More -te stuff..

Okay, after squeezing in time over the past few days for Japanese, I think I’ve managed to distill the following grammatical point:

-ておく – Used when something is done in preparation for some event. Differs from -てある in that -てある is used to describe a state of something when that state has been reached because of a particular reason. -ておく simply describes the act of preparation.

Will need to lookout for this in normal japanese – not too sure how to form complete sentences correctly with it yet. (Which is a huge problem!)

Will also talk more about -temo, -te kuru and -teiku next time: physics pract beckons.

JPN Grammar Note: -tearu, -teiru

I’ve been trying to pick this up earlier in the day and it took me a while to get the difference between -tearu and -teiru. As far as I can tell, -tearu conveys that an intent, or a reason, was behind the current state of an object. -teiru simply describes the current state of an object.

To use an overused example – consider a window.

• 窓が開いています。
• 窓が開けてあります。

The first sentence simply says that “The window is open.” However, the second sentence states that the window is open because of something. Perhaps the context is that the room was too hot or something and someone opened the window a while ago. However, it is important to note that when describing the act of a person opening the window, -teiru is used: 彼は窓を開けています。

Also note-worthy is that -tearu accepts only transitive verbs (I.e. verbs that work on a direct object – those that require a ‘wo’) while -teiru accepts intransitive verbs.

Learning Japanese!

Ok, I’ve been meaning to do this – posting about my Japaneses self-study progress – for a while, so I finally decided to get down to it before I procrastinate any further. For the past few years, I’ve been learning Japanese on and off, and the result was that my grasp of japanese was often fuzzy and inconsistent – I’d often remember some sentence structures, grammar rules and vocab one day, and forget them on another day.

I’m trying this out as an experiment to see if writing about what I learnt would help me to remember better, and more importantly, keep me consistent in my learning. I’m going to fit in at least an hour to two of japanese a week – if not more, when time permits.

I’m currently aiming for a JLPT3 cert by next year, and maybe JLPT2 in 3 years time. At the very least, I would like to understand conversational Japaneses (Although I don’t expect to pickup slang that quickly) in 2 years. Currently I have a very basic grasp – I know the kana and I can decipher basic sentences (i.e. simple conversational, like the stuff you have in 4koma) with the help of a dictionary.

In any case, I’ll be posting about grammar, sentence structures and vocab as I pick up more japanese. Maybe a few translations of my own here and there, if I think it’s good enough. However, you should take what I post with a pinch of salt, because I can’t be sure if I misunderstood a grammar point or any other aspect of the language without a teacher by my side.

So, without further ado,

Let’s roll.