[ファブリス]

Okay I'm trying to write my first email in japanese and I want to reply to

1)

覚えてますか？

I think it means "can you remember?"

I'm looking at grammar for the te-form but it looks like this is a "able to" conjugation of the verb 覚える ? Is that correct ?

覚えてます -> "Yes, I can remember" Is this correct ? or just 覚えます ?
ps: what if I wanted to say "Of course, I remember!" ?

When you just say "thanks for such-and-such", can you just write :

"such-and-such" は、ありがとう。

Last saturday :

先土曜日 ?
前に土曜日 ?
昨土曜日 ?

Thanks,

日本語ビギナー

I'd probably just say 先週の土曜日. What d'ya think?

覚えてますか？

I would probably hear this and think they were saying "Do you remember what I was just talking about?" whatever the context was. Sort of like 覚えていますか？

According to 'A dictionary of basic Japanese grammar'

Iru is used as an auxiliary verb with Verb-te and expresses the continuation of an action
or state. See also Tae Kim te-form.

So remembering is something you started in the past and are still doing which makes it
a continuing state. I guess that is the theory.

Normal:覚えます
Continuing: 覚えている
Continuing polite:覚えています
Continuing polite lazy version:覚えてます

As CG says it looks like you can just drop the い.

So yeah the correct reply is:

覚えてます - I remember
覚えてますよ - I remember!
ちゃんと覚えてますよ- Of course I remember, how could I forget!

先週の土曜日 gives 900,000 hits in google, versus a few hundred for the other
ways so...

And yeah to the ありがとう thing.

You could also say:

もちろん覚えていますよ - of course I remember

-もう一人の初心者.

[ファブリス]

Thank you!

ファブリス Wrote:覚えてますか？

I think it means "can you remember?"

I'm looking at grammar for the te-form but it looks like this is a "able to" conjugation of the verb 覚える ? Is that correct ?

I think a lot of this was covered by nmkohi but just to confirm that 覚えてます has no relation to the potential (or 'able to') form of the verb 覚える. The potential form would be 覚えられる or 覚えられます. I can't think of any situation where the potential form of 覚える would be used.

The word 思い出す is also used in situations where the word 'remember' is used in English. The usage in Japanese is different though.

覚えてますか？ is a spoken form of 覚えていますか. Try saying the latter quickly and you'll soon see/hear why. I quite often read (verb)~てる or ~てます when I receive messages on my phone from friends. Emails are usually a little bit more formal.

If you're looking for some more detail on the て form and the use it has in describing continuous states then I can back up nmkohi's recommendation of the basic dictionary of Japanese grammar. However, without stating the obvious, the best way to get used to it is to see it in practice and try and copy. You meet it all the time.

I would go for もちろん like Piitaa said. ちゃんと is also used but I make more mistakes using it that I do with もちろん. もちろん can always be translated as 'of course' (I think) but ちゃんと can be used in other situations like

A: 私の部屋はいつも汚いです。
B:ちゃんと掃除したほうがいいですよ。

My room is always a mess.
It would be better if you cleaned it.

先土曜日 ?
前に土曜日 ?
昨土曜日 ?

I'm fairly sure none of these can be used. Charley had it right.

wrightak Wrote:However, without stating the obvious, the best way to get used to it is to see it in practice and try and copy. You meet it all the time.

Hear Hear. I didn't know what the fuss was with は and が until I recently read helpful explanations in textbooks, now I have no clue which to use. Real life > textbooks.

wrightak Wrote:The potential form would be 覚えられる or 覚えられます. I can't think of any situation where the potential form of 覚える would be used.

I found this nice example on a page about remembering passwords and codes:

ならば数字に意味があれば、覚えられるはずです

Maybe something like: If the numbers have meaning (she) should be able to remember them.

If there were 10 of you in a restaurant and the waiter didn't have a notebook,
could you say (assuming you weren't worried about being patronising ):

覚えられますか?
Are you able to remember the orders?

I hadn't thought about it from that angle. When I said I couldn't think of a situation for the potential form, I obviously wasn't thinking hard enough! Maybe someone memorising kanji could say 多すぎで覚えられない！ There's too many so I can't remember them!

wrightak Wrote:覚えてますか？ is a spoken form of 覚えていますか. Try saying the latter quickly and you'll soon see/hear why. I quite often read (verb)~てる or ~てます when I receive messages on my phone from friends. Emails are usually a little bit more formal.

I used to get mails with てます alot aswell, it tripped me up at first, but it's definatly only used in informal speech. I wonder what the difference in nuonce between てます and てる is?

てる　is the regular casual form and てます is the polite form. It does seem strange for a polite form to be abbreviated, but you can't always equate polite with formal. If I send an email to a new acquaintence I recently met for the first time, I might use 覚えてますか　because 覚えてる？　sometimes seems too abrupt for someone you don't know very well (the reason I wouldn't write ています　is that emails reflect the language of speech, and ています　would seem too uptight). Friends speaking together usually use the てる　but may switch to てます　if the topic turns from simple trash-talking to something more serious. But it seems that the use of the ます　form never lasts very long and they always move back to the casual form fairly quickly. Similarly, the staff at my workplace often chat with customers with casual forms but then switch to polite forms when it's time to get down to business.