Slight confusion
 

Hello everybody! =) My first post here hehe.

I have a slight confusion with the exact meanings of some phrases. I will type in Romanji cus I'm still just beginning to learn and am not proficient in either Hiragana or Katakana. (Ironically, I'm probably better at Kanji since I'm Chinese XD)

Ok so, here are a few questions. These questions arise because I'm currently using Rosetta stone. It's very good at teaching things imo, but there can be cracks because it's all pictures hehe.

First of all, if I say the sentence: "Kare wa Hanashite imasu". Does that mean "He is a speaker (like at a convention or something)" or "He is speaking"? (or both?) Would this apply to sentences replacing "Hanashite" with say "ryourshite" or other words ending in "ite"?

My other question deals with contractions. Is there any real difference between me using "nonde imasu" and "nomimasu" (or similarly for other words like "hanashite imasu" vs "hanashimasu").

Thanks guys. =D

Kare wa Hanashite imasu literally means "He is speaking," though, just as in English, there could be a context where it might mean "He is the speaker".

"nonde imasu" and "nomimasu"

The ~de imasu form means the same as "~ing".

Ok so if I say "Kare wa nonde imasu" it means he is currently drinking. But if I want to say something indicating he drank earlier or will drink later I should use "nomimasu"?

You are correct for "will drink later." There are two tenses in Japanese: past and non-past (which incorporates the English present and future tenses).

For past tense, "nomimasita."

のみました。
nomimashita.

I realize this is most likely a pure typo and don't mean to point any fingers, I just want to point it out.

'si' is a valid form of romanization for し.
It will even come out as し if you type it in the IME.

You may also commonly see other things like 'tu' for つ, or 'ti' for ち.

I wondered if anyone here would "correct" this.

I frequently have typed out things like "shi" and "tsu" and such here with a mind for the newbies who don't know any better.

However, if you go to Japan, you will find most Japanese people will use romaji like this: "gohan wo tukurimasita" instead of "gohan wo tsukurimashita." In fact, the official government romanization scheme in Japan writes shi/tsu/chi as si/tu/ti.

I've just frankly gotten a little tired of using one romanization scheme on JF and the (in my mind) superior one everywhere else, so I thought I'd make the transition back to what I prefer now.

I was gonna ask if you were useing rosetta stone, but then I re-read your msg and saw that you said it lol. Its pretty good, watch out for the annoying "newspaper" "book" confusion/mistakes. The program gets them confused.

Just want to add that Japanese also has past progressive, e.g.

飲んでいました/飲んでいた＝was drinking

And ている does not necessarily correspond to English "ing". If a verb is instantaneous, i.e. the action takes place and finishes immediately, then ている functions like English perfect tense. Examples are:

死んでいる＝is dead (not dying)
結婚している＝is married (not in the process of getting married)

ている indicates that the results of those instantaneous verbs continue.

Technically past progressive is an aspect, not a tense.
Continuous and progressive aspects - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia