Daily Thread: simple questions, comments that don’t need their own posts, and first time posters go here (March 04, 2024)

6 comments

1. Hello, I have read an article stating the following, and I would like to know if its true, I just started learning a week ago:

   TLDR (in the way I understand the article): Japanese speakers are transitioning more towards english words written in katakana to give sentences more structure. Previously, kanjis were used more.

   > Japanese students begun learning English in junior hight school but the government recently decided to introduce it from primary school level. This had unintended consequence of making English language as secondary language, position held by classical Chinese in the past. Written Japanese language need to make a clear distinction between operative word (noun, verb and adjective/adverb) and particle. This was previously done by differentiating between characters (kanji) and alphabet (hiragana/katakana). Now, this is replaced by English written in katakana and particles written hiragana. This replacement is ongoing. Just comparing 20 years ago, the amount of English words used in Japanese text has increased massively.

2. Hey, doing some genki 2 work and I was comparing my answer to the answer sheet and not sure what makes my sentence wrong. The task is to make a similar sentence using either the passive form or the てもらう form, whichever is appropriate, for the sentence “My brother treated me to dinner at a famous restaurant”

   I wrote 「兄に有名なレストランで夜ご飯をおごてもらいました。」

   The answer sheet says 「兄に有名なレストランで晩御飯をごちそうしてもらいました。」

   Are these not essentially the same sentence? When should I be using ごちそう and おごる. Same thing with 夜ご飯 and 晩御飯。 Thanks!

3. tl;dr: Jisho.org copy-paste from pdf failing/not registering in search bar for no apparent reason. Suggestions? Help?

   This is not necessarily a question about grammar, vocab or listening, but I was wondering if I was the only one who has an issue on copy-pasting words from a pdf document to the big popular E-J dictionarionies.

   For some reason, like when I see a kanji I don’t know and I copy-paste it from the pdf to the search bar of E-J website, it gives a “no results found” page. But it’s like really weird because if I type those kanji in myself, then it actually gives the results for the word I originally copy-pasted. I thought maybe it was a *ctrl+v* vs. *ctrl+shift+v* issue, and I did the latter key combination to get it to work but it still failed. I tried opening a google doc, CP-ing the word into that doc and then CP-ing the word from that google doc to the websites and I get the same result. I tried the same thing but ctrl+shift+v instead of just ctrl+v like I described earlier and still the same issue. I tried doing literally everything I just mentioned a second time but this time, instead of putting directly into the search bar, I put it in the URL line/link right under where the tabs are, and it still didn’t work—and worse: it looked exactly as like the ones I’d type in but for some reason just didn’t want to work. It’s acting like the characters copied from the doc that are virtually the same characters I’m typing out are like complete different characters that I’m not able to see somehow.

   For reference, I’m using Chrome and have windows 10. I’ve tested this on three E-J Dict. sites—jisho.org, kakimashou.com, and jotoba.com—and for some reason in all of them, this happens. I even tried to make it work through google but, it still was really a hassle and kinda didn’t even work.

   Are there any fellow language learners that happen to be tech-savvy and know why?

4. I am interested in learning Japanese to aid with my work and potentially moving to Japan temporarily. Does it make sense to learn how to write the language if realistically don’t see myself ever needing to write?

5. こんばんは

   I am self-re-learning japanese via Genki. I took JP101-102 in college (eight years ago) so it’s going…fine…

   I just got most of the way thru lesson 7 which teaches the 〜に行く construction to describe the purpose of certain types of movement
   eg 東京におてらを見に行きます。
   My question concerns this construct with multiple verbs. Suppose I wanted to say
   “I went to Ōsaka to eat delicious food and meet friends”
   could that be constructed with te form to connect the verbs, ending with the 〜にいく construction like this:
   “大阪においしい食べものを食べて、ともだちに会いにいきました。”
   If not, how would I write a sentence like this?
   Sorry if this is a dumb question, many thanks for any help!

6. I have the Genki pdf that I got from the internet for free. It doesn’t allow highlighting of text nor searching, as I assume it’s technically just images of the pages. Is there a true pdf version that does allow highlighting and searching?