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The Most Basic Basics about Kanji and Hiragana
Thereupon, Marduk, the highest god, challenged the sea goddess Tiamat and the 11 dragons she had given birth to to fight against him. (my translation)
--->> Most of the time, Japanese isn't written with the letters of our Latin alphabet (the Latin alphabet, called Rōmaji, "Roman letters", is actually only used when people try to make it easier for ( Read more... ) -
Spot the verb & adjective!
Now, let's spot the verb in: asapparakara donaru n ja nee... (source: Oriental Blue by Ayano Yamane)
We are lucky, lol, because the verb happens to appear in its basic form, ending in u: donaru
You can now look it up in a dictionary: donaru = to shout; to yell
(And the whole sentence should mean something like: Don't yell ( Read more... ) -
Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives... and what they (sometimes) look like
It's not really surprising that the Japanese language has nouns, verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech much like English, French or Spanish - even though it isn't always so easy to find out what is what in a sentence... lol.
But spotting nouns, verbs and adjectives in a sentence can be quite important when you try to analyze and understand ( Read more... ) -
Translation Strategy
は --> the element before it is the theme of the sentence. Often this is the doer (subject).
を --> the element before it is the person/thing affected by the action (direct object).
- knowing how verbs look like and where they are placed in sentences
それで, 英雄神 マルドウク は 海の女神 チアマトと 彼女が 生んだ １１種の竜を 相手に たった 一人で 戦いを挑みました。
戦いを挑みました --> The main ( Read more... ) -
A Language Dummy's Guide to "Reading" Manga
A couple of months ago, I started to seriously worry about the rather extensive collection of untranslated Japanese doujinshi and manga I've accumulated over the years. (I have manga inside my wardrobe, under my bed and in sky high stacks along the hallway :D) Unfortunately, I've never been very good at learning new languages, I've had to learn ( Read more... )