New Series: Beginning Japanese-1: Genki?

Japanese Lesson: Comment, rate, etc. If the reception is good I will try to do one a day.

Let's try to learn to focus on one expression/word a day.

Camtwist is MAC only! I think. Sorry!
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31806
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Video Language Notes:
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GABMAN Lesson 1:
1) Japanese has 3 alphabets
a) hiragana/ひらがな: phonetic alphabet. Most all hiragana characters are made up of one consonant and one vowel.

About my Japanese ability & a VERY Basic Japanese Lesson
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q7MQE79Nm6w

Hiragana Pronunciation Chart
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=ez-MDfhF1Uk

Shorter Version of Hiragana Pronunciation Chart
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=UcVLxgrQqT0

b) katakana/カタカナ: phonetic alphabet used for loan words

c) kanji/漢字: characters that come from China

d) Japanese also mix a bit of the roman alphabet and call it ROMAJI

2) genki

a) Genki desu ka? = Are you OK?, How are you?, Are you healthy? etc.

Not the ﾒuﾓ in ﾒdesuﾓ is not pronounced very strongly. It is almost silently. There are a few words in which the ﾒuﾓ is almost silent.

b) Genki desu yo. = Yes, I am fine!, Iﾕm good!

c) Genki kai? = How are you?

3) To make a question you can just alter the intonation at the end of a sentence or add ﾒkaﾓ.
A more casual slang variation is ﾒkai.ﾓ Examples: Genki desuka? Genki kai?

4) Adding ﾒyoﾓ to the end of a sentence adds emphasis to that sentence.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• gimmeabreakman
• japan
• japanese
• 日本語
• レッスン

[rdrkx80]

Can you elaborate on the "Genke Kai"? You just sort of mentioned it in passing.

[Gimmeabreakman]

@rdrkx80

It's just a more manly casual version of "Genki desu ka?"

[POLOq8i]

why thumbs down i dont understand ???

[Gimmeabreakman]

@POLOq8i

Yeah, it was somebody who threatened to thumb me down if I didn't leave YouTube. He used a software program called a bot that he set on my channel. Course he had to manually plug in the address of every video. He even attacked my dog's channel. It's pretty lame and accomplished nothing but he sure wasted a lot of time.

[siemprenadia]

Hi Victor

Thanks for your help...Do u have a web site ?

[Gimmeabreakman]

@siemprenadia

Working on a new one now.

[ChungFat4eva]

loan words?

[EternalQuestion]

I would have said the word you were looking for was 'loanwords', but when I looked it up on wikipedia, I came across the japanese term 'gairaigo' which specifically refers to japanese words that have been borrowed from other languages. Is that what you meant?

[MegaDarknero]

When he said 'katakana' I thought he said katana, lol.

[hinko13]

Say a name ends with an L and is translated to U would you pronounce that U? for instance a book I'm using has an example Mary Pascall and is translated to Mari Pasukaru. Would you pronounce that "u"?

[Generalvaldez]

so you have probably been corrected millions of times on this but I guess I'm just ... I don't know the adjective. So, Chinese is not one langauge, or two ( which I'm pretty sure you were thinking about Cantonese and Mandarin) there are soooo many Chinese languages, and Chinese characters don't only have to have one pronunciation for example 乐( compare to japanese 楽) has can have le or yue, in mandarin, depending on the combination, just like japanese. Just thought you should know, great vid!

[loxcovInC]

So if I call correctly: Genkidesu ka? Is what you hear often when you start a converstation as (how are you?)... but do you use the other forms like ''Genki'' and ''Genkidesu ka yo'' in differend situations?

ty gimmeabreakman ^^

[kira1a]

thank you even though i learned that through anime it cleared up a few things. 

[x3n0s]

@LotusDragon09 sry for late reply lol, but the character 行 from Luxing (travel) is pronounced hang in yinhang (the bank). And some have up to 4 pronunciation. While this one 和 can be pronunced with 5 pronounciations, he2, han4, huo4, he4,huo5.

[Lovable0ak]

i finally got my hiragana and katakana down