Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Wed Feb 22, 2023 6:59 am

Kimi ni Todoke ep9:

I figured out the title card thing. It looks like every episode has one (or at least every episode starting with ep3 - couldn't find the first two). However, normally the title card is at the end of the intro, and thus gets skipped when I skip the intro. Ep6 was unusual because the title card was partway into the episode, which is why I saw it for the first time. I also discovered that the title cards are not unique like I had assumed. Eps3-6 all have the same image (the one with grapes everywhere), and Eps7-9 also have the same image (Sawako in a bunny outfit at night).


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By the way, does anyone know if this "Osawa doll" thing is a reference to anything? Google did not help at all.

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Also, ep9 has the first hint of underhandedness from Mysterious Blonde Girl, sorry, Kurumi, as she tells Sawako that she looks like a doll (which Sawako interprets as a compliment), but then she thinks to herself "a cursed doll".
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Feb 22, 2023 12:45 pm

golyplot wrote:By the way, does anyone know if this "Osawa doll" thing is a reference to anything? Google did not help at all.

I don't know if this has anything to do specifically with naming conventions for traditional Japanese dolls, but the spelling お爽 suggests that this is a transformation of the name 爽子 into an outdated naming convention. The way I've heard this explained is that before the Meiji era the name suffix 子 was reserved for noble-born women, while common women instead had names with the prefix お (Kikuko - Okiku, Taeko - Otae, Hanako - Ohana, etc.). Meiji and later reforms eroded the old class distinctions, which resulted in 子 names becoming general-use and お names going out of use.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Feb 26, 2023 6:25 am

On Wednesday, I started doing 7 new cards a day on JPDB instead of 8. I also blacklisted several obnoxious leeches. Other than that, I've just been holding the line on JPDB, getting through the review pile and doing my seven new cards of the day just minutes before the deadline most nights.

On the bright side, I accidentally discovered that the Chrome IME is working again, so I can finally type in Japanese again.

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一樹は、「僕が大学に入学した時と全く一緒だよ!さすが、兄妹、似てるよな~。

SR had an interesting note today saying that while 姉妹 is read "shimai" like you'd expect, other combinations are all read "kyoudai" regardless of the kanji used. E.g. 兄妹 here is kyoudai rather than kyoumai. I would have never guessed.

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Kimi ni Todoke:

Kurumi's devious machinations really kicked into gear in ep12. I assumed it would be a dramatic story arc where she succeeds at first and it takes several episodes to sort out the misunderstandings. However, instead, her plots all fail immediately (which is a lot more realistic). It's more of a comedy than a drama. It's pretty funny watching Kurumi get upset as all her plans fail, as well as upset at Sawako's naive oblivious reactions. I completely lost it and burst out laughing in ep13 when Kazehaya mistakenly thinks that Kurumi is in love with the teacher.


Also, ep13 has a new title card. For some reason, this show seems to use random weird title cards for each episode, but they use the same one for 3-5 episodes in a row. The previous two had grapes everywhere and Sawako in a bunny suit hanging out with squirrels at night, but this one is much more understated, just plain with ginkgo leaf patterns in the background.

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Last night I was looking for more Touhou songs on Youtube, and came across a couple music videos that were fully animated. It was very surprising to see, since the animation is so high quality, it looks like clips taken from a real anime. It's amazing to think that that was all the work of fans! I wonder how they could afford to put so much time and effort into something like that.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Mar 09, 2023 8:10 am

Wow, I can't believe my log has fallen almost to the bottom of page three again! For a while, I was posting here every day, but this will be the first post since Feb 25 (twelve days ago) and only the second since Feb 21.

I think part of it is that I've been too busy just trying to keep my head above water with the basic WK/SR/JPDB routine and haven't had time to do anything interesting in Japanese, which also makes it hard to get excited or maintain motivation, so there's a bit of a vicious cycle there. Plus the one time I did spend a lot of time on Japanese (last Saturday), I was frustrated by how much time it was occupying when I have so many other things I want to do as well. Oh well. Hopefully, I can get back in the Japanese study spirit soon.

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Altdeus: Beyond Chronos

Last year, on Februrary 12th, I tried playing Altdeus: Beyond Chronos in Japanese. Unfortunately, I struggled to understand anything. I played through the prologue, but then stopped in the first room after the prologue. I picked up Altdeus again on June 22nd and on August 20th, but both times, I just repeated the same conversations in that same first room before giving up again.

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Therefore, I decided to try playing the game again on the one year anniversary (Feb 12), to see how much my Japanese had improved in the last year (well really, since August). Unfortunately, I completely forgot about it until last week, so I only got around to playing it again on Saturday (March 4th), almost a month late from the anniversary.

Anyway, I decided to try to finish all the conversations in that first room where I'd been stuck for over the last year and finally move beyond it, which ended up taking 32 minutes. Overall, I felt like I could definitely understand things better than when I played before, but I could still only understand a fraction of the dialog. Occasionally I could understand a line or two almost in real time without even reading it, but more often, I was completely lost, so that was a bit disappointing.

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悪役令嬢が私をいじめるのには訳があるそうです

I haven't had time to do much outside of the basic WK/SR/JPDB routine, but I did read several chapters of 悪役令嬢が私をいじめるのには訳があるそうです over the weekend. On Sunday, I got to a chapter where they play One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and it was interesting to see the role names rendered in Japanese. Apparently, the Robber is a "mysterious thief" (怪盗, apparently the same word used for Carmen Sandiego) in Japanese. However, what puzzled me was the "てるてる" role, since I couldn't guess what that was supposed to be, and Jisho and Google couldn't find anything. I even looked up the list of roles in ONUW to try to figure out what it might be, but it still wasn't clear.

 一応役職はこういう風になっている。

・人狼
・人狼
・占い師
・怪盗
・村人
・てるてる


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Also, on Friday (March 3rd), I finished listening to Utaco's podcast for the 10th time and started Noriko's for the 24th time.

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Kimi ni Todoke

Kini ni Todoke has been pretty boring lately. Sometimes I wonder why I'm even still watching it. I'm thinking about stopping once I reach the end of season 1. In any case, a few notes:

In ep17, they're shown eating the exact same kind of cake that the characters constantly ate in K-On, and that shows up sometimes in other anime as well. It's interesting to see how common the spoke cake with strawberries on top seems to be in Japan, judging by anime.

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It always bugs me when artists draw implausibly thin and curvy crescent moons, with the crescent curving almost all the way around the moon, as if the Earth is casting a shadow on the moon in the middle. Do they think the phases of the moon are caused by eclipses or something?

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The brief appearance of karaoke in the latest episode made me think of just how common it is in anime, and presumably by extension, Japanese culture. Karaoke is a word in English too, but you don't really ever see it like this. It's interesting to see cultural differences like this.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Mar 12, 2023 6:52 am

The Japanese meetup on Thursday went much better than usual. This time, there were only four people, including myself (and only three people for half the time). With the small number of people and absence of the most fluent members, there was a lot more opportunity for trying to talk, and I did try to say things in Japanese sometimes (though I often had to resort to English as well). I'm sure I was mangling the grammar a lot, but it often was enough to get the point across at least.

It was interesting to discover that the others were not familiar with the word 有料, which I knew from years of listening to Noriko's podcast, where she talked about Japanese learning sites, free, and paid. Of course, the others brought up other words that I had never heard before, such as 吹雪 and びしょびしょ, but it was still notable as another reminder that the others aren't perfect at Japanese either. In general, it was cool that I could often pull relevant words to mind, even if it was hard and often unsuccessful. It seemed like I was getting closer to the point where I could be conversational in Japanese.

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Starting yesterday, I decreased my JPDB quota yet again, from seven new cards a day to only six.

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I finally got around to reading the next chapter of 悪役令嬢が私をいじめるのには訳があるそうです。 today. Based on how the game goes, it is clear that てるてる is the Tanner. I'm still puzzled by via Jisho and Google don't know about that word though.

I also got really confused for a little while by a bad mistranslation from DeepL. I put the story into DeepL afterward to try to understand what happened and what I missed, but at the beginning of the chapter, DeepL inexplicably translated teruteru as "werewolf", making the story nonsensical until I realized what had happened.

I was confused about why, as stated by DeepL, if they thought Sofia was the werewolf, that that would imply that Charlotte or Phil was also the werewolf, when the opposite should be the case. It wasn't until I realized that it was just a sneaky mistranslation and that in the Japanese , they were suspecting Sofia of being the tanner, which implies that Charlotte or Phil must be the werewolf by process of elimination.

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Also odd is that they play with four people and six roles, with only two extra roles on the table, when you're supposed to have three extra roles.

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Here's an old screenshot from March 5th of an unknown kanji I encountered in a lyric video. Of course, I often still encounter new kanji in all sorts of places and rarely bother to note it, and songs tend towards more poetic language, and hence rarer vocabulary. so it's not too surprising.

What makes this notable now however is that it is a perfect demonstration of how often when I write about "learning" a new word, I don't actually learn it. Which is of course not surprising - it usually takes a lot of repetition for something to actually sink in, but it is still disappointing every time it happens. In this case, I looked up the new word when I saw it in the video and it turned out to mean "field of stars" or something like that. But in the week afterwards, I completely forgot what it was, and it is impossible to look it up now, since I now longer know the reading (I was only able to look it up originally due to hearing the reading in the song.)

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Kimi ni Todoke:

Well, I finally finished watching Kimi ni Todoke season 1 tonight. I'll probably stop now and watch something else, but here are a few more accumulated comments from the last couple episodes:

According to the subtitles, Jo suggests that they play "Truth or Dare" at the Christmas Eve party. However, I heard what sounded like "ousama geimu" during this line, and thus I suspect that he's actually talking about the "Who's the King?" game seen before in Komi and the subtitlers just substituted a different party game that would be familiar to American audiences.

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I was really impressed with this shot, because artists never bother to draw realistic slushy snow with footprints and tracks. In art, snow is always pristine, with perhaps just a few clean sets of footprints from the characters. I guess this almost makes up for the dumb eclipse-crescent moon in a previous episode.

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In the last episode, Sawako tells Kazehaya about the classes she was in each year kindergarden and elementary school, and they all have names like "Class Plum", "Class Pine", "Class Bamboo", etc. I know in highschool, the classes are numbered, 1-A, 2-B, etc., so it was surprising to see that elementary schools apparently use nature names instead of numbers. Does anyone know how common this is?

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Mar 13, 2023 5:07 am

Today, I disabled the option to lock new vocab until the corresponding kanji are "known" on JPDB. I still have kanji cards enabled, but it no longer waits until they are known before adding the vocab cards. I initially checked this option because it seemed similar to JPDB, but JPDB's implementation turns out to be very badly designed. It often takes months before a kanji is considered "known" on JPDB, because the criteria is that you have to get it right twice in a row regardless of how long the SRS intervals are.

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悪役令嬢が私をいじめるのには訳があるそうです。

最後の目が泳いでいるのは演技ではなく、純粋に嘘が下手だから。

I thought it was interesting to see Sofia's eyes described as "swimming" as a tell that she was lying.

I also encountered an interesting new word: 幽霊部員 - ghost club member, i.e. member who does not participate in activities.

Also interesting is that chapter 60 ("リリム") begins with the author's note "コロナ怖いですね。" However, that chapter was only published April 7th, 2020. I'm surprised they didn't say anything about COVID earlier, like in March.

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I didn't watch any anime tonight, but I did watch a Hayato video.

I learned one new kanji/word - maki (firewood).

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Then another. For this one, I had to rewind several times in order to guess the reading and look it up. It turns out to be okayu (thin rice porridge). I'm sure that's a kanji I'll have to use all the time.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Mar 14, 2023 5:04 am

This morning, I ran into a really bizarre mistranslation on DeepL. It hallucinated a sentence completely unrelated to the output! How does that even happen?

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I encountered an odd example sentence on JPDB tonight:

学校サボって遊んでたのが親にバレちゃってさ、大目玉食らったよ。

Most of the sentence is straightforward, but 大目玉 really confused me. Apparently, it means "severe scolding" instead of "big eyeballs" like you might expect for some reason.

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I started watching Vampire in the Garden tonight. The setting appears to be Russia-inspired, which is not something you often see in anime. But what really got me was the clothing. They live in a world where it appears to snow constantly and is presumably very cold, and they wear winter coats, but still have bare hands and legs. WTF?! That must be pretty painful!

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I also encountered a new kanji in a song tonight (絆). This one is kizuna and means "bonds".

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Mar 17, 2023 3:17 pm

Wanikani:

I finally reached level 49 on Wanikani yesterday morning!

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This morning, I missed burning the kanji 地 due to mistaking it for 池. It's always a bit embarrassing when you miss a really basic kanji like that, but it's hard not to because there are so many similar-looking kanji and it's hard to guess them when presented randomly without context. I don't even know how many times I missed 緑 due to never being able to guess whether it was 縁, 線, 綿, etc.

Of course, context doesn't always help. This morning while trying to read an example sentence on JPDB, I misread 迎える as 抑える.

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Vampire in the Garden ep2:

So far, this is a pretty nice show. The background art in Fine's mansion is impressive, and it is faster paced than you might expect, since it is only five episodes in total, not 13 or 26.

One interesting bit is that in episode 2, they sing a song in a language I didn't recognize. I assume that it was Russian, given the Russia-inspired setting, but I'm curious what it was.

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This morning on Youtube, I stumbled on a trailer for an upcoming live action adaptation of Kimi ni Todoke on Netflix. The strange part is that the trailer begins with "A Netflix Series" in a blurry purple Comic Sans-like font, amateurishly superimposed on the background. It really looked like a kid's school assignment level of video editing, and it was highly incongruous in an otherwise professional TV trailer.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Mar 18, 2023 4:30 pm

This morning, 根本 came up for review on Wanikani, and I managed to guess it due to seeing 根本的 recently in 悪役令嬢が私をいじめるのには訳があるそうです。, so that was cool.

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Yoasobi has a new song out, Adventure. A lot of the recent songs disappointed me, but this one is actually pretty good.



I was curious what story it was based on and managed to find a list of all the original works for Yoasobi's songs, with links where available. Unfortunately, it's based on a paid novel (which I kind of expected, since all their recent songs have been based on paid novels), but I am planning to try reading the short stories for all the old songs based on short stories that I haven't already read.

Also, I was surprised to see a link listed for 大正浪漫, since I was under the impression that it was a paid book. It appears that the story was originally published free online, and then it was heavily revised and published as a book.

https://monogatary.com/episode/146441
https://www.nhk.or.jp/irotoridori/song/
https://ahamo.com/special/yoasobi/novel/
https://monogatary.com/episode/38870
https://monogatary.com/episode/50041
https://monogatary.com/episode/78170

I started by trying to read めぐる this morning. It turns out to have multiple chapters, so I just read the first chapter, which took 21 minutes by itself. Despite knowing almost all the words, it was a struggle to read and I could barely understand it. As usual, I put it into DeepL afterwards to try to understand it and see what I missed. As usual, DeepL helped a lot, but there were some bits that it couldn't figure out either.


Notes:

娘は毎週、彼の仕事が休みの水曜日に通っていたから、彼もたいてい送りがてら見学しているのだが、今日はコンビを組む営業担当が代わることもあり、向こうの都合もあって、あいにく午前中顧客をめぐらなければならなかった。

I managed to (correctly) guess here that たいてい is actually the kana form of 大抵, a word that I can never remember on Wanikani and have missed countless times.

「わかった。なんとかがんばってみるよ。水泳楽しい?」
 ネクタイを締めながら、占いの画面にかじりついている娘に聞いた。
「楽しいよ。早く大会とか出てみたいなあ」

I was puzzled by the use of 占い here. What is a "fortune telling screen"? And DeepL just ignores that in the translation. My best guess is that the father was watching a horoscope on TV of some sort, but I wish I knew. I'm also puzzled by "かじりついている". That one I had to look up, and it is listed as "to bite into", which makes no sense at all. How is the daughter biting into the screen?!

Anyway, it is interesting to see a story set in the early COVID times. It's not something you see come up in fiction much (Glass Onion is the only example I can think of.)

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Mar 20, 2023 5:19 am

Yesterday, I tried reading Taishou Romance, and spent 25 minutes but only got through part of it. As usual, DeepL was helpful for understanding parts I missed, but also has to be used with care because it sometimes mistranslates things and even occasionally hallucinates things out of whole cloth. I'm hoping I'll find the time to finish the story soon, but it will likely take a while.

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Speaking of finishing things, I watched the last episode of Vampire in the Garden tonight. The end credits song was (presumably) in Russian and almost made me wish I was studying Russian.

But what really stuck out was when Momo gets trapped underwater and then rescued and appears to be completely dry afterwards. By all rights, her coat should be soaking wet, which is the worst thing to be in the middle of a frozen wasteland.

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It has long bugged me how snow seemingly just isn't cold in fiction. Or really, cold isn't cold in fiction. In visual media, characters inexplicably never ever wear gloves when it is cold. Even when playing in the snow, they'll happily scoop up snowballs with their bare hands, despite anyone who has ever touched snow in real life knowing that this is a terrible idea. They also never wear hats, scarves, etc.

The Witcher season 2 had many, many faults, but one of the things that drove me crazy the most was how the characters were never dressed for the cold or seemed to react to the cold, despite traveling through a snowy wilderness the whole time, making campfires, etc. Perhaps if the show had been more entertaining I'd have never stopped to think about it and started yelling "put on some f*cking gloves!" every minute in the first place. Still the episode where a troupe of scantily clad women teleport into a remote frozen wilderness and back seemed like the showrunners were actively rubbing the audiences face in how stupid everything was. (And that's before they had a scene in ep4 where a character breaks the fourth wall to literally insult the audience!) But I guess that's enough ranting about The Witcher for now.

Anyway, I guess a new rule can be added to this list. In visual media, characters never get wet either, unless it is an explicit plot point, and even then they'll only be wet briefly.


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I also watched a song this morning and noticed that they wrote nagai with 永 rather than 長 like normal. Also, they wrote torawareru using 囚 rather than 捕.

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