Japanese Language

Mine was at the beginning to be able to read Visual Novels, but now is more than that, I like to learn more and there are few sensations like understanding new "symbols" as words.

If so, any recommendations on podcasts to listen to?

Thanks in advance!

知ってる慣用句は少ないけど、「死んだ魚の目」という慣用句が好き（英語の意味は「thousand-yard stare」それとも「empty eyes」）。

他の面白い慣用句を聞かせてください！

This video by Kotorabo, one of the best YouTube channels about language and etymologies talks about the question we’ve all wondered at some point: why doesn’t Japanese just get rid of Kanji?

It seems like it's every day that I get advice that is aimed at beginner learners, like how to learn kana, or to pick up Genki or Minna no Nihongo, or use an app like Duolingo or Lingodeer. However, I'm closer to intermediate level (approximately N3, maybe N2), and I'm kind of stumped when it comes to studying.

For example, one of the most common pieces of advice I get is to immerse myself in the language, for example by playing games or watching movies/anime in Japanese. However, that method does get really frustrating in many ways. For example, when there are no closed captions available for Japanese movies, which makes understanding much harder, especially if the characters speak very quickly. Another nuisance this method has, is when I have to look up a word or two for every single sentence I hear/read. This is made even more annoying when a certain word contains complicated kanji, so I have to type it into the dictionary radical by radical. Doing that so often can be a real pain in the backside and suck the enjoyment out of the game/film. And also, it gets even tougher when I come across some slang or colloquial expression, or onomatopoeia, or a grammar structure I haven't heard of before. During these times, I'm not very sure how to look those up, since I'm most likely not going to find these in the dictionary I use.

Moreover, I'm not quite sure how to learn vocabulary with this method of media consumption, since it's not uncommon for me to encounter a word once or twice and then never again, making it difficult to remember. I'd learn it with flashcards, but 1, making flashcards takes a long time. And 2, it gets quite boring, and I tend to forget words very easily, even with Anki.

I also heard of advice saying I should pick up an advanced textbook, like Tobira. However, the grinding aspect of just translating sentences into a specific grammar pattern repeatedly always felt boring. Even with Genki, I kinda just speedran/skimmed through the exercises, made notes out of the grammar explanations, and solidified what I learned through graded readers (which were still a pain, because they weren't very interesting to read, to be honest).

I have a feeling that despite being given these pieces of advice, there must be a wrong and right way of using them. So, I think I might be misusing the advice I've been given (either that, or I've been given the wrong advice, which I kind of doubt).

If anyone out here can give me corrections on how to study correctly, as well as perhaps giving new advice, would be very much appreciated. 読んでくれてありがとうございました。

Alright everyone! JLPT is tomorrow. Discuss anything related to the test, success or failure stories, fun anecdotes and everything in-between in this thread!

Good luck to all of you taking JLPT within the following hours!

When I mean learning I do not mean translating big sentences or something like that, I mean things like: "Is this japanese sentence correctly written? 雲の日が好きです" In this example it answered: "

Yes, the Japanese sentence "雲の日が好きです" is correctly written. It translates to "I like cloudy days" in English. Here's a breakdown of the sentence:

• 雲 (くも/kumo): This means "cloud."
• の (no): This is a possessive particle that indicates the relationship between "cloud" and "day" in this context.
• 日 (ひ/hi): This means "day."
• が (ga): This is a subject marker particle that marks "cloudy day" as the subject of the sentence.
• 好きです (すきです/suki desu): This means "like" or "to like" and is a polite way of expressing one's preference. The verb 好き (suki) means "to like," and です (desu) is a polite copula used to indicate politeness and formality.

Therefore, the sentence "雲の日が好きです" correctly conveys the meaning "I like cloudy days" in Japanese.

"

Is this correct,do you consider it reliable?

Sometimes I also ask some questions like: "What function does 'こと' grammatically fulfill on this sentence? .... "

Since I decided to nuke my reddit account, here's an archive link to one of my niche posts that has helped people interested in Classical Japanese.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/79947

Anime has slowly grown into a global phenomenon, but visual novels are far more niche. Many visual novels remain untouched by localization companies, and sometimes the localizations we do get are…lackluster.

Often, the best way to experience a visual novel is in the original language—Japanese. Whether you’re already interested in learning Japanese, or want to learn Japanese purely to play visual novels in their original language, both motivations are perfectly valid. Visual novels are a great way to learn Japanese, because you get exposure to both the written and spoken language.

I've written a guide on how you can learn Japanese by playing visual novels with the help of a friend who made some suggestions to improve it, and it's available on our wiki, wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it's licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, meaning you're free to share, remix, and build on the content.

If you're interested in learning Japanese or have already begun, I hope you find this guide useful. It isn't meant to be a dedicated guide on learning Japanese, but there are some tools you might not know about that will make your life easier.

If you have any additions or corrections to offer for this guide, or are interested in working on our other pages, you can sign up for the wiki here. You'll need to contact Neo on Matrix for a password as emails aren't setup yet (details on page).

I want something to say when my other language-learning friends talk about how hard/easy XYZ language is.

For example, for easy parts:

• No genders
• Easy vowels/consonants

For difficulties:

• Kanji
• Formality

Please help? Thanks!

Edit: summary of comments for my future reference:

Easier:

• no genders
• resource rich for learning
• simpler tenses

Easy and hard:

• pronunciation (consistent, but accent hard to eliminate)
• grammar (consistent but different)

Harder:

• Kanji (like icons)
• formality

Source: https://twitter.com/ScriptingJapan/status/1673932232036319232

(Sorry if my english is wrong)

Hello, I have been learning japanese on my own for a few months now (Reading Genki, WaniKani, PDFs, etc) . My main goal for now is to reach a good level to use Visual novels (In japanese of course) with Yomichan + Textractor to learn new vocab.

I have been reading about this on the internet and many people says that Visual novels often lack normal vocab or they use unusual vocab.
Is there any Visual novel with formal vocabulary and that you would recommend?

Thanks.

Source: https://twitter.com/kudo_70/status/1447140179504939016

In language school, our Japanese teacher told us that in Japanese writing, the type of stroke that you use is important. When learning Kana or Kanji, we should always take special note of Tome, Harai and Hane.

By now, I am wondering, how important that really is. Are there Kanji that you can only differentiate by the type of stroke? I imagine that it might be important when writing by hand, just because it will look strange.

For those who don't know about the different types of lines, this page explains it quite well.

Source: https://twitter.com/tsudashin/status/1413733451488919555

I recently bought a suit to go to a friend's wedding.

New vocab:

• 生地 cloth, fabric
• 生地感 texture of fabric
• 縮める bring in the sides/waist/legs
• 仕立て tailoring, fitting
• 直線的 linear
• 曲線的 curved (style for broad-shouldered as opposed to 直線的 for skinny guys)
• 既製 off-the-shelf, ready-to-wear (as opposed to パターンオーダー)
• お渡し ready, done

What new vocab have you learned in-context recently?

最近、何かを読みながら「忠実」という言葉に出会ったが、ふりがなはなぜか予想の「ちゅう・じつ」の代わりに「ま・め」だった！辞書になかったから、投稿の記事を見つけた。

記事の纏め：

「水面」と書いて「すいめん」と「みなも」。また、「最中」と書いて「さいちゅう」と「もなか」。 漢字の中には、こんなふうにまったく同じ漢字なのに二つの読み方をするものが少なくありません。 そこでこの記事では、上記のように“二つの読み方がある漢字”をピックアップしてご紹介。あなたはいくつ読めるでしょうか？

@japaneselanguage On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being great and 1 being horrible, how good is Duolingo for learning Japanese?

@japaneselanguage I like how Japanese is simply structured. Especially as a programmer, I have been able to pick up Japanese due to how sentences are structured.

(I don't have a Japanese keyboard.)

watashi wa (
niji ni (
hirugohan o (
tabemasu
)
)
)

Everything can be broken into blocks which is really nice. This is what programming languages do, so this feels very natural to me.

My native language is English, but I am thinking of moving to Japan.

I listen to a lot of podcasts in English, and I've been trying to find good, interesting podcasts in Japanese as well. Audiobooks are also good.

I found すずめの戸締り, but I'd love to hear about other resources that people have found.

I've found that any time I'm interested in a game, looking up let's plays in Japanese has helped me make a lot of connections between the game's contents and Japanese vocabulary.

I'm linking a good example of that with Metroid Dread, which is a game I played last year and I spend a few weeks watching let's plays and reading online content about it in Japanese, mostly because I loved the game, but I also thought that doing so might be a good exercise for intermediate learners as well.

The key to searching for a let's play is to just enter the Japanese name of the game (for example: バイオハザード４ or ダークソウル３）and then adding 実況 which is the keyword here. Any popular game followed by 実況 is likely to yield tons of results, so give it a try if you're into games, and you may learn a lot of vocabulary from it!

Hey all, I barely passed the December 2022 N3 and last month, I went to Japan for the first time and spent two weeks there.

Overall, I was both disappointed and pleased with how far the N3 got me (note I'm talking purely about my skill level -- at no point did I ever show anyone in Japan my N3 certificate lol).

On the one hand, some might say that N3 is enough for anime and conversations with normal people. As someone with a 31/60 on the listening section, this is categorically not true. I never got the chance to, nor do I likely have the ability to, hold a long everyday conversation with anyone in Japan. It's not like I was surprised at my lack of skill by the time I was on the ground in Japan and talking to people, but I did expect to have been able to do so by the time I got an N3 back when I first started studying. So I am a bit sad that that expectation was off.

On the other hand, wow does real immersion make a huge, gigantic difference. When I first landed I had to ask people to repeat themselves slowly two or three times for me to get what they said, and people would often switch to English before I put together what Japanese words (that I already knew) actually corresponded to the sounds I was hearing when they were speaking Japanese earlier. But by the end of the first week, my conversation skill was enough for dining in restaurants, shopping in malls, speaking to hotel staff, and small talk with tour guides 100% in Japanese. It was incredible how comfortable I felt talking about non-trivial upgrade options or specific observation site locations, and it was also incredible how much nicer people treated me when I was speaking Japanese with them vs when my wife would talk first in English. It was absolutely 100% worth it for me to get to this level of skill, and it really made me feel like my work has finally paid off.

To conclude, if you're like me and you grinded almost nothing but Anki all the way to around N3 level, you probably have the same mix of okay vocab/grammar but extremely shitty listening comprehension. If so, I highly recommend greatly increasing the amount of listening practice you do on a daily basis. I'm still not sure what's the best way to study that, but I definitely could have used more of it before my trip. But at the same time, don't despair if you're going on a trip without that. You'll be fine -- trust your subconscious brain and enjoy the huge comprehension gains!