Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:08 am

Last night, I got bored and tried reading 濁った瞳のリリアンヌ again for 10 minutes.

生後9ヶ月目くらいに母クレアの誕生日会があった。

One thing that really confused me was why the family would be throwing a birthday party for the MC when he is only nine months old, rather than a year. It was only when I looked this over a second time while writing this log entry the next day that I realized it was actually a birthday party for his mother. I guess that's another example of how tricky Japanese can be, even when you understand all the words!

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I went through another period of ebullience regarding Japanese yesterday and this morning. I got impatient towards immersion and decided to start reading いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば as soon as I hit 92% known on JPDB, rather than waiting until I've finished reading every story on Satori Reader first like I originally planned. I did a lot of JPDB this weekend and finally broke through the giant review pile barrier. Now that I'm doing new cards again, I expect to hit 92% known on いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば very soon.

Incidentally, one new card I saw today was 幼馴染 (osananajimi). One of the major characters in Komi Can't Communicate is named Najimi Osana, so now I get to study her namesake.

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だから僕は、不安でしょうがなかったんだよ。

Here's an interesting grammar note from SR about how X-shouganai means "so much X that it can't be helped".


宿題どころじゃなかった。

And another note about how "X dokoro dewa nai" apparently means "in no state to do X/X is out of the question".


夏休みの最後の日に、宿題が終わっていなくて両親から大目玉を食らったのを覚えてる。

I was confused by 食らった here. The presence of ら made it seem like some sort of conjugation of taberu rather than kuu. Apparently it's a third word I wasn't familiar with, kurau, meaning "to receive something negative".


父さんが見張っておくから、早く食べなさい」と言う声が聞こえた。

見張り is a word that I encountered on JPDB a while ago but have struggled to learn ever since (it doesn't help that it really looks like it should be read "mibari" rather than "mihari"), so it was cool to see it in the wild for the first time (or at least the same root, anyway).

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I watched another episode of Komi Saturday night, and found the footprints in the snow scenes interesting. Animators often get lazy with footprints in snow, since they're unattractive as well as being more work to dry. Komi is a very interesting example because when the characters walk around during a single shot, they do leave footprints behind in the snow, but the snow is perfectly unblemished otherwise and gets restored whenever "the camera" cuts. It makes it seem like the characters teleported into the middle of the snow.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Jul 09, 2022 5:44 am

I finally started reading いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば last night. It was a bit demotivational at first, seeing how many words showed up that I previously studied on JPDB but still couldn't remember. On the other hand, it was also kind of cool to finally see all the words I've been studying actually show up in context. It's a struggle right now, but hopefully it will get easier to read over time as I get used to the story and characters and writing style and so on.

Also, every story I've read up to now was told in first-person (three isekais on syosetu.com, The Temptation of Thanatos, and Kona's Big Adventure, Akiko's Foreign Exchange, Hole in the Wall, The Jam Maker, Oku-Nikkou, and Kiki-Mimi Radio on Satori Reader), so the third person narration of いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば is really jarring, as is trying to keep track of all the named characters. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get used to it soon.


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The last three episodes of Komi Can't Communicate centered around a school trip, and I find it very interesting to learn about Japanese cultural practices that are very different from our own. The conflict of the first episode centered around the fact that Komi had never been on a school trip before due to being too shy to find a group. Apparently, the Japanese school trips involve dividing the students up into small groups, something unheard of here.

Specifically, the students are divided into same-sex groups of three, and Komi is worried that she won't have any friends to go with her. She ends up getting paired with two girls who haven't shown up before. In the second episode, they take the bullet train to Kyoto and spend the day with a tour guide being herd through various tourist attractions. I was puzzled after this episode about why there was so much drama about choosing groups when the students all just spend the trip together and don't seem to be actually hanging out in their assigned groups.

My confusion was answered in the third episode, which covers the second day of the trip. Apparently, the students get a free day where they can go off in their groups and do whatever they feel like. Komi's group has an ambitious schedule where they go off to a completely different city (two in fact - Osaka and Nara) on their own. They also have a hotel room to themselves that night. Now that is something that just seems completely alien from an American perspective.

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動物の声をこのラジオを通して聞くと、言葉が分かるようになるんだ!と思った。

I pasted this sentence into my log so long ago that I forgot what I was planning to say about it. Oh well.

もし誰かに知られたら、悪用されてしまうかもしれないと思った。

I find it interesting that this uses the passive of 知る. It seems like a more natural phrasing (at least in English) would be like "If I told anyone..." although I guess you can say "If anyone knew" or "If anyone were to find out" in English as well. Incidentally, this seems like a good place to use バレる.

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元気な声で挨拶をしてきたのは、高校に入ってできた友達の三浦一、一と書いて(はじめ)と読む。

So apparently, there's a character in いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば whose name is written 一 but read はじめ. WTF? Not only is the reading insane, but even having 一 as your name seems pretty insane. That's got to be confused in writing all the time, since it's such a simple and common single character.

The other interesting thing is that there is only one other case of a name reading being given in the text so far - 天斗, who is apparently read そらと for some reason. None of the other names have readings listed. I guess those are just names that are read the common way for that name, and they only list it when they're using an unusual reading. It's a bit annoying if you aren't already familiar with Japanese names and don't know "the usual way" though. I've just been putting them into Google Translate and hoping that it guesses the right reading. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell Google Translate that certain names should be translated differently, so 天斗 and 一 are Tento and Ichi respectively.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Jul 10, 2022 6:06 am

Tonight, I tried reading いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば again, but immediately got bewildered by the large number of different names being thrown around (12, not counting the teacher!) and the impossibility of figuring out who was talking to who or what was going on. I decided to go back to the beginning of the story again and make notes of each character and their name as introduced in order to create a cheatsheet to make sense of the story.

In the process, I discovered that the story actually is technically first person narration. For the first couple paragraphs, the narrator refers to himself as 僕. However, after mentioning his name (Sorato), he exclusively refers to himself in the third person, which is part of why I got so confused and didn't even realize he was the narrator. Even more strangely, after introducing himself to Erika, he suddenly switches back to first person narration again for a little while before going back to third person. It's very confusing as well as just strange to read in general.

Anyway, here are all the characters introduced so far, in order of appearance. And this is only the first third of the first chapter!

Kenta Sakamoto - childhood friend of narrator
Mika Murata - childhood friend of narrator
Sorato Kimura - the narrator
Hajime Miura - friend of Sorato and Kenta since highschool
Nanami Aizawa - friend from middle school
Ueda-sensei - the homeroom teacher
Erika Wakabayashi - newly arrived transfer student
Mayuu Kawamura - Nanami's friend

That's an awful lot of names! Especially since Japanese characters are sometimes referred to by first name and sometimes by last name, making it extra hard to keep track without a cheatsheet.

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おじいちゃんは、「あの日の朝、ばあさんは腰にきのこ袋を下げて、山にきのこを採りに出かけたんじゃよ」と話し始めた。

Interesting note from SR here about how sageru can apparently mean "to hang (from a body part)" in addition to the more common meaning of "to lower".
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Jul 10, 2022 7:26 pm

You may have noticed that it's been a long time since I included any screenshots in my post and I haven't been talking about Komi much lately. It's because I got lazy, and after a while, the screenshots I took started to pile up more and more. I guess the solution is to sort through them and make one giant post with all of them. So here goes:

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I previously mentioned encountering the card 幼馴染 on JPDB, and thus finally understanding the joke behind the name of the character Najimi Osana in Komi Can't Communicate. I was surprised when the very next day, I watched part of an old Hayato's Ambition video where he was playing a game that made the exact same pun.

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Every episode of Komi Can't Communicate features the same voiceover near the beginning, explaining the "communication disorder" concept. I'd long wondered what it was actually saying, particularly the part that sounded like "rui subeki". Fortunately, episode 18 shows the text onscreen along with the narration, so I could finally see what it was. Turns out that it is 留意 (ryuui), meaning "bear in mind".

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I was very confused by the "thousand arm Tadano" thing here. After looking up the onscreen Japanese text, it looks like it is a reference to Kannon, a Buddhist god of compassion.

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信号 is a word that has long caused trouble on Wanikani, due to the unintuitive nature of the kanji and meaning. Anyway, I was surprised to see it come up in a Hayato video, playing an aquarium simulator of all things.

Incidentally, I learned a new word from this video - 水槽 (aquarium), which obviously comes up constantly.

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From the same video, 仙人 also came up, a word I learned from WK which I never expected to actually see in the wild, since I was under the impression that it usually referred specifically to Buddhist monk hermits.

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Apparently, 噛む can mean "to flub one's words". I was surprised when I saw this since I had learned 噛 as just "bite".

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I had learned 琴=koto (harp), but here is is used with a reading I'd never seen before. Apparently, 琴線 means "heartstrings", derived from the strings of a harp.

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Here's some onscreen Japanese text that the subtitles didn't bother to translate. Being able to pause the show and attempt to decipher it in such cases is kind of neat.

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I heard the word "surudoi" in the dialog here, and found it interesting, since it is normally listed as "sharp". It would seem that it can also be used to refer to someone having "intense" eyes.

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Based on the English subtitles, I was initially under the impression that they went to three cities, Osaka, Nara, and Futomaki, and was confused when I was unable to find any information about a city called "Futomaki" online. Looking more closely at the Japanese text, it is actually listing specific places they went, including the Futomaki Movie Land. Apparently, this is a fictionalized reference to the real life Toei Movie Land in Kyoto.

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In episode 22, the characters make chocolate cake. It shows what appears to be the recipe onscreen, so I paused it out of curiosity, as I've experimented with baking myself. However, the ingredients listed don't make much sense, in particular the flour. WTF kind of recipe would use 20 grams of flour? That's basically nothing! I'd expect more like 200g or 400g in a real recipe. I could understand them maybe making a flourless cake, but why even bother going to the trouble of listing it if you're just going to put in 20g?

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The WTFs don't stop there. The directions shown later have them mixing cream in, but there's no cream listed on the initial ingredients list (but it is depicted on the tabletop in the picture above - maybe they just didn't list all the ingredients? After all, there was no milk listed either, which is kind of odd). Even worse, they appear to bake the cake in a freaking microwave oven! WTF is up with that? I've never heard of anyone baking in a microwave oven, certainly not an elaborate from-scratch recipe like this.

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The last WTF is that they eat the cake "piping hot". As anyone who has ever baked a cake would know, this is a bad idea because it makes it impossible to frost. Any frosting you put on will just immediately melt and run off. To be fair, they don't appear to frost the cake at all, which is a bit odd on its own.

However, they were show making a meringue topping earlier, which is presumably the white blobs that some of them have on their cake here. I guess the fact that those blobs appear to have melted and run off the cake is accurate to the fact that the cake is "piping hot", but that still leaves the question of WHY. Why go to all that trouble to make a topping that will just melt and run off? Just scoop up some vanilla ice cream or something if you're going to go that route. Does anyone know if this is a Japanese cultural thing of some sort?

Also, I'm not sure what that orange thing they're drinking is supposed to be exactly, but it'd odd that they wouldn't drink water or milk along with cake. With something sweet like cake, it's best to just go with water. Orange juice in particular is the worst possible thing to drink with cake, since the sugar in the juice is ruined and it just tastes really sour. Then again, orange juice is yellow, not orange, so who knows what they're actually drinking?

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Lastly we have Katai giving "rival chocolate" to Tadano for Valentine's Day. The onscreen text says 強敵, but with the furigana "とも", which is presumably meant to mean "friend". I'm sure there's a joke here, although I don't quite get it. I guess it's meant to be poking fun at how Katai is talking about rival chocolate but actually thinks of Tadano as a friend maybe?

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JPDB

In my big update a little over a week ago, I complained about JPDB and talked about how I kept going through cycles where I would do new cards for a day or two, then get overwhelmed with the resulting review pile and spend a week clearing it out before I could start doing new cards again.

However, lately things have been very different, and I'm not sure why. As you can see, I've managed to do new cards for seven of the last eight days. Part of it is that I'm spending a lot more time on JPDB than I often used to, but that can't be the only reason. I wonder if it because I'm adding easier words now.

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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Jul 10, 2022 9:46 pm

golyplot wrote:Lastly we have Katai giving "rival chocolate" to Tadano for Valentine's Day. The onscreen text says 強敵, but with the furigana "とも", which is presumably meant to mean "friend". I'm sure there's a joke here, although I don't quite get it. I guess it's meant to be poking fun at how Katai is talking about rival chocolate but actually thinks of Tadano as a friend maybe?

It's more that 友(とも)チョコ is an actual thing, as one of the three types of chocolate presents given out by girls on Valentine's day, the others being 本命チョコ and 義理チョコ. Just listening to the dialogue, and thus going by the furigana, this would be an unremarkable observation that these days giving out chocolates on Valentine's isn't just something that girls do and that male friends may also celebrate their friendship this way. The subs translating the kanji instead of the furigana, while understandable, has the effect of "saying the quiet part loud" since the kanji is more of an additional layer of commentary that only exists in the written word. You can interpret it as commentary on gender norms and how a normal gesture of affection between female friends has to be coated in a layer of "badassery" to become acceptable between male friends, or it could be meta commentary on the tendency of media aimed at teenage boys to add "depth" to their dialogue by using ad hoc and fanciful kanji-furigana combinations (in fact "written 'rivals', pronounced 'friends'" is one of the more clichéd examples of this phenomenon).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Jul 14, 2022 6:34 pm

I finished reading いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば ch1 yesterday. I've just been going through it quickly and relying on context to try to guess what is happening and use Google Translate to fill in the bits I don't understand. Of course Google Translate doesn't understand everything either, but it's the best I can do.

This morning, I didn't manage to do any Japanese study. Oh well, I'm sure I'll do better again soon.

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公園に着いてウォーキングを始めると、私は何となく違和感を覚えた。

Apparently, 覚える can mean "to feel", as well as the more common meaning of "to remember". According to SR, it is often used in writing following words that end in 感 in order to avoid having two 感 in quick succession.

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猫が彼女のもとへ寄ってくる。彼女と猫が戯れていた。僕は素直に彼女が可愛いと思った。
「きゃっ! 」
 猫が彼女のスカートをふわりとめくった。僕は見えてしまった。純白の小さなピンクのリボンのついたパンツが。

About 80% of the way through いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば ch1, I ran into the first word I hadn't seen before (戯れる), immediately followed by several more (ふわり, めくった, and 純白), so that was a bit frustrating.

When I first started the deck, I studied it in chronological order for a while before switching it to frequency order, which means that I'd already studied every unknown word from the first 80% of ch1, regardless of frequency. However, I was dismayed to see such a sudden cluster of unknown words, since even without that, I already have 95% coverage (with 93% known) of the entire story on JPDB.

But going through the rest of the chapter, it seems like that was an outlier, and the unknown words aren't that common, which makes sense if they're only 7%.

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でもなあ、年寄りは一歩歩くのにも、腰が痛かったり、膝が痛かったりと、あちこち体中が痛いんじゃよ。

A note from SR explaining that -たりと can be used as a relative clause explaining how something happens.

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「もう下の名前で呼んでるんだ。やっぱりあんなに可愛い子木村くんも好きになっちゃうよね……」

I found it interesting that first names are considered the "lower" name in Japanese.



恵梨香に対して、七海は少しの嫉妬を覚えていましたね

Last night, I ran into another example of the "feeling 覚える" pattern that I had first learned about on SR that very morning, so that was an interesting coincidence.

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JPDB

In my last post on Sunday, I'd marveled about how I was doing new cards on JPDB every day for a week and still getting through the review pile. Of course, that turned out to be famous last words. Right after that, the reviews started stacking up and I still haven't been able to get through them or do any new cards in the last four days.

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Also, I watched the final episode of Komi Can't Communicate last night, which covered White Day. I was under the impression that White Day involves boys giving sweets to girls, much like Valentine's Day, but apparently, the return gifts don't have to be food. In this episode, Katai gives Komi a book about muscle building and Tadano gives her a jar of skin cream (plus a single candy to imply he likes her).

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Jul 15, 2022 5:29 am

One Komi bit I forgot to post earlier: I was surprised to see 甘い here with the English title "it's just a pushover". It comes up frequently in the dialog as well, and seems to be slang for a pushover, though I had trouble even finding this on Jisho.

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Anyway, I watched the last episode of Komi last night, so tonight, I started watching Blue Period. I heard that Yoasobi's song Ultramarine/Gunjyou was based on Blue Period, so I figured I'd give it a try so I could understand the meaning behind the lyrics better.

Blue Period is very different from the kind of anime I've watched before and hasn't hooked me yet, but we'll see how it goes. There is one moment I wanted to comment on though - Japanese highschool architecture.

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For some reason, it seems like every Japanese highschool in every anime I've watched has an upper-floor hallway lined with windows on one side. I wonder if this is the influence of the 廊下 in traditional Japanese architecture. As far as my own childhood goes, I don't think any schools I ever saw had anything like this. American schools always have classrooms on both sides of the hallway.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Jul 16, 2022 5:27 am

Last Sunday, I watched Halzion by Yoasobi. I had no idea what was going on in the song, but it was catchy and the video made it seem like there must be an interesting story behind the song, so I got curious about the inspiration.

Unfortunately, Halzion was not based on a short story on Monogatary.com like the rest. Instead, it's based on a short story that was released as part of an ad campaign for Suntory, so I had no idea where to read it, or if it was even possible to read it. Fortunately, I happened to look back at @kelvin921019's old Yoasobi post, and discovered that it had links to a bunch of the stories, including this one. Unfortunately, the link no longer worked. Fortunately, it turned out to still be accessible via archive.org.

Unfortunately, it looked like this:

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Back when I read The Temptation of Thanatos, I decided to try to read it quickly without looking anything up to practice "extensive reading", and then went back over it afterwards and looked things up and read the translation in Google Translate to understand what actually happened. This time around, I had no choice in the matter. It was impossible to copy paste the text, which meant I couldn't look things up even if I wanted to. Which also meant that I couldn't put it into Google Translate to find out what happened later either.

I had gotten pretty confident about reading lately after reading various things such as Thanatos or いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば, but this was a rude awakening. Reading Soredemo, Happy End was incredibly difficult and brutal. There were tons of unknown words and unknown kanji and the writing style was more difficult in general and there was less context. And of course, the whole thing was written vertically, which made it much harder to read on top of everything else. I was constantly struggling to even figure out the general outline of the story, let alone the details, particularly in the first half.

Reading this story felt like a mental marathon that reminded me of taking the JLPT, and I kept hoping the story would just end. There were a bunch of times when the screen turned itself off due to inactivity, it took so long to read. The Temptation of Thanatos took me 21 minutes to read, but Soredemo, Happy End took an hour and 22 minutes.

So that was a bit demotivating at first. On the other hand, I also recognized a bunch of words that I had studied recently, so it was really cool to see my study efforts paying off. And I'm sure that things will continue getting easier over time. Speaking of which, I finally broke through the neverending wall of reviews on JPDB and started doing new cards again this evening.

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でも、おじいちゃんはおいしそうに、おせんべいをバリバリと食べた。

On Satori Reader this morning, I encountered the word バリバリ, meaning "crunching". Soon afterwards, I listened to Noriko's podcast and noticed her say "baribari" when talking about being busy. At first I thought I must have misremembered and that it was actually two different words, but I looked it up, and sure enough, it was the same word that can mean both.

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宣伝 has long been one of my problem words on Wanikani, mainly because I can never keep it straight with 宣言 and remember which one means "propaganda" and which "proclamation". So it was interesting when I noticed Noriko say "senden" today when talking about trying to get more people to listen to her "Extra!" podcast. Apparently, in addition to "propaganda" as listed on WK, it can also mean "advertising".

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I also finished listening to Noriko's podcast (for the 21st time) this afternoon and started listening to Haruka's podcast for the first time as planned. Haruka has some volume problems and is a bit harder to hear, but I guess it's all right. It's funny because when listening to it, I keep thinking for a moment that I'm listening to Noriko's podcast where she's interviewing a guest (complete with reduced sound quality). Of course, Haruka actually has been a guest on Noriko's podcast.

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Blue Period ep2:

In the first episode, Yaguchi decides that he wants to go to art school, and since his family can't afford a private university, it is the Tokyo University of the Arts or bust. Unfortunately, the Tokyo University of the Arts is said to be nearly impossible to get into. I would have assumed that he'd have some regular universities has a backup plan, but in ep2, it briefly shows a "career survey" that Yaguchi filled out. Pausing shows that it asks students to list their top three university choices, and Yaguchi just wrote down the same thing in all three spots! Obviously, he's going to make it since he's the protagonist, but I still can't help but want to shake some sense into him.

Also, I am really baffled by the translation of "sensei" in this series. Obviously in Japanese, it is common to call people by name where we wouldn't in English, and to use titles where we would use names in English, and so on. So doing an idiomatic translation makes sense. For example, when talking to Mori, Yaguchi just calls her "senpai", but the subtitles translate this as "Mori", which makes sense. The part that is really weird though is that the students all refer to the teacher as just "sensei", but the subtitles translate it as "Saeki sensei". WTF? It would make sense if they were trying to do an idiomatic translation, in which case it would be "Mrs. Saeki" or something, or if they just wanted to do a literal translation and keep it at "sensei", but why on earth would they translate it this way?!

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Wanikani: My attempts at WK continue to disappoint. I’m beginning to suspect that the problem is that I’ve already burned/enlightened/etc. the easy items and all that is left are the hard ones.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Jul 17, 2022 5:21 am

This morning, I got annoyed by Haruka's slow speaking speed in her podcast, like she was often musing to herself. I set Castbox to play it at 1.2x speed which luckily made it feel a lot more natural. Unfortunately, there's less that can be done about the poor audio quality, and in particular, the poor volume control. Haruka has a tendency to speak really quietly, even compared to the intro and ending music, which forces you to constantly crank up the volume, only to get your ears blasted off when the ending starts, or you switch to anything else. Castbox has a "Volume Boost" option, which I enabled, but it's hard to tell whether it actually helps. I can't find any information about what that option actually does - it probably just applies a uniform volume boost to the podcast, which is not terribly useful since you can just use the phone's volume control for that anyway and it doesn't help with the uneven volume problem.

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I happened to look up a list of Spring 2022 anime out of curiosity, since the only ones I'd heard of were Spy x Family and Komi Can't Communicate, and I wondered what the rest of the anime landscape was like. Anyway, I noticed one called 群青のファンファーレ, translated as Fanfare of Adolescence for some reason. I'd previously seen 群青 only as the title to a Yoasobi song, and assumed it was a rare word not worth studying. But now that I've seen it twice in the wild, I guess I can justify adding it to my deck on JPDB. I do wonder why the English translation has nothing to do with the listed meaning of "ultramarine" though.

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I decided to try to read いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば ch2 today. It took me a lot of time, but I eventually managed to get through the whole chapter! Of course, I still feel like I miss a lot of the nuance and grammar and just have to guess everything from context (and often can't guess what exactly happened at all and Google Translate doesn't know either), but I'm sure I'll get better over time if I just keep reading enough. Hopefully, Satori Reader will help a lot with that as well.


恵梨香が転校してきて、少し学校が前よりも楽しくなってきたような気がして、毎日毎日が楽しく過ごせて、充実した日々を送っていた。

In ch1, I learned that 送る can mean "to escort", something I'd never heard of before. Here in ch2, I ran into yet another hithero unknown meaning - apparently, it can also mean "to spend time"!


嬉しくて嬉しくて仕方ない天斗だった。

It took me a while to figure out exactly what was going on here, but I eventually realized it was probably another instance of the "so X it can't be helped" pattern that I'd previously learned about on SR.


第2話ありがとうございました。雨が毎日たくさん降っています。梅雨の季節は洗濯物が困りますね。本編でも夏休みが始まります。暑くてアツイ夏休みを楽しみに!!第3話で会いましょう!!

Here's the author's note left at the end of ch2. I found it rather bizarre to see an author talk about the weather and doing laundry. Also, someone on the JPDB Discord once commented that the story seemed like it might have been written by an actual highschooler (i.e. the writing quality is subpar). Seeing the author talk about summer vacation here made me wonder if they might in fact actually be a highschooler.

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Blue Period ep3

I was very confused halfway through the episode when it turns out that Ryuuji is a guy, despite having waist length hair and dressing like a girl, especially because it wasn't treated as a twist or reveal at all, but something the audience was supposed to know already.

Out of curiosity, I went back to ep1 and rewatched the first scene with Yaguchi and Ryuuji. After Ryuuji disparages Yaguchi for smoking, Yaguchi retorts that he is concerned about seeing him dressed like that and later calls him a weirdo. I didn't pick up on it at the time, but in retrospect, there were clear hints, and it seems like the audience was expected to know all along and I just failed to notice. Another thing I noticed on the rewatch is that Yaguchi pointedly calls Ryuuji "Ryuuji-kun" in this scene (and he immediately responds "don't call me that name"), something that was completely lost in the translation to the English subtitles, where he seemingly objects to just being called "Ryuuji" instead for no apparent reason.

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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1726
Joined: Mon Jan 16, 2017 9:41 pm
Languages: Am. English (N), German, French, ASL (abandoned), Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Jul 18, 2022 5:43 am

Blue Period ep4:

Following the end of the summer oil painting course, Hashida suggests an "after-party". I was surprised to hear "uchiage" a lot in this scene, because I'd previously only known the word from the title of the song Uchiage Hanabi and thought it meant "launching (as in fireworks)". However, it can apparently also mean "party to celebrate the successful completion of a project".

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