Dou iu koto? (How I learned [or reviewed?] ~ KOTO GA / ~ KOTO GA DEKIMASU)

Posted on January 9, 2015 by John

Today I learned the correct way to say and mean DOU IU KOTO? which basically means “what do you mean?” or “what are you saying?”

I hear this a lot in Japanese. I’ve found myself having to say “what do you mean?” a lot (and also hear it often being said to me! :P) while chatting online with Japanese friends and others learning Japanese, so it was something I naturally adapted into my vocabulary pretty quickly.

However, I started saying it myself a good while before ever really knowing how to write it correctly, so I was actually saying it wrong. (I was saying “DOU YO KOTO?” which is incorrect.)

Here is a short story on what led me to correctly learning this phrase today:
Today I was watching a Japanese prank show and their target was some cute girl who I think was famous or something. Probably a singer, I have no idea. Anyhow they set up a fake interview in the evening in some kind of poorly-lit apartment, with the sliding balcony door in the background and they would fly a fake UFO across the sky behind her to make her think she was catching a real UFO out the corner of her eye. She takes the bait and they all head outside to the balcony. The pranksters proceed to put on a fake UFO landing about a half mile away to make her think she was witnessing something for real (even though you can totally tell it was fake! Haha). Anyways, long story short they eventually had a few guys dressed in alien suits bust through a paper wall to the side of her (Japanese seem to enjoy busting through paper walls :P) and replayed her reaction from about 3 or 4 different angles. She screamed as the aliens yelled a bunch of stuff to her and after they got done shouting whatever it was, she gave them a frightened and puzzled look and after a second of silence she said “dou iu koto?” They put in subtitles at the bottom when she said that and that’s when I instantly realized I was saying this phrase wrong this whole time! But I think that what I was used to saying was close enough to where it sounded more correct than incorrect so maybe in retrospect I wasn’t sounding too stupid! Hahaha.

Cool story bro…

So now that I know how to correctly write this phrase, naturally I wanted to find out exactly how this phrase was constructed and quickly got to searching Google. I learned it contains the verb IU (言う) which is “to say”. Ah, I’m starting to see now how this phrase means “what are you saying?”!!!

So what about the DOU part?
I found this page where someone basically says DOU is kinda like the question form of SOU (sort of):
http://thejapanesepage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3850#p2749

Nice. Never knew that! Ok moving along.

What about KOTO?
After a minute or two of searching, I found this page where I’m given a good explanation of KOTO (as well as DEKIMASU):
http://ww8.tiki.ne.jp/~tmath/language/jpverbs/lesson31.htm

I think I’ve come across this page before maybe a year or two ago. I kind of remember reading through it and learning how KOTO turns a Japanese verb into a thing. Kind of how -ing in English works:

Read-ing YOMU KOTO / Drink-ing NOMU KOTO

I like reading. YOMU KOTO GA SUKI DESU.
I like drinking water. MIZU WO NOMU KOTO GA SUKI DESU.

Now to add a little bonus to my lesson today, I got some good examples on how to use the verb DEKIRU (can do).

I can read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKIMASU.
I couldn’t drink beer yesterday. KINOU WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKIMASEN DESHITA.

Here are the same two sentences above, but using the plain (casual) form of DEKIRU in both present and past tense and in both affirmative and negative ways:

I can read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKIRU.
I can’t read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKINAI.
I was able to read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKITA.
I wasn’t able to read Japanese. WATASHI WA NIHONGO WO YOMU KOTO GA DEKINAKATTA.

I can drink beer. WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKIRU.
I can’t drink beer. WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKINAI.
I was able to drink beer yesterday. KINOU WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKITA.
I couldn’t drink beer yesterday. KINOU WATASHI WA BIIRU WO NOMU KOTO GA DEKINAKATTA.

Here is a good page on how to conjugate the verb DEKIRU in all tenses:
http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/Japanese/dekiru.html

やった！！

I think I’ve found a great way to get some good listening practice!

Posted on January 9, 2015 by John

By listening to Japanese TV without watching it!!! O______O

Especially when the dramas are on. It’s almost like listening to a book on tape! You get all the dramatic piano music in the background, sound effects, etc., and you start to notice that since you can’t see what’s happening, you start to hang on to every single word that’s being said in order to figure out what’s going on. Effectively forcing you to paint a picture in your own head, even though you might only understand a few verbs, nouns and adjectives here and there.

I’m also having fun trying to figure out what products or services the commercials are advertising.

If you have a computer and internet access and you’re wondering where YOU can watch LIVE Japanese TV, I’ve found a GREAT website where someone (who goes by the name WilsonJJ?) has taken the time to stream live Japanese programming for everyone to enjoy! You can find it here:

http://wilsonjj.me/jptv/

You will see the channel being changed from time to time, so there is a chance you might really start to get into an episode of some J-drama and then have the last ten minutes cut off on you due to WilsonJJ changing the channel, but I think its great that different networks are shown. The channel isn’t just flipped on you at any random time thank goodness. There is a “TV guide” you can check out on the site so you can get an idea of when certain programs will be shown, or about when the channel will be changed. ナイス！

I’ve tried different methods for listening practice in the past. When I was first starting out a few years ago, I would just listen to random internet talk radio streams while washing dishes or something. At that time I could hardly make out any words. All I really heard was sentences being started and finished, and a whole bunch of “random” syllables in between. I knew something was being talked about, I just didn’t know what! I was more or less mindlessly listening to a bunch of gibberish. But in the back of my head, I knew eventually I would be able to make things out. I just had to suck it up, make and take the time to get listening practice in. Along the way, I found a post at All Japanese All The Time (AJATT), which basically suggested that I should get in 10,000 hours of listening practice in, in order to get good at listening. I had already been taking the time to practice listening before finding this post, but kind of wanted to know how much listening practice I needed in order to notice any improvement. 10,000 hours is a really long time and Katz (the author of AJATT) suggests all sorts of ways to get that time in. I’m not extreme enough to try every single one of his suggestions, but just to have that number 10,000 was good enough for me. I knew that if I even got in 25-30% of 10,000 hours, I should definitely notice an improvement.

To be honest, the craziest I’ve gotten with trying to get the time in was playing Japanese radio from my iPhone (I use an app called Hot Radio JP) while taking a shower or placing the phone under my pillow so it goes into my ears while I’m sleeping. I’ve tried other less-extreme methods in between, such as watching Japanese people’s live webcam streams on TwitCast (which is good for being exposed to and learning casual spoken Japanese, and maybe make some friends!) and also watching CrunchyRoll animes with paper taped to my screen to cover the subtitles.

I have no idea how many hours of listening practice I’ve put into my ears at this point. A rough guesstimate would probably be in the low hundreds (200? 300 maybe?). Nowhere near 10,000 I’m sure. It may be a combination of all the studying, listening and chatting in Japanese I’ve done so far, but I can proudly say that I can more or less make out where words begin and end when I hear spoken Japanese and passively listening to it. If I really try and focus on what I’m listening to, I can roughly get the gist of what’s going on.

For the past year or so, I’ve been randomly leaving the WilsonJJ J-TV stream on all night as I sleep, or I’ll put it on while I work. I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, so I’ve been having to switch from browser tab to browser tab while the Japanese TV is still playing in one of the background browser tabs. And so just a day or so ago, I’ve found myself multiple times completely frozen, staring blankly at some work-related webpage because I was listening to the audio from the J-TV and trying to imagining what was going on! Hey wait a second, did I just find a way to boost my listening practice methods?!

As I am typing this post now, I have the J-TV playing in the background. And I think I’m finding it way more interesting to “listen to” as opposed to listening to “radio” audio that is intended to only be listened to (and not watched).

Crazy, right?? Maybe this might be more fun for you as well!

You can thank me later.

Today I made a pretty big decision for this website! D:

Posted on January 9, 2015 by John

I’ve decided to make the blog part of this site it’s main feature.

That is all! There is no reason to keep reading this post beyond this point unless you want to read a pretty long boring explanation as to why I made this decision.

In the beginning, I had huge plans for this website. I thought it was going to develop into a great “START HERE” point someone could use to begin their journey of learning Japanese. Who knows, it might still have that kind of potential in the future, but in the beginning I had this notion that Japanese was going to be this easy, practically linear kind of learning experience. I thought learning Japanese would be sort of like learning math where you start with the easy stuff first, and as you go along learning more and more, eventually everything would just start to “fit” like a huge puzzle — like something you can just “get through” if you sit down and put in the time and effort to do it. I also thought learning Japanese would be something that I can just write out what I was studying as I go along like it would turn into some kind of “instruction manual” on how to become a master of the Japanese language.

WRONG.

Could I get any more arrogant/ignorant?! LOL. If I could slap my past self right now I would. Please learn from my hugely mistaken dumbass self. The truth is, learning Japanese will be a never-ending journey. But don’t let that discourage you! I mean think about it for a sec. Do you know every single word in the English language and how to use it?? Unless you’re some kind of super genius freak-of-nature, then no, you don’t. English is a living language. It has evolved over a large period of time and will continue to grow and change as time goes on. Thanks to the internet’s ability to allow people to communicate at lightning speeds, new (particularly slang) words are being introduced into English at rates no one on Earth can keep up with. It seems there is a new ridiculous word “everyone and their mom” is saying popping up every month, sometimes every week. The latest slang word I’ve grown to hate is “bae” which short for “babe”, used to refer to someone’s girlfriend/boyfriend/hubby/wifey/bootycall etc… I mean really, people, are we so lazy that we can’t say “babe” anymore?! SMH. My point is, technically, you as a (presumably) native English-speaker are still learning English! Mind blowing, I know… You’ve simply just learned and have used enough English in your life to be really really REALLY good at it.

Just like English, Japanese is also a living language. If you continue to study, practice and use Japanese, eventually you will become proficient enough to communicate at a native-speaking level if that’s what your goal is. If anything, you WILL learn enough to have fun. At the very least, you will learn enough to impress your friends.

At the time of this blog posting, I am still a no0b. I’ve been studying Japanese on and off for the past 4 and a half years or so. Still way green, but I can confidently say that if I were to be dumped in Japan with nothing but the clothes on my back, I would totally survive.

Anyhow I am getting a little off-track here. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, because there really is no point A to point B way of learning Japanese, I’ve decided to convert this site into more of a blog-based site. I will now be using this site as a kind of journal in an effort to document my progress. I will be posting things that I feel are working for me as an individual. There are already tons and tons of great online resources out there for teaching yourself Japanese. Absolutely no sense in trying to re-invent the wheel here. Everyone’s journey into the Japanese language will be a different one. But perhaps this site/blog could be used as a sort of “breadcrumbs path” that I myself can use to go back through later, or something that someone else could stumble upon and perhaps get some insight on what has been working for me.

I’ve found that my Japanese studying habits are pretty sporadic. I try to keep it fun and sometimes whatever I’m doing to study can start to become boring, at which point I’ll take a break, stop for the day (or week, or month), or switch gears and move on to something else in order to keep things interesting and stay motivated. So with that said, that’s pretty much what you’ll be seeing on this website from this point on. Some posts may be quite informative, others may be less “educating” and more like “this is what I’m doing right now” or “look what I’ve found!”.

Hopefully this decision will be a beneficial one to both myself and the site, and also to anyone who finds it and perhaps maybe follows it.

Cheers!