Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon May 23, 2022 5:09 am

I happened to notice Utaco say 腐女子 yesterday, a word which I previously came across in an (English) article back in March. I wasn't even paying attention to the podcast at the time, it just happened to pop into my awareness while I was intently thinking about other things.

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I was thinking about the word "shizumu" recently, as it is ingrained in my mind due to being the beginning of 夜に駆ける. It's been a while since I listened to it, but I can still hear the first word clearly in my mind. I decided that it was probably some variant or inflection of 静か, but when I looked it up, I discovered it was actually a completely different word! (沈む)

The annoying part is that I actually theoretically know 沈む from WK, but it's not something I would normally think of since it is much less common than 静か.

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I heard Utaco talk about "henpinreshitto"s this evening. The problem is that you need a receipt to return an item, but providing the receipt to the recipient of a gift so they can return it would reveal the price, a social faux-pas. Apparently, some places have special Return Receipts that do not show the price available to solve this problem. It's interesting because despite being American, I'd never seen or heard of this before. TIL, I guess.

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Glass Mask ep27: Well, this is the episode where everything goes to hell. I knew it was coming, but it was still sad to see. I only remembered some of the details from when I watched it long before, so there were still some surprises. For example, I remembered that Maya's mother died in the theater watching White Jungle, but forgot about Mizuki confronting Nori or that Nori used her motorcycle gang friends to waylay Maya at the end.

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WK:

This morning, I noticed that the review counts showing on Wanikani were three higher than what my script was saying, so I had to investigate and fix it.

It turns out that the issue is related to three items (又 (kanji), 又 (vocab), and 公告) that were moved to a higher level last August and September. At the time, Wanikani was programmed so that when an item is moved to a level higher than your current level, it will no longer show up for reviews, even if you already unlocked it. Therefore, I had to add a level filter to my script in order to get the correct review count.

However, it looks like Wanikani must have recently changed that behavior, since those three items are coming up for review again now, even though I’m still only level 46, and the count of items awaiting review is correspondingly three higher. Therefore, I had to remove the level filter from the script to get the correct numbers again.

Edit: Turns out this change was made six days ago.

Sun May 22 2022:
Time spent: 6m
Reviews completed: 27
Reviews remaining: 2530
Reviews in next week: 3075 (+545)
Reviews in next month: 3883 (+808)
Accuracy: 66.67% (18/27)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 1219
Guru: 1332
Master: 1000
Enlightened: 1327
Burned: 2289
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue May 24, 2022 5:27 am

あれからエナが読んでくれる本の中に " 世界の観葉樹全集 " と " オーベント王国における草花の育て方Vol,1 " などのかなりマイナーっぽい本が増えた。

Right off the bat, ch7 has a word that even Jisho doesn't know (観葉樹). Google suggests that it means "ornamental tree".

The previous chapter ended with Ena reading a similar sounding book (世界の植木鉢全集), and Jisho did know "植木鉢". I initially thought it was meant to be the same book until I went back and checked. Apparently, they decided after that that the main character really likes books about plant cultivation and started reading lots of them to him (her?). It seems like a weird kind of book to read to a baby though.

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I missed the reading of 眺める yet again when it came up on WK today. I noticed that it has a different and much better mnemonic than I remembered (starting at people means looking a long time and 長い -> naga). It's a lot better than trying to guess whether "nag" is supposed to be naga or nagu. I always get it confused with 慰める and put nagumeru for the reading, which is why I keep missing it. Hopefully the 長い mnemonic will help me actually remember it.

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Glass Mask: Ep 28 mentions that Hayami is 11 years older than Maya. I do wonder how old Maya is supposed to be now, since her age hasn't been mentioned in like 10 episodes.

Ep 29 - Hayami (Masumi)'s father shows up onscreen for the first time, although his face is conspicuously not shown. I was actually really surprised by this, because whenever his father was mentioned before, he was only shown as an old portrait (with his face in shadow), which made me assume that his father was already dead when the show started.

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Also, Hayami appears to kiss Maya in her sleep, which is creepy on multiple levels.

Image

The episode also reveals that Hayami is adopted, although I'd already read that elsewhere as a spoiler. Apparently, his mother worked for his adoptive father as a maid until they married, so I guess dubious romance runs in the family.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue May 24, 2022 3:46 pm

特に兄のテオは嬉しくて堪らないといった感じで、大量にもってきてくれた本の中の、特に木に関する本を毎日読み聞かせてくれる。

I had to look up 堪らない and was a bit frustrated to find that it was a N3 word that I had learned earlier this year with my vocab drilling, but I still didn't recognize it because I had never seen the kanji form before.

Also, is this といった the quotation と?

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I tried looking up 観葉樹 on weblio.jp, but even that didn't have it. It appears that "観葉" is a word by itself though (ornamental leaves). "観葉樹" must not be a common usage (though there are plenty of images on Google).

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その中には観賞用の部屋に置くような観葉樹も含まれるようで、何冊も月単位で発刊されているようなマイナー雑誌まで読み聞かせてくれる。

I encountered その中 as a new card on JPDB this morning right before reading this, so that was a striking coincidence. Still didn't help me actually remember it though. Part of the problem is that the definition ("wherein; therein; thereinto") is so vague.
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Tue May 24, 2022 7:52 pm

golyplot wrote:特に兄のテオは嬉しくて堪らないといった感じで、大量にもってきてくれた本の中の、特に木に関する本を毎日読み聞かせてくれる。

I had to look up 堪らない and was a bit frustrated to find that it was a N3 word that I had learned earlier this year with my vocab drilling, but I still didn't recognize it because I had never seen the kanji form before.

Also, is this といった the quotation と?

Yes. Meaning-wise という being in the past tense doesn't make much of a difference in this case.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Wed May 25, 2022 2:58 pm

Here we have a completely wrong and unhelpful card on JPDB:

Image

Obviously, none of the example sentences are actually talking about bows as Jisho unhelpfully suggests (the definitions on JPDB appear to be taken straight from Jisho anyway).

Although Jisho was useless here, I noticed that two of the sentences used "ボーとする", so I googled that and found a page explaining it. Apparently, "ボーとする" means "out of it" or "spaced out". As for the sentence using ボー by itself, that presumably means something like stupefaction by analogy. I wish there were actual translations though.

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Glass Mask ep30: This episode exposed the limits of my memory.

In this episode, Maya puts on a one-woman play for the school culture festival, inspiring Ayumi to try a one-woman version of Romeo and Juliet. I remembered the fact that Ayumi's does a solo Juliet play from when I watched these episodes long ago, but I did not remember Maya's plays at all, or the fact that Ayumi was just copying Maya here. (I also mistakenly remembered it as coming earlier in the series.)

I also remembered from last time that Tsukikage visits Maya by the riverbank and has her mime riding the bus and train. However, this turned out to be the conflation of two separate scenes! Early in the episode, Maya mimes riding a bike for some boys by the river. In a completely different scene at the end of the episode, she mimes riding the bus and train for Tsukikage at night in the city.

Of course, it's obvious that human memory is fallible, but it is still kind of shocking to see it exposed like this. This reminds me of one time when I was looking through old entries in my diary and discovered that two incidents which I clearly remembered happening on the same day actually happened two weeks apart.

This episode also brings up the mystery of Maya's schooling. After absolutely no mention of school for 12 episodes, Maya suddenly goes back to high school and unsuccessfully tries to join the school theater club, then decides to put on a play by herself for the school culture festival.

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This was surprising to me for two reasons. First, that school hadn't been mentioned in 12 episodes, so I assumed Maya was not in school this whole time. After going back and checking ep18, I noticed a mention line saying that a Daito contract would "pay for her school expenses", implying that she actually was attending school all this time offscreen. I guess all the TV and movie and commerical stardom was somehow arranged around that, though it's hard to see how. My understanding is that usually kid actors are tutored on set, since the filming schedule is not compatible with regularly attending school. At the very least, there's one scene where Mizuki drives Maya to some event at 2pm, which seems like it would be during the school day.

Second that the last time it did get mentioned, she was wearing a completely different color of uniform! At first I wondered if she was at a different school now, but no, I went back and checked ep18, and the subtitles explicitly refer to it as "One Star Academy" in both ep18 and 30. What's up with that? I thought maybe she was still wearing her old junior high uniform in this scene, except that I don't recall her ever wearing it when she was actually going to school.

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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby Aozora » Wed May 25, 2022 3:42 pm

golyplot wrote:
Although Jisho was useless here, I noticed that two of the sentences used "ボーとする", so I googled that and found a page explaining it. Apparently, "ボーとする" means "out of it" or "spaced out". As for the sentence using ボー by itself, that presumably means something like stupefaction by analogy. I wish there were actual translations though.


It should be ぼーっとする, note the hiragana and っ, that should get you better search results.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu May 26, 2022 2:57 pm

Not strictly Japanese related, but I watched the first two episodes of De Regels van Floor (in Dutch) yesterday - it was a huge struggle and I only understood a fraction of it, especially at first but it was still funny. Still, it was a reminder of how limited my skills are in other languages, so I guess I don't have to feel so bad when I struggle with Japanese. Incidentally, it's just so hard to get over how odd and dissonant Dutch sounds.

That being said, Dutch does have a big advantage over Japanese in that everything is generally phrased the same way as in English, with the same sentence structures (and a lot of the words are cognates too). It's just the sounds and words that are different. I think that makes it a lot easier to infer things from context, since you already have the blanks to fill in, unlike in Japanese.


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今、注目の的になっていることになど気付いてはいなかった。

This was a card on JPDB for 注目の的, but the part I found interesting was the 気付いて. While listening to Utaco recently, I noticed her say something like "kizuite" or variants a lot, and always wondered what it was. The only thing that came to mind was 傷, which is sometimes read "kizu", but it didn't make any sense given how often she said it. Now I know what she was probably saying all this time!

I also noticed her say "futo" yesterday, a word in the N3 decks that I've struggled with, but naturally, I couldn't remember what it meant then either.

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Also, the latest chapter of Hole in the Wall featured 意地悪, a word I remember seeing on WK a lot, so that was kind of cool. (I mostly remember it from WK because it has a tricky reading - I've also missed it a few times in review by putting "jerk" rather than "malice" for the meaning)

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Glass Mask ep31: And the mystery of Maya's school uniform deepens!

At the beginning of the episode, she's wearing the same white uniform that everyone was wearing in ep30. However, the audience is all wearing a blue uniform instead.

Image

Even stranger, Maya herself is wearing the blue uniform later in the episode. It is similar in color to the one she was wearing in ep18, but the tie is different and it has a patch on the front. What on earth could possibly explain these weird uniform switches, especially within the same episode?

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One other detail I found interesting is that the pedestrian walk signals have a blue light for "go" (and red for stop). Additionally, the blue light just flashes briefly when it is about to end, before going to red.

In the US, the standard is to have a white light for "go", which changes to an orange light with a number counting down to 0 to show how much time is left, and then a solid orange "don't go" signal. In Germany, they have the famous Ampelmännchen, which have a walking figure on the light similar to the Japanese example here, except that the go light is green rather than blue. It's really interesting to see how little things like this that you don't normally think about differ between countries.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri May 27, 2022 3:13 pm

Satori Reader included a note about Japanese school classes:

From elementary school all the way up through high school, kids are organized into classes called kumi. When you see a name like Ichi-nen, san-kumi, the first part means the year of school, and the second is the class name. Class names can have either numbers or letters, depending on the school, so at a different school, Kumiko's class might have been Ichi-nen, C-kumi.

Each kumi consists of about 30 kids. The kids that are in a particular kumi spend all day every day together. That's because in Japan, even up through high school, the kids all stay together in the same classroom and the teachers move from classroom to classroom instead. There are a few small exceptions, such as sex ed, when boys and girls are separated and receive gender-specific lessons, but otherwise, the kids all receive the same instruction, together.

So your class becomes something almost like your tribe for the year. You study together, eat lunch together, clean up the classroom together, and go on field trips together. Everyone has the same teachers, and gets all the same homework, so everyone can commiserate together. As you might imagine, it's a great opportunity to build close relationships. But it also means that if there are kids you don't like, you're going to be stuck with them all year too. So there are definitely pros and cons to this arrangement.


Obviously, I'd picked up some of this just due to watching lots of anime and seeing references to "class 3-2" etc. all the time, but I was still surprised by some of the details, in particular the way the students stay in the same classroom all day. It's just so different to anything in the US. In my own school, we were in a single class all day from 1-2 grade, then 3-6, we still had a homeroom, but we were in different rooms for some classes (with the students redivided between the three rooms based on ability in that subject). In middle and high school, there were no homerooms at all and everyone had a different class every period.

Come to think of it, it can't be literally true that Japanese students stay in the same classroom all day. I've seen students cooking stuff at school in anime before, and that requires going to a special room equipped with kitchen appliances. Presumably, they also have chemistry labs, computer labs, etc. as well.

Still, it is amazing to think that the Japan school system has no tracking or electives, even in high school. I guess that fits with the "treat every student the same" ethos I've read about. It's also interesting because the "bell rings and everyone rushes to the lockers in between school periods" is such a staple of American high schools. It never really occurred to me that that isn't something you see in anime.

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そんな水くさいこと言わないで。

I was very confused by 水くさい. WTF is a "water smell"? But apparently it means "stand-offish" of all things.



皆様、当機はただ今、東京国際空港に到着いたしました。

I looked up touki (当機) on Jisho and I was amazed just how many words there are with the reading "touki". Jisho lists eight different "common words" with that reading, and another nine that are not common words (当機 is not a common word, apparently).

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そのせいか読んでくれる本は " 草花 " に偏っている。

Although the overall meaning was clear, I couldn't figure out why the ka particle was used here. I tried researching it, but was still confused, as Tofugu and Japanese Ammo didn't list any uses of ka that seemed to fit. The only thing I could find about it was in Japanese. Apparently, せいか is used to express an uncertain cause with a negative connotation. Incidentally, the article uses the phrase "可能是因为". I've never seen 为 before, and even Jisho seems to have no knowledge of it. What's up with that?

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Glass Mask ep 32:

This episode has a lengthy explanation of Ayumi's childhood and motivations, which was interesting, since she never got much focus before. It is also a goldmine of chronology, after almost no hints about the passage of time for the last 14 episodes.

In this episode, Tsukikage announces that Ayumi will win the Scarlet Goddess unless Maya manages to win the Best Actress Award within two years. Which conveniently means the rest of the show will probably take place over two years. It also features the high school graduation of Maya and Ayumi, which confirms the approximate time of year, and that it has been three years since ep18, when Maya started high school.

It also briefly shows a book of photos of Maya at school. This is translated as "yearbook", although it seems strange to me, since an American yearbook would just have random photos of scenes at school, not a bunch of photos of one specific person. Maybe this is a translation issue of some sort? Or maybe it's just the universal fiction thing of focusing on the main character regardless of how little sense it makes. It is amusing to imagine the Yearbook Club just following Maya around all day taking pictures and ignoring everyone else.

This shot also further demonstrates the mystery of the school uniforms. Maya is shown wearing the blue uniform in some photos and the white uniform in others. What on earth is going on there?

Image


Ep 32 also marks a return to Tsukikage's signature Acting Lessons Via Physical Torture technique, something not seen since all the way back in ep20. In this episode, Tsukikage has the troupe stand in a circle around Maya and pelt her with balls while she tries to dodge. For an hour. Every day.

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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby Aozora » Fri May 27, 2022 4:12 pm

This shot also further demonstrates the mystery of the school uniforms. Maya is shown wearing the blue uniform in some photos and the white uniform in others. What on earth is going on there?


Winter vs summer uniforms.
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Fri May 27, 2022 9:21 pm

golyplot wrote:Still, it is amazing to think that the Japan school system has no tracking or electives, even in high school.


I was sure that at least some schools did have electives, and having just done a little searching I found that it's something more commonly associated with middle schools than high schools, so a lot of the time they're more like additional classes aimed at expanding the students' horizons rather than preparing for specific careers. As for tracking, from what I've seen this seems more like something done on the level of the school as a whole, with different high schools either formally or de facto specializing in certain areas.

golyplot wrote:そのせいか読んでくれる本は " 草花 " に偏っている。

Although the overall meaning was clear, I couldn't figure out why the ka particle was used here. I tried researching it, but was still confused, as Tofugu and Japanese Ammo didn't list any uses of ka that seemed to fit. The only thing I could find about it was in Japanese. Apparently, せいか is used to express an uncertain cause with a negative connotation. Incidentally, the article uses the phrase "可能是因为". I've never seen 为 before, and even Jisho seems to have no knowledge of it. What's up with that?

The せい here is basically the 所為 one that usually translates to "fault", with か as the questioning particle expressing uncertainty. And 可能是因为 is in Simplified Chinese, with 为 being the Simplified version of 為.
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