Practicing your skills

particles

We've covered a great many particles by now. の, が, は, と, に, を, か, へ, で, も, から, まで, け(れ)ど(も), よ, ね/な, ながら and がてら and in this lesson you also learnt と, でも, そして, のです, ので and しかし. This assignment is about you making sentence that use one of more of these particles, making sure you've used every particle in this list at least once. In addition, because it's important not just to use them, but also say what they do, provide translations for all your sentences. If you want to use words that you don't know in Japanese yet, you have a dictionary at your disposal so good luck!

Counting

As this lesson was about counting, let's start off with a simple exercise.

• look at the following numbers and pronounce them in Japanese: 1, 23, 142, 336, 8723, 61278, 2938475, 77362598, 200476071, 1000000000000

In addition to counting plain numbers, we also learnt how to count "things" by using counter particles to indicate a certain category of thing. The next exercise is meant to practice combining counters and numbers, by having you write out the pronunciation tables for the following counters (so that means 1 through 10, 100, 1000 and the "how many?" word). To make things not too complicated, all of these use the chinese counting series.

1. 案あん - used to count plans, propositions or projects
2. 件けん - used to count between-people dealings or human-caused events, such as number of web hits, (formal) applications, business deals made, etc.
3. 作さく - used to count authored works like novels or movies, stressing authorship.
4. 通つう - used to count written communication intended for people, like pieces of mail or email messages.
5. 男なん - used to count the number of boys/mey in a group.
6. 箱はこ - used to count square containers.
7. 便びん - used to count hauls, such as transported by cargo plane, ship or truck.
8. 面めん - used to count surfaces.
9. 夜や - used to count [strict] nights (as opposed to nights of staying over, 泊).
10. 輪りん - used to count wheels and, bizarrely, (cut) flowers.
11. 割わり - used to count steps of 10%. 1割 is equal to 10%, 7割 is equal to 70%, and 15割 would be equal to 150%.

Also, for practice purposes, rather than have you drone the counters we learnt this lesson, we're going to do a little connect-the-dots instead. Match the counter to the category of items it counts:

Surprise exercise

Verb conjugation. Remember verbs? to make sure you haven't forgotten basic verb matters, we will be conjugating all the verbs in the wordlist:

1. explain how 五段 ans 一段 verbs differ in terms of conjugation
2. give the plain and formal, present and past, affirmative and negative versions for the verbs listed in the word list

The pop quiz

Again, as a final bit of testing, we'll run through the words in the word list. Please translate the following words:

And relax

Alright, that's it - for now anyway. Have a cup of tea on me, double check your anwsers, and leave the Japanese for tomorrow ^^

- Pomax