In the “new” Japanese 1 for German speakers I just stumbled about something that hopefully @MarikoMiz (or somebody else with more knowledge than me) can clarify.
In level 1, 「ようこそ」 is translated as “Willkommen”, “Welcome”. But I remember hearing or reading 「いらっしゃいませ」 for “Welcome”, for example to greet a customer who enters a restaurant or shop. So I looked into the differences between those two, but I can’t get a clear picture from my sources.
According to one source, the distinction seems to be the politeness level. You can invite a friend into your home with a colloquial 「ようこそ」. 「いらっしゃいませ」 would be a more formal phrase that honors the guest or customer and humbles yourself (something like “May I welcome the esteemed customer to our little store”). If that is correct, maybe it would be a good idea to mark 「ようこそ」 as “informell”, “informal”, like with 「ありがとう」 in level 2.
On the other hand I’ve read that the distinction is about where you enter. If somebody enters into a public place, like a country or a town square, you’d use 「ようこそ」. If somebody enters a more private place like a shop or a restaurant, even if there’s public access, you’d use 「いらっしゃいませ」.
So now I’m a little confused and hope for an explanation when to use which phrase
ようこそ is general welcome. ie airport gate, theme parks, and いらっしゃいませ is normally only heard in shops, restaurants, convenience stores… you get the idea For example, when you walk into a store the staff will greet you with いらしゃいませ instead of other types of greetings.
I am really enjoying going back through the Japanese 1 lesson with the correct writing style. One thing that I’m missing from the older cracking-kanji lessons though is how Kanji were introduced. In the new lessons they are introduced only as parts of the words that are being taught without their standalone meaning, compared to the previous way which was to introduce some kanji then build up more complicated ones that contain the already known kanji. It was fun learning the meanings of radicals inside the Kanji I learn for example:
物 = 牛 + 勿
私 = 禾 + 厶
Also because of having already learned the meaning of 幸, I found it much easier to learn 幸せです than for example 元気です.
Perhaps the cracking-kanji lessons could be reintroduced in some fashion to the new courses to make learning the kanji-containing words easier.
Thank you very much for your input. ‘Cracking Kanji’ levels were removed because they were unpopular, due to their lack of audio. Many people didn’t find them useful as they only displayed what they meant.
That being said, if those levels help you understand how kanji are composed, I think they’re definitely worth bringing back! Let me wait a little more and collect more feedback about them.
About furigana for Shokuji, the function to edit furigana is currently broken but I will as it as soon as it gets fixed. Thanks!
In that case, I’d like to say that like @CamJN, I found the old Kanji lessons to be useful. Some kind of pronunciation guide for them (furigana, sound, or both) would have been great, though I could see that getting messy with the different readings. They did actually help me though, as I started recognising the Kanji around the place, especially in Japanese restaurants.
Could お召し上がり be introduced before it’s used in こちらでお召し上がりですか、お持ち帰りですか？ that’s a lot to process as is for a beginner and throwing in a new word makes it harder.
I’d also like to suggest that in Japanese-2 lesson 1 that the “thin” that refers to someone’s weight be changed to “thin; slender” or something (to make it clearer) and the short that refers to someone’s height be labeled short (height) or something like that.
Something I’ve found with the kanji in the course is that I don’t necessarily feel like I’m learning to recognise the characters. As you learn words in Memrise you go through different difficulties of activities: select the correct word from the list, type out what you hear. However, once you’ve “learned” a word, the revision you get is to translate English into Japanese. For me, this means I’m not learning the kanji effectively, since I type in the “hiragana”, and this gets converted to kanji for me. Funnily enough, this made the activities where you have to select it from a list of options more challenging, but you only get those when you first learn the word, and never after (unless you fail the word in your reviews).
For example, to translate “I’m well”, I type in わたしはげんきです, hit spacebar, and it turns into 私は元気です. In this process I’m never really picking up on what 元気 looks like. Similar for words like お腹, 喉, 悪い, 野菜. Looking at them now I don’t think I could accurately identify these kanji, but typing them is no problem because I know the hiragana.
The current setup helps you speak, read, and write (well, type) Japanese, but I don’t know if it’s helping for reading kanji. One option that pops to mind is to be given Japanese and write the English equivalent, but I can see that having issues with how you pick an exact translation. Though, I guess we’re doing that in the other direction anyway?
Thinking about the course before, this wasn’t a problem because there was a one-to-one translation between what you typed and what you read with hiragana. However, with kanji, you can’t “read” out the word; you just have to know what it is.
I’m currently using the JLPT Bootcamp N5 course and would suggest you switch to that to learn the Kanji.
I’m halfway through the ‘N5 Vocab’ which doubles up to teach and test you on both English->Hiragana and English->Kanji. You see the Kanji displayed frequently on both sections, and the doubling up really makes a useful difference in getting enough repetitions. Once I finish I’m going to switch to the ‘N5 Readings’ which tests Kanji->English and Hiragana->Kanji. I feel like the vocab is really solidifying for me this way, after first completing the original 1-3 and a Genki deck, and am looking forward to coming back to these new Memrise 1-3 courses once I have the Kanji down.
That sounds like a great idea! I’ve also gone ahead and created a course doing the Kanji to English words for each level of Japanese 1, if anybody’s interested. I definitely feel it’s helping me get the Kanji down
The new chatbot missions aka Prochat are now active on Japanese 1. Have you tried them? What do you think of the four different scenarios? Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!
What are the Prochat missions and how do I access them? I tried learning some new words and did 2 reviews but didn’t notice anything? Interested to see what these are!
Edit: Ah, after some googling I found they’re in the app version. Just tried out the teaser and getting directions, and think it seems like a neat concept! I would note that seeing all the romaji while in the kanji course was surprising, and I think it’d be good if words that were used in the chats would be covered beforehand. I liked the idea of the little quiz at the end of “Getting Directions”, but I didn’t actually know what the directions meant and happened to guess the right answer
Oh, and one other thing. In the “Gettiing Directions” activity, I was offered to use “sumimasen” for excuse me, which is taught as すいません in the ‘main’ series. A brief look online suggests that すみません is the “correct” pronunciation, so I take it すいません is more colloquial, or something?
Yeah, you have suimasen and summasen as some colloquial variants.
Apparently these types of slight shortenings tend to happen a lot with words that are too commonly used, in any language.
Just a question. In Memrise Japanese 2 - Level 6 (US version) there is a sentence saying わたしはえいごをはなせます (I speak English). Should that not say わたしはえいごをはなします? I learned in other lessons that if you do not know if a person speaks a lanuguage you use “はなせます”. But in the above case is says “I speak English”.
So, what is correct?
I think the course (or the EU one at least) specified はなせます as “can speak” where as はなします is “to speak”. I guess more literally the sentence is saying “I can speak English” rather than “I am speaking English”. Take this with a grain of salt though, I only guess at these things
There is a bug in Japanese - 2 where あれ is written as それ. あれ is heard in the Audio, and by the native speakers in the video but それ is written when introducing the spelling and must be given as an answer.
I am near the end of Japanese 1 and one thing I ran into today was the fact that in my review session it asked me for the Japanese for “no.” In one case it was asking for の, in another case it was asking for いいえ、and in a 3rd case it was asking for iie (romaji). Yet in all three cases the question looked identical and I had no way to know which “no” they meant (the word no, or the sound no), or whether or not to respond in hiragana or romaji.
Please can you clarify which version of the Japanese course you’re on? There’s hiragana only (purple-ish image of Japanese girl), full script and romaji course. (A link will be great!). Thanks.
In Japanese 3 the kanji symbol for 朝食 the first kanji (chou) is written incorrectly on the multiple choice tap questions.
Edit:
The kanji that is incorrectly given is 昼食 (chuu) meaning lunch…this is kind of confusing as it is also required to get the correct answer for “to have breakfast”
For example, when you walk into a store the staff will greet you with いらしゃいませ instead of other types of greetings.