Learning Japanese From Zero

[golyplot]

Usually if I come across an unfamiliar kanji whose reading I can't tell I try to copy it using some form of handwritten input. Apple devices don't have handwritten input for Japanese by default, so I use either input methods for Traditional Chinese or the Japanese one in Google Translate.

Thanks. Unfortunately, that isn't an option for me because I don't know how to handwrite kanji at all, even the easy ones.

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Grammar

Tonight, I finished unit 3 and did the end of chapter review. My scores were as follows:

I: 8/13
II: 4/9
III: 8/9
IV: 3/3

It was still a struggle where I had to guess on most of the questions, but I did noticeably better before.

As before, section III was completely meaningless because you can guess almost every question without knowing anything about the grammar, just by guessing the only one of the choices that appeared in the chapter. (Sections II and III here were equivalent to sections III and IV of the Unit 2 review. It's annoying how they change the format up a bit with every chapter).

However, I was more proud of my results on sections I, II, and IV, in that there were actually several questions that I knew the answer to without guessing. Still, it's pretty hard, especially the repetitive unmemorable points (yarayara, no/monoyara, dano dano, nomotode, etc.), and I always struggle enormously on the conjugation section (section II this time around).

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Doki Doki Literature Club

I was curious how Monica's dialog about the game being (presumably) set in Japan would be translated, but I didn't expect to actually see it come up in the video, because she has 50+ topics that are randomly chosen and a normal player will only sit through one or two before proceeding with the game.

However, Retoruto fortunately decided to sit through all of them until it started looping, which took like an hour and a half. After a while, I started skipping through it to just look for the Japan topic, and I didn't bother to watch most of act 3.

I'm not confident in my understanding of the Japanese translation, but it appears that they just changed "everything is in English" to "everything was originally in English", which makes sense..

"By the way, there's something that's been bothering me..."
"You know how this takes place in Japan?"
"Well...I assume you knew that, right?"
"Or at least decided it probably does?"
"I don't think you're actually told at any point where this takes place..."
"Is this even really Japan?"
"I mean, aren't the classrooms and stuff kind of weird for a Japanese school?"
"Not to mention everything is in English..."
"It feels like everything is just there because it needs to be, and the actual setting is an afterthought."
"It's kind of giving me an identity crisis."
"All my memories are really hazy..."
"I feel like I'm at home, but have no idea where 'home' is in the first place."
"I don't know how to describe it any better..."
"Imagine looking out your window, but instead of your usual yard, you're in some completely unknown place."
"Would you still feel like you were home?"
"Would you want to go outside?"
"I mean...I guess if we never leave this room, it doesn't really matter anyway."
"As long as we're alone and safe together, this really is our home."
"And we can still watch the pretty sunsets night after night."

Incidentally, one nice side benefit of watching videos like this is that you can hear the dialog read aloud, and hence you'll occasionally encounter words that have a weird reading you would have never guessed from the kanji. Today I encountered 反吐 (vomit), which is apparently read "hedo" for some reason.



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Demon Slayer

As previously mentioned, Demon Slayer episodes 1-13 always depict the moon as the Stock Artistic Unrealistic Crescent Moon, and then episode 14-23 randomly switched to always showing the moon as a full moon instead for some reason.

I was even more surprised though in episode 24, where it shows the moon first as gibbous, and then as a realistic crescent, because those are things that are virtually unheard of in visual media, particularly a gibbous moon. Why did they suddenly decide to start drawing the moon realistically, and why did it take them 24 episodes to do it? I really wonder what went on behind the scenes there.




Also, Zenitsu was really annoying in episode 24, as he has been in nearly every appearance. He was a bit more subdued in episode 25 though, and I hope he stays that way. I'm sure the writers intended for it to be comedic, but they went way overboard with the whining, and just made him really annoying.

[golyplot]

I didn't get around to tackling the grammar book today, but did at least watch an old video about a supposedly haunted hotel. I could only understand parts of it, and the video itself is pretty corny, but it was still interesting to see. I looked up and learned a few words like akazunoma (forbidden room) and shinrei taiken (ghost experience) which I'm sure I'll be using every day.



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Satori Reader

An interesting note on Satori Reader this morning. I of course knew about the multiple kanji for different shades of meaning thing before, but I had no idea why that started.

As you can see, 計る is the simplest. It's only for time. 測る covers the most (ahem) area, if you will. Most of the measurements you would typically make with a tape-measure fall into this category, and many measurements that don't clearly fall into any category (measuring someone's ability, for example) are covered by this one too, so you can treat this one as a default. Think of 量る as being specifically about weight and (three-dimensional) volume.

Looking at this episode, you might protest that dividing hakaru up like this doesn't really make sense. After all, the word for "scale" (体重計) uses the character supposedly reserved for measuring time. It's also true that other measurement-related words combine these characters without regard to the above categories. For example 計測する can be used of weight. And you would be absolutely correct: these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, and even Japanese people have trouble with them.

It helps to understand why this situation came to be. When kanji were being introduced to Japan, there were places where Chinese made distinctions that Japanese did not. So there were multiple Chinese words (and therefore multiple kanji) that corresponded to the same word in Japanese.

"No problem!" those early linguists thought. "We'll just pin all of these characters to the same word." Let's imagine this happening for the characters 計, 測, and 量. "Our word はかる covers all of these, so whenever we see those in Chinese, we'll just translate them to Japanese using はかる. Problem solved."

But that meant, later, when people started writing Japanese using kanji, a writer would need to stop and consider which of those characters would be the most appropriate for what is actually just a single word in Japanese. The writer might do this by considering other ways those characters are used, or which character would be used in Chinese. But clearly, it would be difficult to do this consistently.

Later, people tried to impose order on the chaos by creating rules such as the ones above. Unfortunately, they were not able to do so in a way that was totally consistent with existing compounds. So take heart: you are not going crazy. This is just a side-effect of the history of kanji in Japan.

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Demon Slayer

I finished season 1 of Demon Slayer tonight.

I noticed "oroka" come up when the subtitles said "fool" which is interesting because that's another high level word that I've been struggling with on Wanikani.

The word itself is 愚か, but when I looked up "oroka" on Jisho, it also showed it as a reading of 疎か for some reason. 疎か can also be read "orosoka", which is how it is taught on Wanikani, another word I can never remember. I think the problem is due to never being able to remember which is which between 疎か and 疎ら, in addition to 愚か,

[golyplot]

Grammar

In addition to the end-of-chapter tests I've already described, there's also a much longer まとめ test every three chapters, and I tackled the first one tonight. My scores were

I: 15/25
II: 9/25
III: 17/25

The sections were a similar format to the previous tests. Section I was the fill in the blank section, and as usual, there were a few questions I actually knew, and then I had to guess on everything else (I usually guess "ni" for everything, since every grammatical particle always seems like it should be ni to me.)

The second section was conjugation as usual, and as usual, there were a couple questions I actually knew and I had to guess on everything else, except that I can barely even muster a decent guess. This time, I actually scored it as if I just guessed "dictionary form" for everything. If you don't count those, my score was only 5/25.

The third section was the same multiple choice style I talked about before, but unlike before, I wasn't able to guess everything automatically. In the chapter tests, it's basically a freebie, as I explained before, because most questions will only have one answer choice that actually appeared in the chapter, and thus you can get a perfect or near perfect score without any understanding of the grammar or sentences at all.

However, for the まとめ tests, this doesn't work because with three chapters worth of grammar to choose from, they usually have multiple possible choices from the book for each question, plus it's harder to remember which ones appeared in the book or not. Thus, I only managed 17/25 this time around.


Overall, it feels like there's a couple of grammar points I can actually remember (e.g. nagara or kotoni), but I'm always just randomly guessing on the vast majority of the questions. It's pretty frustrating.

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Satori Reader

An interesting note on SR today, explaining 八つ当たり. I'd actually already previously studied "八つ当たり" and already knew what it meant, but there was an interesting aside at the end explaining the reading of 三日月, a word I'd recently learned from Wanikani.

I already knew from WK that the reading of 三日月 was mikadsuki, rather than mikka like you might expect, but I just chalked it up to a random exception and didn't know why. I didn't realize this was part of a general pattern of words appearing before a tsu. Also odd is that WK lists the meaning as "new moon", while SR says it is "crescent moon".

Also, while I already knew 八つ当たり, I had no idea why it was like that. Apparently the eight means "all directions", i.e. dumping your anger indiscriminately.

There are several interesting things to note in the word yatsu-atari. First, in terms of meaning, the dictionary includes the phrase "venting one's anger," but a critical aspect of yatsu-atari is venting anger by taking it out on someone who is unrelated to the original source of the anger. For example, suppose you get chewed out by your boss at work. You're in a surly mood, and you end up saying mean things to your partner at home. That's yatsu-atari.

The atari part comes from the verb ataru, which most basically means "to hit; to strike (intransitively)," in the sense of one object colliding with another. An example of this basic usage is:

子供が投げたボールは壁に当たった。
The ball that the child threw struck the wall.

There are a lot of additional senses that spring from this core sense. For example, atari! means "a hit," as opposed to a miss, as in when guessing.

「誰がこのケーキを作ったと思う？」「お姉さん？」「当たり！」
"Who do you think made this cake?" "Big sister?" "Hit! = Bingo!"

From the "strike" sense comes the sense of "laying into a person" figuratively.

彼女はお母さんにつらく当たった。
She laid into her mother bitterly.

It's from this sense that the word yatsu-atari comes from. The yatsu part literally means "eight," but what it really means here is "in all directions." So someone doing yatsu-atari is indiscriminately lashing out in all directions.

Finally, you might wonder why it's yatsu and not yattsu, which is the usual way to say "eight" with the tsu numbers. This is actually a consistent pattern in Japanese. When the tsu numbers that feature a doubled consonant (three, four, six, and eight) appear in compound words, they almost always lose the doubled consonant. Here are a few more examples.

三日月
a crescent moon
四つん這い
on all fours (on hands and knees)
八つ橋
yatsuhashi, a popular food from Kyoto

---
Demon Slayer

Tonight, I started season 2 of Demon Slayer, which begins with the Mugen Train arc. Mugen Train is famous for being the worldwide top grossing movie of 2020 (as Asia ended the US's longstanding dominance due to COVID). It also broke many records for the top Japanese movie set by Spirited Away 19 years before.

Fortunately, it turns out that Netflix watchers won't have to go out and watch a movie in between, because the movie was split and edited into anime episodes for the second season of the anime. However, the fact that it was split up from a movie makes the editing and pacing a bit weird.

The most obvious fail was when Flame Hashira first sees the Mugen Train and there's dramatic music and it slowly zooms in on the train... and then it just randomly stops and cuts to an unrelated shot. I suspect that that was the point in the movie where the opening credit roll started, hence the awkward hackjob in the editing.

It's also noticeable that this episode doesn't end on a cliffhanger followed by credits like every episode in season 1 of the anime did. Instead, the episode keeps going with credits overlay and then ends with them riding off on the train. And there's no ending OP at all, like a show would normally have.

I think the movie nature also betrays itself in the writing. A TV show will normally (re)introduce all the major characters and plot elements at the beginning of each season in case viewers are just jumping in and don't remember or didn't watch the previous seasons. But here, the entire first episode follows the Flame Hashira and the actual main characters of the series only appear in a brief cameo at the end and aren't even named.

Anyway, with that out of the way, there was one notable moment in the episode Japanese-wise where I noticed that the subtitles were completely different than the Japanese dialog. When the speed demon challenges Flame Hashira to a race, it sounds like he said "omae wa...", then charges and kills the demon, and then says "osoi!". However, these were subtitled as "Good luck!" and "I win" respectively. The altered lines still make sense in context, but they're completely different than what he actually said!



Also, today was the first day in at least a week that I didn't manage to get through the review pile and do new cards on JPDB. Not that it really matters. I always expected that I'll probably have to skip days from time to time to prevent the review load from gettting too bad. The only question is how often and long this will happen, and so far things haven't been too bad.

[golyplot]

Now matter how much time I have, it never seems like enough. Lately I've been worried about booking hotels for my upcoming trip to Japan next month. I still have barely researched hotels and I'm worried that all the good deals disappeared weeks ago. But I never seem to even get around to trying.

Sometimes I procrastinate by attempting to study the Japanese grammar book instead, but I never seem to get around to that either. I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself, because even my basic routine of WK+JPDB+SR is probably an hour a day, even without anything else. But it's still frustrating. And even besides that, I never get around to anything else I've dreamed of doing or need to do either.

Anyway, I started reading chapter 4 of the grammar book, but apart from the first two (-panashi and -konai), it was impossible to understand the grammar points from the description and example sentences in the book, so I'll have to research those online later to try to find actual explanations.

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Tongue Twisters
I came across a post elsewhere on the forums where someone listed two Japanese tongue twisters. The first, I'd already heard of, but the second (鳳凰を追おう), I had never seen before.

I looked up 鳳凰 and discovered that it means "Chinese firebird" and is read "houou". I guess that explains the name of the Pokemon Ho-oh. It's pretty interesting to discover the hidden puns behind a lot of Pokemon names by studying Japanese.




---
Satori Reader

健が薪をくべて、囲炉裏に火を付けてくれた。

Another new unknown kanji, 薪 (firewood)

モカはやっぱり…、癌みたいだ。

Here's one I definitely haven't seen before, 癌 (cancer). It looks pretty weird.

Also, this morning, SR had an interesting note explaining that for words that are written in kana as "-oo" rather than "-ou", this is usually because originally, they were "oho" and then the h was dropped over time. It's weird to imagine words like "tooi" originally being "tohoi" instead.

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Fuji TV

I forgot to mention that that the Fuji TV haunted hotel video I watched on Monday said "じゅうぎょういん" (employee) almost constantly. 従業 is a really simple word, and yet I've struggled with it for as long as I've been studying Japanese, because I can never remember whether it means "occupation" or "employment" (and vice versa for 職業). Hopefully this will help.

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Demon Slayer s2e4

There was one weird moment in ep4 when Tanjiro first confronts Lower One on the roof of the train. The music rises dramatically, the shot zooms in... and then it just goes blank for a moment and cuts to a wide shot with another view of the same scene.

You see that kind of thing a lot in old TV shows, because that's where they put the commercial breaks. Shows designed for linear TV would need to plan around commercial breaks and make sure there's always a dramatic cliffhanger before each one, and then it cuts back to the same scene after the break to remind viewers what were happening. However, it looks really weird when these same shows are viewed on an ad-free streaming service, since it just cuts between the two immediately with no gap.

However, what made it so strange is that the Mugen Train arc was originally a theatrical movie and thus had no reason to facilitate commercial breaks. So why on earth is it like this? Maybe the anime was aired with commercials in Japan, and so when they edited the movie for TV, they also inserted these things? It's very weird, and it's not like it happens often. I don't recall any instances of jarring transitions like this in season 1 for example. I also wonder if the moment I described in episode 1, which I initially assumed to be a missing cut to credits was instead actually a cut to commercial break.

Also notable is the "total concentration breathing, water breathing" thing. In season 1, every time Tanjiro attacked, he would always say "zenshuuchuu" and then "mizo no kokyuu", followed by the name of the particular attack. However, at the end of season 1, he is told that the Hashira maintain Total Concentration Breathing 24/7, even while asleep, and learns to do this himself. I was curious how they would handle this, since if he's doing it all the time now, there'd be no reason to announce it specifically when attacking.

The answer is a bit weird. When Tanjiro attacks in ep4, he goes straight to "mizo no kokyuu" and doesn't mention Total Concentration Breathing at all. However, in ep1, Rengoku does say it, even though as a Hashira, he should be doing it 24/7 as well.

Lastly, in ep4, there was one moment where the subtitles said "tuberculosis" and I head the dialog say "kekkaku", so I looked up "kekkaku", and sure enough, it means "tuberculosis". It's kind of cool to be able to learn new words this way sometimes.

[golyplot]

Grammar

I finished Chapter 4 of the grammar book and took the ch4 review test this afternoon. Technically speaking, I already finished reading through chapter 4 on Saturday night, but of course reading the book alone doesn't accomplish much. You have to research the difficult grammar points online in order to actually understand them, and that takes time, especially since I'd been very busy lately.

Anyway, here are my results:
I: 8-9*/9
II: 7/11
III: 11/11
IV: 3/3

On the first section, I correctly identified which grammar point to use on the first question but couldn't remember how to conjugate it properly and guessed incorrectly. However, I later saw a question in section II which used the same grammar point, and thus showed the proper form, and I went back and corrected my answer in section I, so it's hard to decide how to grade that. I think it was basically cheating, since I effectively saw the answer from the rest of the test and went back and corrected it, but on the other hand, I was already half right.

Anyway, the amazing part is that excepting that one mistake, I somehow managed to get a perfect score on every section except section II (conjugations), and even there, I did way better than I'd ever done before. No matter how hard I try, I can never seem to remember/guess the conjugations, but this time, I still managed to get 7/11 there and a perfect score on everything else.

As for section III, I've repeatedly explained previously that you can get nearly every question right without any understanding of the grammar at all, just by always guessing the one answer choice that is actually from the chapter. However, that wouldn't have been sufficient to get a perfect score in this case because there was a trick question at the end where that tactic would lead you astray, so I think my showing was still pretty impressive.

I couldn't believe that I did so well. Of course some of it is just short term memory and recognizing the example sentences after reviewing them, since the test questions are all taken from the example sentences in the chapter, but I still felt like I actually knew quite a few of the questions and didn't have to guess as much as usual.


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Satori Reader

モカが階段の踊り場にオシッコしちゃったみたい」と健を呼んだので、僕は階段の踊り場へと走った。

Apparently, odoriba can mean the landing of a staircase, as well as "dance floor" like it seems like it should mean.

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Demon Slayer

Warning, spoilers!

I finished the Mugen Train arc last night and was really surprised that they had Rengoku's Heroic Sacrifice and Heroic Second Wind end up being all for nothing, instead of having him take the Upper Three demon down with him as he died. It's not often in fiction that a major character makes a dramatic sacrifice like that and still dies for nothing.

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JPDB

I've been stuck in Review Backlog Hell yet again and haven't done any new cards since September 18th. One of the frustrating things about JPDB is how if you slack off for even a second, you'll be overwhelmed with reviews for a while. I've also tended to miss reviews over and over lately, which is frustrating. Occasionally I even give in and just blacklist items that I'm tired of seeing.

I aim to do five review sessions (15 minutes) per day, and I think part of the problem is that even five review sessions is normally barely enough to keep up with the review load, so it's very easy to get behind if you slack off one day, and in my case I've been very busy lately and so was below target multiple days. Specifically, here's my review session counts per day since Sept 17th:

6 5 3 3 5 5 3
1 5 5 1

Hopefully I'll catch up again soon, but it will probably take at least until the weekend.