Sure, but this is where you get into how language is actually used. “Can I borrow your pen?” and “Will you lend me your pen?” are both grammatically valid, but the the former is more common than the latter.
Grammatically correct is not the same as language as it’s used. For example, if you say a cat is “white and black”, not “black and white”, it’s grammatically correct, but sounds wrong.
In this case, Japanese is the opposite. You ask people to lend you something, not to borrow it.
If you want to talk about how English is actually used, then you don’t need either lend or borrow for the reply.
Can I borrow your pen?
Sure, here you go.
Yeah.
My point was not regarding the reply but the request.
In English, it’s more common to ask to “borrow” something; in Japanese, it’s more common to ask for something to be “lent”.
An affirmative (or negative) response is okay in both.
I had to look up what “消しゴム” is. I already knew that 消し (“keshi”) was “to turn off” (e.g. the lights or a television) and I could read “gomu” from the second part, but for some reason my brain wasn’t able to put 2+2 together and realize that this word meant “eraser”, as in the rubber thing you use to remove pencil markings from a piece of paper.
So I looked up the actual definition of 消し instead of the context Duolingo taught me the word in, and saw that it actually means “to delete” or “to erase”. This matches german again, where the word “löschen” can refer to
Last week I felt kind of really frustrated with trying to learn japanese. Many easy mistakes. In exchange, today it happened a couple of times where I tried to figure out a complicated Duolingo prompt and was sure that I had made a mistake somewhere, but it was the best I could do at the moment, and it happened to be the correct answer.
e.g.
I guess things are starting to sink in deeper.
Finally some practical japanese
Also at one point Duolingo teaches you the words “Otaku” and explains the rules of rock paper scissors.
Still going almost 100 days in, but my motivation is flagging at times.
Anyway, another important message from Duoling.
…
This is my biggest bugbear with the japanese course on duolingo:
Duolingo gives you segments that usually should correspond with full words. Japanese uses a lot of particles that modify a word, indicate its usage in the sentence, or provide further context. These particles are always written in hiragana. Of course you can write any word in hiragana to spell it phonetically, though most often Duolingo teaches you the kanji for specific words.
Two of the most common particles are the topic-marker は and the particle に which is used to mark time or location (similar to the english word “in”). In the above problem Duolingo uses the word 判子 (a personal seal which is used in japan in lieu of signatures) but instead of using the Kanji which it never introduces it uses the hiragana はんこ, and it gives also that combination of hiragana as a whole word segment to select. However, it does not give the に alone but only the combination には despite it not being an actual word, but segments of two words for this sentence combined and the combination of the particles is very much allowed (e.g. here), making this look like two particles when in actuality it wants you to use the は and other hiragana to build はんこ.
This just feels like a bad trap that does not teach anything but only serves as a “gotcha”.
You’ll hear people use it “incorrectly” too - “he borrowed me his shovel”.
Congrats
I’m still holding stead at day 140. I passed checkpoint 5 of 7 of the japanese skill tree yesterday.
That seems like a decent pace. I’m at 112 days and haven’t gotten to the second checkpoint. But I’m also not particularly motivated or trying to push too hard. Progress is slow as often just going through the daily refreshers on stuff drains me mentally enough that I only bother to do one new lesson, if even that.
I started using it about two weeks ago to relearn the French I’ve mostly forgotten.
I tried out the duolingo for a few minutes. I didn’t realize it was arranged like some F2P phone game with an in-game currency and all that nonsense. Also, it doesn’t seem like there’s just one linear path, but lots of varied activities to do. How do you decide what to do next? Just whatever you feel like?
I’m just doing whatever the next lesson is until I max it out, or pick one of the two that’s next in the pryamid.
So you’re not doing any stories, mastery quizzes, or bonus skills?
I’m doing the progress quiz and fixing mistakes. I haven’t poked at the rest yet.
@Apreche I am not really sure what you are talking about. Perhaps other languages are structured differently, but at least in the japanese course the only thing I see is the regular skill tree. Not sure what you mean by “stories, mastery quizzes or bonus skills”.
The skill tree is structured into individual lessons that have a specific theme, with five grades in each. Usually there are two lessons per level and you have to complete both at least once to unlock the next level, though some levels of the tree only have one lesson. Each lesson has a certain number of subsections, which you have to complete all to get the next grade. I usually have like a couple of these lessons “active” so I dont do the same lesson over and over but mix in different lessons. I successively rank them up to grade 5 and usually when I have made a lesson to that grade I start another in the tree. This gives me a rolling selection of lessons I can do. E.g. this is what the active section of my skill tree looks at the moment.
There are also checkpoints, the castle icons, which are basically tests and unlocks the next segment of the skill tree. This will have questions from the entire previous section of the skill tree, and you must pass it before the lessons in the next segment unlock. They dont have any ranks or review process like the regular lessons.
Once you put a lesson to grade 5 it will become colored gold. You can still do these lesson afterward, but they are no longer segmented into subsections but will give you a mix of questions from all the subsections. After a while this lesson “breaks”, prompting you to review it in that manner, which I do.
I dont use basically any of the gamification features. The only thing I use is that Duolingo gives a certain amount of “XP” for each completed subsection of a lesson or reviewing a level 5 lesson. I do approximately 200 XP a day, which is about an hour and a half to two hours a day for me to do, which I split between two sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening.
