Just found a great resource to read Japanese for NFL football fans

NFL 2011 Week3 Part6 - READ2CH

NFL 2011 Week3 Part5 - READ2CH

I'm just addicted to BBS threads.

Thank you very much, masaegu :)!

What does the small イ mean in katakana? eg: フィ. Or, rather, how do you pronounce it?

I know what all the other small ones mean but I'd never seen this one before.

Thanks.

We pronounce it like "hwi" but so many Japanese-learners pronounce it like "fi", which only helps them sound foreign. There is no "f" sound in Japanese. It is "Mt. Huji", not "Mt. Fuji", believe it or not.

The 「フィ」 mora originally did not exist in Japanese. We created it later on to write loan words from European languages that contained "fi", "fee", "fea", etc.

フィラデルフィア = Philadelphia
トロフィー = trophy
フィールド = Field

Interesting. Is there absolutely no difference in pronounciation between the "H" in ひ and the "H" in ふ?

No difference for us native speakers. It is the same consonant.




0:55~

Now I wonder why all the programs I've used have taught me to pronounce it as an F. It must be common, too, seeing how you said many japanese learners do it. Seems like the world's most elaborate and pointless prank.

Anyway, thanks for helping and for that correction. Appreciated.

So you'd pronounce "trophy", "torohwi-"?

Correct. That is the closest one can get without using sounds that are not used in Japanese.

It is not only Japanese in which this sort of thing happens. I absolutely had no idea what they were talking about the first time I heard an American pronounce "karaoke" or "kimono". So it is all fair.

How do you say "Could you give me your Koebu channel link again"

君の声部チャンネルのリンくをもう一回もらえますか　 is this right?

I can understand this but

「君のこえ部のチャンネルのリンクを、もう一回教えて もらえますか？」or
「あなたのこえ部のチャンネルのリンクを、もう一回教 えてくれますか？」

would be more natural.

To get really technical, the "h" row of Japanese don't all start with the same biomechanical motion, or "sound" if you want to call it that: Wikipedia:IPA for Japanese - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

は・へ・ほ all begin with a "voiceless glottal transition [we can say 'fricative-ish']," meaning your vocal cords do not vibrate and the sound is articulated at the glottis. The same "h" sound occurs all over the place in English. Think hope, happy, help, here, home, hard, hit, and on and on and on. This is the most common English "h" sound. The IPA notation for the sound is /h/.

ひ begins with a "voiceless palatal fricative," meaning your vocal cords do not vibrate, the middle/back of the tongue is raised to the hard palate, and it is produced by constricting airflow through a narrow channel (i.e., a relatively high amount of air friction occurs, here, between the tongue and hard palate). The same "h" sound occurs in English words like "hue." The IPA notation for the initial sound is /ç/. This is a rarer English "h" sound.

ふ, on the other hand, is a "voiceless bilabial fricative," meaning your vocal cords do not vibrate, the lips are pulled closely together (but not fully together) ("bilabial" means "two lips," basically), and it is produced by constricting airflow through a narrow channel (here, between the lips). The sound absolutely DOES NOT exist in English (English has no bilabial fricatives). The IPA for this is /ɸ/.

The English "h" has many sounds as well. I already talked about /ç/ and /h/. In Scottish English there's also the /x/ sound (that German-sounding Scottish "ch" in "loch ness"). Then it does other things like affect the "w" in "wh" words (for some places) and change the sound of s, t, p, and s if it follows it (sh, th, ph, sh). But the only real h sounds are the first three I mentioned in this paragraph, and two of them aren't entirely universal in native English speakers (the only universal sound is /h/).

That being said, if you asked a native English speaker if /h/ and /ç/ are the same sound, they'd say "yes" if you asked, "Do 'hue' and 'hello' start with teh same sound?" Because English speakers consider these two sounds to be the same (we do this with other things, too, like aspirated and non-aspirated p, which Spanish and Hindi speakers treat as different sounds).

Similarly, as masaegu said, native Japanese treat /h/ and /ç/ and /ɸ/ as the same sound.

So what I'm trying to say is that it's not actually the same mechanically, and the sound at the beginning of ふ does not, at all, exist in English. The only time you make the sound in Japanese is with ふ. So there's nothing in either language to analogize it to.

Put your lips in an English "p" sound. Now move them about three millimeters apart. Now without moving your lips, try to make the English "h" sound. That's how you make the ふ sound.

Edit This could also spawn discussions about し・じ・つ・づ・ち・ぢ.

Edit 2 Thought I'd brag about my elite が行 pronunciation. It's very NHKish. ;)
What I'm saying here is that がぎぐげご are not necessarily using the same "g" as in English. It depends on where you are in Japan. My pronunciation (and the NHK-style I'm talking about) often uses a "g" like the "ng" in the English word "sing." Suffice to say, reading up on linguistics and phonetics will go a long way toward improving your pronunciation in a new language.

Unfortunately, things like pitch are not as easy to pick up from a book. I still sound too American for my tastes when I speak Japanese. Which is why I am motivated to brag about the one good piece of pronunciation I have absolutely down in Japanese: my NKH が行. ToT

Thank you, sumire

Basic Conjugation Question
 

I have a very basic question on conjugation.
If I wanted to say something like "Yesterday was hot" do I conjugate the adjective into past tense, the verb, or both of them? Or do I conjugate the adjective the way I normally would when it is followed by a verb?

Basically, I don't know if I should say "Kinou wa atsukatta desu" or "Kinou wa atsui gakusei datta" or something else. Or, am I completely wrong?

Thanks in advance. :)

Thanks kyle, that was very helpful and interesting.

Can you help me with this? What I'm going for in English: His mind becomes clearer, washed of everything but his footsteps.

And my attempt with google's help:

彼の心はすべてのものが、彼の足音で洗浄し、明確にな る。

Your problem is your English, not your Japanese. How can you call it "your attempt" when the gibberish comes straight from Google Translate?

It depends on what is the end of the phrase. If it's an adjective, you change the adjective's tense. If it's a verb, you change the verb's tense. Also, politeness matters.

Adjective: (yesterday was hot / the neighborhood was boisterous)
ます form: 昨日は暑かったです。／近所はにぎやかでした。
plain form: 昨日は暑かった。／近所はにぎやかだった。

Verb: the tall student slept / the pretty student slept
背が高い学生は寝た。／きれいな学生は寝た。

Clear?

Can you explain what the English means? It's not well-written. I don't know what "washed of everything but his footsteps" means. What does "footsteps" mean here? The sound? Figuratively "where he's been in life"?

Also, assuming you mean that the only thing in his thoughts at all are his footsteps, then you don't say your mind goes "clearer." You say it goes "clear." A "clearer" mind would be the exact opposite, I would think, as if you have nothing in your brain except what you're hearing at that moment, your mind is addled. You are mentally broken, not of clearer mind.

The actual sound of what he hears at the moment, the sound of his footsteps. Literally the sound.

I guess by "clearer" I mean it isn't entirely clear because he is focused on the footsteps. So more clear than it was before. Moments before.

Help with Kanji
 

Hi there, so I'm trying to translate a book from Japanese to English and I only have a basic dictionary and Jishop to aid me plus various online places. For little bits, I've been using IME Pad to help me get the right Kanji typed up on my computer, however, it just doesn't seem to recognise this one kanji, no matter how many times or different ways I try to draw it.

I've got some pictures here of it, one is my drawing (sorry, I'm not the best at writing kanji), and also from the book (above か)


So if you know what that is and could type it up for me, I'd be really grateful! I've got the rest of the sentence down so I could probably take a guess at it, but I want to be thorough and translate the book for myself properly.

Also, is there any advice you could give on translating long texts? Is the method I'm using bad or good, or is there a more efficient way of going about this?

Thankyou in advance ^_^

That is 静 .

Type しずか and change it to the kanji.

You would need to know much more Japanese than you do now in order to translate a book. You would need to be able to write pretty much what you want to say in Japanese. Any second-grader knows the kanji 静 here.

How would you say "pants"?

I've learned the word ズボン but not all pants are trousers. There are a few instances when I say パンツ to Japanese customers, they would deny and say that they aren't looking for underwear. I looked up "pants" on jisho.org and it gave me a bunch of entries for different types of pants; like ~パンツ. I wonder, must I be fully descriptive about pants when I don't have the physical item in my hands to play "show and tell" with my customers?

If you want a single word to use at your store, that would be スラックス, period. It would by far be the safest (and easiest) choice.

You can use パンツ with those who look clearly fashion-concsious, but the pitch accent is different for it than when it means "underwear". If you can pronounce it correctly, this is the word that would help you sell more pants than when you use スラックス because it would make YOU look more fashion-conscious.

I would never use ズボン at The Gap. It sounds too old and unfashionable.

Guess: So underwear is パンツ with the pitch being HL, while the fashionable word for things worn below the waistline with two leg pieces is パンツ with the pitch being HH? (maybe it's HHL vs HHH, I'm not sure how to mark the pitch of ン)

This is just a guess since I don't have access to a dictionary that has pitch accent markings. (Wish I knew of one online.)

It is difficult to talk about pitch accents with words but what you stated looks good. For "underwear", the パ receives a clear high pitch accent. For the other meaning, it is kind of flat all the way.

パンツ (underwear) :　Same pitch accent as　「ライス」「合図」「ライム」 「債務」

パンツ (pants) : Same pitch accent as　「あいつ」「パイプ」「こいつ」「とんち」

As for an online pitch accent dictionary, I found a fairly comprehensive one many months ago and gave it to Maxwel in a thread. I failed to keep it for myself and now I cannot seem to find it.

OK, that's what I was thinking. I think the convention is that an all-flat word is considered nothing but high pitches.

I was wondering about that. I recalled seeing one online somewhere very vaguely. I bet I have it written down somewhere.

I actually just did a Google search for only things that appear on Japanforum.com for threads where you and Maxful both posted on the same page and the word "pitch" appears (the specific Google query is site:japanforum.com +maxful +masaegu +pitch).

Doing this search, I have come to a startling conclusion that explains why, twice, you haven't been able to find where you made some comment on JF. Namely, When a thread reaches something like 36 pages in length, it starts having pages go missing. Here's a link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PJeU0ttbroAJ:www.japanforum.com/forum/japanese-language-help/25439-japanese-help-questions-translations-78.html+site:japanforum.com+%2Bmasaegu+%2Bmaxful+%2Bpitch&cd=1&hl=en&ct=cln k&gl=us&lr=lang_ja|lang_en&client=firefox-a

That's Google's cache for page 78 of this "Japanese Help Questions/Translations" thread. Now try to click on another page at the bottom—say, page 79. You'll find you get redirected to page "36" of this thread, which is the last page, the one on which we're carrying on our most recent conversation.

So JF has a memory hole where it forgets things!

This upsets me. The site has gone down for long periods of time before, there is absolutely no way of contacting the owner (I've asked MMM and Nyororin, two MODS, and they don't know how to contact the owner, either!) to report problems, and now I find out that it throws pages away!

I'd set up a board just for Japanese language and invite everyone there if I weren't sure it'd be futile (a forum is worthless without a critical mass of people).

New thread to replace this one: http://www.japanforum.com/forum/japa...tml#post881825