).

sora あおい

5. おおい – ‘ooi’ – an adjective meaning ‘many’, as in ‘rozario to banpaia no panchira wa おおい desu ne’ (there are a lot of panchira in rosario and vampire, aren’t there?).

panchira ga おおい

6. あう – ‘au’ – the verb ‘to meet’ as in, ‘kanojo to あう‘ (he’s meeting with his girlfriend).  It can also be attached the end of verbs to mean “to each other” or “together”.  For example…

“あい shiあう futari ga to-dai tte toko ni haいru to ne, ‘shiあwase ni narerundatte” Here あい is love as in 1. followed by shiあう (to do to each other).  As such this becomes ‘to love each other’ although in this case when translating, it’s more natural to say something like ‘lovers’ rather than ‘two people that love each other’.  If you’re not already familiar with Love Hina, this is the opening passage, “Did you know that if two lovers both go to Todai they’ll live happily ever after?”

7. ええ – ‘ee’ – can mean a lot of things depending on what dialect, how you pronounce it, etc.  For example, in the kansai dialect it’s the word they use for いい.  In normal speech it can be used in a complaining tone ‘ええええ?’ (whaaaat?/do i have to?), or a questioning sort of phrase, ‘ええ?’ (wha?)… or more of a flat agreement ‘ikun desu ka?’ ‘ええ’ (are you going? yeah)

“fukubikiken desu ka?” “ええ、kore kuraいno” (A lottery ticket? Yeah, about this big…”)

“KORAaaaaaa!” “Wa E?!” (“HEY!!!” “Wha.. wha?!”)

Additional Resource:

A quick search for “learn hiragana” pointed me to a nice simple tutorial that includes instructions on how to write these characters.  This post covers the characters in their 3rd lesson.

Next time, か　き　く　け　こ！ (ka ki ku ke ko)

narukana from 聖なるかな {seinarukana} ~The Spirit of Eternity Sword 2~

…I wish I had been “busy” like narukana ^_^;;  Alas no, busy getting my car fixed (stupid flat tire -_-) and was out of town this past weekend.  My blog reading material is overflowing and I should really be catching up rather than writing this random post ^^;

Work has been busy too, but luckily none of this inhibited me in signing up for the JLPT this year!  I think I took level 3 two years ago or so, but that wasn’t much of a challenge given the course work I had done in college.  This year I’m going for level 2 (which I believe is where my professors said I should’ve been after taking 3 years of class ^^;;)… hopefully I won’t have too much of a problem.  Danny mentioned the test in a post a little while ago if you’re wondering what the average dannychoo reader’s JLPT plans are.  Anyone here studying Japanese?  Did I ask that before?  I have a terrible memory ^^;;;

nozomi and satsuki (also from seinarukana)

I also decided to sign up for a class… was a pretty good deal recommended to me by a relative… $150 for an 11 week course, 3 hours a week… there’s 1 week off, but it’s still only like $5 an hour!  Hopefully that’ll keep my studying on track.

katima would also keep me on track...

Any seinarukana players?  That game is epically long.  I think I’ve only played through one route so far…  love the characters so I’ll have to make it through the rest someday…  Not sure what prompted me to decorate this post with pics from that game ^^;;  For those that haven’t played… it actually has a pretty dang good rpg battle element to it.  Combine that with tons of story and you’ve got a small vacation’s worth of gameplay awaiting ya ^_^

Oh yes, it’s cooling down!  Gonna start unboxing pretty soon and finally get my collection back on display!

Here’s a few pics of my collection taken before summer set in…

I remember worrying at one point that my display case would look rediculous for lack of anything in it…

…but with Exelica taking up one shelf…

…and what will most definitely be an overcrowded haruhi shelf… I think I may have to ask for another detolf for Christmas ^^;;;