Crawling to a brutal JLPT beating in December 2023 (aka 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.

---
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).

---
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.



---
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.



---
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.

---
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.

---
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.

---
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.

---
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.

---
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.


---
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.

---
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.

---
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.

[golyplot]

Moumoku Tenshi

Today, I finally burned through the JPDB backlog and did new cards again for the first time since September 18th. I decided to check what the highest "Known words (%)" web novels were on JPDB now, and discovered that 俺の天使は盲目でひきこもり (which I call Moumoku Tenshi for short) is the second highest %known web novel of all the web novels on JPDB that I haven't already read.

I previously attempted to read it back in April, but found it too difficult and stopped after only two chapters. However, I decided to give it another try and read the next two chapters. Unfortunately, the story is very long and each chapter is very long. According to the April log, ch1 and 2 took me 40 and 30 minutes respectively to read. Today, chapters 3 and 4 took 21 and 26 minutes respectively (not counting reading the translation afterward), which is still a long time, even though I was trying to go fast and ignore unknown bits and not look up too many words.

I also tried using ChatGPT (free version) to translate it to English, so I could read the translation afterwards and confirm my understanding/see what I missed. I remember trying to use ChatGPT for translation a few months ago and having bad experiences. However, this time, it worked a bit better.

One major issue before is that you had to continuously click "keep going" to make it keep printing out text, which is really annoying, since it is also very slow, and the fact that it won't just print it all out on its own prevents you from just opening it in the background and waiting. However, this time, it was able to translate all of ch3 in one go in the background, even though this story has relatively long chapters. (Ch4 on the other hand did require me to click "continue generating" once).

It's still not perfect though. In fact, when I asked it to translate ch4, it translated part of it, and then randomly switched to repeating ch3 instead for no apparent reason. I ended up deleting the chat and creating a new one, and asking it to translate ch4 again, at which point it worked. It's really weird and baffling that that would even be necessary though.

On the bright side, I guess the fact that it was able to see ch3 in the history even after I pasted in and asked it to translate ch4 is also proof that they improved the context window, since back when I last tried it, it was a struggle for it to even hold a single chapter in the context window, and it would usually forget what it was doing midway and hallucinate without warning.


　この子は目が見えないだけで様々なハンデを背負わされている。

I found it interesting that "hande" in Japanese apparently means "handicap", since in German, the same word means "cellphone". I also ran into several new kanji, since this story loves to use obscure kanji spellings, but I guess there's little point in listing each one like I used to.

---

Demon Slayer

In the Entertainment District arc, the main characters go undercover as girls in Yoshiwara, and in typical fictional crossdressing fashion, they are somehow believed*. I wondered whether they would use feminine speech patterns while in disguise and tried to look out for that. However, I didn't notice anything like that, though my ability to pick up on nuance like that in Japanese is pretty limited.

The one thing I did notice is that at one point, Tanjiro ended a sentence with "-n da yo". I remembered Satori Reader saying that this is a more masculine pattern, and that the female speech will tend to drop the da before yo and say "- no yo" instead.

* Ep4 reveals that at least one person actually recognized Tanjiro as a boy from the start and was just playing along out of curiosity. However, it seems like most of the people in the show still somehow believed they were girls against all evidence.

[golyplot]

Grammar

Last night, I took the ch5 review test and scored as follows:

I: 8/10
II: 3/8
III: 10/10
IV: 1/3

I knew that last time was an outlier and I'd probably do worse this time, but it was still a bit disappointing.

Anyway, on to ch6. One of the example sentences said that their house will become "mechamecha" if they don't clean, which confused me, since I always thought of it as meaning "very", but apparently it can also mean "messy" as well.

Also, I learned that "というものだ is a fairly strong expression in Japanese ". I'd often used that phrase for normal statements when attempting to speak Japanese, just because I have no idea what I'm doing, and I didn't realize that it was so strong.

---
Moumoku Tenshi

I read two more chapters. Six down, only 78 to go! ...this is going to take a while.

　延々と、〇〇って何？と聞き続けるアンジェ。

In ch5, Angie spends a while asking the main character what various words mean, so I guess now I know what the official way of asking what a word means, which seems useful for a Japanese learner.

Also, when I tried putting ch5 into ChatGPT, it sneakily skipped translating the last part of the chapter, so I was forced to give up on it again. It's especially frustrating because not only does it frequently hallucinate, but it's impossible to tell when it does make a mistake just from looking at the output, which makes substantially less useful than it could be.

Back in April, I tried using DeepL for a while, but gave up on it due to constant hallucinations, but I tried it again on the examples I posted back in April and it no longer fails miserably on them, so it seems that DeepL has improved since April, and for now I'm using it again.

---
Satori Reader

SR had a really interesting note about sekkaku. WK taught me that sekkaku means "with difficulty", but apparently what it really means is "don't pass up such a unique opportunity".

At its core, sekkaku means that the speaker feels that some situation is special or valuable or took a lot of effort to achieve. That being the case, the second half of the sentence usually says either 1) that it would be a shame to allow the special opportunity to go to waste, or 2) that the opportunity will regrettably go to waste despite it being special or having taken so much work to achieve. Let's see examples of both. First, the positive sense, in which the speaker thinks it would be a shame to let an opportunity go to waste:

せっかくイタリアまで旅行に来ているんだから、お金のことを心配しないで、楽しもうよ。
We've gone to all the trouble of coming to Italy on a trip, so let's not worry about money and have fun!

The sense here is: "It's a special thing that we have come all the way to Italy. It's not an opportunity we have every day. Therefore, let's not let the opportunity go to waste by worrying about money." Here's one where the speaker acknowledges how special the opportunity is but regrettably has to miss out:

せっかく誘っていただいたのですが、その日は予定が入っています。Y
ou were so kind to invite me, but on that day, I have plans.

Here, the sense is: "It is a very special thing that has occurred in your inviting me. I wish I could take advantage of it! But sadly, I have plans." Sometimes if you think the special situation is already clear, you can abbreviate the first part. For example, the above two sentences could be reduced to just:

せっかくだから、お金のことを心配しないで、楽しもうよ。
Since it's such a special opportunity, let's not worry about money and have fun!

せっかくですが、その日は予定が入っています。
It is a special opportunity, but I have plans on that day.

お兄ちゃんたちに会うのはシェルターにいた時以来だ

It also has a note on the "以来だ" pattern, which can be used to say that something is the first time since something happened, without bothering to state the latter part.

Literally, this breaks down as: "It is since we were in the shelter." What Kona means here is "It is the first time since were in in the shelter." It is somewhat common to shorten sentences in this way and simply say "It is since (such-and-such)."

---
Other

In other news, I watched the Japanese dub of the "The Aristocats" song without knowing anything about it, and then looked up the English lyrics afterwards. I was surprised to discover that in the original English version, only the first half is actually in English. The second half of the song instead repeats in French. In the Japanese dub, they didn't bother with this for some reason and instead just had the same Japanese lyrics twice.




I've also been listening to various regular Japanese songs on Youtube recently, but I haven't found any that I liked yet. I think one issue is that I prefer songs that are faster paced than the ones that Youtube saw fit to recommend to me.

[golyplot]

Vocabulary in the wild

Wednesday night, while watching Demon Slayer, there was one point where the subtitles said something about a "hero", so I paid attention to try to recognize which of the various words for "hero" they might use, but it turns out they didn't use any of them. Instead, the Japanese said "inochi no onjin". And I was even more surprised when right afterwards, I did my JPDB lessons for the night and in a startling coincidence, one of the new words was... 命の恩人!

On a less happy note, I wrote last week about watching a video where they said "jyuugyouin" constantly, and I hoped that that would help me remember that "jyuugyou" meant "employment", as over all the years I've been learning Japanese, I've never been able to remember that word and can never keep straight whether it means "employment" or "occupation" (and vice versa for 職業). Unfortunately, 従業 came up for review on WK last night, and I still missed it. So much for that!

Also, while up sleepless in the middle of the night, I watched a Booktuber Belle video as well. I sometimes watch Booktuber Belle videos when I can't sleep in the hopes of becoming sleepy faster. She talks fast and there is little context, so the videos are very hard to understand, which I hopefully makes people more likely to get sleepy while watching them.

Anyway, she does put text onscreen occasionally, and at one point I noticed none other than 瑞! 瑞 is a kanji on Wanikani, and in fact one of the four kanji left on level 58 that I need to advance to level 59, so that's another remarkable coincidence.

I also learned two other notable words from the text towards the end of the video, 罹患 (contracting a disease) and 闘病 (fighting a disease) after some searching on Jisho. The first one stuck out at me because I initially mistook the kanji for 羅 (ra, spread out), but apparently, it is actually a completely different kanji that I'd never seen before, and it is read "ri" rather than "ra".



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Yuuhei Satellite

I watched this video on Youtube tonight. I didn't know anything about the characters or story or lyrics, but I was impressed by the fact that parts of it are fully animated, which is really impressive for a volunteer fanwork.

Anyway, I noticed two notable new words in the lyrics, 森羅万象 (all of creation) and 虚無 (nihility). I'm sure those are words I'll be using all the time.

I often see people recommend using songs to practice listening skills, which I think is utterly crazy and stupid, though of course everyone as their own opinions. Presumably, the songs they are using are the kind where the lyrics are just like "love love love love love", rather than this sort of thing. Although I think that even then, the advice is stupid, because song lyrics are inherently harder to understand due to lack of content or conversational context and distortion of the singing to fit the meter of the song, and even if you can understand them, they tend to be very simplistic and repetitive, making them not terribly good as a study tool.



I also watched this song, where the lyrics were somewhat easier to understand. There were a lot of -nu forms, but the vocab itself seemed to be relatively normal. There were a few new words I noticed though, 宵 (yoi, evening), yet another kanji I'd never seen before, and 未練, which means "lingering attachment" for some reason, rather than "not yet refined" like I guessed based on the kanji. It's annoying when there are devious words that you think you know because they use simple kanji, but they turn out to have a completely different reading and/or meaning than expected. It's a good thing I happened to go to the trouble of looking it up anyway this time.





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Moumoku Tenshi

I read ch9 tonight, but it turned out to be very short and only took four minutes to read, so it barely counts as a real chapter.

[golyplot]

I came across this example sentence, which seems like it might be useful after I take the JLPT in December.

合格したと思っていただけに、不合格と知った時はとてもショックだった。
I was very shocked when I learned that I had been rejected because I thought I had passed.

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Satori Reader

Another note about a useful phrase - に備えて.

The pattern for saying you do something "in preparation for X" is to say X ni sonaete. For example:

期末試験に備えて勉強をしている。
I am studying in preparation for final exams.
地震に備えて、非常食を買っておいた。
I bought emergency rations in preparation for an earthquake.

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Moumoku Tenshi

I read ch11 this morning, which was much longer than usual. But what's most notable is that DeepL was awful. I said previously that it didn't seem to be hallucinating much any more, but when translating this chapter, it hallucinated repeatedly, including even some of the old "the most important thing is..." hallucinations, and there were also several times where it straight out didn't bother to translate a line for some reason.

Unfortunately, it's hard to demonstrate them because the mistakes seem to only happen if you give it the text to translate in context. If you just cut out the text where it makes a mistake and ask it to translate only that, then it does get it right.

In any case, here are two examples of mistakes that reproduce fairly reliably (note that these happen when you ask it translate the entire chapter - translating only the erroneous passage makes the error go away).

For some reason, right here it tends to hallucinate some nonsense about a "game".


And here, it just doesn't want to translate that one particular line for some reason:


These aren't the only examples either - it makes tons of mistakes like this.


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Google Translate

Speaking of translation fails, I recently searched my log for past mentions of translation mistakes, and came across a post I wrote in September 2020 about Google Translate's hilariously bad translation of the Ja Wikipedia page for 三姉妹探偵団.

That was three years ago though, and I was curious how much it had improved, so I just tried it again today. I assumed it would have gotten much better over three years, but sadly, that wasn't the case. It has noticeably improved and at least manages to use consistent pronouns now, but it's still pretty bad.

September 2020:

Yuriko Sasamoto
The second daughter of the Sasamoto family. I go to a private high school where I can go on to junior college by escalator. He is the strongest of the three sisters and brings together the three sisters. When angry, it looks just like a dead mother. The ball is scratched and strong.

October 2023:

Yuriko Sasamoto
Second daughter of the Sasamoto family. She attends a private girls' high school where students can go up to junior college on an escalator. She is the most consistent of the three sisters and holds her three sisters together. She looks exactly like her dead mother when she gets angry. She's a bouncer and strong-willed girl, which hurts my balls.

As a bonus, here's ChatGPT's take on the passage:

Yuriko Sasaki
Yuriko Sasaki is the second daughter of the Sasaki family. She attends a private girls' high school that allows her to advance through escalator-style education until junior college. Among the three sisters, she is the most responsible and takes on the role of leading them. When she gets angry, she resembles her deceased mother a lot. She is a bit of a spirited and strong-willed individual, which can be a bit of a challenge.

[golyplot]

Grammar:

One thing that annoys me about grammar is how it is sometimes seems so arbitrary. For example, "dake" by itself means "only", but "dake ni" and "dake atte" both apparently mean "so therefore" instead.

Incidentally, I learned that "kuwashii" can mean "familiar with" in addition to the meaning of "detailed" that Wanikani taught me, as not one but two of the example sentences in the book for dakeni/dakeatte used it (彼は１０年も日本にいただけに、日本事情に詳しい and あの子は昆虫博士と言われているだけあって、本当に虫のことに詳しい)

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Also an interesting sentence in Satori Reader this morning. I doubt I'll have occasion to talk about a fight, but the phenomenon of not being able to sleep is pretty common, so the second part seems like a useful phrase.

でも、明日の戦いに備えて、ぐっすり眠らなければと思えば思うほど、目が冴えてしまった。