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Nov 8, 2022

Duolingo Progress with Chinese & Japanese

Spotlight on Chinese






I have been slowly working on Chinese.  It is more daunting an alphabet to learn than Japanese because Hiragana seems like baby steps from Romanji before you learn Katakana and Kanji.

  • happy
  • glad 
  • Kuàilè de
Part of speechTranslation
English - happy, glad


 Reflection: 'I found a number of translations for happy, this seems to match the chinese in Duolingo.  So I guess it is Cantonese not Mandarin.


   Vocabulary comparison across languages: 
English - happy German - glücklich Danish - lykkelig Dutch - Vrolijk Swedish- Lycklig Norwegian - lykkelig Italiano - felice  Francais - heureuse, heureux Romanian-fericit Haitian Creole - kontan Esperanto - feliĉa Latin-felix Welsh - hapus Irish - sásta Scottish Gaelic - toilichte Zulu - ngijabule Hawaiian - hauʻoli Swahili-furaha Czech - šťastný Hungarian-boldog Polish-szczęśliwy Turk-mutlu Indonesian senang Japanese-ハッピー Happī Korean 행복하다 haengboghada Hindi प्रसन्न prasann Yiddish - גליקלעך gliklekh Ukranian-щасливий shchaslyvyy Vietnamese-vui mừng Greek- χαρούμενο charoúmenos Russian счастливый schastlivyy

   Spotlight on Japanese

I first tried Japanese in year 6 at primary school.  My older sister was learning it at high school and later during her university. I was homeschool by my mum that year.  I found her hiragana flash cards to learn while I was sitting in the splits.  Trying to multi task, so I would be distract from the discomfort of stretching my legs to deepen my split while sitting on a pile of phone books with sharp corners.

I can see now that I am in my thirties the knowledge has stayed with me, so I have remembered the first part of hiragana and now need to work on the next years with the double lines ( i think they are called tentens) and the little circles used to make the other syllables like ta -> da, and ka -> ga etc.



Japanese - 名前はなんですか Namae wa nandesu ka 
English - What is your name?

 Reflection: I have learnt that putting 'desu ka' pronounced 'des ka' at the end of a sentence makes a question.  It seems like, isn't it?

   Vocabulary comparison across languages: 
English - name German - Der Name Danish - navn Dutch - naam Swedish- kaka Norwegian - Navn Italiano - nome  Francais - Nom Romanian-Nume Haitian Creole - non Esperanto - nomo Latin-nomen Welsh - enw Irish - ainm Scottish Gaelic - ainm Zulu - igama Hawaiian - inoa Swahili-jina Czech - název Hungarian-név Polish-Nazwa Turk-isim Indonesian nama Japanese-名前Namae Korean 이름ileum Hindi -नाम naam Yiddish - נאָמען nomen Ukranian-назва nazva Vietnamese- Tên Greek- όνομα ónoma Russian имя imya

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