Friday, September 7, 2007

KORE, SORE, ARE & HIRAGANA CONSONANT か、き、く、け、こ

This week, students learned how to say "This is XXX." in Japanese, and hiragana か/ka/, き/ki/, く/ku/, け /ke/, こ/ko/.

The Japanese word for "this" is KORE, and "is" is DESU. Also, in Japanese, "WA" is placed after whatever is to be marked as the topic. (A topic marker topic marker is a grammatical particle found in not only the Japanese but Korean languages used to mark the topic of a sentence. ) Since Japanese word order is SUBJECT, OBJECT, and VERB order, "This is XXX." would be "KORE WA XXX DESU."

Then, students learned how to form a question from a statement sentence. Making a question in Japanese is quite simple. In Japanese, the word order of a question is the same as for statements, except that KA is attached to the end of sentence. So, "Is this XXX?" would be "KORE WA XXX DESU KA." Easy, right?

Also, students learned how to say "What is this?" in Japanese. "What" is NAN in Japanese, so you just place NAN to OBJECT. Now we have "KORE WA NAN DESU KA." which means "What is this?" Please notice that there is no question mark "?" in Japanese because the sentence-ending particle KA indicates a question.

In addition to KORE "this", students learned SORE "that", and ARE "that one over there."
Like English, KORE "this" refers to something near the speaker, SORE "that" refers to something near the listener, and ARE "that on over there" refers to something distant from both speaker and listener. However, those KORE "this", SORE "that", and ARE "that one over there", cannot be used for people except for people in pictures and photos.

By the way, Japanese /ra/, /ri/, /ru/, /re/, /ro/ sounds are produced so that the initial "r' sounds somewhat like a combination of the English "l" and "r" sounds. Japanese people have difficulty distinguishing English "l" and "r" sounds. Ask your child the story about a Japanese tourist who went to a restaurant in Hawaii, and ordered rice at the restaurant.

Moreover, students more hiragana, one of Japanese phonetic characters. They learned か/ka/, き/ki/, く/ku/, け/ke/, こ/ko/, が/ga/, ぎ/gi/, ぐ/gu/, げ/ge/, and ご/go/.

Please notice the diffiece between and , and , and , and , and .

resembles a quotation mark placed at the top right corner of a hiragana character. The mark (daku-ten in Japanese, colloquially ten-ten "dot dot"), is a diacritic sign used in the Japanese hiragana syllables to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced.

Finally, students will have their second test on Monday, September 10 for Period 3, and Tuesday, September 11 for Period 6.

Have a wonderful weekend!

SAYOONARA