Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Jan 17, 2023 6:49 am

Speaking of mixups, I keep confusing 三連休 for 三重苦, as silly as that seems.

I also came across another Disney video with comments enabled, Casey Jr. from Dumbo. The "Baby Mine" video from Dumbo has comments disabled like normal though, so it can't be going by movie. I wish I knew why comments were disabled on nearly all the videos and a few were missed seemingly at random. Like what is the view like inside Disney Vevo Japan's suppervillian lair when they decide which songs to block comments for and how do they manage to miss one random song from a movie and not the rest?

I also read ふわふわ日記 ch18 (fortunately relatively short) this evening, plus a random short story (which was tougher due to a lot of unknown kanji and vocab).

I also finished Noriko's podcast and started Utaco's podcast yet again.

Also, 1111th post! (Not counting the memory-holed posts from Lotus and the other departed member)
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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1726
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Wed Jan 18, 2023 5:43 am

I read the last three chapters of ふわふわ日記 this evening. It's nice to finally be finished with it. This time, I didn't think too hard about it and read through quickly without looking up too many words.


「平日はすいてるねー。」

Another misreading: I read 平日 as 今日.

「うん、良かった。休日に行ったら、ちびっ子たちばっかりだから、ウチら浮いちゃって若干恥ずかしいもんね。」

I didn't even know that 若 had an on-yomi.

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I found another "song" with comments enabled. The most confusing part for me though is why this is even considered a song, since it's all spoken except for the last bit. But even the Disney Wiki considers it a song and even lists the "lyrics".



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Also tonight, I tried watching the first episode of SAO season 4 (the "Underworld War" arc) in addition to the usual nightly episode of Million Yen Women. I previously watched SAO s1-3, but was often disappointed by it, and decided to stop after how bad the second half of season 3 was. But I decided to try watching it again tonight, because the idea that it will be disappearing from Netflix soon makes it feel more important to watch.

What really made me think of it though was the scene in s2e23 where (IIRC) Yuuki goes to school and is asked to read a passage of Japanese, and they question whether she could read it and she says "it's ok, I'm a bit of a bookworm". Lately, I've wished I could go back and see what the writing she was supposed to read looked like, out of curiosity about how hard it actually was, now that my Japanese skills are much better, but unfortunately, Netflix no longer has seasons 1 and 2, and the fan wiki doesn't have any screenshots of that scene either.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 19, 2023 6:18 am

Since I finally finished ふわふわ日記 last night, tonight I started reading 悪役令嬢が私をいじめるのには訳があるそうです, which looks to be the next easiest shortish web novel listed on JPDB. It's nearly twice the length of ふわふわ日記 , but at least the individual chapters are relatively short. I read ch1 this evening, and it was challenging, but I'm sure it will get easier over time.

Speaking of which, in the comments of Closeup: Obon Society on Satori Reader today (ch3) a reader mentioned having read Secret before and said that Obon Society seemed a lot harder, even though both are "Advanced" difficulty on SR. I guess I'll read Secret next once I finish Obon Society then.

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I again watched both SAO and Million Yen Women tonight. I learned a new "word", seigoukishi (Integrity Knight), when Alice revealed herself as one to the townsfolk - though I only managed to figure it out after hearing it twice and consulting Jisho. (However, I'm mostly not paying attention to the Japanese and there's so much SF terminology that I wouldn't understand it anyway, as this example shows.)

One annoying thing is that it's been so long since I watched s3 last year that I only have the vaguest recollection of what happened, and thus have been pretty confused going into s4. For example, I don't understand why Alice was wearing an eyepatch over her right eye in the two episodes. I vaguely recall something in s3 where the characters would see an error message in their eye while breaking the rules, and assumed that Alice lost her right eye at some point somehow in s3 as a consequence of defying the rules, but then halfway through episode 2, she dramatically rips the eyepatch off.. and her right eye looks completely normal! WTF was that all about then?

We also finally get to see a bit of the real world in this episode as well, and I found it interesting that one of the characters is wearing geta. It seems a bit incongruous to wear geta in such a futuristic setting.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 19, 2023 4:15 pm

I watched the next Disney video, Thomas O'Malley Cat, and discovered that "alley cat" was translated as 野良猫, which is read nora neko for some reason. It's annoying to run into such weird kanji readings. I've seen field occasionally read as "no" before, but I've never seen "ra" for 良.

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Recently, I've been struggling with a new kanji, 穿 on JPDB lately. I discovered that although the listed keyword is "drill", and most of the words have meanings of drill/dig in/examine closely/etc., the word in my deck which uses it is 穿く which actually means "to put on". It's annoying how it has a secondary meaning that seems completely unrelated to the primary meaning.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Jan 21, 2023 9:00 pm

There's something I've been vaguely thinking about for a while, but might as well announce now. I want to visit Japan (for tourism) sometime in the fall, and plan to take the N2 JLPT in December as well. Even when I started years ago, I always planned to visit Japan once my Japanese skills were better, as a way to celebrate learning the language, but of course that has continuously been pushed back due to a) Japanese being much harder than I expected and b) COVID.

I was originally thinking of going this spring, but decided that going in the fall would give me more time to learn Japanese, and I could treat it like a birthday present to myself. Of course, the downside is that the spring is popular due to cherry blossoms, while there's not much to see in the fall. It's a hard decision to make.

The other thing is that I was planning to keep studying Japanese until the end of the year, to make a nice round number of four years studying Japanese. However, I worried that once I'd been to Japan, there would be no motivation to continue studying, so I thought it might be cool to attempt the JLPT in December. Of course, I have no intention of immigrating or working in Japan so I have no actual need for the JLPT, but it might be nice for bragging rights. The N2 is really ambitious, even with a year to prepare, but I figure I should just go for it and see what happens.

I guess this means that I am now "crawling to a brutal JLPT beating in December 2023", just like Lavengro.

I also spent over an hour last night reading an old tourism guide I found on Reddit. I still don't have any specific idea of what I would actually want to do on vacation, but there is a long time to worry about that.

Some things I've thought of so far
* ride shinkansen (I'll probably fly to Tokyo, and then take a side trip to Kyoto and back)
* visit keyhole mounds near Kyoto
* stay at Ryokan
* stay at capsule hotel
* visit Enoshima

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I am also now up to ch11 on 悪役令嬢が私をいじめるのには訳があるそうです. Fortunately, the chapters are *very* short, which makes it convenient for reading in bite-sized chunks.


 「これから何処か行こう」だとか「部活だりぃー」とか。

Apparently, 何処 is a kanji spelling of どこ?WTF?!?!?!


 私は高校生で恋人の1人や2人欲しいお年頃なのだ。……って2人はダメか。

Another example of misreading. I mistook 恋人 for 変人. I mix those two up all the time and it's annoying.


 あ、この野菜安い。こっちのお肉も安いって感じで安いものをカゴの中に入れていく。
「…そんな適当に食材を入れて……」
「だって安いし?」

I was confused by the 適当 here, since I assumed it meant "proper, suitable". However, DeepL translated it as "Putting in ingredients at random like that", which makes a lot more sense. I checked Jisho, and apparently it has two, seemingly opposed definitions, with the second meaning being "haphazard".

I vaguely recalled SR having a grammar note about this, so I did a quick search, and sure enough, it does:

The word tekitou can be confusing, because it has two meanings that seem to be almost exact opposites. The first meaning is "suitable; proper; appropriate; fit for a particular purpose," which makes it sound like a very dignified word. And sometimes it really is used in this way. For example:

適当な時期を待ちましょう。
Let's wait for a suitable time.

However, in real life, 97% of the time that you hear tekitou, it means something totally different, something close to the exact opposite. Let's see an example and then we'll talk about how it could possibly come to mean this.

あまり時間がなかったので適当に晩ご飯を作って食べた。
I didn't have a lot of time, so I threw some dinner together ("I made dinner any old way") and ate it.

This tekitou means "good enough; any old way is fine; doesn't matter." When you do something in a tekitou manner, you do it with an attitude of "who cares; whatever." In other words, it is the exact opposite of loving attention to the details.
But how could the upstanding vocabulary word that means "suitable; proper; appropriate" fall all the way down to "whatever"? Well, consider this sentence:

タイヤがパンクしたので、適当なところで車を止めた。
Because the tire went flat, I stopped the car at a suitable place.

Here, "suitable" means "good enough for the task at hand." It's not ideal or perfect, but that doesn't matter. It's fine. It will work. It's good enough.
That's where this second meaning comes from. Not perfect, maybe far from it. But whatever: it's good enough.
You can even describe a person as tekitou. What could that mean? Well, if you're a "good enough" kind of person, you're probably not very detail-oriented. A complimentary way of putting it might be "laid back."

鈴木君って、本当に適当だよね。
Suzuki really doesn't sweat the small stuff, does he?

So in the story, when the woman turns on the switches in a tekitou manner, she's just flipping on the ones that seem about right, with no real care or concern to the ideal operation of the system. The goal is to get this thing functional; good enough is fine.


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I watched the next Disney song yesterday and was puzzled by the title, 誰かが待っている (ビアンカの大冒険), as I had never heard of a movie called "Bianca's Big Adventure". Thus to look it up, I instead tried guessing at the translation of the song title and tried googling "someone is waiting Disney song", which was fortunately close enough to turn it up. It turns out to actually be "Someone's Waiting For You" from The Rescuers.



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Also, last night, I watched two episodes of SAO instead of one, plus the usual Million Yen Women. The last few SAO episodes have been pretty good, but then again, s3 only got really bad in the second half, so s4 might turn out that way as well.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Jan 22, 2023 6:29 am

I was surprised to notice "Reincarnated as Sli" listed on the movie showtimes screen at the local movie theater this morning. It made me think of the webnovel and anime "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime", but I didn't think it could possibly be related. However, when I looked it up later, it turns out that it did in fact get an anime movie adaptation, and that that movie is in fact showing in American theaters now for some reason.

Also, it occurred to me that Avatar: The Way of Water should have been called Avatar Book Two: Water :D .

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I also came across a random gaming video in my Youtube recs and watched it out of curiosity. I didn't know anything about the game, but it turns out to have some pretty creative mechanics, like the 2d-3d switching and the way you can move the "no symbol" between signs.



Speaking of gaming videos, this is not Japanese-related at all, but I heard about the game High On Life today and watched the first hour of an (English) LP to see what it was like. The game actually looked pretty funny to me, at least the part I watched. It must have taken a lot of work to write and voice all those lines. Unfortunately, it seems that the creator has been charged with domestic violence, which really puts a pall over everything.

4 x

golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Jan 23, 2023 6:30 am

Now that I've publicly announced my intention to take the JLPT, I figured I should check out a Nihongo no Mori video to see what I'm in for. I found a video which apparently consists of her going through 50 practice N2 grammar questions and went through the first nine. I had to pause to read each question and then spend a while thinking about it, and it still felt like I was pretty much guessing (except on #9, which I was more confident about).

However, I managed to get four right (#4, #6, #7, and #9). Since I skipped #2, that is 4/8, compared to the 2/8 expected from random guessing, so I did way better than chance at least. Hopefully I'll continue absorbing grammar by osmosis over the next year.



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I was amused to see "horse manure hawk" show up in Google Translate. It seems to be a literal translation of the kanji name for "buzzard" (馬糞鷹). I can't believe that machine translation still makes such obvious mistakes, given that the word is at least common enough to show up in Jisho.

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Today, I finished reading Closeup: Obon Society on Satori Reader and started reading Secret, as previously planned.

それが売買の対象になってしまうことは、非常に悲しいことではないでしょうか。

Here, I misread 売買 (which I had never seen before) as shoubai (商売).

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I also finally finished Million Yen Women tonight. It is a ... weird show. For now, I plan to just continue watching Sword Art Online instead of picking up another anime.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 26, 2023 6:43 am

Not much to report, but I have been going through all the old IOSYS Touhou music videos since Saturday. A few videos of note:

This one features what sounds like "poyo" a lot. I initially assumed it meant "french fries", since french fries showed up a lot in the video, but Jisho didn't recognize it or even any variations on poyo. Per the English Youtube comments, apparently, "agepoyo" is actually 2010-era youth slang meaning "to get excited".


For some reason, this video is heavily censored for no apparent reason. I initially assumed that the censorship was intentional and part of a joke, like the character is doing lewd things or something. However, the comments revealed that originally, the video wasn't censored at all, and that they censored all the ducks out of fear of Disney because the ducks resemble Donald Duck.

Coincidentally, Youtube recommended another copy of the same video that isn't censored, after watching, so it's not like Youtube is even forcing the censorship, apparently. Conveniently, this means I could actually see what was censored, and sure enough, the video is full of cartoon ducks, all wearing blindfolds with the character 穴 for some bizarre reason. Does anyone know why? I'm not familiar with Touhou lore, but I read the wiki page for the character, including the linked "fanon" section, and there's not even a hint of why the video would feature masses of ducks everywhere.

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Speaking of background figures with weird characters on their heads, one thing that shows up in several different videos are people with just a blank white cloth with the character 罪 over their head. Does anyone know what the deal with this is? I'm guessing it is some sort of Buddhist symbolism, given how often it shows up.

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The last few SAO episodes didn't have anything noteworthy to discuss, but the two I watched tonight (11 and 12) did. Specifically, episode 11 has a scene where the villains recruit a bunch of American gamers on the internet to fight for them, and it shows said Americans reading aloud the "game" advertisement in English.

I was amazed at how bad their English is. For the most part, it's just the prosody that's unnatural, but there was also one bit where they managed to turn the middle "stric" in "restrictions" into a straight out "L" sound. Also, at the beginning of episode 12, the Americans say something that sounds like "Good, that's ocean!", and I can't even begin to guess what they were trying to say (and this time, there's no onscreen text they're reading.)

Presumably, it must not be easy to find cheap voice actors in Japan who can speak English convincingly. Either that or it's the Squid Game thing where the directors don't speak English well and thus can't tell the difference themselves.

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P.S. I just looked at the screenshot I posted again and I'm amused by the terrible grammar even in the onscreen text? "Hell to the yes"? "The developer is adventurous"? To be fair, these are supposed to be internet gamers, who are known to deliberately use bad grammar ironically, and I could totally see native English speakers writing "Hell to the yes" online as a joke. However, if they were doing that on purpose, they probably wouldn't bother to use correct capitalization and punctuation. Also, while that does explain the "hell to the yes", the second line, "The developer is adventurous" doesn't make sense as a joke. That's not the kind of broken English that someone would write on purpose as a joke. It just sounds like accidental Engrish from a Japanese company.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:58 pm

I watched part of Hayato's Dave the Diver video this morning. I think it's pretty good for language learning, because the beginning of the game has tons of dialogue which is written on screen in Japanese and which is read by Hayato aloud as well. I didn't pause to try to read it or understand it much, and just watched at normal speed to pick up as much as I could, but I do think it would be useful for language learners. You can learn all sorts of "useful" words like 銛, クラゲ, and 感電. Incidentally, 銛 wouldn't even show up using Google IME - I had to actually go to Jisho to copy paste it.





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Chapter 8 of Secret on Satori Reader had a sudden twist, with Akihiko found murdered. However, I think I accidentally spoiled myself, because way back in May 2022, I scaped all the stories on SR and computed a list of all the non-WK kanji and how often they appear out of curiosity. By far the top of the list was 彦, which appeared 370 times (compared to 餌 in 2nd with 29 appearances), including once in Sakura and Suzuki’s Long Distance Relationship, 30 times in The River Sanzu, and 339 times in Secret. With 339 appearances in Secret, it seems like Akihiko can't possible be out of the story already in chapter 8. I wonder whether he will return as a ghost, or what.

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The "American" gamers in Sword Art Online had another unintelligible line near the end of ep13, saying what sounded like "This game is a rareasack", whatever the heck that was supposed to be.

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This IOSYS Touhou video is very unusual. Rather than their usual style, it feels more like an Anime OP. I wonder why. Did they decide to imitate anime style for one video just for fun or something? I see a lot of English comments on Youtube are comparing it to A Certain Scientific Railgun.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Jan 28, 2023 6:05 am

Not really Japanese related, but this evening while mindlessly checking the Netflix homepage for something to watch to take a break from Japanese study, one new show caught my eye, a French show called The Seven Lives of Lea. I read three reviews of it, which were all positive, and decided to watch the first episode (with English subtitles). So far it's pretty good. I think I'll just watch that instead of Sword Art Online for now.


Also, I encountered a new katakana word I couldn't make any sense of, スキンシップ. Apparently, it means "physical contact" (skinship).
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