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I agree with what everyone's saying, your writing seems really bad.
For example on your first lesson page, you have a sub heading "Phenomenons". I presume you mean phonemes. A phenomenon and a phoneme are not the same thing and actually the plural should be phenomena. I couldn't really be bothered reading beyond that...
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No, phenomenon was meant. I seriously don't know how you could get phonemes out of that for that particular section.
神は本当にある、where did I do that?
The Romanization of a glottal stop at the end of a word is very inconsistent. I've seen texts use a t. So, I decided not to Romanize it at all.
血液 is another word for blood. It was simply used to demonstrate pronunciation.
Probability causes headaches for many, so don't say that if I see one here that another will show up over there. The time and setting in which each lesson was made is rather independent.
I will accept the fact that there are errors. However, there are many times when my drafts are deleted. I don't find out of course until I'm told about errors.
So long as now you people direct me to the problems I'm fine. I just don't want to be hearing a bunch of flibbertigibbets.
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^^ etymology has to do with the history of a word, not how it's pronounced. So that's wrong.
"spatially and timely"... the word is "temporally".
This is what i meant when i said it reads like you're writing in a style that you're not accustomed to. Forget trying to sound clever or academic, and focus on the best way to make everything as clear as possible to your reader. If i were you, i'd just rewrite the whole thing with your readers in mind...
p.s. 血液 is けつえき not ちえき. That's what puddingcat means.
Edited: 2011-11-21, 8:05 am
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I can't believe I did that; some dialect of some sort rubbed off.
I know that's what etymology means and it makes since. If a word is of this historical background, it is written in romanization. If you don't realize that Sino-Japanese, native, and foreign words are of different etymological backgrounds I don't know what to tell you. Nice try.
Sometimes big words can help, but if you just went about telling me not to I don't know why you're spelling something out.
I'm not rewriting everything.
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imabi Wrote:I can't believe I did that; some dialect of some sort rubbed off.
I know that's what etymology means and it makes since. If a word is of this historical background, it is written in romanization. If you don't realize that Sino-Japanese, native, and foreign words are of different etymological backgrounds I don't know what to tell you. Nice try.
Sometimes big words can help, but if you just went about telling me not to I don't know why you're spelling something out.
I'm not rewriting everything.
huh? i have no idea why you're getting all defensive when you're asking for help.
It's lesson one. Since you hadn't explained anything about the different etymologies at that point, i assumed you meant pronounciation. Instead of just assuming i'm stupid, perhaps you should consider that your writing hasn't led me to understand your point clearly enough. I'm sorry I can't magically detect your train of thought here.
I told you the correct word so you would understand why it's important that you don't try to write in a style that you aren't yet capable of.
Always, always, consider your readers when writing. If you can't be bothered, i can't be bothered to read it or help correct.
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Its the internet. I have addressed everything you have asked thus far. If i didnt agree, I stated my reason. I am sure that I am vague in a lot of areas; it tends to happen.
As far as Lesson 32, I took down at the example so don't look at a cached version.
Almost like Newt Gingrich told interviewers, don't try to throw gotcha questions. I digress. With this short back and forth, I have managed to fix at least 5 things. Now, as I am now at school, it will be a while before I can make any more changes.
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i find you very rude imabi.
can you tell me who actually is your intended audience for this blog?
i do think it's a shame... it really could be a very good resource if you could accept criticism a little more gracefully.
Anyway, yeah, it really would be worth sending it to a professional editor (preferably one who has a good knowledge of Japanese grammar) if you don't want to do it yourself.
p.s. i'll do it if you pay me well enough :p
Edited: 2011-11-21, 8:50 am
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Well, I am not trying to be. If I am I am sorry. Now, can we start over?
Well, I have no means of getting an editor.
Besides icecream, I did address your concerns.
I am fine about criticism, just not worded to the point where I'm pinned down, although that is a fantasy of mine.
I dont have money to buy ice cream, much less an editor. So long as the site is nonprofit, so will assistance be.
I'll try to keep my mouth in line from now on. So long as people arent totally bad mouthing me. Fair enough?
Edited: 2011-11-21, 9:08 am
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Looking through your lessons, a few things stand out:
The spend a lot of time going into way too much detail about subtleties of pronunciation (some of which is wrong anyway), syntax (macro to micro) and japanese grammatical terms (parts of speech etc). None of that is relevant to beginners.
You wait till lesson 9 before starting to explain particles...And then your explanations are complicated and hard to understand and you say numerous things that aren't true.
eg.
"The particle ga marks the object of an adjective."
adjectives don't have objects...
"The particle ga marks what's applicable to the predicate in "A ga X da". This is the opposite of "X wa A da". A is the subject and X is the attribute."
Do you mean ga defines A as the subject? How are "A ga X da" and "X wa A da" opposite?
Skimming through other lessons, your example sentences and translations seem to be littered with mistakes such as incorrect word usage and odd phrasing etc. You really need to get a Japanese speaker to take a red pen to the entire thing.
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perhaps you should focus on improving your japanese before trying to offer lessons to other people. Then you should do some serious editing. You can probably explain everything in less than half the words you've used.
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I started with particles earlier and people didnt like that. So, I am at a loss where the medium is. I will say that I have made the lessons a lot easier than they were, but I dont know why they are still problems.
As for your other concerns, I have to addres them later. It doesnt help me, though, if you dont just send in examples.
I wouldnt call anything on pronunciation subtle. What exactly is wrong? I want to fix things.
I am always trying to make things more concise, but i will not shut down the site because you want me to. If anything, my English more at fault than my Japanese.
Edited: 2011-11-21, 9:15 am
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ok, well, i'll give you some more ideas for lesson 1, and help with lesson 2.
In general, it's worth explaining every single academic word you use, since the readers of the blog might not know all the terms you use. You can define all the words inside the lessons, or just define the important words, and include an easily accessible glossary for the others.
So, in lesson 1, you should define "diphthongs".
Like Puddingcat said, the "time" bit needs rephrasing, and explaining about mora would be very helpful here.
It would be useful if you explained the reason why you've chosen to use different romanization for words with different etymologies clearly. (It might actually be worth making this a later lesson entirely, because you explain many of the concepts in this lesson in later lessons. In general, you should define things before you start using them as concepts).
You should explain what pitch is before going into the rules of using it.
"note: This implies that particles are added into word segments" isn't clear. Your beginner starting on the 1st lesson won't even necessarily know what a particle is yet.
You need to explain your notation for the pitch accent in the table. (i.e. "má" means a rise in pitch on that mora", etc.
Explain what it means for a consonant to be "weaker" than it is in English.
In general, you should explain everything as if your reader knows nothing.
*************
Lesson 2:
"It was a more so aesthetically driven writing system" -> It was a more aesthetically driven
(but what made it more aesthetic?)
"Only verb simple items were written according to meaning" I'm not sure what a "verb simple item" means.
You haven't shown any examples of what 万葉仮名 or ひらがな or 送り仮名 look like, or really explained what 送り仮名 even is, so it's going to be hard for any beginner to understand.
Define 旧字体 and 新字体 in english so that beginners understand what they mean.
You haven't told us what the Jouyou or Jinmeiyou or Hyougaiji actually are, only that we need to know them.
"Japanese and Chinese are not related" ... yes they are. I think you mean that they aren't the same. You also should explain somewhere that the Japanese ON is very different from it's Chinese equivalent sound.
"Kanji in Japan and China are different from each other" -> "often different from each other". Some are the same, just in a different font.
sorry, i'm bored of checking now, i didn't get the whole page done...
Honestly, i really think it would be better if you went through the lessons in sequence, imagine that you didn't know anything about Japanese, and think about what you need to correct that way. If you put yourself in the place of a beginner trying to read your blog, it should be more obvious to you what you should correct...
EDIT: i was just reading lesson 4 and 「道を走ってる犬は高いです」 jumped out at me. Honestly, i've never seen a dog described as "tall". Although technically correct, I think 大きい would sound more natural here. Right, enough for today.
Edited: 2011-11-21, 9:54 am
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As has already been pointed out by a few people, I think the first thing you need to address is the way you respond to criticism; if you can't do that then you WON'T get the editing help you need, and all your hard work might come to nothing in the end.
You don't have to like what comments people give, nor do you have to implement their suggestions, but you should avoid arguing with people. If someone makes a suggestion you disagree with, thank them anyway (they took the time to try to help you- thats a good thing right?) Time and time again you respond to comments in the following ways,
"I've already done X"
"I don't need to do Y"
"I'm not going to do Z just because ...."
There always seems to be an argumentative or defensive tone. In a recent post you said, "If i didnt agree, I stated my reason". Why do you need to state your disagreement and reason? Just be polite, thank the person for their idea (no matter how crap you think it is) and move on.
And secondly, you might want to stop telling people how they should help. Eg, you keep asking people to direct you to exactly where you made your mistake. The problem with this is that you are not paying people for their help, so they are not obliged to do anything. Secondly, you wrote all the materials on your site, so you should know it all well enough that you don't have to have someone link you to each error.
If you choose to abide by these 2 simple suggestions then i'm sure the helpful posts will flow in.
No-one is bad mouthing you... what you have done is admirable, but it needs a bit of work and people here are genuinely trying to help you. But don't forget, if you ask for people's opinons, you're gonna get people's opinions (both good and bad)
Good luck
Edited: 2011-11-21, 9:40 am
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I thought i got rid of the word diphthong in Lesson 1. Japanese and chinese are nothing alike. The only thing they share is writing and borrowed vocabulary. That is what i meant. I live in Texas, and there is a lot of stress put on consonants, much more than any Japanese person I've talked to. I will most certainly follow up on yor advice icecream. There is a vocabulary bank for the words used in the history of japanese writing discussion. Should i merge the two?
On your earlier point, I can most definitely see where I need to define things. I did originally have a lot of what you mentioned to change to Lesson 2. It's just that some people didn't want that either.
I thought that sentence about the dog would be funny. Since i haven been chased by a dog of that description, i thought it would be fitting.
Edited: 2011-11-21, 10:18 am
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Your right, i will fix that when i get home. I dont know why i get those words flipped all the time. I should really slow down when typing.
Generally speaking, ocha is just safe. I do agree that it shouldnt have been deemed an imperative. I did note almost always. I should change the title of that section to not be contradictory. Thanks for pointing that out.
Edited: 2011-11-21, 10:28 am
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It says always not almost always, thus grouping it with words like gohan and obake instead of oyu (which you label usually).
Edited: 2011-11-21, 8:08 pm
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Oh, well then that is wrong. I will have to change that when I get home.
