Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Jan 16, 2022 1:03 am

I didn't know that she put her podcast on Youtube, let alone that she added the transcripts too.

In case you want to try to find it yourself, it's 4-something minutes in.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Jan 17, 2022 6:05 am

In case it wasn't clear from my previous post, I already was a Patron of Noriko (since April 2021), I just never bothered to actually look at the Patreon-only content before. Or rather, I am trying to support her. Back in April 2021, I signed up for the $5/mo tier and Patreon shows me as a member and I can see all the rewards and so on, but Patreon doesn't appear to have ever actually charged my bank account. I have no idea what's up with that or whether she's actually getting any money.

Today I finished listening to Noriko's podcast for the 18th time. Or rather, her normal podcast. When I logged into Patreon recently to look up the s2e17 transcript, I discovered that her Patreon offers private RSS links to her list of extra Patreon-only podcast episodes, so I decided to try listening to that today.

I had to copy the link from Patreon into a Gmail draft, and then on my phone open up Gmail and copy the link and paste it into the Castbox app, but it actually worked surprisingly smoothly. Anyway, I'm now listening to Noriko's "Extra!" podcast for the first time. Or ignoring it while it plays in the background at any rate.

WK: Lately, I’ve been consistently getting 80+% accuracy, so I was pretty shocked when both times I tried to do WK today, I got only 55% accuracy and was forced to give up after just a couple minutes.

This morning, someone on Reddit recommended the Japanese speedrun channel RTA in Japan for Japanese listening practice, so I checked it out this evening. I had to scroll down a bit to find any games I was actually familiar with.

I first tried watching a video of Pokemon Crystal, but I found the voice almost impossible to understand, so I gave up and tried a Celeste video instead, which was somewhat easier to follow. I couldn't understand any of the specific content of the commentary on the speedrun, but I could understand enough to at least tell what he was talking about the whole time (it helps that I played the game myself up to Mirror Temple and have read about some of the more famous speedrun tricks). Plus, it was kind of mesmerizing, watching people race through the levels in seemingly impossible ways. I had no idea you could get the Golden Ridge heart without the white block for instance.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Jan 18, 2022 9:57 pm

It occurred to me that since the counter for chickens is wa, "two chickens" would probably be "niwatoriniwa". I wonder if Japanese people find this as amusing as I do, or if they would even recognize it as a pun.

Anyway, I finished Noriko's Extra! podcast last night and started 4989 American Life again. I've always wondered what the significance of the 4989 part was, but was never able to figure it out, so I listened closely to the first segment of the first episode when she said she would explain the number (assuming I understood it correctly).

She talked about how she always sees an idealized positive depiction of visiting the US online and wanted to share the negative aspects of living in the US and let people know that they're not alone if they are suffering from the same issues. However, unless I missed something, she never explaining the meaning of 4989 itself. I'm guessing this is some sort of pun on "suffering" and that she assumed that the Japanese audience would immediately understand it.


I also finally finished going through all the cards in my Anki deck this morning, so all that's left is to keep reviewing them periodically. Also, from the review stats graph, you can clearly see the dip in reviews every week during the workweek when I'm busy with work and not doing new cards. It's not quite a sharp weekend/weekday split because I did a lot of new cards on Monday mornings and Friday evenings, plus having to re-review recent cards from the weekend tended to cause an overhang so the review load gradually decreased over the course of the week.

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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:02 pm

golyplot wrote:It occurred to me that since the counter for chickens is wa, "two chickens" would probably be "niwatoriniwa". I wonder if Japanese people find this as amusing as I do, or if they would even recognize it as a pun.

There is in fact a very famous tongue twister based on this - 庭には二羽鶏がいる (googling just now I found an even longer version - 裏庭には二羽、庭には二羽鶏がいる).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 20, 2022 6:04 am

I've done basically no Japanese stuff the last two days due to constantly being busy with other stuff and not being able to get in the mood to study Japanese, and I had a brief crisis in confidence this morning. I did however continue playing podcasts in the background most of the time except for the aforementioned episode where I got so frustrated I briefly stopped even trying to listen podcasts and switched it to other music instead.

Anyway at one point this morning, I actually paid attention and noticed that Utaco was talking about looking up English synonyms in an online thesaurus for use in essay writing. What I found interesting is that she kept saying something that sounded like Luigi, which I assumed meant "synonym" based on the topic.

I looked it up and found that it must be 類義 (ruigi), which apparently means "similar meaning". Interestingly, Jisho suggests that the most common word for "synonym" is 同義語 (dougigo).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:51 pm

I noticed Utaco saying "binbouyusuri" a lot and my best guess from context was that it meant "financial aid" based on the binbou (poor) part. However, I looked it up and it actually means "tapping your foot". WTF?!

I also noticed that she said "shougeki" when talking about being surprised to discover that Bob is a nickname for Robert. (As an English speaker, I think that's kind of stupid too, but whatever). Anyway, it stuck out at me because I could never remember 衝撃 and 衝突 on Wanikani. I only started getting them right when I figured out that I could put "crash" for both and it would be accepted in both cases. Based on looking it up on Jisho, it seems like they can both refer to a physical collision, but 衝撃 can also refer to metaphorical shock. Hopefully that will help me remember it, though I doubt it.


In other news, I watched the movie Mirai without subtitles. I noticed they said something like "hijiji" a lot when referring to the Great-Grandfather, but I haven't been able to find anything when I tried to look that up. I also checked the plot summary both on the English Wikipedia and the Japanese Wikipedia page to try to see what I missed and look for any explanation of the hijiji thing. I was very surprised to discover that the Japanese plot summary is actually less detailed than the English one! Usually it's the other way around.

Also, Kun-chan seems like such a terrible name. It made me wonder he would be referred to as Kun-kun when he gets older. Isn't -kun the normal boy name ender? Of course, these are the same parents who also thought that ミライ was a good name and didn't bother to name their baby until a while after she was born.


One detail I found really interesting is how they had an advent calendar on the wall. I know that Japanese people celebrate Christmas, but I always thought that it wasn't as big a deal as it is in the US and isn't celebrated in the same way, and particularly not with the Christian elements. It's more like an excuse to eat KFC and strawberry sponge cake and go to the amusement park with your boyfriend, and they don't even get the day off work. I would have never guessed that advent calendars would be a thing in Japan.

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Also, I found it interesting that Kun-chan took off his shoes when he climbed up on the seat of the train:

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Also, it's a plot point in the movie that Kun doesn't know the names of his own parents. Granted, he is only 4 years old, and I can imagine a young western kid not knowing the names of their parents if they always go by Mommy and Daddy and haven't had much contact with the outside world yet. Still, it made me wonder if there's a cultural or linguistic difference that would make a Japanese kid more likely to not know their parents names than in the US.
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AndyMeg
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby AndyMeg » Mon Jan 24, 2022 2:26 pm

golyplot wrote:In other news, I watched the movie Mirai without subtitles. I noticed they said something like "hijiji" a lot when referring to the Great-Grandfather, but I haven't been able to find anything when I tried to look that up. I also checked the plot summary both on the English Wikipedia and the Japanese Wikipedia page to try to see what I missed and look for any explanation of the hijiji thing. I was very surprised to discover that the Japanese plot summary is actually less detailed than the English one! Usually it's the other way around.


"Jiji" is a short form for "grandfather" (and I think this form is mainly used by children. The equivalent for grandmother would be "baba"). The "hi" at the beginning I think is for "great"and could be using this kanji: 曾. So 曾祖父=ひじじ, therefore "Hijiji" would be literally "Great-granddad".
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:23 pm

Nicknames like "Bob" and "Dick" are because English was at some time really into rhyming slang.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Jan 25, 2022 6:36 am

A while back, I mentioned how I was reading the stories Kona's Big Adventure and Akiko's Foreign Exchange on Satori Reader, and in the later story, Akiko is asked to write a beginner Japanese story to help her classmates learn Japanese and writes a story called Kona's Big Adventure.

At the time, I thought it was just a bit of a cheeky reference and nothing more. However, this morning, I got up to the episode "UW, Week 7, Part 2" where Akiko is introduced to someone who works for Satori Reader and talks about how the site works and asks her to write stories for it. Apparently, Akiko's Foreign Exchange is loosely based on the real-life experiences of the author (Rika Nakajima), who is one of the central contributors to Satori Reader (I see she's also listed as one of the authors on Kona's Big Adventure).


Anki:

I have now officially been doing Anki for a month, thus filling up the graph of Last Month Review Counts. As you can see, it previously spiked on the weekends, when I did new cards, but this weekend, it didn't spike at all, because I finished going through all the cards in the deck last week. This weekend, the review count just continued to slowly decrease instead.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Jan 30, 2022 4:55 am

As you may have inferred from the lack of updates, I haven't been able to work up the motivation to do active study of Japanese for the lack week or so. I've still been listening to podcasts in the background all the time and doing a bit of WK each day, but that's it. My SR subscription ended on the 24th, so I obviously stopped doing that as well. I tried watching In This Corner of the World without subtitles last night, but I gave up after less than a minute because I couldn't understand anything anyone was saying, and went and got re-addicted to Magic: The Gathering instead.

That being said, I did have questions about a few things I ran into on WK this morning:

超す vs 越える - what's the difference if any? Also, WK wants "to go beyond" for the later, but Jisho lists "to exceed" and "to surpass" as additional meanings, so I hope I'm justified in adding them as synonyms.

観覧: I guessed "observation" but they want "viewing". I looked it up to try to get clarification, but it seems like it is only ever used as part of
観覧車 (ferris wheel).
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