Daily Thread: simple questions, comments that don’t need their own posts, and first time posters go here (January 30, 2023)

8 comments

1. Was having trouble with this line from the script for final fantasy IV

   > 酒場女主人: あら珍しい。 最近増えた魔物のせいで、お客もめっきりですの。

   Script is here if you need more context: http://ff4com.s4.xrea.com/ff4conve/conve003.html

   I don’t get what this means exactly. めっきりです is throwing me off.

   The rest means:

   > Bar Proprietress: It’s remarkable. Due to recent increase in monsters, customers also (considerably?).

   I think she’s saying that customers are dwindling. But maybe she’s saying they are increasing. I’m having trouble figuring out what めっきり does here.

2. I’m trying to figure out if making a sentence past tense changes where the adjective goes.
   The sentence I’m trying to translate is “The homework was difficult” and I don’t know if the adjective should go after the noun “宿題が難しかったです” or before the noun “難しい宿題でした”.
   I know that in present tense the adjective usually goes before the noun “難しい宿題です” but when it’s past tense I don’t know if it changes because of conjugation.

3. Podcast recommendations? I’ve heard that podcasts are a good resource for listening practice but I’m not aware of many of the options.

4. As a fairly new learner (been working through textbooks for 2-3 months), is it a bad approach to learn mostly in Kanji? I initially figured I’d save Kanji for later, and focus on grammar and vocab in kana, but I’m just getting into Kanji somewhat naturally. So instead of learning a word in Hiragana, I’m learning the written Kanji and the pronunciation. Is that a large problem? So for example, 朝 meaning morning and being pronounced as ‘asa’ means I already inherently know the Hiragana for it, right? I’m still trying to get my head around things, so if this is a mistake, I’d like to know now. Thank you!

5. Does つ have more than one pronunciation? Some words I’ve heard it pronounced like “su” and some pronounced like “tu” (Yes, I know that isn’t actually how it would be pronounced, but it’s the closest way I know how to write it out). I read that the majority of Japanese kana have only one pronunciation, but the more I learn, the less that seems so.

6. The first semi-difficult sentence that I was able to read was about children pulling radishes out of the ground that they grew at school lol. Granted, I did have to use yomichan for “桜島大根” as the largest variety of radish in the world is probably not going to pop up in any core deck lmao, but I was able to read everything else in the sentence. Easy NHK articles, while boring, are so fun to dissect and expand grammar and vocab with.

7. I’m still a super beginner, so the answer to this may be “learn more grammar” but I’m having some difficulty when looking up verbs when doing very basic reading.

   I came across this sentence:

   自転車をおきます

   Based on the context, this means something like “Park the bicycle” or “Leave the bicycle”. Google translate is suggesting “Put up the bicycle”.

   Now I want to look this up in jisho to find what the formal definition is.

   Without the kanji (which isn’t there because it’s a book for babies), is there a good way to tell if it’s an u-verb or ru-verb? It looks like it’s おくる /　送る　which is like “to bid farewell” which makes sense given the context. But I had to pull up the table and reverse engineer some verb stems and search them all to see which made the most sense.

   Is it solved by kanji and I should just keep learning, or is there a better way to look things up before then?

8. Does Japanese use 饗 and 餉 or mostly nonexistent?