Native :English/American
Secondary none
Learning:korean
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Yay, that makes you our first Korean-learner. Make sure to add your details to the table in the first post, where you can also find the old challenges.
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About five years ago a euro was about 130, but I was in Japan during the Brexit referendum, and it made my European money worth 10% less in one night.
Exchange-history sites say that the pound was valued at about 195 yen in 2015.
That could be right, one pound got you about 1.40 euro as well, nowadays it’s more around 1.10
written text is easy
You can’t be sure how word pronounced by text alone. Unlike kanji you have some idea, but still far from transcription coding.
Even if you know transcription, pronunciation is very hard
Its still easy to understand not natives because its clear which text they are (trying) to pronounce
Its not clear when you allowed to not insert an article.
Too many different times, after translation, shades of gray become black or white only anyway.
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Learning to read and understand it is easy (apart of the spelling). But oftentimes, I find the very rigid syntax of english to be a hindrance, when I want to express myself. I’m accustomed to put my subjects and objects wherever I want, as long as I keep the verb on second position; I’m used to words like ‘halt’, ‘eben’, ‘doch’, ‘nun’ to give a nuance to a phrase. These little words make a statement about what the speaker assumes the listener to know and not know, and that’s cool. Then, I find your lack of morphology disturbing. Lastly, a lot of specialised vocabulary, like legal terms, comes very unintuitively to me.
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Bytheway, here’s some recordings of the Francoprovençal from my home area. Mind you, it’s mostly old people from the highland who speak it; the city itself speaks 3/5 French and 2/5 german. I’m technically of the German part, but my parents moved there from elsewhere in German Switzerland, so mine own dialect doesn’t match the one of my friends’.
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I find your lack of morphology disturbing
It’s just a bloody spoon, Steve!
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Hmm. Not sure of what to do for a challenge today so I may just meander about kanji until I think of something.
Here are a few of the simplest kanji.
It’s no coincidence that these were all originally pictograms, which is a fairly rare category of Chinese character compared to phono-semantic compounds.
My Germanic mind, of course, wants to put them together to make things easy: “oh, we can spell swordsman 刀人!” But actually swordsman is 剣士.
I also start to wonder if we could loan 人 into the English language as a shorthand symbol, like how we took etc. from Latin.
口 mouth
田 rice paddy
刀 sword
人 person
内 house
木 tree
米 rice
石 stone
水 water
川 river
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So, that’s exactly what they did:
- 剣 means sword. It’s the simplified form of 劍, which consistse of 僉, which is used for the Chinese phonetics, and刂, which is a variant of 刀.
- 士 means soldier, which stems from a picture of an axe.
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家 house
内 - うち - while (something happens), inside (somewhere), house is far meaning
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Yeah, when I last tried learning Japanese I memorised inside as the main meaning. I just wanted it to fit in with the other nouns on the list.
刀銭（とうせん）- bronze coin of ancient China, shaped like an opened straight razor
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That’s so cool! I suppose that, just like the clay miniatures in Europe, they were intended to represent the value of a real knife.
ie. they’re the intermediate point between barter and coinage
Speaking of which, 内マガリ would be inside turn. How 内 would be pronounced here?
Another question I ponder is what does 整形の手筋 mean? I looked around the internet but can’t understand the meaning.
必須（ひっす）- essential, required
基礎知識（きそちしき）- fundamental knowledge
正誤（せいご）- correct or incorrect
主導権を握る（しゅどうけんをにぎる）- to seize the initiative
力戦（りきせん）- hard fighting
Sentence of the day:
定石と布石は一体なのです。
Imagine the way that took.
“We, the Emperor, declare knives to be our currency!”
“yea, no, smithing iron into knives always takes so much time, and they’re cutting my bum when I carry them in bunches…”
“We the Emperor, declare knive-shaped iron to be our currency!”
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Korean soju : 소주
Japanese shochu : 焼酎
[Press X to doubt writing efficiency]
( and yeah yeah, homophones etc. 
)
I know we did some of these before, but:
Vocabulary Challenge: The Mine & Smithy
- clay
- chalk
- flint
- salt
- peat
- coal
- jet
- marble
- opal
- quarry
- lantern
- miner
- mineshaft
- ladder
- copper
- bronze
- brass
- iron
- steel
- silver
- gold
- electrum
- furnace
- fire (n.)
- hammer
- tongs
- melt
- mine
- smith
- smithy
Japanese Culture
- temple
- meditation
- Buddhism
- calligraphy
- painting
- garden
- carp
- chimes
- soldier
- warlord
- caste
- ceramics
- glaze
- tea
- island
- sea
- river
- fish
- monster
- robe
- rice
- mountain
- emperor
- cat
- mat
- lute
- flute
- sandals
- suicide
- woodwork
Merchantstock
- coin
- jar
- salt
- wine
- sauce
- grain
- olives
- oil
- figs
- spirits
- mead
- beer
- cider
- scrolls
- wax
- incense
- myrrh
- gunpowder
- gems
- limestone
- flour
- barley
- mirrors
- combs
- arrows
- antiquities
- bows
- slaves
- herbs
Terrain
- plain
- plateau
- upland
- lowland
- floodplain
- swamp
- saltmarsh
- forest
- rainforest
- scrubland
- beach
- desert
- archipelago
- savannah
- taiga
- atoll
- salt flat
- mountainside
- delta
- snowy wasteland
- lava field
- crater
- steppe
- countryside
- marsh
- fen
- islet
- spit
- mudflat
- sea ice
Grammar challenge: Make at least three sentences from the words of each section (so 15 sentences in all.) You may supply your own verbs.