I didn't know...

I finally received my manga today, so now it is time to do our first real lesson dealing with the story. Hopefully you have also gotten your books as well. If so please open them up. If you haven't, don't worry - we're just going to work on the first line of the first page. You aren't missing much in the pictures!

I should mention, in case you don't already know, that Japanese books are read from right to left. You will notice that the front cover is on the side of the book that we usually think of as the back. In Japan, this is the front of the book. As we go on, you'll begin to understand why.

One thing you will notice upon opening your book is that the story doesn't start right away. On the inside cover is a note from the author. That's a lot of text! Let's tackle that at the end of the manga! On the left hand side is a title page. Have a look at it... I hope you find that you can read it completely because it has exactly the same text as in the first lesson. Go back to last lesson if you are having any difficulty.

Turning the page over, you will see the table of contents on the right hand page, and the first page of the manga on the left. We aren't going to tackle the table of contents today. For one thing it's boring. And for another we will get all this content when we reach each chapter.

On the right hand page is the first page. It isn't quite chapter 1 yet. This is sort of a pre-book teaser. But this is where we will start. You will see that the first line says:

僕(ぼく)(boku) は(wa) 知(し)(shi)らなかった(ranakatta)

Here, I've written out the hiragana characters on the top and the kanji characters on the bottom. If you don't know what I'm talking about, please go back and read the additional reading assignment from the last lesson.

When you read this manga, you will notice that the kanji characters have hiragana printed in small letters beside them. This is called furigana. The intent is to show people how to pronounce the kanji characters. Many books intented for young readers include furigana. For us it's extremely helpfull!

So for instance, the kanji character 僕 has the hiragana characters ぼく above them. ぼく is known as the reading for 僕 as it tells you how to read it properly.

That's all well and good, but what does this stuff mean? Well, let's write it out in romaji (Note: As a general rule, I won't be displaying romaji for things. Eventually you will be able to read the hiragana, so we will rely on that. But for now I'll help you out). The line above would be written as "Boku wa shiranakatta". There are a few tricky things about these characters, but I will describe them in the next section.

"Boku" is a humble word that men use to refer to themselves. You can think of it as "I" or "Me". I will discuss it more in the vocabulary section. "wa" is called a topic particle. It tells us what we are talking about. "shiranakatta" is the negative past tense for the verb "shiru", which means to know.

So the whole thing means "About me, didn't know", or more english like "I didn't know". Japanese grammar is completely unlike English grammar. So in this guide, we will generally "half-translate" things. We're going to intentionally create "Engrish" so that you can understand the sentence, but also get an indication of the Japanese sentence structure.

There are 8 characters to learn today. If we add these to the 6 we learned last time, that makes 14 characters. Two of them are basically the same as others (just the "muddied" version), so that makes 12 distinct characters. Believe it or not, after you memorize these you are more than a quarter of the way to being able to read all the hiragana characters. It's probably a lot easier than you thought, right?

In fact, I'm going to add one more character to the list that we haven't seen - る(ru). The reasons for this will become obvious later.

Here are the characters for today, organized in Japanese "alphabetical" order.

There are a few "special" characters in the mix here. The first one is つ. At normal hight, this character is pronounced "tsu". But if you look closely you will see that in the word fragment " なかった", the つ is half height (っ). From your previous reading, you should know that this creates a slight pause in the sound. Please review this if you are still unsure.

The other "special" character is は. Normally, this is pronounced "ha", but in one special case it is pronounced "wa". It's a little bit confusing at first, but you will get used to it over time. The は that is pronounced "wa" is a special grammatical word that indicates the topic of a sentence. This is the case here. As time goes on, I will discuss how to identify whether the は you are looking at is the "wa" は or the "ha" は.

Today we have 2 words to learn. It seems like we will be going slowly if we only learn 2 words a day. As time goes on, this number will increase. But there is enough work learning the characters to get too worried about adding vocabulary just yet.

The first word on our list is ぼく (notice that I'm not giving you romaji - you have to do your best!). As I mentioned, this means "I" or "me". Literally the word means "man servant" and is often ued to refer to little boys, so the speaker is calling himself a little boy. This is why girls don't use it. A more general word for "I" is "watashi", but we will get to that another day. ぼく is a pretty casual word, so if you start speaking Japanese, please use "watashi" to refer to yourself.

The second word on our list is しる. This the verb "to know". You might have noticed that しる doesn't actually exist in our text. Instead we have しらなかった. Japanese verbs have a root part (usually shown by the kanji character for the word) and an ending. For しる, the root is 知(し) and the ending is る. To get different verb tenses, you modify the ending of the verb.

We will be learning the unmodified form of the verb. That's because it is the easiest way to memorize the word. As we learn grammar inflections, we will learn how to modify the endings of the verb to get different tenses.

Incidently, you might now be getting an idea of why it is convenient to use kanji in Japanese. In this case, you can easily see the root of the word and then determine the inflection by looking at the hiragana following it. It makes reading much easier.

There is no specific grammar to learn today. Don't worry that we brushed past some grammar. This will happen for a while until we get through most of the basics. Over time you will build up piece after piece after piece.

The additional reading section points to a discussion of basic grammar from Tae Kim's grammar guide. Please read through it. Don't try to memorize it. Just read it.

Today's Mnemosyne file. Just like yesterday you need to download the file. Then run mnemosyne and select File->Import. From the dialog, browse to where you saved the file "manga-day2.xml" and read it in. After importing the file, you should have a total of 17 items.

Today's file is more hiragana characters and the two new pieces of vocabulary. Just like the hiragana characters, the vocabulary is stored in only one direction - from English to Japanese. This might seem strange. Even though the goal is to be able to read Japanese, when memorizing, we want to memorize from English. The other direction will take care of itself.

When studying, you should practice reading the characters in the answer window. If necessary, go back to previous lessons or a hiragana chart to make sure that you are reading it properly. With vocabulary, make sure to read the characters in the answer window so that it gets reinforced in your head.

Finally, make sure that you review mnemosyne every day. It won't take much time out of your day, but it is extremely important that you get your reviews on time.

Today's reading is "The state of being". You may find it a little bit difficult to read because it assumes that you know some hiragana characters we haven't learned yet. Just do your best and look up the characters in the hiragana table

The idea here is not to memorize anything. It's just to provide a brief introduction to very simple Japanese sentences. As we move forward this will become second nature. And as we see sentences with this kind of structure in the manga, we will schedule it for memorization. For now, familiarity is all that is required.

This is another long lesson. The ones at the beginning are going to be more challenging. Don't worry, it will get easier over time. If you need to take some extra time to get through today's lesson, feel free to do so. But remember to spend some time every day. Don't miss a day!

That's it for today. I will try to post another lesson tomorrow, but if I don't, there will be 3 days before the next one shows up (I'm busy with Canadian Thanksgiving!)