ー市-cloth AND 市-market; city I think they are the same, and causes confusion.
ー がand は are used randomly in sentences, and nothing indicates wether I have to use the known marker (は) or the unknown marker（が）.
ー ください and おねがいします are used randomly in sentences, there is no marking which one is required.
ー “I dont have water.” with answer “みずがありません” shoud be “(I) don’t have water”. And the same with other sentences.
ー “I speak”, “you speak” are written with either “はなします” or “はなせます”. “I speak” should always be “はなします”, and “I can speak” should always be “はなせます”. This difference is also not metioned during the course as far I know.
ー"Tea" is either “おちゃ” (green tea) or “こうちゃ” (black tea), the difference is not mentioned, and nothing marks which one is expected when typing an answer.
ー"order" is either “ごちゅうもん” or “ちゅうもん”, and I still don’t know what is the difference between the two.
ー”それ” (a thing far from me, but close to the other person) and “あれ” (thing far from both of us) are used in a random way. The course doesn’t explain the difference, and it is never marked which one is required in the answer.
I found out about this app two days ago and am currently going through Japanese level 1. I’ve been studying Japanese for several years.
I’m finding a fair amount of issues with this lesson plan as I go through it. Some of them have been stated already though, such as the first post expressing that the hiragana kana は is not pronounced as わ, especially in the context of learning hiragana.
Similarly, hiragana is being taught out of order. There’s a reason that the 五十音 exists and is used to teach hiragana. It’s used to facilitate looking words up in the dictionary i.e. alphabetical order. You wouldn’t teach someone the English alphabet as such: A, H, Z, N, etc. It would be of great benefit to teach hiragana and katakana in order. “あ、い、う、え、お。 か、き、く、け、こ…etc.”
Teaching ちょうし ＆ ちょうしはどう as one of the first words and first phrases makes little sense to me. ちょうしはどう is a conditional phrase, it requires context and is not the same as say, 『おっす/おす！』 You wouldn’t greet someone and say ちょうしはどう, yet this is being taught along side こんにちは、おはよう、おやすみ、etc.
I’ll update or post again as I continue the lessons.
Besides those issues, there is also the fact that some verbs are given in polite form, and some in regular form. 見る and 見ます are even both present. The same goes for adjectives. Most are required like 大きいです. But 辛い is given in the regular form. Again, it is impossible to tell which one you should give.
Thank you for your comment. It’s on my to-do list to make all verbs and adjectives consistent in their presentation (ie polite VS basic form). Which form do you prefer personally?
Hiragana are taught in random order and not following the hiragana chart order because at such early stage of learning, having all 50 hiragana is overwhelming for many novice users. Many people want to start off learning phrases and words, as opposed to being forced to learn 50 hiragana or katakana in order to proceed to the next level. It follows idea of the lexical approach which is the logic behind how the official Memrise courses are created.
I do agree with you that ちょうしはどう feels slightly more out of place in comparison to other more standard forms of greetings (ie hello, goodbye), but the same same could be said for English phrase ‘what’s up?’, as it’s not a phrase as ‘standard’ as ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. That being said, with the nature of Japanese language (generally a lot more formal than Japanese), this phrase may be removed/moved depending on feedback from other users.
Thank you for taking your time to give us feedback! I agree that the course isn’t perfect and needs improvement and editing. I appreciate your patience in the meantime.
Cool, that would be great! I would argue that you should be exposed to both forms from the beginning. I understand the course does not offer grammar lessons, but a simple addition of (polite) or (casual) would already help tremendously I think.
Thanks for your response. I just wanted to clarify about one thing. My issue with ちょうしはどう wasn’t that I felt it was out of place with the more standard greetings, but rather that it is out of place. ちょうしはどう is not the Japanese equivalent to the casual, informal English greeting “what’s up?” The Japanese equivalent would instead be おす or おっす. As I stated in my previous post ちょうしはどう requires context to be used. It’s a phrase used to inquire about something, to gather more information about a topic that is already being discussed. It is not used as a greeting, however.
I added ‘polite’ to items in the first few levels of Japanese 1. (ie. わたしはきぶんがわるいです I’m sick (polite).). I will see how this feels for the users, see if I get any complaints or positive feedback, before going ahead and implementing it in the rest of the course.
Thanks for your quick response! I’m not sure if I agree with you entirely on ‘what’s up?’ being the equivalent to おっす/おす。I would consider those far more informal, almost to an extent of ‘sup?’. Also because with ちょうしはどう？ and what’s up, you can usually expect a reply like ‘I’m okay’, ‘not much’, you don’t usually expect a reply from おっす, as it is almost like ‘hey’ or ‘yo’. If you’ve seen the rest of this forum, you might have noticed that the phrase ちょうしはどう has caused a bit of stir… also due to it containing the small ょ which many users are not familiar with in such early stage. That being said, I’m considering removing this item entirely, and adding something a little bit more standard. Thoughts??
I’m sorry that you weren’t notified that you needed Japanese keyboard for the course. The courses are mainly designed to be used on mobile devices, so not all users have experienced the same problem.
There is no your in this sentence. Your is implied in context outside of this sentence or at least was. This sentence could be about his,her,their,His Imperial Majesty’s phone. Putting your here just makes it harder because one has to remember this not related word to answer it correctly.
So, I’m very novice at the language, but maybe a newbies perspective could be useful as feedback as well. Naturally, as a beginner, I didn’t mind the inclusion of “ちょうしはどう？”. What I can tell is that I’ve heard that phrase twice in a TV show so far (I’ve seen so many recently, I have to do some looking up to tell you the title exactly) and it was apparently used as a greeting.
In one instance, there was young man greeting an elderly couple like that, and they looked rather perplexed. So I thought it was a non-formal, casual greeting that young people might use more frequently. Like a young lad saying "yo, what’s up?: to someone older, and that being considered rude?
Anyway, I rather have stuff included in courses than excluded, so maybe a more detailed definition is in order instead of replacement?
I hope my point came across and was somewhat useful, English is not my native language and sometimes I struggle a little.
I like the phrase personally. I thought it was pretty clearly stated what the usage was, considering that 調子 is translated separately as “condition”. So, a literal translation would obviously be something like “how is your condition?” I haven’t heard it used very often in anime, or J-drama, but it does exist, and can be used in that context. It’s also a nice and polite way to say it. Anyway, I’m well beyond that part of the course, so what you do doesn’t really effect me too much, but anyway, just wanted to say I liked it, personally.
In normal conversation you wouldn’t want to say “your” at all. In any context, the person you are speaking to is going to know that you are asking for their phone number. In fact, it would be awkward and unusual for you to say something like あなたの電話番号は何ですか？. Using any form of “you” in general conversation is really unusual, and sometimes even insulting, depending on the context. The inclusion of it in the course is probably because it is mostly textbook Japanese, but you’re not going to speak like that on a regular basis. Hopefully. I get that it’s a little bit annoying having the translations not line up, but just remember that the translation without あなたの is the right one.
Is it possible to get the course to recognize right answers in kanji? It’s pretty frustrating, and kind of hurtful to my progress, to not be able to write correct answers in kanji on both the mobile app and, especially, the computer site. If I change the answer to the kanji, it always marks it wrong. As I’m currently trying to get used to using and trying to remember the correct kanji, it is really a bit of a hold up being forced to write everything out in hiragani. I can’t really use the website at all, as it is, because I never really get a chance to see the kanji. Fortunately I can at least look at the kanji on the app before selecting the answer.
Related, I was wondering if there was a way to hide the translations for specific words, or for everything. It’s easy for me to accidentally rely on my knowledge of the English translation, or the hiragana, rather than actually reading out and identifying the kanji as it is. For example, here’s a screenshot. If we could hide where it says “actually; unexpectedly”, that would be really helpful, as it would force me to remember what 案外 is actually read as, rather than being able to rely on my knowledge of the English translation(and yeah, this translation is wrong, it shouldn’t have 好きです at the end, obviously).
but just remember that the
translation without あなたの is the right one.
The problem here is consistency. I don’t mind if we assume that the default is you, but the most sentences start with あなたは under the same conditions in this course. The problem is not the difficulty of Japanese language but the inconsistency of the examples.
The WA is a subject particle and it’s a context modifying element. The problem is that here there is no context. Guessing if one should write or あなたは is the only thing left then.
I think the English translation provides the context for the conversation reasonably well. I get what you mean though. Having consistency is important. There is a lot of issues with that throughout this course though, unfortunately, but by and large, it’s a pretty good program.
And now I’m about to report a few more translation problems…
They aren’t TOO common, but I’ve been running across a good few of these, which are annoying. The bottom should be translated as コーヒーは私のお気に入りの飲み物です、but is translated in hiragana instead, for some reason. Having the bottom in kanji is literally invaluable to me, so I’d appreciate it if this kind of thing was kept to a minimum.
