こんにちは！

I'm looking for someone that can help me in my Japanese studies. I would prefer someone who has some experience with English, but you don't have to be fluent. I am very happy to help you with your English as much as I can!

Right now, my Japanese skills are not very good. I can form simple questions and sentences, say basic phrases, I can tell the difference between formal and informal speech (I'm still working on this one), write in ひらがな, カタカナ(mostly), and some 漢字.

Hope to talk to some of you soon!

Best regards,

Caleb Johansen

For Elementary / Intermediate English Learners

[EDIT]: Please note that this concept is more of a theory, but it still holds some very substantial truth behind it. This topic does not cover adjectives that fall in the same category or rare exceptions of this rule.

In many languages, the order of adjectives that describe a single noun doesn't matter. In English it does. If you do it wrong, you still get the point across, but it might not sound right. Many native English speakers still struggle with this, and most of us don't even know we unconsciously word things this way. Here's how you do it...

[opinion], [size], [age], [shape], [color], [origin], [material], [purpose], [Noun]

For example, you could have a "lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife", and that would sound fine. But, you can't have "iron new pots" because [age] comes before [material]. This would better be said as "new iron pots".

The example above about the knife is not something you would generally read or hear, but it's still grammatically correct and makes sense. Usually when describing an object, you want to follow the rule of 3's, meaning that you use a maximum of three adjectives before a noun. You could then continue to describe the object in following sentences. You might better describe the knife like this:

"I have a little silver whittling knife that I got from my grandfather. It has a green handle and I believe it came from France! It's very old and a bit rectangular shaped, but it still works surprisingly well for its age!"

Notice how I used only three adjectives first to describe the knife, then I continued to describe other aspects of it in the following sentences. Also note how I never described it as 'lovely' because your opinion of an object can usually be derived from how you talk about it. Here, it can be obvious that I think it's a very good knife because 1.) I'm talking about the knife in more than one or two brief sentences, and 2.) my comment on how sharp the knife is suggests that I may like using it because of this quality.

The reasoning behind this whole 'order of adjectives' is that we put things that we care about the most first. We put attributes like [size], [age], [shape] and [color] first because those attributes describe how the object generally looks. Other attributes like [origin], [material] and [purpose] are of secondary importance. We like to list things that describe how an object looks first because it's easier to know what something is once we know what it looks like. [Origin], [material] and [purpose] don't give you this kind of general information.

Sometimes you can switch attributes around depending on what you want to emphasize in the sentence. The two groups of things we put first (size, age, shape and color) and things we put last (origin, material and purpose) are generally never switched around, but attributes within the first group can be. For example, if I want to emphasize the color of an object along with describing it's shape, I may put the color before the shape along with using the word 'very' for emphasis. "It's a very green rectangular knife" sounds much better than "It's a rectangular, very green knife". The following phrases are also permissible:

"A very old little knife"

"A very rectangular little knife"

"A very green little knife"

"A very rectangular old knife"

"A very green old knife"

Please comment below if you have any questions about this or would like me to phrase something in a simpler sentence for you!

If not, then I would be very greatful if someone could explain to me how basic verb tenses work.

When I say basic, I mean:

Past,

Present,

Future

I have a little knowledge on the present tense but very little on the rest.

(Example sentences with contexual explanations when needed would be helpful!)

اهلا بيكم!

I was wondering if anyone knew of any audio resources that I could use in my Egyptian Arabic studies. When I say this, I mean completely natural audio, like a YouTube channel of someone who makes daily videos in Arabic or some popular music artists that I can listen to.

This is all so that I can increase my listening skills and really get the sound of Arabic in my head. I don't want anything that has English in it or is trying to teach me the language.

Thank you all in advance for any help that you might offer!

 - Caleb Johansen

I've been reading through a book to help improve my colloquial Persian and it quoted the following sentence:

"Everything is known by everyone. 'Everyone' has yet to be born!"

I was wondering what the translation of this would be in the original Persian. Thank you all in advance!

I've been wanting to learn Arabic for a very long time now, and I just got access to my first two resources for learning the Egyptian dialect. (I have chosen to learn a dialect first because I would much rather learn to converse with people first as opposed to learning the standard way to read and write yet.)

This is what I now have:

- Rocket Arabic (Rocket Languages Audio Courses)

- "Kallimni 'Arabi Bishweesh" by Samia Louis

I was wondering if any of you guys knew of any other resources that might be useful for learning about grammar, vocabulary, culture, etc.

Thank you all in advance for any help!

شكرًا!

It is my understanding that اون is the pronunciation of the written «آن» due to diglossia, but that اون is also used as an informal pronoun meaning 'he', 'she' and 'it'.

When asking the native speaker if this was true, she corrected me by saying that "آن is only used for objects", of which doesn't make sense to me.

I'm having trouble forming the big picture of the useage of اون, and that last correction the native speaker made leads me wonder if you still use the pronunciation «آن» to represent آن in colloquial Persian.

Thank you all in advance for any help on this matter.

TRANSLATION:

How do you say "See you later" in Persian?