>>33864
Yes and Japanese seems to have more of them and they are also spelt the same(or would be without Kanji), they don't just sound the same or very similar.

>>33801
>in romaji こ is written as ko not co
Wrong, you can write it in whatever way you want, so long as it makes sense phonetically and looks good. See also ニコ動/Nicovideo, 大君/Tycoon, 谷川ニコ/Nico Tanigawa, and of course 遠野/Tohno (instead of Toono or Tōno). There are different schemes for the systematic transliteration of Japanese into English, but they should not be used by learners of Japanese for anything but typing Japanese on a keyboard. Anyone who is serious about learning the language should study the kana and go from there.

>it's irksome that it's paired with what's probably among the jankiest writing systems.
Japanese has the best writing system in the world. It has both phonetic spelling thanks to the Kana, and a offers high reading speeds thanks to Kanji's compact representation of complex meanings. English has neither.
>Given that koreans were able to reform via Hangul, I do wonder why Japan has decided to stick to this.
If you ever get around to learning enough Japanese to actually read books, it'll be obvious why they don't want to dump the Kanji, despite some Europhiles in the Meiji era advocating for it and (((America))) trying to coerce them into it after WW2. Written Japanese without Kanji is ok for playing Pokemon, but anything more complex than that is going to be nearly impossible to read due to all the homophones.

>>33868
>and a offers high reading speeds thanks to Kanji's compact representation of complex meanings
It's certainly more dense, but that might not necessarily translate to quicker reading if the gap which you focus on at any given instant differs in width between the two (with the limiting factor being the brain's processing rate, not the optical field of view).

There haven't been many cross-comparisons between reading speed in languages, but the two I've found [1, 2] do seem to place Chinese slightly above English in terms of reading speed (separated by 1 SD = ~1/5 of the given reading text). I could only find one comparing Japanese and English [2], but interestingly that has JP 1SD lower than English (and about 2SD lower than Chinese). I'm not sure why there's this difference between CN and JP.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19388079909558298?journalCode=ulri19#preview
[2]https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2166061

>>33870
>Reading time (aloud) was measured by stopwatch.
That study is completely irrelevant to my point. The big advantage of Kanji is that you can easily glean a word's its meaning without having to sound it out in your head first.
What's more, spoken Japanese is not a very dense language; it makes up for its low number of phonemes by being more verbose, i.e. it tends to use more syllables than English to express the same concept. Of course saying オオカミのたましい out loud takes a long time, but that doesn't change the fact that the meaning of 狼の魂 can be understood very quickly.

>>33870
Japanese would take a lot longer to read without Kanji. How fast it is compared to other languages isn't so relevant.

Op update: I've finished Genki 1. How is everyone else doing?

>>34051
I couldn't even learn the basic alien letter things so I gave up.

>>34051
Fairly well, much of what I read is starting to fall into place much sooner.

>>34052
That's one of the biggest hurdles. You have to write them a lot over and over again, daily. It takes around a week to get them down solidly. This step is the only time romaji will be useful. Write the kana, then its romaji, over and over again for a few lines of paper.

I'm currently using anki for vocabulary and various guides (Tae Kim, Imabi, Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, Visualizing Japanese Grammar, and Yuko Sensei) for grammar. I feel like I'm doing pretty good so far. Does anybody believe that my course of study is effective? I hear that I should just study kanji alone, however I also hear that that may be a bad idea and to just study vocabulary. What do you guys reccommend?

Yeah, they really did need Kanji. The amount of things that are read as こう is getting ridiculous.

>>34066
I think what really helped me understand the necessity of kanji was seeing an RPG write out an uncommon word with hiragana and scratching my head over what the fuck they meant.

Ive been studying for quite some time now. There has always been much ado about "this method" or "that method", but in reality you should use whatever works best for you, regardless of what the "community" is using. After all it's unreasonable to expect the same method to work for everyone else. I lost too much time with Anki and the "Antimoon" stuff, because at the time every guide said "Do your reps", "Grind Anki", but it never worked for me. This whole AJATT thing doesn't interest me either. What I do is I learn Kanji by grade, as they do in Japan, by writing via an app and then on paper, and write it on a 10x11 sheet with a pencil, then I redo the strokes of the same kanji over the original, but with a color pencil, using 6 different colours for stroke ordering. This leaves me with a sheet containing 110 learned characters and I can see the stroke order just by glancing at it.

I agree partially with you OP. Actually in my country I've seen many people treating even English that way, to the point of want to speaking with the accent of a determinate news broadcast network accent because it's international and others are wrong or just the local accent as well, all with the intention of "going unnoticed that he is not an native speaker"
>If somebody ever sees their face, they'll still know they're not Japanese.
These are my exact thoughts on the situation.
>Is this just a goal anybody has because of how ethnically homogenous Japan is?
I know people who try to do with English, so I don't think it has anything to do with ethnicity, at least it's more likely that you could pull it off in more diverse countries such as Canada.

>>34064
>I feel like I'm doing pretty good so far
Seems to me that it is effective for you.

>>34073
>I learn Kanji by grade, as they do in Japan
I don't know about that. I don't know what methods they actually use(colored pencils?) or if those kanji lists are intended as study material they learn in class, or as bench marks, like "if you're in grade 6, you should at least know this already". I've read somewhere, kanji is "learned" in Japan purely through context, vocab words and such. Japanese people look at how kanji is learned by westerners and are bewildered. Don't know how credible this is though.

I used to learn them on their own in a similar, but less rigorous way to what you do up to grade 4, but I stopped because even if prior kanji knowledge is helpful every once in a while, it seems like many common words have their own kanji which is rare anywhere else. I just learn words now and accept whatever kanji comes with them, passively noticing patterns. There's other things that could be done in that time.

OP update: I've finished genki 2. I'm doing tobira next. How's everybody else doing?

>>34835
Good job OP. I haven't been doing well and I hate myself for it. I need to motivate myself more. I only know like 50< vocab.

>>34835
Good job OP. I haven't been doing well and I hate myself for it. I need to motivate myself more. I only know like 50< vocab.

>>34836
Thanks. Routine is God.

>>34835
I'm slowly going through vocab and kanji. Interestingly I haven't really found a need to focus on grammar explicitly since I feel that I learn better by looking up new grammar in the context where it's used.

I'm suffering a lot with not even three months of anki. Truth is I started to study japanese in college like ten years ago, did it for two years, never made any progress. I still struggle with the most basic shit. Still, I will keep with it or I will die trying. Sometimes I wonder if my brain is suited to learn japanese, maybe it's one of those things you can't do no matter how much you try.

>>34839
How do you deal with idioms and expressions? If I've never seen it before it, I wouldn't know if it's vocabulary or what.
>>34841
Examining your methods and trying something else might be worth a try. I always write the vocab as i'm going through my flashcard. If I can't recall a word, I write it over and over. Maybe some muscle memory is what you're missing.

Post edited on 30th Apr 2020, 4:11am

>>34844
>If I can't recall a word, I write it over and over.

I tried that the other day. I couldn't remember a meaning even while I've been looking at the same word for the last 15 days. I wrote the word and the meaning like 100 times. And 30 seconds later I looked at the word again. I completely forgot the meaning and I confused it with another one. It was incredibly frustrating.

The other day I confused 日 with 月. Basically the first kanjis you learn and I have learned like a decade ago. I confuse き, さ and ち in a daily basis. I mean, it's a mistake you can do while learning hiragana, not something to keep doing ten years later.
Right now I can only trust in my autist willpower and hope someday I will be able to understand things because I assume being just functional it's impossible.

>>34845
Maybe a more multi-sensory approach would be helpful. I almost entirely ignore the audio component of the language since i'm not really interested in it, but maybe focusing more on that would be helpful to you. I hope you keep at it if it's what you want to do.

I do spaced repition like this. If I can't remember the word, I write it for two lines of paper and just move on. At the end of the week, I see which ones I remember and which ones I don't, I then limit what I practive in the set next week to what I didn't remeber. The number I have to go through in a set shrinks like this. I try to reward myself for what I know more than punish what I don't. Also, do you use the vocab you do know for anything? Are you working through a textbook?

Post edited on 30th Apr 2020, 6:04am

>>34846
I mostly do Anki with sound. I worked with textbooks before (minna no nihongo and others), but not really my thing.
What I try to do is kinda the opposite. I forget about what gives me a headache to learn and keep going. I know I will be confusing 開 and 閉 (or anything similar) forever so I don't think I should focus on that but just keep going. The idea is to be able to read and have a general idea of the meaning of things, even by using context. Problem is the wholes in your knowledge can be really demoralizing.

What bothers me more about japanese is their phonetic simplicity; I see the syllabes as a really limited number of puzzle pieces that are just slightly different from each other and are used to make an absurd amount of combinations so it's really hard to remember anything, you're studying 15 new words everyday that are too similar if not identical to the 15 words you studied yesterday.
And Kanji can be pretty much the same.

>>34847
>it's really hard to remember anything, you're studying 15 new words everyday that are too similar if not identical to the 15 words you studied yesterday.
And Kanji can be pretty much the same.
This may be true, but I prefer to look at it by ignoring similarities a bit and focusing more on the differences, what makes a word unique. These differences may be minute, but when everything is really different from each other and unique in many ways, the total amount of information you have to learn is larger. In hs I took German classes and it was a far less pleasant learning experience for me personally. They conjugate everything and there's tons of exceptions to rules.

>>34848
For the phono-semantic ones you can sort of take advantage of their similarity by knowing that they will sound similar. Although this only really helps if you learned vocab (in e.g. hiragana) before the kanji, since then you can associate the sound to the kanji (and thereby derive the meaning from its association with vocab) rather than trying to remember the meaning directly.

>>34844
Yeah those are tricky. I remember seeing "~ka mo shiranai" and being confused trying to make sense of that literally.

>>34849
>Although this only really helps if you learned vocab (in e.g. hiragana) before the kanji
I learn everything at the same time: how it's written with kanji, how it's sounded with hiragana, and the meaning. I forgot to mention that. In the two lines that I write a vocab word, I write those three in order over and over again. I shorten the english meaning to four letters to conserve paper space and say it in my head.

Post edited on 30th Apr 2020, 11:08am

>>34850
This is what an average piece of practice paper looks like for me(not my neatest handwriting).

So, how do you guys read the "fake furigana" thing? Like they have a a word written just normally, but above the Kanji they have a "joke" reading in kana. Like the reading says puri-zun or chiruden or something, but the Kanji says kangoku or kodomo. I've seen this in scenarios that are not limited by english-japanese word play, like the reading gives omocha but it should be dorei.

>>34937
I think the furigana in those cases might provide additional context, either in the sense of a clarification, word-play, or doublespeak. Sort of the equivalent of doing something like "plaything (read: slave)" or "plaything slave"

Post edited on 8th May 2020, 2:26pm

What's been really annoying me for the longest time is 月, or rather many of the words that use it. I keep getting gatsu and getsu mixed and getting the word wrong and this has been going for a while now... I feel so stupid.

>>34940
Gatsu getsu no difference.
Just don't call madotsuki madogatsu and you're fine.
t. 窓月

>>35074
There's definetly cases where がつ is preferred over げつ and vice versa, like ６月（ろくがつ） and 月曜日（げつようび）. Also, Madotsuki's name is 窓付き, not 窓月.

>>35075
new years eve is お正月 - おしょうがつ - oh shyo ga tsu. the biggest pain in the ass for me is the vowel extension う. If you forget one, the ime wont know what you want.

The fact that からだ can be written as 体, 身体 or 躰 is confusing me.

Lately, I've been seeing the expression　につき　fairly often. More precisely a particular instance of につき: 凶暴につき. I searched around:
につき is defined as:
because of, on account of
regarding
per, apiece
The regarding sense I'm already used to, but the other ones don't seem to fit in the context. There is also a very famous japanese movie その男、凶暴につき I never watched it, but maybe it comes from there? When I saw the expression in anime, it got translated as is cruel, but that doesn't explain anything.

>>37006
What's the context? A quick survey of Yahoo!知恵袋 seems to suggest that most people interpret 「～につき」 in 「その〇〇、～につき」 as synonymous with 「～だから」「～なので」「～のため」.

>>37015
It's from initial d second stage. The 8th episode is called そのクルマ 凶暴につき .

Does anyone know a site that list jap onomatopoeia?

I spent a long time going through anki core 2k deck and reading through tae kim grammar guide and expected that I would at least understand the basics of the language by now.

So I started reading ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石,
and needless to say I have no idea wtf I'm reading. I can recognize many individual vocab words but cannot put a sentence together. Is reading through novels without understanding anything really the key to getting good? That's what AJATTers say on youtube. I can't understand shit

>>37738
Reading something shorter like news articles would probably be better. NHK Easy News should definitely be possible

I've been studying japanese by listening to songs and trying to make out the lyrics and then reading the lyrics afterwards, to fully understand everything. However I've come across a bump in the road. I've watched this anime Genma Taisen Shinwa Zen'ya no Shou, and listened to its OP and ED songs. I've found some lyrics to the OP but I can't find the lyrics to the ED, and there are some words I can't make out, especially the first word she says in the song, in both the ED and the Full version. The song name is 月のシズク by 桂亜沙美. The full version of the song and in the link is all the episodes of the anime on MEGA. Can someone give this song a listen and tell me the first word she says?
Link to the episodes: https://mega.nz/folder/BoQXEK4C#k3MRIk2m0rVGjaiuNeU5QQ/folder/QsIBiaTK
Link to the full version song: https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=GJ9F35AQoZk

>>38460
I'm not exactly sure but I think it's ぎこちない.

>ぎこちない.
Ah, that makes sense, I kept hearing it as きこちない, thanks.

>>38460
Does this work? Are the lyrics not hard to parse nonsense?

>>38464
Yes, it works. I find it much more useful than using books or anime. These kind of works are very narrative drive, which requires an extra effort to keep up with, also if you miss something a lot of the fun is gone, and it piles up so in the end you can't keep up anymore. Music on the other hand, can be enjoyed without even having the slightest idea of what the singer is saying. It also works on a subconscious level, whereupon sometimes you will be doing another thing completely unrelated and remember a song, and it plays in your head pleasantly, even then you're listening to it and learning. The only setbacks of doing this is that sometimes you can't make out the sounds, but even then there's lyrics online. Music without easily searchable lyrics like this one is very hard to come by. But I'm still a beginner, so take this with a grain of salt.

>>38466
Thanks. I had considered doing the same but came up with excuses. I'll go ahead an try.

>>38466
I concur that this works well. The most important part of learning a language is practice, and songs naturally get stuck in your head so you're basically practicing it throughout the day. What I do is pick an OP/ED I really like (strong emotional connection makes this more effective), read through the lyrics once in kana (or romaji) form so you can actually lex the individual words, try to interpret as much as I can based on existing knowledge, read the English lyrics, listen again, and repeat the last two steps over the course of a few weeks.

If you come across a song without English translation, that's also an opportunity for you to practice translation skills and contribute back to the community. Song translations are a great stress test of your JP skills since they will often use more obscure (sometimes archaic) grammatical patterns, word play, and will leave a lot of stuff up to interpretation.

>>38474
>If you come across a song without English translation, that's also an opportunity for you to practice translation skills and contribute back to the community.
I've been thinking about this. Is there any database of japanese songs/anime songs? Where would be the best place to upload it? Ideally it would have the original lyrics and the translation in one page for each song. I've found a few songs that don't have easily searchable lyrics and that I would like to translate but I'm still thinking were to send it to.
Also, in the aforementioned case of 月のシズク there wasn't even the transcription of the song on the internet. The only option to get an "official" transcription would be to buy the out of print CD from Yahoo Auctions or something, but I'd say that's a lot of effort and money and logistics. Probably would need a middleman to ship it back to me as well. The reason I'm bringing this up is because although we had a similar discussion on the "State of Fansubbing" thread, the specific topic of what I've come to call "Linguistic Architecture" - I'm sure there's already a word for this but I can't find it - never came up. To explain what I mean by this let me tell how I've came across this idea. I was watching Speed Grapher and there was an episode - the translation of the episode was something on the lines of "A disgrace of a mother" - whose title contained the word ハハ. Not 母, but ハハ. The katakana version did not convey the usual familiar and caring tones of the kanji version, because of this it was used. Now, if I am to transcribe a song without the original lyrics I may used kanji instead of kana, or kana instead of kanji. The fact is, this is an actual concern I have if I am to submit a song's lyrics. It would not be present in other languages, but in japanese this is a thing.

>>38621
Yeah often times I've used even things such as whitespace to get an idea for how to interpret lyrics.

As for places to upload, I've been lucky enough to find wikia pages for the songs I TL'd, so I just posted it there. There is "animelyrics.com" which I've run across a lot when searching for song translations, which despite the name seems to be general enough to include doujin, j-pop, etc. so you could try there (they also appear to be a legitimate community, as opposed to the various fly-by-night copy paste jobs); and they have full support for original kanji/romaji transliteration/english translation pages.

Although amusingly despite the fact that they require you to pass a JP language test before uploading translations, some of the English translations there have been less than stellar (which I guess is because crafting good translations is itself an art, especially so for song lyrics).

Post edited on 13th Aug 2021, 9:03pm