By all means its not native. :) ã Prior to last January I didn't know a single japanese word. If you have to wonder about politeness level, I'd say stick with -masu form unless you've been immersed in japanese society long enough to know exactly what you're saying and what it implies.
If you're interested in sentence patterns, you may be interested in "A dictionary of basic japanese sentence patterns" (isbn: 4770026080). It covers levels 3 and 4 of the japanese language proficiency test. A lot of it is pretty basic to me (hence the title :), but I did found some good points that I never knew before, which makes it a good pre-requisite or a checkpoint as to where you are in the language (I'm constantly wondering whether I'm making progress). Here's an example from the book: N1ããVãN2ãã N1 is N2 who does V. äæïããïãããäåïãããïåæïããããïããåç(ããããïãã Mr. Ito is a student who is graduating this year. On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 12:33:40 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Yes, that's exactly what I meant to say. Whether or not it's actually > > proper japanese, I'll let someone with more experience or a native > > japanese person be the judge. :) > Oh. So it's not native. I was going to learn it as a model for further > sentences. I may still, because it looks like decent Japanese to me, but now I > have to wonder about politeness levels and other less obvious aspects of > appropriateness. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything. http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/9rHolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Japanese_Language/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
