"Aoi sora no tsuki no you ni, hakanasa daite / te o nobashitai" *

[larryhammer]

Sometimes, to practice a language, I construct useful sentences to have them at hand when I need them. This morning on the way to work I came up with Heriumu o suite shigai no ue ni ukande atta kyodai na ika you ni datta yo ("It was like a giant squid had breathed in helium and was floating over the city!").

Well, I had to look up a couple vocabulary words. No guarantees as to correctness, not valid with any other offer, all sales final.

But that seems a good excuse for Japanese progress notes:

• It takes me about 30 minutes to read a page of Ooki na Mori no Chisa na Ie (Little House in the Big Woods) with about 80% comprehension. I'll mark this as a win. Tho' I'm disappointed that, after learning the kanji for "fox" from it being all over Tebukuro o Kai ni, it's written with kana here. As is bear, wolf, mountain cat, and deer. In general, there's not enough kanji here.
  
  
• Speaking of Tebukuro o Kai ni, my biggest difficulty reading it was telling when 手 means hand and when it means paw, which is important as the fox kit has one of both for much of the story. Foxes being, after all, kitsune. This was even harder than untangling the long, stylishly comma-spliced sentences.
  
  
• I continue posting translations of classic poems over here.
  
  
• Assignment for me to write out 500 times: "If a verb ends in -eru or -iru, by default treat it as an -eru/-iru verb, not -ru verb. If a verb ends in -eru or -iru, by default treat it as an -eru/-iru verb, not -ru verb ... " The exceptions can be memorized separately.
  
  
• So technically speaking, the passive verb suffix -(ra)reru, polite verb suffix -masu, negative verb suffix -nai, and so on are axillary verbs. Which means they conjugate in their own right, which is cool -- and makes things easier to remember: -(ra)reru conjugates as a regular -eru verb, -masu conjugates as an irregular -su verb, and -nai conjugates as a regular -i adjective.
  
  Yeah -- negative verbs are adjectives. Okay, I can go with that, given that -i adjectives are really stative verbs and not what we think of as adjectives in English. Or at any rate, they conjugate rather than decline and can be the verb of the sentence. So moving on ...
  
  
• There's a negative conjugation for -i adjectives, which means a double negative verb is grammatically easy: yomu = I read, yomanai = I don't read, yomanakunai = it's not that I don't read. Which is, of course, another -i adjective -- however, I suspect further recursions are not viewed with favor.
  
  
• Verbs are fun fun.

* "Like the moon in the blue sky, I want to embrace transience / and hold out my hand"

---L.