Okay so i'm trying to learn japanesse, but every source

i'm not quite sure what you mean by "how the characters translate".

the table in you picture shows one of the japanese syllabaries. those characters only encode sound and not meaning so there's no way to say what they mean, you just have to memorize them.

if you're talking about chinese characters, you would usually learn both their individual meanings and the way they are put together into words, so for kaze, it is written with the character 風 which simply means wind. arigatou is usually not written with kanji but when it is they are 有難う. 有 meaning "exist" and 難 means "difficult" (see explanation below) and う is of course just the ending in hiragana and has not individual meaning.

if your teacher is not telling you the individual meanings of kanji (which i doubt desu) then you can look them up in a kanji dictionary (jisho.org also works) if you know the radical elements of the character (if you don't, use handwriting input on your computer).


if you want a literal translation, kaze really just means wind but "arigatou" is a little more complicated. it means something like "good to have" and therefore "appreciated".

arigatou is actually an adverbial form of the adjective arigatai which in turn is made up of ari (from aru "exist") and gatai (from katai "hard") so arigatai means "hard to exist" -> "rare" -> "good to have; appreciated".

today adverbs in japanese are formed by adding -ku to the adjective stem but in an earlier stage of the language they were formed by adding -u, so you got the form arigatau from arigatai which over time developed into arigatou (in some formal settings it is still spelled arigatau). this form is parallel to ohayou (o-haya-u, cf. hayai/hayaku), omedetou (o-medeta-u, cf. medetai/medetaku). those are the only words where this peculiar form stuck because they are set phrases.

>>1265195
OP here, yeah what i mean by what the character's mean is, each character should be directly translatable into X other language somehow. If we couldn't do that and couldn't figure out how each character correlates to one of our native language, it would make it extremely hard to learn the language.

So if we seperate a Japanese word into it's syllable's like "Su-Mi-Ma-Sen"(think that's how it's separated.) and try to translate it to it's english meaning "Excuse Me" or "I'm Sorry" how does each individual syllable of the Japanese word make it's way into the english word.

By the way, your comment was fairly helpful but i might not have explained properly.

>>1265230
Im pretty sure it works like english, as in there probably aren't "specific parts" that mean certain things, its the entire word that holds the meaning. I know what absolute means without needing to understand what "ab" and "solute" are, or there origins.

>>1265262
As a tangent to that point "solute" and "absolute" are completley unrelated

>>1265230
>if we seperate a Japanese word into it's syllable's like "Su-Mi-Ma-Sen"(think that's how it's separated.) and try to translate it to it's english meaning "Excuse Me" or "I'm Sorry" how does each individual syllable of the Japanese word make it's way into the english word.

for sumimasen the syllable (or more correctly mora) separation should be su-mi-ma-se-n. that separation is based on the way it is separated in the script, but the individual syllables do not correspond to units of meaning. if you want to separate that word into units of meaning you would have to do sumi-masen or even sumi-mas-en. it is a verb form from sumu "to be finished", the stem of which is sumi. to the stem is added the polite negative ending -masen. that way the meaning is literally "it is not finished" which implies "i will do something to compensate for the trouble i've caused you". that's why it can mean sorry but also thank you in some situations.
the polite positive ending would be -masu, therefore you could potentially also separate into mas-en but that's just nitpicking.

>>>/int/

>>1265324
actually what OP wants is /jp/, there's ongoing Japanese learning threads in there with fluent anons and tons of resources.

Hey OP, jisho.com is gonna be your friend. But seriously, go to /jp/.

>>1265391
Huh, then why are there constantly japanese learning threads on /int/?

Fuckin weebs

File: 1497866541372.png (232KB, 277x594px) Image search: [Google]

232KB, 277x594px

>>1265324
>Going to /int/ for anything but shitposting in other languages

>>1265324
Agreed. I'm not making any sense of what OP is trying to say. He doesn't sound too intelligent.

>>1265108

On /int/ they have

1) /jp/ general especially dedicated to people who want to learn more about japan and japanese
2) /lang/, a general just for people who are learning a new language

I really can't see the sense of this thread being posted in this board

>>1265230
>So if we seperate a Japanese word into it's syllable's like "Su-Mi-Ma-Sen"(think that's how it's separated.) and try to translate it to it's english meaning "Excuse Me" or "I'm Sorry" how does each individual syllable of the Japanese word make it's way into the english word.
If we separate an English word into it's letters like "f-r-o-g" and translate it to it's French meaning "grenouille", how does each individual letter of the English word make it's way into the French word?

Or in other words, you're talking complete gibberish.

>>1265532
iirc, /a/ mods kicked /jp/ out