Daily lessons · Day 13 of 90
You finished this day
Days of the week & making plans
Arrange to meet someone
Two things today, and they fit together. The days of the week, which are built from a pattern you already half know from the kanji course, and the two sentence endings that let you propose something and agree to it. By the end you can arrange to meet someone at a particular time on a particular day.
The days of the week
Each is an element plus ようび, day of the week:
These are the seven elements you learned on days 5 and 6 of the kanji course: 日月火水木金土. The week is those seven characters in that exact order, each followed by 曜日. If you have done that kanji day you have already met every one of them, which is a good example of the two courses feeding each other.
Suggesting something
Two endings, and the difference between them is worth getting right:
ませんか looks like won't you and feels, to an English speaker, faintly negative. It is not. Framing an invitation as a negative question is a politeness move: it makes declining easy, because the sentence has already half-offered the no. ましょう does the opposite and assumes you are both in, so use ませんか to propose and ましょう once it is settled.
Putting a time on it
Everything you need to pin down a plan:
Notice で rather than に for the meeting place. に marks where something exists; で marks where something happens. Meeting is an action, so it takes で. This pair trips people up for months, and the test that works is: is anything happening here, or is something simply located here.
Carry over, from earlier days
Check yourself
8 questions. Nothing is saved unless you finish.