Learnin' Japanese

一緒に日本語学ぼう！

Some notes on learning Japanese. Published as http://www.w3.org/2003/11/jpnotes/

This document collaboratively scribbled by various W3C team mac users: danbri, bert, caribou, dean, karl, amy, olivier, tim

...using SubEthaEdit (formerly called "Hydra"), a multi-user text editor for MacOS X. The editing software allows users to collaborate over any Internet connection. Users connecting via the same IP network can make use of Rendezvous-based discovery facilities to share and edit documents in a peer-to-peer-ish fashion.

The topic of this document is a mix. It is partly about learning Japanese, since the W3C Team are in Japan for our Advisory Committee meeting. But it is also implicitly about Web-collaboration, annotation and editing technologies. Meta-commentary on our use of these tools probably belongs at the end of the document, eventually.

Making PC-using colleagues jealous may also be a goal.

Todo-ish list...

• A few lang="ja" are/is? missing too. good to learn english as well ;)
• Could we make better use of CSS to highlight bits of the katakana tables etc.? Dunno how., thinking out loud... (yes, definitely)

Resources

Paper: Henry gave me a print out of katakana and hiragana, in random order for memorising. Isn't online/electonic, but I (danbri) might try reproduce it.

Dave Raggett mentioned a book (by his father-in-lore) giving history of specific Kanjii characters, to aid memorability.

Online translation tools:

Excite Japan's conversion service. Options: the radio button options are 英→日 (English to Japanese, default) and 日→英 (Japanese to English); the drop-down options are 訳文のみ表示 (default) and 訳文と原文を表示. The second option allows you to have english *and* japanese, not just the translation ("really helpful when you can read a little japanese", --olivier). Is there a way to enter text by pasting it in, instead of by URI?

Infoseek Japan also have an online translator.

Examples

"Eric" spelled phonetically: エリック. The エ is "e" (pronounced like "a" in english -- anyone familiar with phonetic notation?) ; リ is "ri" (so I type "ri" on my Mac in katakana mode to get that symbol), the ッ is a small "tsu", used to double the next sound, here ク. Thus, e-ri-kku. Eric.

Computer Stuff

@@Anyone got a good link to katakana tables online?

Chaals showed me how to enter characters on my mac (in Panther MacOS X). It isn't so hard. Go into the Internationalization control panel, select Japanese from the (mumble) tab. This gives you a toolbar option to flip between input thingies (using keyboard apple-space or apple-alt-space). It can be in katakana or hirigana mode, so you type the western(?) phonetic equivalent, and it shows in the proper script. The mac will underline the current bit it is thinking about, and if you press the down arrow, will attempt a lookup to find appropriate Kanjii. Nifty.

Owners of a Japanese (JIS) keyboard can turn the option to input hiragana directly, others can input phonetically using roman letters and use the IME to change the phonems into either kana or kanji.

The Japanese IME (Input MEthod) is slighlty different in Panther and Jaguar, but the basics are the same in both -- and quite similar in windows and Linux, too.

Hiragana modifiers and compounds

Hiragana have a mechanism to "modify" a phonem into another. The main modifiers are 　゛ and ゜ 　(note to self - phew, had to switch to japanese keyboard input for 　that!). When added to a kana, these bits change the phoneme into a related phoneme, as follows:

• ゛ transforms a phoneme into the equivalent "guttural" phoneme, e.g. "ka" （か）　becomes "ga" （が）, "ta" （た） becomes "da" （だ）, etc.
• "゜" is only used to modify the "ha" family, and transforms a h- phoneme into a p- phoneme, e.g "ha" （は） becomes "pa"　（ぱ）. Not to be mistaken with "ba" （ば）.

Katakana

Meta-notes on document editing issues - Realtime Wiki Corner (chat/notes)

I don't know Japanese, but it is the first time I see Hydra in action :-) [BB]

Nifty -- but does indicate how nice it would be for a structured editor version. How about a "quick" Amaya hack? ;-) -tim +1 re structure, but no such thing as quick. Also would be good to have a protocol-based version. This uses NeXT-ish object serialization I think.

PLEASE CHOOSE A DIFFERENT COLOR, RED GUYs :) +1 How????preferences.. Is there a way to get a colorized html final version too? Not sure. I would like some way to capture this to show folks. Screengrab at least. ok!

Here we are. :D

Various scribbles below:

ダンブリ　は　日本語を　話しません。
ダンブリは日本語を話しません。チャールズは英語話します。あいうえお
大きい　大学
子
ビール　ビル

エリック
ノブ
あいうえお
かきくけこ
さしすせそ

カリブ
ダンブリ
オリヴィエ　
カール
ディーノ
ティム
ベート 
エーミ

[ note - katakana-izing names is Keio Team's "national sport" ;) ] 

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1972　　千九百七十二
私のなまえはチャールズです。
行きます。

Katakana hover-table