Goziamasu. Can go after afternoon and evening greetings too?

[Dravinian]

Quite straight forward, just starting out with the newbie lessons and in the lesson that introduces Goziamasu on the audio they only use it with ohayo, good morning I believe, I just wondered if I could use it with Konichwa and Konbon wa as well?

Forgive my phonetic spelling of words my Romaji is just basically to help with understanding how the words are formed, so phonetics seems to work. I am not sure I am ready to learn how to read Japanese just yet, speaking it seems daunting enough!

Though its amazing how much I already seem to know after just a few days of listening to the audio tapes for an hour a day. (I repeat the lesson a couple of times, not an hours worth of new lessons)

[Kat]

Dravinianさん, thanks for your kind comments! I'm Kat, the host of Newbie Series Season 5 Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!

To answer your question, "gozaimasu" (which is actually an archaic form of "desu") can only be used with "ohayou". "Konnichiwa" and "konbanwa" literally mean "As for today" (= kono nichi wa) and "As for tonight" (= kono ban wa). Hope that helps you remember!

[Dravinian]

Dōmo arigatō Kat-sensei.

[ggenglish]

Further to "de gozaimasu" being a polite form of "desu". I was listening to the casts for months before I even realized what the intro actually meant. This lesson was a big wake-up call for me when I eventually came by it:

http://www.japanesepod101.com/2005/12/2 ... ing-theme/

So if you like the sound of gozaimasu (who doesn't ), in theory you can use "de gozaimasu" instead of desu whenever you want.
"hajimemashite, ggenglish de gozaimasu, yoroshiku onegaishimasu".
I think people will kill you if you use it too much though. hahaha.

If you deal with romaji you are undoubtably going to be confused by these "konnichiwa" and "konbanwa". As you have learned, or will learn, the topic particle is は(ha) but pronounced wa (i.e. not written わ)

So written out you will have seen:
こんにちは=今(this)日(day)は(is)=so basically we have "This day is....". Probably over time it went from there being something for the "..." to dropping it for convenience. Or maybe the other party was supposed to fill in the blank and tell them how their day is going. Anyways, as you have seen, the popular expression for good morning is not こんあさは which would be "This morning is...". Why? Beyond my knowledge, sorry.

Hope that adds some further insight.

good luck with your studies.

[Dravinian]

Dōmo arigatō ggenglish-sensei

In another post a user named Irukawa-san made a mention that he learnt Hiragana as a pre-cursor to learning Japanese spoken and that it had helped him.

I have to say, I would also recommend this after this morning's exercises.

I was really, really, struggling with 'O'tearai wa' (bathroom is?) not even so much the "R" sound, which is difficult, but just the way the word moved between "Te" to "A" to "Ra" to "i" and not knowing what each of those should sound like and having difficultly discerning them exactly from audio file. Even seeing it written down didn't help that much, until I looked at the Hiragana.

One morning of looking at Hiragana and I know what they 'should' sound like (not that I am doing the correct sound yet) and am far better at reproducing the sound of "O'tearai wa"

Which is awesome, because I somewhat recognise what you are saying about the Ha being a Wa sound in Konbanwa and even recognise the hiragana you used!