Course Forum for Introduction to Japanese by JLPTBootCamp:
I already know Kana, so it’s kind of bothersome to be studying these early levels in Romaji because I really don’t like to be using it, unnecessarily leads to a bad mental habit. I’m enjoying it otherwise though, it leaves me conflicted whether I should skip on to the next level at the risk of missing a bit of material
@HarleyRomboutf5 I finished this course a long time ago, but I still keep up on the reviews. Whenever the early romaji items come up, I’ve always been able to answer them using kana, so I think there are alts in place for them.
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Yep, there should be alts for all of them that allow you to type in the
kana. Let me know if something isn’t working for you.
Haha, i’ve never even heard of alts. I usually use mobile but now in my Browser I see there’s an extra line with the word or sentence repeated in Kana. Are this the alts? I’ll start using the browser then. Thank you!
EDIT: Wait, actually spoke too soon. Only Itadakimasu had Kana below it, and that was only at the learning bit where you first see it but not at rehearsal
Yes, those are the alts. However, not all alts are visible on the learning page (they don’t show up if they have an underscore before them in the database), so some of them may be hidden.
What I would suggest is to stick to answering in kana if you don’t want to mess with romaji, and if one pops up as wrong, post it here so @jlptbootcamp can add the alt.
Hi @jlptbootcamp Sorry I can’t find your topic for the JLPT Readings/Vocab/etc. courses so just posting here.
Couple of things from the JLPT N5 VOCAB course:
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The entry “one (something)” has a required squiggly line (like this ~) and the kanji is marked wrong without it. Ok. But. The squiggly line produced in kana input mode is apparently a DIFFERENT squiggly line to the one produced in alphanumberic input mode (I guess it’s full width instead of half-width).
あ Squiggly Line = ～
_A Squiggly Line = ~
Seriously? The full-width kana one is not accepted making this question a massive pain in the arse cos you have no choice except to change modes. -
The answer for “really” is ほんとうに。 Can just ほんとう be an accepted answer?
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The answer to “lunch” is 昼御飯 and the (common) alternative 昼ご飯 isn’t currently accepted.
Probably more stuff, but I’ve forgotten. Will let you know ^.~
PS hate the new forums /sigh.
Huh, I thought we had resolved 1) a long long time ago, but the alts were missing, so I put every possible combination I could think of in.
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ほんとう is truth (noun, adjective). ほんとうに is really, (adverb). They are different parts of speech. Actually, the whole reason why ほんとうに is included in this course is to practice/show a way to make adverbs and emphasize the difference between them.
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昼ご飯 and 昼ごはん were both invisible alts for this word. I changed the main def to be 昼ご飯 and the alt of 昼御飯. And made everything visible so you can see them.
Yeah, the forums have good things and bad things about them. Better for course designers though because we can easily see what is addressed to us, and not just random questions about the language. Anyway, thanks for the help!
@jlptbootcamp thanks for responding! The squiggly issue persists on one card
An answer without the squiggly line (i.e. “一”) is marked yellow (half right) and a correction required as shown in picture. In the correction, a full width squiggly isn’t accepted.
Hmm, this should work now. Or at least it works for me. For some reason, it really doesn’t like invisible alts.
Note that after you get an answer wrong, it will look for the primary answer in the ‘make it green’ box and not all possible answers.
I started a course in beginner Japanese, because it’s been a while and I wasn’t sure how difficult or easy the courses would be.
one of the vocabulary is “thank you”, and it sounds like
ありがとう (A RI GA TO U), but the spelling review marks that as wrong and says it should be ありがと (A RI GA TO).
Later I started the Japanese 1 course to see if it were more challenging and saw that it has “thank you” spelled as ありがとう (A RI GA TO U) just as the speaker sounds like she is saying it. I WASN’T incorrect in my spelling or hearing or memory of that word. The beginning level has it spelled incorrectly without the final u
I worry that a true beginner will learn the spelling without the long o-u on the end and have difficulty remembering the correct spelling with the long o-u later.
Arigato and Arigatou are the same word, basically. The difference is, Arigato is used to teach you how to pronounce it better, however the spelling for Arigatou is the true spelling. (which is said the same way)
It is an ease thing. When I first heard Arigatou, I thought of Harry and Gateau, but A-Ri-Ga-To is fine. Some times Ar-Ree-Gat-To is just as good too. It is preference at the end of the day. Question is, which one is more comfortable to you, as long as it sounds right, people understand it, job done.
This is my understanding of the word, I am sure Native speakers will have a better explanation.
I look in your courses and see that you are taking Memrise’s Japanese 1. Is that the course you are talking about? That course teaches a very few words using Romaji in level 1, just to get started, then introduces the Hiragana in Level 2, and then in Level 3 spells the words using Hiragana. Since you are familiar with Hiragana, just click on “ignore” for all of the Level 1.
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The old version of the official course started with Romaji but the current one doesn’t.
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This is in Introduction to Japanese. The question type is Listen and type what you hear. The audio says “A RI GA TOU” TOU being a long sound of TO-. If you actually type what you hear, you are marked incorrect. So you type an incorrect spelling to get a good mark.
Then you move to Japanese 1 and are asked to spell Thank you. if you type “A RI GA TO” You will be marked Incorrect, because the correct spelling AND pronunciation is “A RI GA TO U”
Even though , in actual conversation, the work may be truncated for ease and speed, it seems imperative to learn it correctly and not be punished for giving the correct answer, especially at the very start of learning. I think the solution is to just spell it as it is correctly pronounced from the start, and let any dialectual habits come later. Better to me, to be more formal and correct than unintelligible.
Hi lurajane. The question is not about official course but introduction to Japanese. In Japanese 1 it ia spelled correctly
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(A few posts were moved to the relevant course thread)
When prompted to type Japanese it almost always has roman letters mixed in with the kana.
It’s not a huge problem but it makes the right answer obvious a lot of the time.
Sorry Tacyn, this is a ‘bug’ with Memrise. There is not much I can do to keep them sorted. One of the drawbacks of mixing different types of tests in the same course. Sorry about that. 
Hi.
I recently learned that it is the community who works on this course. I’m already a bit advanced, but I’m enjoying the review of hiragana and the words I didn’t knew.
I was bringing forward some feedback directly to support, but I was referred over here (after being asked to reinstall the app).
The observation is that some of the audios are “dirty” with noise and static, and adding that the volume of them isn’t normalized it tends to be quite annoying, specially when using headphones. (Support first told me to reinstall lol)
Is it possible for the community to clean up the noise and normalize the volume?
I don’t know if I would be allowed to, if noone has the time for it, I am happy to do it. If you point me to the audio files so I can download them, I’ll work on them.
I hope I’m on the right topic.