Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Nov 19, 2021 6:34 am

WK: This evening, I noticed that my review count was only 4540 something and decided to push ahead and go for 4500. When I first tried to do reviews, there was a Wanikani bug that broke the review UI, so I almost gave up right at the start, but luckily that went away after a few minutes, and despite missing a bunch of reviews, I pushed through until I hit 4498. So now my review count is finally under 4500 for the first time!

SR: すごくしっかりした体で、角が大きい。

This technically not a new kanji, since I of course learned 角 on WK long ago, but it may as well be, with a completely different meaning and reading. WK only teaches that 角 can be kaku/angle or kado/corner. I had no idea that it can also mean "antler" of all things and with a completely different reading (tsuno). Arggh!


Also, I watched Komi Can't Communicate ep3 tonight. The problem with this anime is that it seems to be very comic-inspired and makes heavy use of on-screen text boxes to comment on what is going on, and sometimes the subtitles don't translate them. Either way, I found myself constantly pausing to try to read the onscreen text, but that took a long time and I could often barely read it anyway.

Also, I ran into a new kanji in the process - 晒

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Nov 21, 2021 6:03 am

Another new kanji from SR: 唾

鶏の唐揚げは、私のおばあちゃんのレシピだ。最高においしいよ、と説明すると、みんなは、ゴクリと唾を飲み込んだ。

I thought that 唐 might be a new kanji here as well, but I checked and Wanikani does have 唐. However, it is listed as "china", and the only word it has is 唐突 (sudden). It doesn't have any kunyomi words at all.
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SpanishInput
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby SpanishInput » Mon Nov 22, 2021 12:56 am

golyplot wrote:However, it is listed as "china", and the only word it has is 唐突 (sudden). It doesn't have any kunyomi words at all.

Hi! I studied Japanese decades ago, and now I learn Chinese. 唐 has the original meaning of "big words, boasting", which is hinted by the 口 component. In chinese it's used with the meaning of "to exaggerate", or to say something inappropriate. 唐突, for example, appears in the Chinese drama The Rise of Phoenixes when a character does something "abrupt", meaning doing something without consent from a superior. (See Episode 8, time 3:58 for a good example)

Oh, and 唐 (táng) is also the name of a Chinese dinasty. This dinasty was so famous that, in some words, 唐 is synonimous with "China". For example, in the word 糖人街, táng rén jiē, "Chinatown", literally, "The street of the Tang people".
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Nov 22, 2021 6:50 am

Wanikani Progress Charts

As you may remember, back on May 12th, I returned to Wanikani with an ambitious challenge. My review pile had grown to over 6500, and I wanted to see if I could re-review everything, since I had forgotten so much since blitzing through it all the year before.

Anyway, over the subsequent six months, progress was much slower and more frustrating than I expected, and I had to reset from level 60 to 46 in order to lessen the load a bit. However, I have been slowly making progress, and my review count has gone down a lot lately. Anyway, today I finally took the time to figure out how to scrape my progress posts and create some graphs showing my review count over time.

The first two months of this challenge are a bit complicated to graph, because I reset my level several times, first from 60 to 48, then to 47, and finally to 46. Below is a chart of my review count for the first 90 days, showing the count after each time I reset in a different color. As you can see, this was not a happy time for me :(

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And here’s a chart showing my progress in the 135 days since I reset to level 46 (July 9th - November 20th). At the end of August, I also started tracking reviews due in the next week (red line) as well as the current review count (blue line). Note that this graph does not include the stats for today (November 21st), which are way off the bottom of the graph :)

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And now for tonight's Wanikani update:

I did well on my reviews today and completely smashed the previous record review count, reaching 4284. And that’s even more impressive than it seems, because I also did three new lessons today, so my review count would have been only 4281 if I hadn’t done any lessons.

Incidentally, I don’t think it’s entirely coincidence that I’ve been blowing past one record after another recently. If you look at my graphs above, it may seem like I was basically just treading water for months, but I think one of the keys is that a lot of progress comes in ways that aren’t reflected in the review count graphs.

First off is the fact that almost a quarter of the easier items have advanced to guru or higher now. When I first started, most of the reviews I did were at Apprentice level, so whenever I tried to “sprint” by doing lots of reviews at once, my review count would just bounce back almost immediately as all the items I reviewed re-entered the review pile in hours or days. However, nowadays over half the reviews I do end up at guru+, meaning that they won’t add to the pile again for at least a week. This means that the bounce back is not as severe and takes longer to manifest, which has enabled me to dive much deeper than before.

The second major factor is increased accuracy. While there are some items I’ve missed repeatedly, I sometimes I do manage to remember an item that I missed previously when it comes back up for review. Combined with increased familiarity in general, and my accuracy has gone up a lot over time, which also helps keep my review count down for longer with less effort. Another side effect of this is that when my accuracy is higher, I’m a lot more motivated to do reviews. When I miss a bunch of reviews, I’ll just give up and quit early.

Back during the summer when I was just treading water, I told myself that every little bit helped and I was still slowly making invisible progress as described above. However, it’s one thing to think that and quite another to really see it in action.

On another note, at the end of August, I added a new stat to my nightly stat posts - reviews due in the next week. The idea behind this is the “bounce back” effect mentioned above. Early on, most of my reviews were Apprentice, which meant that the current review count was highly volatile. If I did a bunch of reviews, the review count would plummet, then immediately bounce back up.

The idea was that tracking the review count due in 7 days instead would provide a much less volatile picture of my progress, since it isn’t affected by Apprentice reviews at all. You can see this reflected in the graph above. The red line tends to track the blue line, but it goes up and down by smaller amounts each time, and more smoothly.

However, since over half my reviews lately have been Guru+, the +7 day review count is still relatively volatile, so I decided to add a new stat: Reviews due in the next month. This number can only be decreased by Enlightened and Burn reviews, so it will probably only go up and down very slowly.

Sun Nov 21 2021:
Time spent: 92
Reviews completed: 409
Reviews remaining: 4284
Reviews in next week: 4740 (+456)
Reviews in next month: 5094 (+354)
Accuracy: 75.79% (310/409)
Accuracy on resurrected items: 92.65% (189/204)
Accuracy on non-resurrected items: 59.02% (121/205)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 2835
Guru: 1387
Master: 470
Enlightened: 714
Burned 1650


In other news, I saw yet another new kanji from SR today: 頬

みんなは、リンゴやバナナをかじったり、ナッツを頬張ったりしていた。
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Nov 23, 2021 5:54 pm

Saturday night, I encountered the wo katakana for the first time. I remember back when I started learning Japanese, I went through Tofugu's lesson to learn the kana, and they included wo but warned that it is almost never used in practice. They sure weren't kidding!

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In other news, last Thursday, a new batch of lessons appeared on Wanikani, and among them, 豚カツ, the first time I'd seen the reading "ton" for 豚. It made me think of Aggretsuko, where there's a giant pig character named Director Ton. It made me wonder if his name was supposed to be a pun. Likewise, when I learned from Satori Reader that 角 can mean "antler" and be read "tsuno", it made me think of the gazelle character Tsunoda, and whether that is also a pun. I looked it up, and in her case, her name actually is spelled with 角, though it doesn't seem to mean anything in particular.

Anyway, it's interesting to discover these hidden puns, whether they're intentional or not.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Wed Dec 01, 2021 2:32 am

I was off on Thanksgiving vacation for the last week, and so did essentially no Japanese practice. Hopefully, I'll get back into the swing of things soon.


There was one interesting bit today - I finally realized today after a year and a half that the thing Noriko always says is "shingata coronavirus" where shingata = new (shin) + type (kata). All this time, I had just assumed it was a mangled pronunciation of "singular" (which makes no sense) rather than a Japanese word and didn't pay much attention to it. I do think it's pretty cool that I managed to not only infer the meaning from context, but also guess the component kanji of the word just from hearing it.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Dec 04, 2021 2:42 am

This evening, I tried looking through the Youtube suggestions to find new Japanese Youtube channels to watch, but for some reason, it just had an endless stream of HoI4 videos with robot voices. I tried clicking through to channel after channel, and every single one was using robotic voices. It was very annoying, and I couldn't find anything worth watching. It made me wonder if "gaming videos with robot voices" is some sort of popular genre in Japan or something. Here's an example of one of the suggestions below.


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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Dec 06, 2021 2:39 am

I looked for new Youtube channel suggestions on the Japanese learning subreddit today, and saw this one recommended.

It's basically a video of someone going through a daily routine in Animal Crossing while narrating everything. I could understand some bits, but overall it felt overwhelming and hard to understand. I think it might be good practice for more advanced learners though.





Here's another Animal Crossing channel that was recommended on Reddit. Since I haven't actually played Animal Crossing, I found this one to be boring (in addition to being hard to understand like usual), so I quit after just a couple minutes. I did however learn the words shinyoujyu and kouyoujyu. I had no idea that 葉 could be read as "you". Even after racing through Wanikani last year, I'm still continually surprised by weird new kanji readings.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Dec 07, 2021 3:52 am

So far on Satori Reader, I've been reading the easy version of each chapter of Akiko's Foreign Exchange and then the hard version of the chapter before going to the next chapter. However, yesterday I finally got bored and frustrated enough to quit and decided to only read the easy version of each chapter instead.


I've heard "onaka ga suita" many times before, but I'd never seen it in kanji before. I guess this is yet another weird kanji reading that I'd never heard of before.

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Here's a good example of how reading kana can actually be harder than kanji. When I initially paused the video to try to read the example sentences, I couldn't figure them out at all. I couldn't tell where the word boundaries were and thought that it might be using a word like "kawa" and then the explanatory "kara". However, once I saw it written in kanji in the subtitles, I of course immediately understood that it was wakaru. Of course, it's not just the subtitles - I would have also instantly understood it upon hearing it spoken, even with no writing. I guess the difference is that speech has some cues that help you notice the word boundaries which is impossible if you just have a mass of kana with no spaces.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Dec 07, 2021 5:28 am

Tonight, I learned about the 三菱銀行人質事件 and read about it on Wikipedia (using Google Translate to English out of laziness, since there's no English article). I did briefly look at the Japanese though, and was surprised to discover that 質 can be read as shichi as in 人質 (hitojichi). I always thought 質 was just shitsu. It seems like there's no end to the alternate kanji readings!
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