Japanese Language

Where should I go to chat with natives?

When I encounter a new vocabulary word, it is often useful to see how that word is used in other contexts. Previously, I would use Jisho.org and do a sentence search for the word, but they really only have sentences from tatoeba.org, which are not always the most natural, and sometimes, there just aren't very many. I've found yourei.jp to be significantly better, as they take example sentences from real books and display them in order of readability.

Compare (example word: 円満)

• Jisho.org
• yourei.jp
• weblio.jp

One disadvantage is that yourei.jp doesn't provide English translations, so if you need those you might be better served elsewhere.

(For this particular example word I chose, weblio.jp seems to have decent results, but it overall seems to be hit-or-miss. For instance, ぼかす. Lots of sentences, but they're all basically useless. Most seem to be excerpts from technical manuals.)

I've been semi-casually studying Japanese for around 5 years. I currently live in Japan, but since I already have a remote job for an English-speaking software company, I've never had an interest in getting a job for a Japanese company, and having a good level of Japanese was really only ever a matter of convenience and personal achievement.

On a whim, I participated in a mock JLPT session that was held by a local university. To my surprise, I passed the N2 level. Not with flying colors, but with enough margin that if it were the real thing, I probably would have passed.

This is a win, because I have never passed the JLPT before, and haven't done any test preparation. I mostly just read books and participate in daily life. I have some Anki flashcards, but I'm far from consistent with it.

I signed up for the December test!

I watched a TV show with Japanese subtitles, and noticed the sentence: "秘密にしててほんとごめん。"

I was a bit confused because didn't know why there was a second て after the te-form of する. Because I didn't know how to look this up in my textbook or on Google, I asked a certain AI chatbot about it.

It tells me that してて is actually a contraction of していて (te-form of する and いる).

秘密にしててほんとごめん。 meaning "I'm really sorry for keeping it a secret."

秘密にしてほんとごめん。(without the second て) would only mean "I'm really sorry for making it a secret."

Is this correct?

Inspired by some concepts in programming recently I've come up with the idea that は marks an environment and が marks a variable inside an environment.

Environment and variable:

An example of environment:

猫は

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: cat            │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 └───────────────────┘

This is an environment with the name 猫.

Many things can exist inside this environemnt:

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: cat            │
 │ ----------------- │
 │ behavior nyan     │
 │                   │
 │ cute liquid       │
 │                   │
 │ mouse ...         │
 └───────────────────┘

An example of variable:

猫が

             v: cat

This is just a variable with the name 猫.

私は猫が

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: I              │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │           v: cat  │
 └───────────────────┘

This is the depiction of an variable with the name 猫 inside an environemnt with the name 私.

Some sentences

Sentence 1: 猫が好きだ

This sentence can have any of following meanings according to context

a) Generally speaking, cats are liked [猫が好きだ]

b) As for me, cats are liked (-> I like cats) [私は猫が好きだ]

c) As for ? (someone or something according to context), cats are liked [◯は猫が好きだ]

a)








             v: cat───────► liked



b)

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: I              │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │           v: cat──┼────► liked
 └───────────────────┘


c)

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: ?              │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │           v: cat──┼────► liked
 └───────────────────┘

Sentence 2: 猫は好きだ

This sentence can have any of following meanings according to context.

a) Generally speaking, as for cats, everything about cats is liked. [猫は好きだ]

b) Generally speaking, as for cats, ? about cats is liked. [猫は◯が好きだ]

c) As for me, as for cats, everything about cats is liked. (-> I like cats) [私は猫は好きだ]

d) As for me, as for cats, ? about cats is liked. [私は猫は◯が好きだ]

a)

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: cat            │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   ├───────► liked
 └───────────────────┘


b)

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: cat            │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │            v: ? ──┼───────► liked
 └───────────────────┘


c)

 ┌───────────────────────────────┐
 │ E: I                          │
 │                               │
 │                               │
 │        ┌───────────────────┐  │
 │        │ E: cat            │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   ├──┼────► liked
 │        └───────────────────┘  │
 └───────────────────────────────┘


d)

 ┌───────────────────────────────┐
 │ E: I                          │
 │                               │
 │                               │
 │        ┌───────────────────┐  │
 │        │ E: cat            │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │           v: ? ───┼──┼────► liked
 │        └───────────────────┘  │
 └───────────────────────────────┘

Sentence 3: 猫好きだ

I think here 猫 can be either an environment or an variable.

Environment & variable vs topic & subject: I think this environment model explains things betther than the use of the terms "topic" and "subject", at least for me.

I took inspirations from following sources:

a) Lesson 3: WA-particle secrets schools don't ever teach. How WA can make or break your Japanese (by Cure Dolly)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9_T4eObNXg&list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj&index=3

b) Environment model in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO1aqPBJCPg&t=2023s

One trope you’ll see repeated all over anime, manga, novels and even in real life is that of the ボケ (the idiot) and ツッコミ (straight man). Once you know a bit more about its dynamics and some of the more famous 芸人 duos, you start seeing it everywhere.

Downtown is one of the more famous ones, but if you want a shortlist of some of the most famous and relevant duos, the M-1 Grand Prix as well as the contestants of the Documental streaming series are great places to get into Manzai.

Manzai is certainly one of the most relevant media in Japanese, and it is so important you start to see language trends as well as cultural shifts reflected in manzai performances. At the same time you also get to see manzai actively shape Japanese culture and set new trends. It’s a great step if you want your Japanese to improve considerably and get closer to real Japanese humour.

There's a dish in Japan called 親子丼（おやこどん） which is a chicken + eggs rice bowl. 親子（おやこ） can be translated as parent and child, which was a bit disturbing the first time I knew about it.

This week, I didn't have chicken to prepare it so I searched for alternatives and found two:

• 他人丼（たにんどん）which replaces chicken with pork and means strangers haha. Also called 継子丼（ママコどん） meaning stepmom bowl.
• 開花丼（かいかどん）which is the beef version. Meaning "blooming" bowl.

Do you know any other interestingly named dishes like this?

For example in this episode's poem:

天（そら）に響めく（どよめく） まやかしの

捉う心（とらうこころ）にはしる旋律（せんりつ）

For me it's interesting that the kanji used for そら (sky/heaven) is not the usual 空 but 天 which is never read そら, usually read てん, but it conveys the meaning of heaven more than 空.

I've seen Bleach doing it several times in the poems

Has anyone used Italki or a similar platform to aid in their studies?

I'm considering taking weekly lessons with a tutor, the main goal in specifically improving my speaking.

I've lived in Japan for a few years and work in a Japanese company and while my comprehension is okay, my output is terrible and I always hesitate to speak.

I'm hoping a tutor would give me some real-time feedback on my speaking and help build my confidence.

I don't need a professional teacher / structured lessons and I guess my budget would be around ¥2000 for the hour (is it reasonable?)

Please let me know your experiences.

I've been doing it since day one, but I fear that if I don't do it carefully enough, it might cripple my accent later on.

Also, saying the words out loud kind of demotivates me from doing anki as it's a lot more work and gets stressful since I don't want to pick up bad speaking habits, so not saying words out loud would actually be a relief, but I want to do what is most optimal for learning.

I've gotten into reading Japanese books a lot more recently, and I prefer e-books as their built-in dictionaries are a god-send for foreign language learners.

I've only used Google Play so far. The integrated dictionary is fine, but one annoyance is that it can't detect any word that uses furigana. Are Kindle, Kobo, or any other platforms any better?

Is there any free or paid software or browser extension that can read japanese text?

We've been working on a guide to help players on all major GNU/Linux distributions play visual novels for the past few weeks. The main focus is on getting Japanese-only visual novels to work, because they tend to be much quirkier.

This guide is designed to be used by both beginners and experts, with minimal need to touch the command line.

openSUSE wins the award for "never had to touch the terminal" and "simplest setup instructions", but Fedora is a close second.

While there are a few existing visual novel guides for GNU/Linux around, we've tried to fill in the gaps we noticed. We've put a lot of research into this guide and ensured it is accurate while remaining simple and approachable.

If you're interested, start here!

We have an extensive Troubleshooting section on our Problems page if you're having trouble getting visual novels to work, too.

I wrote this guide with a lot of help from two other people, including /u/neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space. It’s available on our community wiki, https://wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, meaning you’re free to share, remix, and build on the content as long as you credit us.

We also have some other pages you may find useful:

• If you're looking for something to play, check out our Recommendations page.
• If you want to know where and how to buy a visual novel you want to play, our comprehensive Buying page will help you out.
• And if you want to read a visual novel in Japanese, our Reading in Japanese page offers a lot of advice and points you to some useful software to make the process easier.

I'm currently learning with Duolingo and even though I can read, I've realized I never know which syllable should be accented.

A simple example: みず.

How can I tell if the accent goes on "mi" or "zu"? Is it like English? Like you need to hear the word to know where the accent goes? Or are there rules that let you know just by reading it?

I thought this was a very interesting vieo about the use of "huh?" or 「はぁ？」 and how many languages around the world have found a quick way to let the other party know that there has been a problem in communication.

The Japanese level is rather advanced but I encourage intermediate learners to give it a try and see if you manage to pick up a good chunk of the vocabulary you didn't know from context as well.

Wikipe-tan has been the (cutest) unofficial mascot for Wikipedia since 2006. This manga was posted to PIxiv and Wikipedia in 2010 by Kasuga, where he said this:

二年ぐらい昔に、後輩の合同誌で描いたウィキペたん漫画。 （「ウィキペたん」が何か知らない人は、ウィキペディアで検索だ） こんなもん再利用する人はいないと思いますが、 「クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 3.0」のライセンスで配布してます。 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.ja

しかし、この子ってこういうキャラだったんだね。

The pages on Wikipedia:

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipe-tan_manga_page1.jpg
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipe-tan_manga_page2.jpg
3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipe-tan_manga_page3.jpg
4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipe-tan_manga_page4.jpg

• https://djtguide.github.io/grammar/dojgmain.html
• https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/learning-grammar#grammar-guides
• https://yonde.itazuraneko.org/index.html

image source: 4chan

I just switched to Android after being a very long time iOS user and I'm somewhat at a loss at the best apps and must-haves of Japanese content, dictionaries and similar stuff.

What are your best recommendations?

Not a plea for help since I imagine using the word bank allows the text to be accepted. And no, I'm not trying to get it to fail by using 二 instead of ニ. I'm pretty sure the exercise is bugged.

You can now use furigana in your posts via the DenDen Markdown syntax for furigana. If you write the following

{学校|がっこう}

It will come out like this: {学校|がっこう}

This channel is pretty fun whenever I need something to watch and relax without thinking much about it. It has also helped me realise I make a lot of mistakes when writing by hand which inevitably leads to messier characters. Definitely recommend watching if you’re into this type of stuff.

I've been playing japanese games on my steam deck lately and have discovered a useful workflow for looking things up if you've got an Android device on hand.

Install Google Lens. Install Aedict and add JMDict in it (JMDict is what jisho.org uses, so it's pretty good). When in Google Lens, you can use "Text" mode to take a picture then select and copy text. When you copy text, Android will helpfully pop up a Share dialog. Click the share logo, find Aedict in the list and bookmark it so it's always at the top by holding down on it and click "pin".

Google lens will smartly let you select entire words with a single tap and has a dedicated copy text button, so this workflow is a surprisingly fast way to open your dictionary when trying to read text from other devices, from physical media, or out in the wild. It's even pretty good at reading handwriting.