Re: kind of

Hi members,

I opened my mailbox this morning to find a lot of postings in my 
mailbox from the list. I really enjoyed reading them. 

Bill and Sarah, many many thanks for the clear and thorough 
explanations on how to use "kind of."
Yes!  I hear "the wrong usages" all the time and sometimes see them 
in print, so I got confused.
I checked my English-Japanese dictionaries and found out that the 
thickest and most detailed one has exactly the same explanation as 
Bill gave me.  
And thanks, Sarah, for sharing the little cute input on the 
phrase "hog's heaven" as well. :)

Sarah, so you studied Japanese and you once showcased your Japanese 
at the ariport by helping out some Japanese girls. Fantastic!

Tero wrote:
> There you go :) aren't kanguages fun? We have here Japanese friends 
on 
> this list. If you are still going to study Japanese, you could ask 
them 
> help.

Yes! If you need help with the Japanese language, please feel free to 
ask me and other Japanese members. I'll try my best to answer your 
questions. I'm always looking for ways to return favors I've recieved.

And Tero, you may be right. When learning a language, living in the 
country where the language is spoken is a wonderful way to pick it 
up. However, I don't think it's something necessary. I think not many 
study materials for the language are availabe outside Japan but there 
are people who have a flair for language in general, and can learn 
languages without living in the countries where they are spoken. 
Maybe Sarah is a good example. :)

Sarah wrote:
>> 1) They use "parts of speech" markers, which are words you throw 
into 
>> a sentence to tell you what functions the various other words 
mean. 
>> Like you would say, "I subject you indirect object the book object 
>> give." 

Yes, you are right!
We have subject markers and object markers in Japanese, so you can 
put them in different orders in the sentence and we have no problems 
understanding them.
And I learned from Tero that Finnish is a bit similar in the word 
order in a sentence. Maybe you have many forms of a nound like 
subjectives, objectives, datives, objcetives, ablatives ...in Finnish.
It seems I'll be never able to learn the different forms! 
But my favorite joke is "I can speak three languages: Japanese, 
English, Finnish (finish.)"

2) And, they don't have any future tense. They do have a past 
>> tense, but only half the verbs do. For the other half the verbs, 
they 
>> put the past onto adjectives instead. (Or maybe it's only half the 
>> adjectives take the past, I forget).  HUH???

I've never thought of Japanese verbs and adjectives from that point 
of view. 
Very interesting. I think all the adjectives used as the predicate of 
the sentence take past.
There might be adjectives only used as an attributive adjective. If 
there are, they won't take the past tense, but I cannot think of any 
off the top of my head.

All the Japanese verbs have a past tense. But we don't have verbs in 
Japanese that act exactly the same as be-verbs in English.  That's 
why adjectives take the past instead in Japanese. Well, I'm not an 
expert of comparative linguistics, anyway and this is not a Japanese 
forum, so I'll stop here.

Have a great week, everyone!
Thank you again for your kind help and input.

Wish

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