some doubts

[Monstro]

konnichiwa minna.

well, let's begin with the questions:
- I was studying the grammar through the site and found something
weird. Why do you use the "ha" hiragana for the particle "wa", instead
of the "wa" hiragana.
- The other question is how do i read the hiraganas in the studygroup
website?? 'cause i can't read them, i get some weird symbols instead
of hiragana. ALso, how do i write hiragana here in the forum??
Well, that's it.

if there is a thread with this questions already, gomen nasai!

arigato gozaimasu.
sayonara

[Go-ruden Naito]

For the viewing the japanese characters, you go to view then codification and click on japanese. If you dont have it, download it from microsoft's web page.

[Riley]

1. when used as a particle, in this case as the topic marker, the "wa" is written with the hiragana "ha"...it's like a rule
2. to view the japanese letters you should go to "view-encoding-japanese(shift_JIS)"
3. if you want to write japanese characters and you're using windows then go to the language bar at the bottom of the screen, right-click the icon and choose "settings", in the new window add the japanese language. once you add the japanese, switch between languages with Alt+Shift until you see JP as the language icon, then right-click on it and choose "restore the language bar". now the bar should be on top of the screen and you should see a tab called "input mode"-just choose hiragana or full size katakana to type the letters...hit the H and A buttons on the keyboard to get は and so on
hope that helps...

[Matsumoto_hideto]

Monstro wrote:

well, let's begin with the questions:
- I was studying the grammar through the site and found something
weird. Why do you use the "ha" hiragana for the particle "wa", instead
of the "wa" hiragana.

theres no reason

its something you have to accept as a part of the grammar

[Sakaki-chan]

I also needed to learn how to put in japanese but I'm having a few problems. i have the language bar at the top but I don't see the "input-mode" thing anywhere. I've tried looking for it but I don't see it. Sorry for the trouble...

[Mukade]

Monstro wrote:

Why do you use the "ha" hiragana for the particle "wa", instead
of the "wa" hiragana.

It's because in classical Japanese the subject marker was "ha," pronounced "ha." It was only over time that the pronunciation of the subject marker changed, although the convention for writing it did not.

So, for example, a Japanese person from 1100 AD would have pronounced 私は田中です as "Watashi ha tanaka desu."

There are other instances of this same phenomena: for example, the direct object marker "wo," now pronounced "o," is written with "wo" because it used to be pronounced that way.

Unlike the "ha/wa" example, however, this pronuncation died out fairly recently (during the Meiji-Taisho). In fact, you can still run into older people (in their 80s or beyond) who still pronounce it "wo."

[Kei]

Someone really needs to make an FAQ about this otherwise there's going to be many posts in the future regarding the same issue...

[Riley]

sakaki when you restore the language bar and select japanese the bar should become very long with some tabs like "input style,input mode,conversion mode" and others...left click the input mode and choose hiragana/katakana...if you want to write kanji just hit the space bar when the word is done