今日は金曜日です．今週私はとても忙しいでした。宿題はあります。時間はありません。
I was just looking over my (as of yet unfinished) homework for this week. When I look at a page full of Kanji and Kana, it pretty much just looks like pretty pictures to me, especially when I type it without spaces.
However, individual characters are starting to leap out at me, and, sometimes, actual words call themselves to my attention. In other words, little bits of Japanese are starting to look familiar to me. That’s a good thing. Anytime I see a sign that the work is paying off, I’m glad.
This week, work has been a real bear, so Japanese has been shifted to the back burner more than I would like (hence the word “unfinished” in the paragraph above). What I am not doing, however, is stressing about it. I hope to at least get all my homework done (and review the ８課のことば (words – vocabulary – from Chapter 8) even if I don’t get any of the Chapter 8 work done, but, even if I don’t make that goal, it’ll be okay, so no stress.
Funny – my last post was about how learning Japanese doesn’t really take as much time as you think. This post is about how I haven’t really had the time to study this week. Well, work got really busy and I got sick. That’s a bad combination for studying.
Still, I’m learning Japanese for the fun of it, so it would be counterproductive to get all stressed out about not meeting some goal that, after all, I set for myself. Failing to meet the goal has no penalties attached to it.
Oh, the sentences at the top of the page? In case you can’t read them, that was just a little cry of frustration!
今日は金曜日です.
今日 – today
は – topic marker
金曜日 – Friday
です – is
今週私はとても忙しいでした。
今週 – this week
私 – I
は – topic marker
とても – very
忙しい – busy
でした – was
Really, I would have liked to say “have been” but I don’t know how to do that yet.
宿題はいます
宿題 – homework
If you have looked at enough recent posts, you probably recognize this word
は – topic marker
あります – there is
Okay, really, this would be “exists” for inanimate or nonliving things
時間はありません
時間 – time
は – topic marker
ありません – there is not
Obviously, this is the negative form of the verb in the previous sentence.
So, if we put that all together, what I was trying to say was: Today is Friday. I was very busy this week. I have homework. I don’t have time.
I break this stuff down like this because (a) I don’t know that I successfully said what I meant to day – I am a beginner at Japanese and (b) maybe somebody somewhere could learn something from it.
Oh, and in case you’re new here, I have homework not because I am in a class but because I meet weekly with a tutor on Cafetalk.
Breaking down Japanese sentences word for word is kind of intriguing to me. The sentence order is so different from English and you run into different words like あります which don’t really have an exact counterpart in English, which I think is pretty interesting.
Well, I guess I should be doing my homework instead of writing a blog post, so back to work.
頑張って
This is not Japanese music from a Japanese band, but I’m putting it here anyway, just because. Daikaiju with The Trouble With Those Mothra Girls.
