Lesson 100 at last!

It took a year of hard work and much studying during work breaks, but I finally made it to lesson 100 of JapanesePod101.com. The idea started more than a year ago when I got back from Japan in November 2007. At that time, I resolved to get through the first 100 lessons within 3-6 months, but setbacks such as moving to a new country, and parenting got in the way, but I’ve persevered when I had time and I’ve reached the 100th lesson of the beginner series.

It felt really good to finally fulfill this goal of mine, even if pretty late.

The lesson also covers a really, really helpful piece of grammar I noticed gets used in Japan a lot, but one I never learned before. I noticed that people in Japan often take the regular verb, such as “to eat” (食べる, taberu) and turn it into taberun desu (食べるんです) in conversation. Or you can make it into a question: nan nichi irun desu ka? (何日いるんですか？), which means “how many days will you be here?”*

So lesson 100 said that even though you’re using the plain form of a verb, if you had “n desu” to it, it becomes polite. That explained so much when I heard that. I really wish I had listened to this before going to Japan recently, but that’s life.

What I am trying to find out now is when to use the usual polite form of a verb, like tabemasu (食べます) and when to use the plain form with “n desu” like taberun desu (食べるんです). I’ll update the post when I find out.

Speaking of milestones, I also have completed memorizing all 300 kanji in the flashcards I own. That too has taken me almost as long to complete, and fraught with similar interruptions. Three-hundred kanji is hardly anywhere close to literacy, but I have noticed that it has helped immensely with reading Buddhist scriptures in Japanese or with watching Japanese TV, which likes to use a lot of subtitles for dramatic effect. As I wrote before, the key to memorizing kanji is just to think of it like a rehearsal, where you just practice your lines over and over again until you can do them without thinking. Every morning, while eating breakfast, I just go through the ones I missed before until one day they just stick in my mind. You shouldn’t cram, just practice over the long-term and get exposure or flight-time with the kanji.

I already ordered and received the next set of flashcards, which contains 1,000 more kanji. I definitely won’t be able to complete these in the next year, but I will start soon I hope. I noticed that as the kanji get more advanced, they’re actually a little simpler because they have fewer ways to read them, so there’s less to memorize per kanji. Early kanji like 下, 上 or 後 all have many different ways to read them, and all those readings get used. Things should be a little more stream-lined as I move into the more advanced kanji.

Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu

* – I know this one’s grammatically correct because someone did ask me this the last time I was in Japan. Since I don’t have enough practice listening to Japanese, my brain processes simple questions too slow still. I’ve been watching my wife’s recorded TV shows a lot lately to help catch up listening. Watching girly dramas though can be a little tiring at times.