Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby golyplot » Mon Aug 02, 2021 5:26 am

Recently, I started watching School Live! (w Eng subs) on Crunchyroll. (Yes, I did know about the big twist before watching.) Anyway, I noticed that Yuki sometimes says "gomin" instead of "gomen" when apologizing. Anyone know what's up with that?


Also, while watching ep3, at one point, I noticed that Yuki said "雨ふらないかな" while the subs said "I hope it rains..."

Interestingly, Tae Kim's grammar guide provides the following example sentence:
今日は雨が降るかな?
I wonder if it’ll rain today.

It doesn't say "kana" can mean "I hope". I guess he just didn't feel like discussing all the possible meanings. It's also interesting that Yuki didn't use a subject or topic particle here. Presumably that's a casual way of speaking?
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kelvin921019
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby kelvin921019 » Wed Aug 04, 2021 6:30 am

golyplot wrote:Recently, I started watching School Live! (w Eng subs) on Crunchyroll. (Yes, I did know about the big twist before watching.) Anyway, I noticed that Yuki sometimes says "gomin" instead of "gomen" when apologizing. Anyone know what's up with that?


Also, while watching ep3, at one point, I noticed that Yuki said "雨ふらないかな" while the subs said "I hope it rains..."

Interestingly, Tae Kim's grammar guide provides the following example sentence:
今日は雨が降るかな?
I wonder if it’ll rain today.

It doesn't say "kana" can mean "I hope". I guess he just didn't feel like discussing all the possible meanings. It's also interesting that Yuki didn't use a subject or topic particle here. Presumably that's a casual way of speaking?

~ないかな/てくれないかな/てもらえないかな/ないかしら is an expression for hope / wish
"かな" can mean "I wonder...", you can read here for explanation:
https://jlptsensei.com/learn-japanese-grammar/%E3%81%8B%E3%81%AA-kana-meaning/
The explanation of ~ないかな/てくれないかな/てもらえないかな/ないかしら is here (in Japanese tho, translation in Chinese) I can't find a good site explaining this point in English.
https://nihongonosensei.net/?p=21533

[edit note: correcting some typo]
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby golyplot » Thu Aug 05, 2021 5:41 am

Warning, School Live! spoilers below:


I watched ep6 of School Live! tonight, and the reveal made me go back and re-watch the parts of episodes 4 and 5 with Megu-nee. The interesting part is that I kind of zig-zagged figuring out the twist on my own.

At the beginning of episode 2, I initially assumed that Megu-nee was real, since she still appeared even after the reveal of Yuki's hallucinating her classmates at the end of episode 1. However, I picked up on the fact that noone besides Yuki ever reacted to her, especially after she teleported past the barricade offscreen and deduced that she was actually still a hallucination of Yuki.

Then episode 3 was a flashback to when she was unambiguously alive, including interacting in person with the three initial club members, so I assumed that she was still there for the mall trip in episodes 4 and 5 and kept waiting for the flashback to get up to the point where she dies. So I was confused at the beginning of episode 6 when she started being ignored again and then inexplicably teleported into the music room, and assumed she had died offscreen between episodes 5 and 6.

Then ep6 reveals that she actually died offscreen before the mall trip. It looks like viewers are only "supposed" to figure it out after the reveal in ep6, although there's of course plenty of hints dropped earlier. I find it really ironic that I figured out the twist early on, and then un-figured it out.

I went back and rewatched the parts of eps 4 and 5 with Megu-nee, and sure enough, noone except Yuki ever unambiguously interacts with her. The most damning part is that it is Yuki who hands over her car keys, rather than Megu-nee handing over her keys herself. I can't believe I missed that bit. This also neatly resolves a plothole. While watching ep4, I was confused about why Kurumi had to guess which car was hers when Megu-nee should have just told her beforehand, but at the time, I just chalked it up to a mistake on the writers' part. I feel kind of foolish now.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby golyplot » Fri Aug 06, 2021 2:56 am

Today, I found out that bilingualmanga.com went down. Luckily, I still have an old tab opened up to ch1 of Gekkan Shoujo Nozakikun. It made me decide to start reading it more while I still can.

だが恋愛相談には
結構乗って来た方だぞ

I learned 乗="ride", so I was very puzzled here. Jisho didn't help much, though it does seem to have a lot of metaphorical meanings. I've also never seen だが before. Apparently it means "but". Presumably it's another of those casual contractions?

告白したんだけど
気付いて貰えなくて
でも そのおかげで
話す回数は
増えたんだけど
Ug, more of those awful んs that appear everywhere. I can never remember what they're supposed to mean.



Whew! It took me 15 minutes just to get through one page! Reading things takes forever when you actually try to look everything up.


As far as the (presumed) demise of bilingualmanga.com goes, I'm of two minds. I did find it annoying how the English translations were usually full of obvious errors, and sometimes there would be errors even in the Japanese. It's really annoying because it makes me constantly wonder whether I can actually trust it or whether it's just a mistake. On the other hand, it's hard to beat the price.

I think I might actually be willing to pay for a service like that if it had professional quality translations and scans (plus the convenient UI for flipping between languages with the press of a button), but I'm not sure if there's anything like that available.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby vonPeterhof » Fri Aug 06, 2021 2:48 pm

golyplot wrote:だが恋愛相談には
結構乗って来た方だぞ

I learned 乗="ride", so I was very puzzled here. Jisho didn't help much, though it does seem to have a lot of metaphorical meanings.

相談に乗る should be in Jisho as a single idiom, just separated into two in this sentence.

golyplot wrote:I've also never seen だが before. Apparently it means "but". Presumably it's another of those casual contractions?

Not really a contraction, but it is a bit unusual in that the copula だ is used in the beginning of the sentence instead of the end. This sort of construction is usually meant as a response to or a continuation of the thought expressed in the previous sentence. Since が already means "but" on its own, だが could be more literally translated as "that is [so], but".
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby golyplot » Wed Aug 18, 2021 2:48 pm

There hasn't been much to say lately, since Japanese has mostly been on the backburner for the last month or two. I've just been doing Wanikani and podcasts on autopilot, and there's little to be said about that.

However, this morning I tried reading a NHK News Easy article for old time's sake, and I was really surprised to see that I could read it with only minor difficulty. That was pretty cool.
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crush
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby crush » Sat Aug 21, 2021 4:13 am

golyplot wrote:I think I might actually be willing to pay for a service like that if it had professional quality translations and scans (plus the convenient UI for flipping between languages with the press of a button), but I'm not sure if there's anything like that available.

The closest thing to that you'll find is Satori Reader.

There are also books (and manga and video games) targeted at younger audiences which have full furigana over each kanji, if you get digital (non-DRM) versions it's generally pretty trivial to just load it into Firefox/Chrome and use a pop-up dictionary, you don't get the full sentence translation but it is nice. I do all of my reading apart from manga/video games in the web browser on my phone with Yomichan installed.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby golyplot » Sun Aug 22, 2021 1:49 am

(reposted from my Wanikani log)


On sustainability

On July 11th, my review count dipped below 5000 for the first, and so far only, time. While it was a little disheartening to see it go back up to above 5300 over the last month, all along I was patient and knew that as long as I kept going, I’d make progress eventually.

The key is sustainability. That July 11th milestone took a huge sprint of 3.25 hours of WK reviews in just one weekend in order to reach. And naturally, that meant that it immediately shot back up again as well.

The real key is to consider not just the review count, but the total amount of non-burned items outstanding. Review count is just non-burned count minus the number of reviews that will come due in the next four months but aren’t currently in the review pile. This means that non-burned count is a ceiling on the review count, and in order to push review count below that ceiling, you have to “juggle” more and more reviews. This is especially problematic if most of them are apprentice and thus won’t stay in the air for long, meaning feverish juggling is required.

On July 11th, I had 6160 unburnt items, meaning I needed to “juggle” 1161 just to reach the 5000 mark. As shown by finally reaching the burns > enlightened milestone yesterday, I’ve made enormous progress on that front. Today, the number of unburnt items is only 5793, so I’d only need to have 794 reviews outstanding to hit the same mark.

Going slowly isn’t glamorous, but every day, I make a little progress, and I know that the next time I reach 5000, I will probably stay under 5000 and keep making progress for good. And I won’t have to kill myself doing reviews all day to reach it either.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby golyplot » Tue Aug 24, 2021 3:18 am

Last week, I came across an interesting post on Reddit. I've always been worried about not knowing the readings of kanji when trying to read text without furigana, or not being confident if I do know them. It was gratifying to see the top comment point out that a similar problem exists in my own English! There are so many English words that I mispronounced for a very long time due to only seeing them in writing.


I also finally finished listening to 4989 American Life yesterday and started Noriko again. This time I totaled up the episode lengths to estimate just how much I've been listening to podcasts on average. I went through the first 169 episodes of 4989 in just 31 days, meaning that I averaged 172.3 minutes of podcast per day, or nearly three hours per day. Pretty crazy, even if I was only actively paying attention to a tiny fraction of that.


I also started watching the anime Erased last night. There was one bit where the English subtitles said a character was known as Yuuki because he always said "have courage", which of course doesn't make all that much sense in English. Even with subtitles, knowing Japanese let me understand something that I would not have gotten otherwise.
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crush
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening: 2021 Log

Postby crush » Tue Aug 24, 2021 3:35 am

golyplot wrote:I also finally finished listening to 4989 American Life yesterday and started Noriko again. This time I totaled up the episode lengths to estimate just how much I've been listening to podcasts on average. I went through the first 169 episodes of 4989 in just 31 days, meaning that I averaged 172.3 minutes of podcast per day, or nearly three hours per day. Pretty crazy, even if I was only actively paying attention to a tiny fraction of that.

I think i found both of these podcasts thanks to you and they are two of my staples. I've listened to all of Noriko's podcasts (including the Extras from her Patreon) and a good portion of 4989 American Life. I like Utaco's little stories, it's interesting listening to something that's not aimed at Japanese learners, though i do sometimes wish for stuff like that but based around my hobbies. How are you finding your comprehension of the two? Have you been finding it go up compared to six months or a year ago?

golyplot wrote:I also started watching the anime Erased last night. There was one bit where the English subtitles said a character was known as Yuuki because he always said "have courage", which of course doesn't make all that much sense in English. Even with subtitles, knowing Japanese let me understand something that I would not have gotten otherwise.

Oh man i really loved that show, hope you enjoy it as well! I watched with Japanese subtitles (for sentence mining) and just really had a good time with it. I'm currently mining ReLife and surprisingly enjoying that as well. I've kept a list of anime i've watched + ratings on AniList in case you're interested. I never watched anime until i started learning Japanese and still prefer stuff that's less over-the-top (like those chibi characters and stuff). Heh looking at it now, Erased ("Boku dake ga Inai Machi") is one of the few animes i gave a 10/10 :P
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