Home
Category: Learn Japanese

All Blog Posts, Learn Japanese

FFLC – Minna no Nihongo Vocabulary and Kanji Through Stories Vocab Words Memrise Courses

So, I really like duplicating information into different formats. One of my favorite duplications is taking text from a book (especially lists, but sometimes chunks of information as long as it is broken up into fairly small groups and is very interesting information that deserves to be classified and organized) and typing into digital lists and different forms of study. One of my favorite websites to publish my digital lists of information onto is memrise.com which is a site with a wonderful program to review and study and learn such digital lists. Memrise is specially created for the purpose of studying languages. I have made many different courses on Memrise to help me study Japanese, you can see all of my courses here. But I mostly wanted to write this article to share my newest courses with my fellow classmates at FFLC.

First, I would like to share my course with all of the vocabulary words for みんんなのにほんごI. They are categorized by chapter, so you can easily ignore all other words and focus on learning and reviewing only the vocabulary words for the particular chapter you want to focus on. You simply have to go to each individual chapter page and click the ignore button and select the all box and scroll to the bottom and save.

Once you are done reviewing a certain chapter and want to move onto the next chapter, you can ignore all of the vocab in the previous chapter and unselect (or select none to ignore) on the next chapter and save after selecting/deselecting words from each chapter. Once you have learned a word, you will never have to relearn it unless you want to and you clear the data you have accumulated for each individual course. So you can ignore words and once you unignore them it will be like you never ignored them in the first place. Also, if there is one word or a couple words that you still want to focus on learning and remembering, you can choose to unignore (not ignore) any words you wish and you will continue to review them every time you choose to review words you have learned.

Secondly, I am working on typing up all of the Kanji vocabulary words from Kanji Through Stories. I have one course with the Kanji as the main focus that can be used to study the meaning of the kanji as well as pair the hiragana with the correct kanji. I also made another course to practice the correct spelling of each kanji vocabulary word by being able to type the correct pronunciation.

Please contribute a Meme if you think of a good way to help yourself and others remember a Japanese vocabulary word. You can even create Mems with videos to help you remember a word with a certain video. Simply type: embed:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SZaryV1PLo followed by any text you wish to see below the video. Here are some examples of some Memes I have created.

difference between birthplace, to be born, to give birth in Japanese funny Japanese baby picture

All Blog Posts, Learn Japanese

Difference Between – To Give Birth, To Be Born & Birthplace in Japanese

An Odd Coincidence – A Japanese Lesson About Birth on Easter.

In light of the Easter holiday I find this lesson to be very interesting, because the day I finally decide to get these three words straightened in my mind it falls on Easter, and what’s more appropriate then words revolving around birth?

So I’ve been getting these words on WaniKani.com for awhile now and I’ll start to understand them then… NOPE, I’ll see one and think it’s the other and since I’ve not had any real reason to use these words with anyone or even myself or my wife they quickly get mixed up, so here is an attempt to make sure that they can be remembered moving into the future. Perhaps I’ll have more opportunities to use these words since I now live in Japan, but I got to know them first :).

UMU – 生むーうむ：To Give Birth
UMARE – 生まれーうまれ：Birthplace
UMARERU – 生まれるーうまれる：To Be Born

So the best way to remember UMU is by adding a bit more to it to remember it.

By the time you are going to give birth, it’s too late to turn back, U MUst be ready to give birth, you don’t have a choice.

To remember UMARE is by changing it a bit to be pronounce in English U-MAR-E

Your birthplace will usually dictate where YOU get (U) MARRIED (MA-RE) at.

UMARERU is a fun one to remember, but you got to break it up a bit. Think of the famous giraffe that was pregnant forever and what the mother was constantly thinking.

UM…? ARE YOU (UM… ARE (/R) U) ever going to be born?

Perhaps these are not the very best ways for you to remember how to think of these. If these don’t sit, then take a couple minutes and think of some ways to remember these on your own. The best way to remember anything in a new language is to do space repetition and to create stories around the words. They work even if you have to break the rules of the language at times just to remember the spelling/word. Click here to check out my favorite programs online for free.

-Nihon Scope

All Blog Posts, Learn Japanese

Easy Kanji Mix-Ups: Husband, End & Not Yet

Kanji Mix-Up’s – Matsu, Mi & Otto/Husband

These three were giving me trouble for a little bit on Wani-Kani so I’m going to do a quick exposé of the characters and maybe some ways to help you remember them.

This is the character for husband. Now it’s a fairly simple character but for me at least once the two other characters came in, I started to not notice why I kept getting all these wrong and at times calling the other characters this and this character the other words.

Now here is the culprits that caused me to keep mixing things up. On the left is ‘Not Yet‘ and the right is ‘End‘ in Japanese Kanji. So when you compare husband to this, you’ll notice that the difference is not having the tail stroke coming down the middle like it is on ‘End’ and ‘Not Yet’.

Another thing I noticed that makes ‘Not Yet’ and ‘Husband’ different is the length of the top horizontal stroke. But the biggest give away is still not having the middle tail stroke coming down the middle. So noticing that will obviously help solve that mystery of ‘Husband’ and ‘Not Yet’. But when going through flash cards or Wani-Kani, you may at times in the beginning figuring out these two.

Now in Wani-Kani they first teach ‘Not Yet’ as the radical ‘Jet’, like a plane. After getting these wrong for a while, I decided to give it a better story. So I took the radical ‘Jet’ and the story goes:

“You get on a jet-plane and when you first step on the plane you notice your seat is in the way back, so you’re ‘Not Yet’ to your seat, but by the time you get to your seat you’re at the ‘End’ of the plane.”

So you can see the tiny stroke as an indicator of where you are on the plane.

Silly and possibly a tad stupid, yes. But, that’s what helps you remember the kanji!

-Nihonscope

Page 1 of 8

First

Last