Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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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 » Thu Sep 15, 2022 5:19 am

This morning, I finished 4989 American Life again and started listening to Haruka's podcast ("The Real Japanese Podcast!") again.

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Stein's Gate: At one point I noticed Okabe say "umu" (subtitled "indeed"). Kotaro in Kotaro Lives Alone said "umu" constantly, and I figured it must be some archaic samurai-speak thing, which Kotaro does a lot, and thus I was surprised to see it come up again here. I wonder if this is just a Okabe being a chuuni thing, though it didn't sound like it.

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At one point, I also noticed Okabe use 振り込む, a word I've constantly struggled with on JPDB and never been able to remember (it certainly seems like it should mean something about shaking, not "to make a payment (by bank transfer)" of all things!).

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I haven't been doing much WK lately, but I did amazingly well on it today. I guess I'll copy paste tonight's post from my WK log here:


I haven’t been doing much WK lately because I keep getting up late and thus don’t have much time for WK in the morning and keep getting distracted by other stuff in the afternoon (and often the morning too). This morning, I got up late again like usual and planned to only do 50 reviews like I’ve been doing lately, but this time was very different.

This time, I had an amazing run of luck at the start, completing over 10 items before missing a single one. Obviously, my luck got worse after that, but I decided to go ahead and do the full 100 and ended up doing 100 reviews in only 15 minutes this morning with 82% accuracy (worse than I used to, but higher accuracy than I’ve been getting lately).

In the afternoon, I decided to go out for ice cream if I got through another 100 reviews and raced through them as fast as possible. Surprisingly, I got through another 100 in 15 minutes at 82% accuracy again. In a further coincidence, this left me with exactly 1337 reviews remaining tonight.

Anyway, this is the first time in almost a week that I managed to get 100 reviews done in the morning and the first time in nearly two weeks that I managed to do the full 200, something I used to get through almost every day.

Wed Sep 14 2022:
Time spent: 30m
Reviews completed: 200
Reviews remaining: 1337
Reviews in next week: 1756 (+419)
Reviews in next month: 2570 (+814)
Accuracy: 82.00% (164/200)
Level: 47

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 519
Guru: 637
Master: 574
Enlightened: 2382
Burned: 3189
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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 » Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:15 pm

Today, I started reading the English (in more ways than one) book "How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual". There is a scene early on where the author asks her classmates if they've read Fruits Basket vol4 and they respond by telling her about a "steamy boy's love" manga called Gravitation. I was surprised, because while I didn't know anything about Fruits Basket, I was always under the impression that Fruits Basket itself was Boy's Love as I once saw someone reading it as a kid and the one page I saw had a naked guy. But apparently it isn't actually BL.

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https://tapas.io/episode/1068787
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Sep 16, 2022 4:48 am

Wednesday morning I finished listening to 4989 American Life again and started listening to Haruka's podcast ("The Real Japanese Podcast").

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Also, I noticed several interesting words while watching Stein's Gate tonight, most notably "niyaketeiru", said by Kurisu to Okabe after he gets the text from John Titor. It is notable because ニヤける is a word I've been struggling with on JPDB that I was never able to guess/remember the meaning of.

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Also, I watched "Can You Feel The Love Tonight?" in Japanese tonight. In Japanese, it is apparently.... still "Can you feel the love tonight"! I've seen several Disney songs now that kept words or phrases from the English version untranslated, but this is the most extreme case I've seen yet.

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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Sep 17, 2022 5:06 am

JPDB:

This evening, I got frustrated enough with JPDB that I deleted my それでも、ハッピーエンド deck, sending me from 3973->3751 words known and 866->804 kanji known on JPDB. But hopefully the review load will be a little better now and I won't have to deal with so much hard to remember BS vocab.

I also decided to go ahead and try reading たぶん, even though I haven't finished learning the vocab for it on JPDB yet and am only at 86% coverage per JPDB. I figured that それでも、ハッピーエンド was a failed experiment, where I spent weeks studying all the vocab for the story and still couldn't read it, and thus I should just go ahead and try reading it now to see how hard it is.

Anyway, I spent 20 minutes reading the first part of たぶん, though as usual "reading" is perhaps too generous. It was easier than それでも、ハッピーエンド but harder than 月王子. I could understand some things, but I was mostly relying on putting every paragraph into DeepL to understand the story. And of course, progress was very slow anyway, so I didn't get far.

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Satori Reader:

私が全盲だと分かってから、母は毎日、私のことで頭がいっぱいになってしまった。

I always thought wakaru was just "to be understood", but apparently, it can also mean "to be discovered".
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Stein's Gate: I was actually pretty happy after watching ep8 tonight, so so far I would recommend the show, even though I didn't like the first episode or two. The protagonist is pretty unlikable thanks to his chuuni antics, but it gets a lot better once the plot gets going.

Also, I think this is the first time I've seen an explicitly trans character in anime, though the crossdresser in Blue Period came close.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Sep 18, 2022 5:12 am

Today I went to the local Japanese supermarket and got some food to try for the first time. I got a salmon onigiri, an onigiri combo, a package of castella, and some Japanese dish sponges (because I need sponges and for some reason Safeway doesn't stock them).

The onigiri combo had some fried chicken and two onigiri, one salmon, and one with some thin black things I couldn't identify. Does anyone know what this is?
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Stein's Gate:

At one point, the subtitles have an (English) meme, and based on the way the characters react, it seems that Christina used some sort of Japanese internet meme. I wish I knew what she actually said.

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Also, at the end of the episode, Okabe discovers that the butterfly effect has gone a lot farther than he realized when he discovers that there is no Tora no Ana location in Akiba like he remembers.

I looked it up out of curiosity and it turns out that Tora no Ana is a famous shop in Akibahara in the real world. Or at least it was... apparently it closed just last month. What timing!

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Sep 20, 2022 4:47 am

「つけまつげ」とは、その名の通り、付けるまつげです。
False eyelashes are, exactly as their name says, eyelashes that you affix.

I found this sentence on SR hilarious because the translation makes no sense in English. It seems that in Japanese, false eyelashes are more like "attaching eyelashes".


可愛く見せてくれるつけまつげですが、くれぐれも大事な時に取れないようにしたいですね。

くれぐれも has long been the bane of my existence on JPDB, so it was nice to see a note on SR here. Per SR:

The kuregure mo on the front is an adverb that literally means "earnestly" or "sincerely," but it often comes before some well-intentioned admonition. Think of it as meaning "Take all good care and (do such-and-such)" or "Be very careful and ..."
Therefore, the above means "One wants to take every care to ensure that they don't come off at a critical moment."
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Sep 29, 2022 5:59 am

Well, it sure has been a while! I guess it's for the best though, since my frequent posting two weeks ago seems to have driven away the readership :cry: . I've been struggling with motivation to study Japanese the last few days, but I'm doing my best to work through it.

Today, I finished listening to Haruka's podcast for the second time and started Noriko's podcast for the 22nd time.


I've also been struggling a bit with JPDB lately. For the last couple months, I've been making an effort to get through the review pile and do new cards every day, but not always successfully. For a while I was doing 19 new cards a day, but then I felt overwhelmed and lowered it to 17, and then again to 16, but I'm still getting overwhelmed sometimes. As you can see from this graph, I missed a day a week ago, and then two days ago, I basically just gave up and declared Japanese bankruptcy. I haven't managed to clear the review pile and do any new cards for the last two days, but I'm hoping to get through it tomorrow. I also decided to lower my max new cards per day yet again, from 16 to 13, in the hopes of lowering the review burden in the future.

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luke
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby luke » Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:01 am

golyplot wrote:I also decided to lower my max new cards per day yet again, from 16 to 13, in the hopes of lowering the review burden in the future.

It's always fun to watch how you approach your project.

I think of flash cards as a long-term project. I've gotten to the point of lowering the automatic "adding of new cards" to 0. Then I can use "time spent on cards" as my metric. When that gets below my "threshold", I add new cards for the day. Even that number has continued to go down. For example, one was recently 7 new cards when I was below the time threshold, then I changed it to 5, then 4, then 3. Obviously, there are days when no cards get added. Even if I'm just doing "reviews", each day still counts as progress.

What I like about this approach is that I can add 3 cards at a time. If a day was very light, I may end up adding 6 or 9. I try not to create a formidable wall of reviews.
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DaveAgain
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby DaveAgain » Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:33 am

golyplot wrote: For a while I was doing 19 new cards a day, but then I felt overwhelmed and lowered it to 17, and then again to 16, but I'm still getting overwhelmed sometimes.
On another thread Gordafarin2 mentioned a "load balancer" Anki add-on.
If you do your reviewing at the computer, I recommend the Load Balancer add-on. It helps to avoid all your reviews clumping up at the same time. It might make the Anki algorithm a little less 'efficient' by shifting cards a few days forward or back, but the consistency you gain is worth it. It's so disheartening when you wake up to a mountain of reviews that you didn't expect.
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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 » Fri Sep 30, 2022 4:28 am

As it turns out, I still didn't get through JPDB today, so no new cards for the third day running. Maybe tomorrow.

Steins;Gate ep 20:

In this episode, the mysterious FB, who Moeka assumed to be a woman, was revealed to actually be Mr. Braun all along. I was wondering why Moeka was so insistent that FB was a woman when they had apparently never met or even talked by voice call, until Braun mentioned "writing like a woman" and it suddenly occurred to me that he must have been using feminine speech patterns in his text messages. It's interesting all these cultural/language nuances that don't translate. As an American, it never would have occurred to me that you could judge someone's gender just from text messages, but of course, Japanese is different.

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Soon afterward, he talks about a thread descending from the sky, as thin as a spider's. It's a good thing that I had previously watched Erased, which featured the story of the spider's thread, because I would have never gotten the reference otherwise.

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