Japanese 102: Reading
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yhlee. Also available as a Google Doc for printing and editing convenience.Assignments
Find something to read that you like - song lyrics, reddit, merchandise packaging... - and post that here in a comment
Fill out the vocabulary table
Practice reading your kana
Attempt a translation if you feel up to it! Post it here, ask questions.
Reading
With basic hiragana and katakana skills out of the way, it's pretty much time to just find some stuff and read. A lot. It's hard as adults to just pick up and read something: we're not children learning in a native environment or picking stuff up incrementally from texts catered to us. Foreign language texts for adults tend to be frustratingly dry or just straight up condescending.
In my experience, one of the most useful things to read have been - hilariously - those bad phrasebooks you pick up at airports. But it makes sense: phrasebooks, by definition, regurgitate commonly used phrases. They are the core lego blocks of what you need to survive in real life, as opposed to textbooks that want to teach you phrases like global warming or whatever. Once you jazz that up with some incidental knowledge of grammar, you're in a much better position than someone trying to conquer Chapter 1 - 10 of Boring Textbook, at least in my opinion.
Part of that also comes from the auditory exposure you'll get by learning things that are real. Hearing something you're learning adds another layer of memorisation/recall, and so that's what I'll try to aim for with these exercises: content first, vocabulary second, grammar third.
Get Some Content
Time to pick your poison. Maybe try Reddit's Japanese Today I Learned and pick a piece you want to read. Use Chrome's Rikaikun extension to help yourself with the kanji and vocabulary; paste the whole thing here in a comment and we can step through it. Or look at websites for things you like in Japanese (IDK, fountain pen stuff?) and find something that you'd buy in real life.
Test Run
For now, I'm going to stick to one of the ways I learned Japanese before I ever learned Japanese, which is blindly picking an anime pop song that earwormed me, no matter how ridiculous, and learning from there.
I'm going to go with UVERworld's D-technoLife to show how truly out of touch with current anime I am. Hi, BLEACH fans!
Oldness of the source material aside, I've picked this song for a couple of reasons:
The lead sings every syllable pretty clearly. Do not, for example, try this with - say - Asian Kungfu Generation just yet.
The chorus and bridges both are catchy and contain lots of phrases that you'll encounter a lot. Like how you'll hear corazón in Spanish.
It sticks in my head, so it's free mnemonics for me
Another thing is that Animelyrics.com provides romaji and kanji, so if you get stuck on kanji lookup you can cheat and just do this for now. Let's step through it. I'm picking the chorus for this assignment.
Before jumping in, listen to the video a couple of times and try to avoid the translation until you're done with your own.
REAL LIFE:
癒えない 痛み 悲しみで キズついた 君
もう笑えないなんて 人嫌いなんて 言葉そう言わないで
見えない未来に起こる事 全てに意味があるから
今はそのままでいい きっと気づける 時が来るだろ
KANA ONLY:
いえない いたみ かなしみ で キズ ついた きみ よ
もう わらえない なんて ひときらい なんて ことぼ そう いわないで
みえない みらい に おこること すべて いみ が ある から
いま は そのままでいい きっと きづけるとき が くる だろ
First up: I've spaced the words out so that you don't get saturated trying to fight and figure out where one word ends and a particle begins. It's important to know that you want to get away from this and towards reading the giant chunk of united text sooner rather than later, but I've got two things to say to that:
One: kanji form natural separators, and without it, you're going to have a bad time. Until you're learning more kanji, don't feel bad about having a headache with kana-only chunks. I'd sure as hell get a headache if I had to read English without fullstops.
Two: known vocabulary and grammatical structures will do the same thing in time. Once you start recognising things like common particles, negations (ない) and tenses, reading will be better.
In the meantime, trying to fight all those battles - reading kana, reading kanji, recognising vocabulary, recognising grammar - all at the same time is frustrating and super duper uber unfun. So I'm going to try to cut shit down as much as possible so that you can focus on what matters at the current point you find yourself.
語彙・ごい・Vocabulary
I'm going to fill out some of this, and leave the rest to you as an exercise in preparation for GRAMMAR!
Using Rikaikun, use a dictionary service (like jisho.org) to find out the type of verb (click Show Inflections) - ichidan or godan. Take note of it in your table but don't worry until next week.
Happily enough, all of these words are fairly common and worth knowing.
Word ー＞ Form In The Lyrics | Kana | Translation |
癒える ー＞ 癒えない Verb, ichidan | いえる | To heal, to be healable -> To not heal; to not be healable |
痛み | いたみ | Pain. Noun form of 痛む, to hurt |
悲しみ | かなしみ | |
〜で | ||
キズ | Injury. Written in katakana for emphasis. | |
つく ー＞ ついた | ||
君 | きみ | |
〜よ Particle | (Emphasis) | |
もう Adverb | Already. | |
笑う ー＞ 笑えない | To laugh -> To be unable to laugh | |
なんて Suffix/adverb | Such-like, something like | |
人 Noun | ひと | Person |
嫌い | きらい | |
言葉 | ことば | |
そう | ||
言う ー＞ 言わないで | To say -> Without saying | |
見える ー＞ 見えない | みえる | To be able to see (this is a special verb) -> To be unable to be seen |
未来 | みらい | The future |
〜に | ||
起こる | おこる | |
こと | ||
全て | すべて | |
意味 | いみ | |
〜が | ||
ある | ||
から | ||
今 | いま | |
〜は | ||
そのままでいい | ||
きっと | ||
気付ける | きづける | |
時 | とき | Time |
来る | くる | To come |
です ー＞ だろう Verb | To be |
Re: first flailing attempt at translation
癒えない 痛み -- you had "unhealing pain", which is great because you've hit on the fact that Japanese verbs can and do modify nouns.
悲しみ -- The song links up two nouns next to each other and doesn't bother with と in between them for "and". Because it's a song. It would be more "properly" rendered 癒えない痛みと悲しみ
で -- particle; "by".
キズついた 君 -- you have "injury scars you", which is really close. 傷ついた is past tense, so if you think about this as a modifier, you've got "the you who was scarred"
Translating this one sentence kind of shows that Japanese tends to be a [long long modifier] for a [[subject or noun]]. In this case: [癒えない 痛み 悲しみで キズついた] [[君]]. It's kind of why it's always worth reading riiiiiight to the end before letting your brain try to translate.
----
Same with the next line:
[もう笑えないなんて 人嫌いなんて 言葉] [[そう言わないで]]
The "clincher" is そう言わないで. そう = "like", "such as". The negative verb + ~で is a grammatical structure. iwanai = will not speak; the ~で links it up to form 言わないで（ください）, which is "(please) don't". Not an imperative, but something close - a sort of request.
The "modifier" is [もう笑えないなんて 人嫌いなんて 言葉] . なんて = "such as" and can be seen here like "etc". Do the same thing and see that ことば is being modified by everything in front of it, so... "Words... like I won't laugh anymore (or) I hate people".
--------
見えない未来 = you had obscure, more "unseeable", "unforeseeable" future
に = "at" for a time (as opposed to place).
起こる事 = "things... that will happen"
全て = all
意味がある = ~ がある = ~ has = there is meaning
から = "because"
[見えない未来に起こる] [[事]] （は） 全てに意味があるから
---
そのままでいい is a set phrase: "that'll do, little pig" kind of a feeling. "It's all right just as it is now."
[きっと気づける] [[時]] が来るだろ - here we have きっと気づける "surely realise" modifying 時 - so instead of "surely you recognise the time", it's "the time where you will surely realise".
--
General takeaways: if a noun seems to make NO GODDAMNED SENSE where it is... separate it from the stuff behind it, and see if what's in front of it is modifying it. A good way to gloss is doing this thing where you try to figure out [modifier] [[subject]], with the knowledge that modifiers can sometimes be SO LONG that they have [modifier] [[subject]] components within themselves.
Re: first flailing attempt at translation