I started learning a few weeks ago. I've been translating Girls und Panzer 4 comas on Gelbooru(because nobody else had) and I've been using WaniKani. I'm still not good enough to start reading manga, it takes a while to translate even 4 comas and often I am not happy with my translations.

>>33796
Op here, I'd suggest you learn the radicals(with the original meaning) and learn how to write them correctly. I don't think little things like the kanji for left and right starting with a different strokes are important, but learning the general patterns was helpful to me. I don't think counting strokes is important either. Just get the motion down. The way you draw a box for example is totally different from what you might do intuitively. The way the thread kanji is written works very well while what you'll try by looking at it without knowing anything looks like shit.

Do Kanji straight from the start(right after kana). When learning vocab, learn them with their kanji. Going back and learning the kanji which goes with old vocab is a waste of time. It's too early for you to be doing translation. It's just too early.

Post edited on 7th Dec 2019, 8:23pm

>>33799
>Do Kanji straight from the start(right after kana). When learning vocab, learn them with their kanji. Going back and learning the kanji which goes with old vocab is a waste of time. It's too early for you to be doing translation. It's just too early.

Yes, that's what I have been using WaniKani for, my plan is to learn Kanji through that(plus it teaches some vocabulary) and vocabulary through 4 comas, these 4 comas have furigana so it's not 100% necessary to actually now Kanji to read them.

>>33800
>4 comas
It's 4 koma (in romaji こ is written as ko not co)

>>33799
>learn the radicals(with the original meaning)
This is good advice. If you're serious about doing kanji and don't already have exposure to it from Chinese, then focusing on kanji alongside or before vocabulary is helpful so that your brain can recognizes the symbols as something other than amorphous squiggles. Breaking it down by radical is helpful in giving them structure. It should be noted that wanikani makes up their own meanings for radicals, and obscures the structure of some kanji (many kanji are made up of phono-semantic components such as 仲 made up of a "person" radical 亻and the kanji 中 which gives it the reading).

I've been doing kanji for some time and probably the most annoying part is all the different readings. At least in Chinese it's supposedly consistent, but with kanji you have *multiple* different ON/KN readings. Given that the grammar is relatively straightforward so the spoken aspects can be acquired relatively easy (barring accent issues), it's irksome that it's paired with what's probably among the jankiest writing systems. Given that koreans were able to reform via Hangul, I do wonder why Japan has decided to stick to this.

>>33801
>the most annoying part is all the different readings.
I've been completely ignoring the readings when learning them. My thinking is, if I know the word and how it's pronounced, I know the word; if I don't know that word, I don't know it. Learning how actual words are written and pronounced at the same time seems way less torturous than learning every possible reading of kanji, and more efficient. If there are clear patterns, like with 学, i'll pick up on them.

I don't like how they change the meaning of radicals. It makes learning the meaning of kanji a bit more difficult and maybe removes some interesting cultural context. The village radical and one of the fire radical coming together to form the black kanji sort of makes sense. It doesn't if you learned the village radical means computer because it looks a little bit like one.

>Given that koreans were able to reform via Hangul, I do wonder why Japan has decided to stick to this.
Once you know them, kanji makes reading a hell of a lot faster. There's also the matter of cultural preservation and accessibility. The average Korean can't read a 1970s newspaper from their own country. Imagine them trying to read a book from that era. Their language also has the same problem with homophones(maybe a bit less), which has caused confusion and even pretty bad infrastructure damage.

Korea has always had a struggle with literacy rates, yet despite having a more complex written language now, Japan's literacy rate is one of the highest in the world. Plus Kanji is good for the brain.

Post edited on 7th Dec 2019, 10:06pm

More info on Hangul only vs mixed script.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190401182600/https://kuiwon.wordpress.com/articles/

Post edited on 7th Dec 2019, 10:11pm

>>33801
>own meanings for radicals, and obscures the structure of some kanji

True, their mnemonics are often not helpful either but I try to ignore them anyway.

I find the different readings to be quite interesting etymologically, but yes they are annoying.

I've been learning for about 1-2 years now, I forget when I started but I haven't had to use translations or subtitles for some time now.
>AJATT
AJATT is weird and culty, which is why Matt (the american guy in the video) made MIA, which is what I've been following to very high success as of now.
One of the things you should know about MIA is that he's not just outlining it so you can be "fluent". The end goal of MIA is to be native level, i.e. you're not just speaking in a way people can 'understand' you but also in the way they'd speak themselves. Also, the point of it isn't to not have an accent, but precisely TO have an accent: an accent natives would have, that doesn't sound awkward. To this extent, studying pitch accent (which isn't that hard actually), and copying native speakers to correct any mistakes in your pronunciation is paramount.
The guy's aware total mastery isn't for everyone, or you don't have 10 hours of your life to dedicate to this daily, which is precisely why MIA was made to be extremely flexible to people's needs and schedules. As far as I'm aware he also wants it to avoid "cult status" as much as possible. I'd recommend checking out the website, even if you're not interested in really precise speech corrections there's tools for making Anki better and methods to improve listening comprehension.
>JLPT
I took a sample quiz a few days ago. It's literally just a reading quiz with added listening parts. Don't bother 'studying' for it.
>Kanji
The first big goal in reading comprehension is learning to see kanji as characters rather than little squiggly lines that mean jack shit. I admit I'm not 100% sure what the best way to do this is, or even how I got past this barrier, perhaps grinding a deck in Anki could help. Other than that:
1. Don't bother "learning readings". Just learn how words are pronounced and eventually the readings of kanji will come naturally to you.
2. It's very possible to be able to fluently read a passage of Japanese and be unable to properly write any of the kanji from it from memory. In the same way, you can learn to write a kanji but be unable to read the word its in. Reading it and writing it are two different things.
3. Don't worry about "how much kanji you know".

Also, don't bother with any language learning community. You'll just try and compare yourself to your "peers" when you should only be focusing on your goals. I don't even bother with MIA's "community" despite following parts of the system.

>>33805
>It's very possible to be able to fluently read a passage of Japanese and be unable to properly write any of the kanji from it from memory
Even natives experience this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

>>33805
>lso, the point of it isn't to not have an accent, but precisely TO have an accent: an accent natives would have, that doesn't sound awkward. To this extent, studying pitch accent (which isn't that hard actually), and copying native speakers to correct any mistakes in your pronunciation is paramount.
Why is this something which people want to obtain? If your pronounciation is horrible and incomprehensible, then yeah, the problem is obvious, but if you're talking to somebody on the phone, why is trying to make sure they can't tell you're a foreigner important? If you listen to audio regularly, you'll probably unconciously start to imitate what you hear, so while not as effective as active study, your pitch accent will still improve. Again, basically nobody approaches English like this. I guess if you want to live there I can get it.

>>33808
One must aim for the best.
I'm lucky with japanese because my native language means I can pronounce perfect japanese almost without any effort. Sadly I can't remember kanji for shit.

>>33808
>Why is this something which people want to obtain? If your pronounciation is horrible and incomprehensible, then yeah, the problem is obvious, but if you're talking to somebody on the phone, why is trying to make sure they can't tell you're a foreigner important?
It's partially a perfectionist thing. The big difference between "native level" and "fluency" is sounding like a native. People who strive for native level want to be as damn well good at speaking Japanese as they can possibly be.
>If you listen to audio regularly, you'll probably unconciously start to imitate what you hear, so while not as effective as active study, your pitch accent will still improve.
That's partially true. Listening a lot will help you naturally pick up on the pronunciation of words, how sentences are formed, and builds up listening comprehension in general. The specific problem with pitch accent is that it requires a bit more training to properly hear, since most languages don't have that sort of accent. With the use of an Anki addon this becomes really trivial and easy to do. Once you really do start hearing pitch accent, you'll realize 99% of everything you hear is said with the proper pitch, so deviations from that would definitely sound weird to a native.
>Again, basically nobody approaches English like this. I guess if you want to live there I can get it.
Most people don't approach language like this in general. Going out of your way to have natives correct the very small issues in your speech that couldn't be corrected through listening, correcting your own speech through copying a native, and whatever study you did on speech is something that's done by people who want to eliminate as many mistakes in their pronunciation as possible. It's basically already done by people who are near-perfect and probably wouldn't "need" it to be understood.
Also, English is a pretty widespread language that's spoken by several different countries, so the "proper" pronunciation can change depending on where you live.

Although if you're just out for fluent literacy then there's obviously not much point in worrying about your pronunciation and you can decide whether or not to even bother with it later.

>>33810
What language is that?

>>33813
Catalan.

>>33794
You'll achieve your goal if you just have the persistence to stick to it. The most important thing is that your study plan is reasonable enough for you to commit to it on a daily basis. Patient effort is what will pay off, impatient people are forever stuck in the loop of overdoing it and giving up (or doing nothing at all while daydreaming about studying 10 hours a day).

>>33819
For example: if you memorize 2 kanji every day (and do regular reviews), you're finished with jouyou kanji in 3 years. It may sound like a long time but some of us have spent 10-15 years wanting to learn Japanese but never making any real progress. I'd even advise starting at 1 kanji per day pace and raising the amount only when you're 100% sure that you'll stick to it.

>>33820
I haven't practiced kanji specifically in a while, but "at my peak" I knew up to grade 4, which is around 600. Just the meaning and how to write them though, not the pronounciation. It helps me a bit with learning vocab. I'm not sure if learning kanji on their own is worth the effort or not though. I learned them in sets of ten. I would write each one for three lines of paper, then go through them and see which ones I still remembered. I'd write the ones I forgot for another three lines. Then I'd move on to the next ten and then review all of them back from the start and so on. I learned about 20 to 50 a day that way. Some spaced repition was involved too week by week. Tedious, very tedious.

Post edited on 12th Dec 2019, 11:16am

>>33820
>if you memorize 2 kanji every day
That's what I've been doing. However since my focus is more towards spoken Japanese rather than written (with the intent of translating hitherto obscure/untranslated OP/ED and accompanying B-Side tracks), in addition to the 2 kanji per day I'm also going through ~20 vocab words a day (learning in hiragana). I'm using an Anki deck based on the Wanikani vocab, which is nice because it breaks down the words by its component kanji, and even though learning in this way (doing most of vocab before kanji) seems backwards at first, I think it's been working nicely because when it's time to learn a new kanji I've usually seen it in vocab words before so I can make the connection and have something to remember it by.

The one downside is that this doesn't build up the visual link between string of kanji -> vocab word, so I will have to go through the entire vocab deck in kanji when I'm done learning the individual kanji. I consider this an acceptable tradeoff though since reading isn't my main focus and I think the second pass through will be much quicker since I will know both the pronunciation and meaning already.

>>33821
>I'm not sure if learning kanji on their own is worth the effort or not though.
I'm not interested in being able to produce kanji on paper from memory, so I hardly spend any time writing down kanji - recently I haven't bothered at all. That removes much of the time and effort and it's still really helpful in improving kanji recognition. This page is great for reviewing: https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/horon/kanji/ichiranhyou.html

>>33823
>>33822
I'm too busy at the moment and lacking energy to focus on kanji study. So I just generalize it.
My daily dose of an NHK and/or Anibu article, as well as the YT channel スーツ 交通 and the live morning news and weather forecast https://aqstream.com/jp present a fun and diversified, less cramming way of learning new vocab and a few kanji. Some stick at first try. Others stick once you've seen them twice or thrice. It's also a great way to expose yourself to more japanese and feel more comfortable with the language.

>>33806
Yeah, this is definitely my problem.

Can't write kanji for the life of me, but once I see it, I know the character meaning.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that Japanese mainly use technology (mobile keyboards, word processing software) instead of actually writing.

>>33801
>Given that koreans were able to reform via Hangul, I do wonder why Japan has decided to stick to this.

I have a theory that it's largely based on how similar many Japanese words are to each other, yes English has this to some extend but it does not seem to have it to the same degree so having a hieroglyph represent a word could give it meaning where it would otherwise be confused with something else. I think that is also why the Japanese language is so context based in general.

>>33863
>it's largely based on how similar many Japanese words are to each other
Not sure if you know this, but that's roughly what a homophone is.

>>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

Op here. It sure has been a long time since I made this thread. Don't exactly have great or inspiring news, but might as well go over what's happened.

I "got through" roughly a third of Tobira. Didn't engage with it much. I also bought the "A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" series and read about half of the beginner volume.

Took a beginner class in Japanese which I breezed through, and then I pretty much stopped my studying except the occasional half-hearted flashcard session that barely scratched my built up pile.

Recently, I had to reinstall windows and I forgot to back up my card data. So I started from scratch and have kept up with it for the past few weeks.

Big difference is while before I had English on the front, Japanese on the back, the cards I'm using now are the other way around. This has made using them a lot less painful. Considering my primary goal is reading and not producing, it also makes more sense.

I've always used Mochi as my flashcard program. It has less features than Anki, but I strongly prefer its ui, and it can import Anki decks. Here is my progress for February(I've been using the Core 2k/6k Tae Kim Vocabulary deck). I'll post a screenshot like this every month now.

I'm gonna try reading now on a regular basis. I can still at least mostly understand the N5 stuff here https://yomujp.com/n5/
I think I'm done with textbooks if I can help it. I'm not trying to pass a test.

>>33794
>I wanna read something like Saya no Uta smoothly and with crystal clear understanding, really enjoy myself. How difficult would that be?
The garbled speech in the opening scene of Saya no Uta seems to pose some difficulty even to native speakers, judging from the few gameplay commentary videos I've watched. While they could pick up the gist of what was being said at least some of the time, none seemed to have crystal clear understanding.
If you pay attention to the context and listen closely to the audio while trying to read along, you can just barely make out what's being said in some cases. For example:
>「ダカラ、屋内ジャ愧Tテサ、屋苞ｧ+けーと。凍ッタ塘1Dpデ滑レルトコロ」
>「だから、屋内じゃなくてさ、屋外スケート。凍った湖の上で滑れるところ」
I believe being familiar with standard pitch accent can also help with making out the words.
By the way, this line is a lot more intelligible than its English version counterpart, which is literally just:
>"TYK#^t3m4T34,Rg4534j&lg45uje@@@"

March 2022 report. The rules I follow are, I only add up to 20 new cards in a day, I only add cards if the number due that day is less than 100.

Post edited on 15th Mar 2022, 11:54am

The japanese use "=" for "-".

It's been months since I first commented here about using music lyrics to learn japanese. All these months passed by and I only feel more despondent. I changed my mind completely on the music learning thing. In the end, lyrics don't really have a concise logic tying the words together, so they are actually not even close to being the ideal medium for learning japanese. I tried to read untranslated manga, on a website called sukima.me. I am absolutely frustrated. Many times I understand every word on a phrase but can't make sense of what's being said, even the conjunctions and the particles, but the overall idea goes over my head. This is the most infuriating thing ever. It just goes on and on in a never-ending cycle of being disappointed towards myself. I try reading a new manga series, using a dictionary. Until just a few pages in, I reach a page where I understand every word being said, but can't make sense of it. I started learning japanese in 2015-2016 it's been 7-6 years, and fucking nothing. I can't fucking read a single chapter of a manga without getting stuck at a fucking simple sentence. I try another manga, the cycle repeats itself, sometimes while using a dictionary every single page, I made it to chapter 3 or 4, then it happens again. Not to mention the fucking exhaustion of doing this. I read 20 pages of manga, and it feels like I read 100 pages of a normal book. I sincerely don't know where to go from this. Will it be 8, 9 years, and I will still be failing at the same things? A child born when I first started learning is already 6 or 7 years old, and I still can't speak japanese for fuck's sake.

>>39451
I could read manga just fine 5 years in, but what matters is how many hours you're putting into it everyday. If you're studying just an hour a day or so, then even if you're doing it for many years it doesn't amount to much. I was putting at least 6+ hours to it everyday religiously until fairly recently and I had many months I would do absolutely nothing else with my day but take a shower and read manga. Even with all that effort, it's a very slow and difficult process indeed.

Reading A LOT really is all it takes to be able to read well though, you can rest assured about that. If you can't deal with frustration very well, then I suggest you pick a manga that has a translation available and put them side by side. That way you can quickly verify the general meaning of the sentence, understand it and move on. I do that for novels sometimes. It helps a lot. I never mind getting stuck though but I'm particularly pacient.

Just to give you an idea of the amount of stuff I had to read before I could read manga well (I kept a log) here are the titles I read every single volume of at least once, many of these I read twice:
Nangoku Shounen Papuwa-kun (7vol), Hanamote Katare (13vol), Blame! (10vol), Saikyou Densetsu Kurosawa (11vol), Capricorn (5vol), SentoMan (3vol), Doraemon (45vol), Jigoku Shoujo (9vol), Itazura na Kiss (23vol), Hoshi no Kirby (25vol), Kuragehime (17vol), Cardcaptor Sakura (12vol), Gugure! Kokkuri-san (12vol), Gakuen Alice (31vol), Rurouni Kenshin (28vol), Read or Die (4vol), Rozen Maiden (8vol), Kingyo Chuuihou (8vol), Mizuiro Jidai (7vol), Chobits (8vol), Super Mario (43vol), Fruit Basket (23vol), Chii’s Sweet Home (12vol), Takamare! Takamaru (17vol), Urusei Yatsura (34vol), Sumire 17sai (2vol), Dragonball (42vol), Angel Densetsu (15vol).
Those are the ones I managed to finish but I read a good amount of volumes from several other titles I either didn't like or it was too hard for me at the time that's not on the list.

By the things you described I think you're on the right path, all you need to do is to understand your frustration is only going to work against you. There's no need to be frustrated, it's not a race, you're not losing anything by getting stuck or not understanding something, as long as you're reading Japanese you're on the right path towards your goal, that's all it matters.

>>39451
>A child born when I first started learning is already 6 or 7 years old, and I still can't speak japanese for fuck's sake.
A child is in "learning" mode 24/7: in complete immersion. The only advantage you have as an adult is that you have already learnt the embedding/abstractions for concepts and so can skip that phase, but that probably doesn't buy you much.

>I changed my mind completely on the music learning thing.
I think song lyrics can work, but you shouldn't only rely on song lyrics. The benefit of lyrics is that they will stay in your mind easier, and you'll get exposure to more diverse/varied style than you would reading prose.

>>39454
>Super Mario (43vol)
Where were you able to find scans for all 43 volumes? The upload I found is missing Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World #7, and Super Mario 64 #5. There also appears to be several chapters that aren't included in the volumes. Were you able to find those too?
>as long as you're reading Japanese you're on the right path towards your goal, that's all it matters.
What about listening comprehension? I would think that most learners here also want to understand the lines spoken in anime without having to rely on translations, and Japanese subtitles can be difficult to obtain. From my experience, listening feels like a separate skill that needs to be honed in addition to reading, especially in cases where the speech is not clearly enunciated.

>>39459
You got it from the same place I did apparently, because vol12 and vol40 are indeed missing and they're the ones you mentioned. Do you care about Mario or the artist? You can read many of Mr. Motoyama's work for free on https://www.mangaz.com/authors/detail/1731. He's a history buff, much of his output is about old Japan. I vaguely remember reading him saying his family comes from petty nobility or something and he even owns a real samurai sword handed down to him through generations. I wish I could find that info again but I can't find it now.

And yes, listening is more or less a separate skill. The anon I responded to was complaining about not being able to read manga, and for that reading more manga is the best way to improve. If anime is the thing you care about the most, then of course watching tons of it is the path to improve. I would begin with watching the entire animelon's catalogue several times. In fact I've watched probably over 1k hours of anime there and I don't even like anime that much. I lost count of the times I watched Kuragehime and Rozen Maiden in there, those are my favorites.

>>39460
Thanks for the tips.

Added another rule that I'd add one new card every day no matter what.

Post edited on 15th Apr 2022, 5:35pm

To any anon who successfully learned Japanese enough to comfortably play VN’s, read light novels, and understand raw anime, was it worth it in the end and how long (in 1000s of hours) did it take to get good?

>>39482
I have a hard time with listening some of the more complex stuff because I don't care at all for anime (I just care for literature and manga really) but as far as reading goes I'm pretty much fluent I guess. Yes it was worth it. Took me about 7 years, at least 3 hours a day every day, missing virtually no days, so I would say about 7k to 8k hours.

I broke the thousand threshold. Remembering is easier after learning even basic grammar since many of the "words" are derivations produced from simple rules.

Does anybody have any experience with the attached pdf? Or can at least somebody who is capable of moonrunes tell me if it is any good?

>>39816
Did you memorize the kana yet? That's the first step. The booklet is fine. It takes a very long time to learn Japanese. Looking in retrospect, the most important aspect of the material you use when first starting out is its ability to keep you going. I guarantee if you study long enough, as the years go by you'll end up using pretty much every method out there. I've used these types of books, too. And Anki and all the Genko books. I memorized Kanji by themselves, in words not writing them down, then writing them down, then writing whole sentences down. I've used pretty much every method under the sun, from books to apps. As long as you keep pushing every single day, you'll get there. Took me about about 7 or 8 years to be really proficient at Japanese.

I see a lot of people getting obsessed with the 'right method' to use, please don't fall for this trap. Don't take hours tweaking your Anki cards or trying to find the perfect grammar book, I see lots of people making this mistake, they get lost and never learn a thing. Don't worry about that, the important thing is to keep learning Japanese. Try that one, work really hard with it, try to reach the end of it, take it seriously. If you burnout or the material is not working out for you, try using Anki, try other books for a while and then come back to it. The most important thing is not to give up. Sounds cheesy but it's the truth. As soon as you memorize the kana, pick up native material. Yotsuba is a good start for that.

That's my advice. The first year is the hardest because you won't understand anything and it can get incredibly frustrating, so don't give up and don't blame on the material you're using, it's not the book's or the software's fault, learning Japanese is just that hard. Develop a schedule and grind grind grind grind, at some point it will be fun and then it doesn't feel like studying anymore. Feels really rewarding. So yeah, do this book, it's fine. Memorize the kana as quickly as possible along with it and as a dessert, struggle through a chapter or two of Yotsuba. Then the next day you do the same thing, same with the day after that. As months and years go by you'll get better.

>>39818
This is a good post. Also note that on learning grammar, there's two approaches you can take: one is to study grammar in depth, the other is to learn by pattern matching via exposure to sentences and text. I think usually people will use a mix of both: if you do only the former, you won't get enough exposure to recognizing things "in real use", and if you do only the latter, you may not have enough exposure to rarer/odder usages of things.

For the former, it's best if you find resources that are closer to linguistic resources than "learn japanese" books, since the latter are often incomplete. Take the infamous "wa vs. ga" thing (which IMO is a bit overrated for beginners anyway, you'll get the meaning all the same, the only difference is nuance). There have been multiple research papers written on this (in English) that you can read through, and this will be much better than any forum post or textbook explanation you come up with. This by itself can help "bootstrap" knowledge, but of course you don't want to be sitting there trying to manually "parse" sentences, you want it to become instinctual, and the only way to do that is through exposure so you can internalize things subconsciously.

>>39818
I didn't, I haven't done anything yet.
Can you recommend something for the kana? I assume first the kana, then the pdf, afterwards the kanji? Anyway thank you for your post, this gave me a few ideas regarding that matter, also thank you to >>39819

>>39820
Hey anon, memorizing the kana is pretty straightforward. You do it exactly like you did with the abc all those years ago. Since you're going with that NHK book, here's their syllabary to go along with it.
https://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/syllabary/hiragana_english.pdf
https://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/syllabary/katakana_english.pdf
You can also find cute looking hiragana and katakana charts to have on your wallpaper or to print it out so you can look at it periodically, which is nice. I really liked the ones like pic related, with words starting with each syllable at the bottom and pictures to go along with it.
Go for the hiragana first, then the katakana. Write them down over and over again. That's how the Japanese do it and that's how I did it, too. Let that muscle memory help you out. Pay attention to the stroke order, this is important because kanji also has a stroke order and that helps you memorize them a lot faster. Put as much time to it as you possibly can. It takes a week or two to go through them all but it takes a month or more to be able to read more comfortably. You can already start with your book if you want, and take a look at Yotsuba as well, but your primary goal should be to memorize the kana, that's the most important thing att.

>>39823
Thank you for your kindness, anon.

>>39816
I can recommend these 3 sites:
>https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/learn/kana.html
>https://www.imabi.net/
>https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

>>39820
Don't worry about being stuck with a few kana(probably katakana) in the first week(s) when instead you can learn the first simple kanji in the meantime. As your studies progress, you may find relief in the discovery that kana descend from kanji, like に from 仁 or せ from 世. But there will be some dozens more of phonetical elements in writing, コ　for some kanji containing 古, ユ　for some kanji containing 俞.

Can someone confirm whether this is an appropriate, if not awkward, reading?
「までも魔術の修行をろく付けてくれないいいかげんな師に痺れを切らしたメリアは」 -> Meria, who became impatient with her careless master going so far as to not give her any decent magical practice.
I'm assuming ろく is being used as an adverb, that までも is there for expressing the extent, and 付けてくれ, putting aside the negation, means giving assignments.
Reading is both a fun and frustrating puzzle.

Sorry, it should be「いつまでも魔術の修行をろく付けてくれないいいかげんな師に痺れを切らしたメリアは」 -> Meria, who became impatient with her careless master never giving her any decent magical practice.

>>40079
That sounds ok to me. I'm not any good, but this is how I parsed it

((itsu made mo) ((majutsu no shugyō wo ro ku tsuketekurenai) (īkagen na shi))) ni (shibire wo kirashita) meria wa

Maybe if you want to make it sound poetic: Maria, who had grown impatient of her master's negligence in providing magical training

After a 3 month "break" I've gotten back into flashcards and have added about 100 more cards.

>>40174
Thanks for the feedback, and your rephrasing sounds a lot more natural.
I'm still confused about the grammatical role of ろく: it seems to be acting as an adverb, but jisho.org, at least, doesn't classify it as such.

>>40207
I think it's roku ni, with the ni being an implied/omitted particle. 碌に.

>>40208
I'm a massive idiot for noticing this. Given how commonplace it is to elide stuff in Japanese, this makes sense.
Really appreciate it!

>>40209
Oops, that should be, "for not noticing."

Hello, I'm back again with another request for verification.
The sentence that's giving me trouble is this one: 「きついと思ったら途中で家に戻ったり村で道具の準備をしながら進んでいったほうがいいわね・・。」. I'm reading it as "If I think it's hard, I should go at my own pace, while returning home on the way or gathering provisions in the village." (Or maybe it's, "I had better go at my own pace, while returning home on my way or gathering provisions in the village if I think things are difficult.")
The primary thing that's tripping me up is the usage, I assume, the stem of する, i.e. 「し」. That and the usage of 「進んで」, which I'm interpreting as "at my own pace."
Any help would be appreciated!

>>40222
Again I'm not any good, but here's my parsing:

(kitsui to omottara) (tochū de (ie ni modottari) (mura de dōgu no junbi wo shinagara susundeitta hō)) ga ī wa ne...

And my attempted translation: "Even if it's difficult, it's probably best if I stop back at the house and gather provisions from the village en route"

shinagara is indeed "suru[noun(~i) form] + nagara", which is used to great effect in the following poetic song line:

>koko ni iru koto ga kioku-shi-kirenai kiseki ni naru yo
>Being here is a miracle that cannot fully be remembered

which is [kioku suru] + ~kirenai

As for susunde, I just thought it's te-form of susume but apparently it's also an adverb in it's own right. They're basically the same functionally and meaning-wise though, so probably not worth distinguishing between the two. The impression I got was something along the lines of "go ahead and do". Dictionary also has a meaning of willingly/voluntarily which I guess I can see and isn't incompatible with the other. I'm not sure if "at my own pace" is the correct english equivalent, since to me that has the implication of leisurely doing X which doesn't seem to be connoted by "susunde".

This started as a joke, but I decided to go ahead and actually make it. Japanese written in latin script to be more consistent with English pronouciation than romaji is.

>>40226
>Again I'm not any good
Even so, you're clearly further along than I, and at the very least, since I'm prone to tunnel vision, another person's perspective is helpful.

>(kitsui to omottara) (tochū de (ie ni modottari) (mura de dōgu no junbi wo shinagara susundeitta hō)) ga ī wa ne...
So, because 「戻る」 is in たり-form, and thus adjoining the subsequent clause, "tochū de" works with the adjoined clause and not just "returning home," correct?

>"Even if it's difficult, it's probably best if I stop back at the house and gather provisions from the village en route"
Given the context, this certainly seems more accurate. Though might you tell me why you inserted "Even" and "probably?"

>koko ni iru koto ga kioku-shi-kirenai kiseki ni naru yo
So given this, then「ながら」applies to 「し」(doing) and not「進んでいったほう」? Frankly, the usage of 「ながら」confuses me. The best I do is, "The course of willfully going while the doing of gathering provisions at the village."

>Dictionary also has a meaning of willingly/voluntarily which I guess I can see and isn't incompatible with the other.
Yeah, that's what tripped me up. I wasn't sure how to apply it. And, given that the て-form of「進んで」connecting to「いった」and「ほうがいい」to mean (in a literal sense) "had better advance and go," which feels redundant to me.

>I'm not sure if "at my own pace" is the correct english equivalent
You're right: it's not. My misinterpretation derived from the volitional aspect of「進んで」, but that's too specific. After all, it's all about willfully doing something, and the intensity, or lack thereof, at which one does it is neither stated nor implied in sentence or context.

My head hurts.

>>40234
>Even so, you're clearly further along than I,
Eh I rely on mecab to transliterate kanji and kana to romaji, and still have to consciously spend effort trying to parse the sentence. I do enjoy grammar though, so thanks for posting these. I haven't had motivation to study up on things for some time, so at least this serves as practice. I don't feel at all qualified to comment, but since no one else has responded I'll do my best.

>works with the adjoined clause and not just "returning home," correct?
Hmm now that you mention it I'm not sure. I parsed as "tochū de ((ie ni modottari) (mura de...))" where "tochū de" applies to both clauses connected by ~tari, but I guess "(tochū de ie ni modottari) (mura de...)" would also work. If it was spoken, you'd have timing clues to figure it out, but in the absence of those I'd probably need the context surrounding this sentence to distinguish. Maybe someone else can chime in if there's some clue I'm missing here. In terms of translation I guess the difference is whether or not the village is also considered en-route. I.e. is the village the ultimate desination, or just a waypoint where he's gathering supplies to proceed somewhere else. Without any other clues my gut instinct is that "(tochū de ie ni modottari) sounds a bit weird though, maybe because of the contradiction in combing tochū de with modoru."

>Though might you tell me why you inserted "Even" and "probably?"
Just the mood of the sentence I inferred from the "to omottorara" and "wa ne...". I.e. the person is probably saying this to himself, a bit anxious and uncertain but trying to assuage herself that this is the right decision (I assume it's a girl because of the ending wa particle, maybe a ojōsama or something). I don't think it's a conditional, since if it were it'd probably be somethign like "kitsui nara".

>applies to 「し」(doing)
Yes, X-nagara should basically be thought of as a single clause. In this case, it's actually "junbi wo suru" that's being converted to "junbi wo shinagara". Your translation of that single clause "mura de dōgu no junbi wo shinagara susundeitta hō" is correct if you want to be hyper-word-for-word literal, maybe I'd say "going and gathering provisions from the village". Basically my impression is that the susundeitta here isn't providing any strict meaning, it's just flavoring providing some nuance. And the "hou" just seems like a nominalizer. THe specific choice of hou as opposed to koto again provides some nuance, hou feels a bit more open-ended, less finalized.

>"had better advance and go" which feels redundant to me
I think in this case it's a te-iru construction, which doesn't necessarily mean "do x and go". As an example "tabete-iru" would be "is eating". The word-for-word literal meaning would be "eat and go", but if you squint you can sort of see how you "apply" the notion of "movement" conveyed by "iru" to "taberu" to get "is eating". The differcen between taberu and tabete-iru is then the same as difference between "I eat [as a habit]" and "I am eating" in English. This is probably covered in most Japanese grammar books though, and it's not worth getting too deep into the weeds of this construction since it's a grammatical tarpit as to which verbs this construction applies to. The technical terminology to look up here is lexical aspect I think [1] but the last time I tried to look into this my head just hurt and I don't think it made me better at Japanese anyway.

But going back to the point, in this case it's the past tense of this construction, te-ita (although the sentence uses te-itta. I don't know if there's any significance or they're just equivalent) which you can think of as referring to the resultative state of the action. (Am eating vs have eaten). As to why they use te-iru vs te-ita, that's another tarpit and I think last time I researched this I concluded it's basically poetic license and nuance, and to not worry about it and just go with the spirit of the sentence. In this case I'd guess he's imagining himself looking back upon this situation, and concluding that this state would be better – hence why author chose perfect tense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect

>>40236
>I do enjoy grammar though, so thanks for posting these.
I'm glad to read that you're deriving enjoyment since it makes me feel less guilty about badgering.

>but since no one else has responded I'll do my best.
Well, I appreciate it since you, in fact, are helping me out with your analyses.

>but in the absence of those I'd probably need the context surrounding this sentence to distinguish
I think「途中で」does indeed apply to both the returning of home and gathering of provisions because "en route" might be figurative in a sense. The speaker's home and the village are at the opposite ends of each other, and the mission's physical location is orthogonal to those points. (Think of a T-intersection.) Thus, "en route" could refer to the adventure and not necessarily the physical route. Hope this helps.

>Just the mood of the sentence I inferred [...]
You're inference is correct: the character (indeed a girl) was conducting a monologue; before speaking to herself, she won her first battle; and the mission she's attempting to accomplish is her first. So damn fine job.

>it's just flavoring providing some nuance.
>T[h]e specific choice of hou as opposed to koto again provides some nuance, hou feels a bit more open-ended, less finalized.
And hence your parsing of that sentence. Makes sense, then, given the context. She's proposing to herself a method or course of actions; in this case, those being returning home and obtaining provisions from the village (But not definitively since -たり is not exhaustive.); while traveling/finishing her mission.

>This is probably covered in most Japanese grammar books though
It absolutely is, and that's why I feel embarrassed.
But, if you have a progressive form of a verb, conjugate it to its past-tense, and append「ほうがいい」to it, you have something like, "I had better return home and gather provisions in the village while fulfilling the request." My reasoning for 進む being in a progressive state is that one is still "en route" physically, but more importantly, figuratively, until her mission is finished.
I don't think it's a case of perfect-tense, i.e. paying attention to the result of the action as you mentioned in your final paragraph, since--well--she's still in the midst of tings.
But, perhaps I just restated what you said, and my gray matter is dissolving as we speak.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect
Yeah, that makes my brain toasty.

>>40237
>I don't think it's a case of perfect-tense,
It's susunde-itta though, not susunde-iru. So it's progressive, but not present progressive. Both "susunde-iru hou ga ii" and "susunde-ita hou ga ii" make sense to me and mean basically the same thing, but the latter feels a bit more reflective than the former.

E.g. the difference between Yuki-san ga tabete-iru vs Yuki-san ga tabete-ita is that in the latter we're at a state where Yuki-san has finished eating and we're looking back at that duration and commenting on it. The difference between tabete-ita and tabeta is then similar to the difference between "ate" and "has eaten". The former is more of a point-in-time activity in the past, while the latter implies a span of time, and we're now past that span and reflecting back upon that.

>>40238
Given that she's speculating, then yeah, that makes sense.
Goodness, this is exhausting. Thanks for staying the course with me!

>>40233
At that point why not write it in ipa notation? Although your chart might be useful for those learning japanese and want a quick reference for how to pronounce things.

>>40240
>At that point why not write it in ipa notation?
Good point. What got me thinking about this is that years ago, when I first saw udon on a menu, I thought it was pronounced "you-don". So when the waitress didn't understand me at first and thought it was funny, I was quite embarrased. I was also annoyed it's spelled that way. Some Chinese loan words, like oolong tea, don't have this problem.

Post edited on 12th Aug 2022, 8:46pm

>>40241
Ah I see. Things requiring a phonetic translation for public-understandability (your udon example) is a good usecase I didn't think of. Although that's more of an English problem since it doesn't have an unambiguous way to provide phonetic description. E.g. you could say the same for things like jalapeno (if you hadn't seen the word before and didn't know Spanish, I doubt you'd be able to predict the pronunciation).

Given the context of having just repaired something, I'm assuming that 「特に問題もなく使える」means something along the lines of "Notably, [I] can use the [the recently repaired thing] without issue."
「問題も」seems to function like, say, 「誰も」. Combined with 「なく」, one might infer "no problem" or "without any problem." My reservation is that it seems like there's something like 「で」missing between the verb and "no problem." But if I've learned anything it's that eliding particles and syllables is just the way of life.

Oh, and I've finally made it to the village. It only took five hours.

Given the context of having just repaired something, I'm assuming that 「特に問題もなく使える」means something along the lines of "Notably, [I] can use the [the recently repaired thing] without issue."
「問題も」seems to function like, say, 「誰も」. Combined with 「なく」, one might infer "no problem" or "without any problem." My reservation is that it seems like there's something like 「で」missing between the verb and "no problem." But if I've learned anything it's that eliding particles and syllables is just the way of life.

Oh, and I've finally made it to the village. It only took five hours.

>>40243
"Toku ni, mondai mo naku tsukaeru."
Yes, that souds right. I don't think you need a "de" particle here though.

"Mondai nai" by itself means "without a problem", "mondai naku tsukaeru" means "using without a problem", "mondai mo naku tsukaeru" just adds "mo" for emhasis.

>>40245
So, 「特に問題[も]」becomes part of an adverbial phrase when attached to 「なく」. Because if "problem" was followed by 「無い」, the sentence would be gibberish.

>>40246
I think it's just "mondai [mo]" that's part of the adverbial phrase, "toku ni" outside of it. But yes, "mondai naku" functions as that. I don't follow why "tokuni mondai nai" is considered gibberish – it makes sense to me at least, and means "Particularly, there's no problem." In fact in anime I'm reasonably certain I've heard the phrase "mondai nai" before.

>>40247
>"toku ni" outside of it
Yeah, I didn't mean to include it. I'm running on fumes right now, so apologies for any errors.

>I don't follow why "tokuni mondai nai" is considered gibberish – it makes sense to me at least
I was implying that if it were followed by 「使える」, in this example, then it would be gibberish, since "mondai nai" would seemingly be the object of 「使える」.

>>40222
>The primary thing that's tripping me up is the usage, I assume, the stem of する, i.e. 「し」.
Yes, し here is the 連用形 of する.
>That and the usage of 「進んで」, which I'm interpreting as "at my own pace."
I think it's being used here as a verb as part of the verb construction 進んでいく, not as an adverb. See below for the meaning.
Even if I'm wrong and it's being used here in its adverbial sense, I don't think it's being used to mean "at my own pace." Not sure where you got that from.

>>40236
>I think in this case it's a te-iru construction,
You are mixing up いる and いく. According to 大辞泉 [1], ～ていく has this meaning:
>（補助動詞）動作の継続・進行の意を表す。
That is, it indicates a sense of continuation or advancement/progression of an action.
Or according to [2],
>When ていく doesn't just mean "go and", it means that something is ongoing and will "keep going" at least into the near future.

>te-iru vs te-ita
According to [3], 「進んでいったほうがいい」 is a stronger, more personal recommendation than 「進んでいくほうがいい」, which is more neutral and general. た is used not only to indicate the past but may also or instead be used to indicate completion (see also [4]). By using the former phrase, which indicates completion, the certainty is emphasized and the feelings of the speaker are conveyed.
According to [5], the former is used for warnings and advice, while the latter is used for comparisons. In the case that it's warning/advice involving a comparison, the former is used.
According to [6],
>The meaning of Verb informal nonpast ほうがいい is almost the same as that of Verb informal past ほうがいい if it is used in situations of suggestion. However, Verb informal past ほうがいい may express a stronger suggestion than Verb informal nonpast ほうがいい.
However, if the phrase preceding ほうがいい is to be negated, using た sounds unnatural [6, 7, 8], so you should just plainly negate it. [4, 6, 7, 8]

>>40243
You can think of 特に問題もなく as "without even much issue" or "without even any issue especially". 「特に問題もなくて使える」 to me has more of a nuance of "There isn't even much issue with it, so I can use it."

[1] sakura-paris.org/dict/%E5%A4%A7%E8%BE%9E%E6%B3%89/prefix/%E8%A1%8C%E3%81%8F
[2] sakubi.neocities.org/#aspect
[3] www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20190301_5.html
[4] detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q13156317098
[5] detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q139154308
[6] itazuraneko.neocities.org/grammar/dojg/dojgpages/basic%E3%81%BB%E3%81%86%E3%81%8C%E3%81%84%E3%81%84.html
[7] hinative.com/questions/2451848
[8] hinative.com/questions/15540807

>>40249
>You are mixing up いる and いく
Yes you're right, thanks for pointing this out. I didn't know that ~te-iku has a meaning other than "do x and go". As you noted, it seems the difference between ~te-iru and ~te-iku for this case is that the latter implies the action is starting now and will continue to the future, whereas there's no such implication about the start or end in the former [1, 2. Analogously then, I assume differnce between ~te-ita and ~te-itta is that in the former we're in the resulting state after the activity ended (with no impliciation as to the timespan of the activity other that it was in the past), whereas with the latter the activity itself is implied to have a duration up until shortly before now [3, 4].

There's apparently also a similar timespan-related meaning for ~te-kuru, which seems to imply the action has started at some point in the near past and will continue to the future. And ~te-kita implies the acitivity had a duration up until and including now.

Also thank you for the resources in the citation links.

[1] https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/61315/whats-the-difference-between-%E3%81%A6form%E8%A1%8C%E3%81%8Fand-%E3%81%A6form%E3%81%84%E3%82%8B

[2] https://www.laits.utexas.edu/japanese/joshu/grammar/glist/y1/ch6/gl_y1_ch6_te_ikukuru.php

[3] https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/676/difference-between-%E3%81%A6%E3%81%84%E3%81%8F-and-%E3%81%A6%E3%81%8F%E3%82%8B

[4] https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/25505/whats-the-difference-between-%e6%ad%a9%e3%82%93%e3%81%a7%e3%81%84%e3%81%a3%e3%81%9f-and-%e6%ad%a9%e3%82%93%e3
%81%a7%e3%81%8d%e3%81%9f?noredirect=1&lq=1

>>40249
Thank you for taking the time to post this, and for providing sources at which to look.

>Not sure where you got that from.
I mentioned the reason above, but in short, I made an egregious mis-inference.

>See below for the meaning.
If I may, the sentence「きついと思ったら途中で家に戻ったり村で道具の準備をしながら進んでいったほうがいいわね・・。」might be then interpreted to mean, "Even if (I think) it's difficult, I had better keep advancing while returning home and gathering provisions at the village." Still unsure how to comfortably incorporate「途中で」without it feeling redundant given「ながら」already provides a similar feeling (while).

>You can think of 特に問題もなく as "without even much issue" or "without even any issue especially". 「特に問題もなくて使える」 to me has more of a nuance of "There isn't even much issue with it, so I can use it."
Might you say why you infer this nuance? Not knowing is killing me.
Also, I should say I misstated the context (apologies to the other anon) in which「特に問題もなくて使える」was said. The speaker didn't fix the object ("it"), but rather "started" it for the time in a while. After doing so, she made this remark. So, your interpretation does make more sense.

Made it to the village; killed some orcs; and, most importantly, am becoming more accustomed to reading. Amusingly enough, a lot of the text is fairly simple to read, and it's mostly the protagonist's monologues that are killing me.
That said, a girl said「観ない顔な」to the MC. As far as I can tell, given the context of the MC being new to the village in which this interaction took place, this can be interpreted as describing the MC's expression (or face) as either difficult to read or perhaps confused/unsure. Given that the girl proceeds to inform that one can do some information gathering at the bar, it feels like the latter is more likely to be correct.
Still having fun!

>>40254
Thank you too. That answer with the diagrams was insightful.
What complicates matters regarding >>40222 in particular is that the pages you linked seem to mostly concern what the verb construction means when it's used at the end of a sentence, whereas it's attached to ほうがいい in the sentence in question, in which case ～た doesn't really indicate the past. So the difference between ～ていった and ～ていた if used in this sentence would be equivalent to the difference between ～ていく and ～ている.

>>40256
>the sentence[...]might be then interpreted to mean,
"I guess I had better keep proceeding (with the mission) while returning home and preparing provisions at the village along the way when I feel things get (too) tough."
As I understand it, ～たら as a conditional is sometimes used to mean something similar to "when" or "once".
>Might you say why you infer this nuance? Not knowing is killing me.
Try referring to some of the resources mentioned earlier in this thread.
Quoting the 大辞泉 entry for て [1]:

原因・理由を表す。…ので。…ために。「頭が痛く—寝ていた」

In case it's unclear, you read the example sentence by replacing the dash with the headword in question.
Quoting Sakubi:

The て particle of ない, なくて, usually carries a "didn't X, so Y" nuance. But this is just a nuance. There's no literal indication of cause and effect here. It's just one of the possible nuances of なくて and some other uses of the て particle.

And later in the same guide:

When it acts as a conjunction (and not a topic), なくて usually implies that a negative statement is the reason for another statement. It doesn't always imply a reason, though.

Quoting Imabi [2]:

て connects two or more phrases, sometimes implicitly indicating reason.

>>40257
I'm not sure if the different kanji or the dropping of だ makes a difference here, but 「見ない顔だな」 is somewhat of a stock phrase roughly equivalent to "Haven't seen you (around these parts) before." [3]

[1] sakura-paris.org/dict/%E5%A4%A7%E8%BE%9E%E6%B3%89/content/10227_150
[2] www.imabi.net/theparticleteiii.htm
[3] hinative.com/questions/47598

>>40258
>As I understand it, ～たら as a conditional is sometimes used to mean something similar to "when" or "once".
After reading some examples on jisho.org, that seems to very much check out. (Should have done so beforehand.)

>Try referring to some of the resources mentioned earlier in this thread.
My apologies, I will try to be thorough before asking questions in the future. I realize that neither is it beneficial for myself to readily questions that are easily answered elsewhere, nor is it fair to you. Nonetheless, thank you for the clarification, really.

>「見ない顔だな」 is somewhat of a stock phrase roughly equivalent to "Haven't seen you (around these parts) before."
I feel embarrassed for not figuring this out, even if the original quote has different a kanji and doesn't include「だ」. I'm simply incorrigible with this tunnel vision of mine.

>>40258
>What complicates matters
Yes I think one of the answers in the SE thread touched upon the fact that in the context of a story or dialogue, the "narrative present" doesn't always have to match with the "temporal present". But it adds the additional complexity you mentioned. It's fascinating the amount of nuance here that gets lost when translating.

>As I understand it, ～たら as a conditional is sometimes used to mean something similar to "when" or "once".
Ah your parsing makes much more sense, so basically it's "((kitsui to omottara (... ~tari ...)) susundeitta hō) ga ī wa ne..." where the condition applies only to the clauses connected by ~tari and not the entire sentence right? I originally misinterpreted "kitsui to omottara" as applying to the whole thing and mangled the translation to "Even if I think it's difficult" – just to confirm, since "even if X... Y" is no longer a conditional construction (since Y will occur independent of X) it wouldn't map onto any of the usages of ~nara/~tara/~to, right? Instead it'd be translated as "Kitsui de mo"?

>>40258
>returning home and preparing provisions at the village
>and
Maybe "and/or" or "or" would be more appropriate. Unfortunately I can't edit my post.

>>40260
>"Kitsui de mo"
きつくても
きつい→きつく→きつく＋て＋も
But if メリア were to say she should do the opposite of what she actually says, it might be something like, 「きついと思っても途中で家に戻ったり村で道具の準備をしないで進んでいったほうがいいわね・・。」 She should go on in proceeding without going back home or managing her inventory at the village before the mission is over even if she feels the circumstances get tough.

You should take my words with a grain of salt, though. My Japanese language proficiency is still sorely lacking, and I feel like I'm talking out of my arse. That's why I tried to cite others' opinions, especially those of native speakers.

I'm trying to figure out the meaning of「そのまま勢いよく腰りだした。」and the usage of 「り」in it. (The context is vulgar, as one might surmise.) I can only imagine this sentence meaning something like, "(And) without pausing, (he) began to vigorously use|shake his hips." The actor (he) was designated as the topic in the preceding sentence.
The reasoning is that I'm inferring「り」to be the stem of 「る」, and thus verbalizing「腰」, and「だした」denotes beginning this action. So, literally, it would be, "to begin the hipping." That said, this is obtuse, so I doubt it's correct.
And maybe one day, orcs won't be rape machines.

>>40284
>"to begin the hipping."
Sorry, that should be, "began the hipping."

>>40284
Yeah I think you're right ~ru is used as a verbalizing suffix here. See https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2022/04/ru-suffix.html for detailed info (really that entire site is a gem, and the author must either be a linguist himself or really into grammar considering how detailed some of the posts get).

>>40287
Thank you for the reference! I will be bookmarking it. (At the end, the tidbit about constructing adjectives will be helpful to know, I'm sure.)
After skimming through, I'm doubting myself more because his examples consist of loanwords or a mixture thereof, and he even states that it's typically these kinds of words that are subject to being concatenated with「る」. That said, I have nothing else to go on.
Tangentially related, but I wonder if there's any nuance to choosing「る」over「する」in this case: 「腰しだした。」Or maybe it's because, since 「腰」already concludes with 「し」, 「り」sounds better.

>>40288
>Thank you for the reference! I will be bookmarking it.
No problem! There's enough reading there to keep one occupied for months, and enough detail in the articles to melt your brain. I'm fairly convinced that the author's doing research in Japanese linguistics or something considering that he consistently cites obscure research papers.

> consist of loanwords or a mixture thereof
Yeah he does state this is usually the case, but I don't see why the same construction couldn't be applied to native JP words as well. I don't know the correct terms to google to find examples of this though.

>>40288
>Thank you for the reference! I will be bookmarking it.
No problem! There's enough reading there to keep one occupied for months, and enough detail in the articles to melt your brain [1]. I'm fairly convinced that the author's doing research in Japanese linguistics or something considering that he consistently cites obscure research papers.

> consist of loanwords or a mixture thereof
Yeah he does state this is _usually_ the case, but I don't see why the same construction couldn't be applied to native JP words as well. I don't know the correct words to google to find examples of this though.

>choosing「る」over「する」
Yeah good question. I think pragmatically it's whatever sounds better, same way words in English organically evolve. For the グーグル case, it makes sense to me that グーグル-suru is simply too long to say. In your case, it's probably the reason you mentioned where koshi-shi-dashita sounds weird.

Also this wasn't a question that was brought up, but I wonder why why ~ru is used for constructing new words (as opposed to one of the other godan or ichidan suffixes). I guess the godan ~ru is more versatile in terms of words that it can be attached to.

[1] https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2020/08/tenses.html

Post edited on 19th Aug 2022, 12:12am

By the way, I hope that I'm not being overly eager in assuming that「だした」means the initiation of an act: "began hipping" in this context. Because I guess it could just mean "was hipping," but then why have「だ」? To make it more masculine?

In other words, is it "(And) without pausing, (he) began to vigorously use|shake his hips," or "(And) without pausing, (he) vigorously used|shook his hips."? In the end, the differing semantics doesn't significantly impact the context.

>>40290
>considering that he consistently cites obscure research papers.
I'm glad he decided to spread his knowledge. Fewer headaches for us.

>Yeah he does state this is _usually_ the case
Indeed, but I'm just weary is all.

>I wonder why why ~ru is used for constructing new words (as opposed to one of the other godan or ichidan suffixes).
Hopefully somebody who knows might chime in as I was considering this too.

>>40291
~dasu is a suffix on its own, meaning roughly to spring into action [1]. Memorable from the rain song in Girls Last Tour "ima sekai ga ugokidashita" - "the world is now beginning to come alive"

[1] https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2019/10/fukugou-doushi.html

>>40290
>native JP words
ボコる comes to mind, as in ボコボコにする. It's also seen with kango, as in 事故る or 告る, but those aren't really native, but they aren't really gairaigo either in the strict sense.

>why ~ru is used for constructing new words (as opposed to one of the other godan or ichidan suffixes)
This is speculation on my part, but since する is already used to form new verbs, and many verbs (including all ichidan verbs and many godan verbs) end in る, the impression of る as a "generic" verb suffix may have taken root in people's minds. In addition, ichidan verbs all end in iる or eる, so words like テンパる (aる), ググる (uる), or サボる (oる) may not feel right to conjugate as an ichidan verb.
When it comes to 腰る（こしる）, if we were to treat it like an ichidan verb, we'd get 腰だした, which is more liable to be misinterpreted as 腰を出した. Treating it as a godan verb, we get り, which makes it much more obvious that it's being used as a verb, which is important because 腰る isn't exactly a standard word.

What does the "ge" at the end of kēburu-ge mean in the phrase "kēburu-ge aidoru"? It appears "ge" suffix can be used in a similar way to ~sou suffix, and in the context of the comedy sketch "cable-esque idol group" fits, but I'm not sure if there's some other usage of ~ge (like how ~bu is used for clubs), or if the ~ge here isn't a suffix but some actual kana-ized english word (only "game" as in saba-ge comes to mind though).

>>40330
Haven't seen this episode of てっぺんっ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, but a quick search reveals that the phrase is likely supposed to be 「ケーブル系アイドル」. It's the same "kei" as in "iyashikei" (癒し系). You can think of it as meaning "type" [1] or "style" [2].
As for the げ suffix, it does mean something like ～そう or ～らしい [3] as you mentioned. You can see it, for example, in the title 『田中くんはいつもけだるげ』.

Speaking of てっぺんっ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, the title reminds me that っ at the end of a word is often omitted from romanization. Wouldn't something like "Teppenh" be better? But I suppose that might be more unsightly or confusing. Or consider the title 『ああっ女神さまっ』. It's variously romanized as "Aa! Megami-sama!", "Aa! Megami-sama", or "Aa Megami-sama", but none of them quite capture the feel of the actual title. And "Aah Megami-samah" might be mistaken for 『ああー女神さまー』, because "h" is already used by some people for long or doubled vowels as in "Tohno" (とおの). I wonder if there's a better way.

[1] hinative.com/questions/13806270
[2] hinative.com/questions/16636508
[3] sakura-paris.org/dict/%E5%A4%A7%E8%BE%9E%E6%B3%89/content/4602_8

>>40336
>ケーブル系アイドル
Yeah that makes more sense, I need to work on my listening I guess, for some reason I could only hear it as "ge". Thanks as always!

>Wouldn't something like "Teppenh" be better
Nice observation, I've seen the small-tsu at the end phenomenon before but never gave it too much thought. Based on [1]

>Although it represents a glottal stop just like it would in a word, when the small tsu ends a sentence it implies a sense of exclamation and brashness. It doesn't change neither meaning nor grammar of the sentence, but adds nuance. It works like an exclamation point or half of an exclamation point. It's common to even see it used together with exclamation points.

I can see why they used it here, since I guess a dozen exclamation marks wasn't quite enough. The article uses a single apostrophe to denote it in romanized form, which I think works nicely and is apparently similar to how apostrophe functions in some English words (e.g. Qur'ran, which is a function I've honestly never noticed before). So Teppen'!!!!!!1! then.


[1] https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2017/05/small-tsu.html#small-tsu-words

Post edited on 24th Aug 2022, 12:10am

I never thought about it much before, but it's interesting that "... nai desu ka?" can be used in a rhetorical manner similar to English's "... isn't it?". I've been tripped up by this before since it's sometimes hard to distinguish whether it's being used to pose a genuine question or just for rhetorical emphasis. Is there any way to reliable distinguish the two (e.g. intonation, or word choices) or is just purely by context?

I found a paper [1] which provides a more linguistic perspective on this construction:

>[While] the Japanese negative morpheme nai is usually used to negate the semantic information in the sentence, it does not always indicate the negation of propositional information in interactive situations. For example, Yamane (2013) notes that ja nai desu ka is used in situations such as when the speaker is seeking confirmation, making an assertion, and/or introducing a new topic. In those usages of ja nai desu ka, the negative morpheme nai does not indicate that the propositional information in the sentence is negated

They give the example
>Kaigi wa tashika san-ji kara ja nai desu ka
In this situation, how would you tell whether the intended meaning is "The meeting is from 3 o'clock, right?" or "The meeting isn't at 3 o'clock, right?".

>As shown in the English translation, the negative morpheme nai does not negate the semantic information in the sentence in (13). In addition, as McGloin (2002) argues, ja nai in Japanese has a function as a rhetorical question marker that is strongly expressive, as well as its function as a marker of a tag-question similar to the sentence-final right? in English. From the perspective of Conversation Analysis, Hayashi (2010) calls ja nai used as a sentence-final expression a “grammaticalized negative expression” (p. 2989), which can function as a sentence extension seeking agreement/confirmation from the addressee rather than contributing to the propositional content of the sentence to which it is attached

One concrete examples from shows in which I remember seeing this:
* Akebi-chan's Sailor Fuku, e6 03:45 "Ashita no doyōbi oyasumi ja nai desu ka" – I assume the clue that the intention is rhetorical is from context; she's nervous and just making smalltalk.

Maybe the rhetorical usage might also be related to how "... ja nai." can function either as a genuine negation or as exclamatory emphasis. E.g. from the OP of GA Art club:
* Pastel wa ika ga? / Crayon ja nai!

Where the intended meaning is "these [pastels] are just crayons!" as opposed to "these [pastels] aren't crayons"

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317337310_Consecutive_n_desu_Structures_in_Japanese_Communicative_Effects_Resulting_from_n_ja_nai_n_desu_in_Discourse

Post edited on 3rd Sep 2022, 10:33pm

>>40386
These should help answer your question. I recommend at least reading the first one.
www.imabi.net/theparticlekaii.htm
core6000.neocities.org/hjgp/entries/417.htm
core6000.neocities.org/hjgp/entries/418.htm
core6000.neocities.org/hjgp/entries/219.htm
core6000.neocities.org/hjgp/entries/220.htm
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Context definitely helps, but pitch can also help determine the meaning. In standard (Tokyo) Japanese, a significant downstep on the ない (from a high な to a low い) [1] typically indicates negation, whereas if the じゃない is roughly flat [1] (in practice, gradually descending), it often means it's rhetorical or has some other meaning. However, the standard pitch accent for the ない in negated verbs differs depending on which group the verb belongs to and which context the verb is used in [2]. And if the character speaks Kansai-ben or something, it may sound completely different.

>* Akebi-chan's Sailor Fuku, e6
Some examples of the former 「じゃない」 in the same episode:
04:58「でもそんなかっこいいのじゃないよ」
16:23「傘じゃないの？」
Some examples of the latter 「じゃない」:
03:33「ウソ、今見てたじゃない」
03:45
04:00「当然、直すべきじゃないかしら」
And at 04:39, you can even hear Kizaki use both consecutively, the latter one being rhetorical:
「やっぱり全然それだけじゃないじゃない」

>* Pastel wa ika ga? / Crayon ja nai!
I'm not sure if there are any other clues here, but since it's sung, pitch doesn't help here, but at least context does. These lyrics likely allude to a scene from the manga (vol. 1, pg. 42) where Tomokane brings crayons while everyone else brings pastels, so I agree that it is indeed the latter 「じゃない」.

[1] hinative.com/questions/3150#answer-7203
[2] www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/kouzokugo/index

>>40389
Thank you for the meticulous detail as always.

I've switched my rules to adding 20 cards if the number due is below 200, 5 otherwise. Some nice progression I think. Reading is still very much a challenge, so I've started dipping my toes in IMABI, which at least claims to be an all-encompassing guide for grammar at every level.

I stopped using Anki, barely watched any japanese tv or movies, read no books, and basically did not use the language for the last 6 months. I can only imagine how good I would be if I could just commit to something in earnest. I spin my wheels because I stop and start which doesn't lead to much progress you just stay in the same level. Been doing this for over 4 years now. I believe I should learn the language well because I always get pulled back to it and my interest gets revived and it's fun for a while, but the problem is I inevitably just stop caring after a while and go back to all english...

How is everyone's study going?

>>41234
>How is everyone's study going?
I lost data again, so I started back from around 700 cards. Now I'm at over 1300, which is probably higher than ever before. I'm also slowly going through Tae Kim. It's not solid progress since I haven't been reading, but it's something...

After finishing Tae Kim, I'll go through this. Can't be too familiar with the basics after all.
https://sakubi.neocities.org/

Post edited on 27th Feb 2023, 11:47am

>>41235
That’s good. All about doing it consistently. I think you should be reading books, even if all you can manage is kid's manga; that's where the gains are made. Lots of reading.

>>41234
I don't really study anymore but I've managed to more or less cut translations out of my life, barring one that I started long ago and am intending to finish that way. It feels nice even if I am looking up words quite often.

>>41234
I once tried to memorize the Hiragana when I was in college, but stopped doing so because it was too much for me to study for college and Hiragana at the same time. Since then I didn't try to learn it again.
Lately I have been noticing that the subs for anime gets worse and worse though, I am watching since a decade and half and seem to have picked up some very common phrases and words.

>>41237
May I ask how you achieved that? I am very interested to throw out translations. Now that I understand a little bit and notice something wrong now and then it really makes me question how good the subs nowadays are. My guess is that they are rather bad, especially in the last few years. Maybe I am just nostalgic for fansubs, but I feel like they actually cared and translated carefully and truthfully.

>>41238
> memorize the Hiragana
Not person you are replying to, but if you are only interested in it for anime subs, you can skip all the kanji and kana entirely. You'll pick up bits and pieces anyway, but really OCR is good enough that it actually doesn't matter, you could transliterate things to romaji if you really wanted. Really the only thing you need is vocab, and then the ability to lex individual words from speech (these are synergistic).

Also for that matter, machine translate is getting good enough now that if you're really in a pinch, interpreting text is not as big an issue as it once was. It's a little-publicized fact that large language models are state-of-the-art translators. I'm waiting for someone to put gpt et al. through BLEU. The real issue remains listening, since Japanese speech-to-text is not very good yet [at least the models you have access to and can run in real-time].

>>41238
If you have time to eat, and sleep, and bathe, you have time to memorize less than 100 characters(hiragana + katakana).
>May I ask how you achieved that?
First, he learned the hiragana and katakana.
>>41239
>you could transliterate things to romaji if you really wanted
The only thing romaji is good for, for language learners, is learning the kana. What you're suggesting, is incredibly inefficient for an adult who knows how to read in one language. It's better to leverage those skills rather than pretend you're some kind of infant.

>>41234
学習の結果はまだ実っている。
読解が徐々に磨きます。
それでも進行感がない。
うちは日々基本的な文法や文例を読んでるの。ウィキペディアの記事の一部とか漫画原作の最初のページを読むの。意味ない、そんなこと。
今は漫画とアニメとゲームの好きな日本の制作に飛び込んで没頭します。
まあ、やる気があればいつかやるぞ。

March progress. I add cards regularly, but don't review consistently enough. My daily amount has been mounting.

Tried graded readers, and will continue to do so, but the ones I can understand are kinda boring.

Jap a little rusty but knew enough to order for the specials on the blackboard. The english translation was a little broken. Heh.

After not doing anything for about a year, I once again got back into flashcards. Although I'm finally near the 2k mark, I don't want to keep going with this. It's too time consuming and my progress over nearly 5 years has been abysmal. All I have to show for it is some vocab and bits and pieces of grammar, but I can't read anything real for shit. This isn't the way. I'll try switching to Anki and seriously thinking about how I allocate my learning time.

Post edited on 15th Jun 2024, 11:54pm

I was reading a visual novel, and "天邪鬼" was translated as "backwards," which came off as odd. When something is "backwards," usually you're denoting it as archaic or old-fashioned in a demagoguery manner. Rather, the remark to which "天邪鬼" was applied seems like it could have been better translated in a more literal sense, i.e. "perverse," although not in a sexual way.

>>42938
contrary/wayward?

(Picture contains a 3D person but it's relevant)
>>33794
I began over two years ago. I was following the meme guides (The 〇〇 Way, Tatsu〇〇, et al) -- did the JLPT Anki decks, then started "mining" from anime, etc. But Anki is quite mind-numbing and after a day or two of not doing it all the reviews piled up and that was very discouraging and made me go on a hiatus. Then I would return a few months later and go on a hiatus again. That went on for almost two years, until I gave the middle finger to Anki and just enjoyed anime/manga/games/VNs while looking up words, without worrying about "mining" them or doing Ankis. Also I quit translations and converted my time spent on translated Japanese media to untranslated. Right now I'm at a point where I have at least like 95% understanding of common Japanese both written and spoken, and if I had to write/speak I could probably at least get my point across. Funnily enough the only thing dragging me back is that despite spending all my day in my room, my Internet/imageboard addiction replaces hours and hours that I could've spent on media (was a problem even before I started learning Japanese), otherwise I probably would manage to reach fluency by 2025 (笑).
Maybe I'm still not in the position to give advice, but if I had to give some:
- JAPANESE IS A NORMAL FUCKING LANGUAGE SPOKEN AND WRITTEN BY OVER 100 MILLION PEOPLE, DON'T TREAT IT AS SOME ALIEN LANGUAGE THAT NEEDS SPECIALIZED LEARNING METHODS COMPARED TO OTHER LANGUAGES -- the only thing that makes it difficult compared to other languages is that it's just completely different, not that it's inherently hard (case in point, Japanese people also have a hard time learning English, does that make it a hard language?) (also as a side note, CIA literally calls Japanese the hardest language in the world in the same breath that it claims that terrorists did 9/11; do you really trust glowniggers with all your heart?)
- "Immersion" is the only true way of learning languages in general, the benefit of "formal study" exponentially decreases the better you get, and if you do still want to memorize things et al, don't make it your primary vehicle for "learning" the language, you don't want to become the man on this picture.
- Also if you're going to do some formal study and memorizing, DON'T BOTHER WITH INDIVIDUAL KANJI STUDY. It's a waste of time and doesn't reflect in actual Japanese. Kanji are just a script, not THE language itself, and they're used quite inconsistently. Just learn words along with how they're written in kanji -- as a bonus you do learn kanji meanings and readings, but in a more natural way. If you want to be able to handwrite Japanese you're going to need to manually memorize how kanji are written (and it may marginally help you with reading), but I wouldn't recommend doing that until you have decent reading ability.
- It's more efficient to learn the overall language from reading than from listening, but obviously you can only develop your listening comprehension from listening. There are rumors that focusing too much on reading in the beginning is going to mess up your listening ability and give you a bad accent which may be hard to reverse... I don't know if that's true, so take that as you will.
- Restrict your time spent on language learning "communities" and become less conscious of the fact that you're studying the language -- you're not "immersing" in a raw anime or VN, you're just enjoying an anime or VN while looking up words and magically becoming better at the language.

PS: Sorry if my post read a bit insufferable, I was a bit drunk.

>>42953
>memorizing dictionaries
I wish I had the skill...

>>42953
That's how I learnt to understand English. And also reading dictionairies (not studying or trying to memorise them).
Formal study on set times drawn out over several years is a horrible way to learn. My understanding of my native language and English was always so far ahead I never bothered to care in school, the teachers and their classes were piss poor anyway. Much of it was just memorising a bunch of words every week, not much grammar or anything. Or watching shitty movies when the teachers didn't want to work. (笑)
I've looked into several languages but the only ones I've tried to actually study have been French and Japanese. French as a forced third language in school, which was mind-numbingly boring. The only thing I learnt was that je ne parle pas français.
Japanese on my own several times in the past, but I always just stopped, in the beginning mostly because of limited resources, later because I get bored. What little I know of Japanese I've picked up through immersion, not studying. I've wanted to learn this language for 20+ years, I need to get going and do more than just listen to it.

>CIA literally calls Japanese the hardest language in the world in the same breath that it claims that terrorists did 9/11; do you really trust glowniggers with all your heart?
lol. The only hard thing is kanji readings. It's a language I know I can get a basic understanding of if I only tried.

An example of your point is how my understanding of English was a rarity among people who had travel dictionary level of understanding at best, and just a generation later it's the prefered language of kids and zoomers who are all fluent with perfect pronounciation (well, "fluent" in "perfect" Internet American). They didn't learn through studying, they learnt by aping what they immerse themselves in all day, what they hear on Youtube/tiktok/netflix, and read on twitter/discord.