Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Apr 15, 2022 5:45 am

私が戻るまで、トムをここに留めておくつもりなのだと思っていました。
I thought you were going to keep Tom here until I got back.

How do you tell that this is talking about someone else, rather than the speaker's own intentions? There's no kureru.


「とことんプライドを傷つけられた!

Why would they use the transitive form and convert it to passive rather than just saying 傷つく in the first place?

二人が来ると部屋の中がとても賑やかになる。

賑 is a kanji that isn't on WK that I learned from the N5 deck on JPDB (though it took me quite a few tries before I started to remember it). So it's cool to see it come up in the wild.


恐らくは父親なのだと思う。

I looked up the grammar of なのだ, and apparently the な is *already* a だ, which turns into na when the no is added to the end to nominalize it. So why not just say 恐らくは父親だと思う and skip the nano part? It seems redundant.


I finally finished reading ch1 of 濁った瞳のリリアンヌ tonight. Well ch1 if you don't count the prologue. But I think for simplicity, I'll just use the regular chapter numbers from now on, which would make it ch2 (the one titled 生後2週間目). It looks like it has some chapters later labeled 閑話 which aren't part of the regular chapter numbering, but I guess I can worry about that bridge if I ever come to it.


そう、僕の家の掟だ。
そして、妹達が3匹も生まれて、もっと窮屈になった。
I also started reading Hole in the Wall on Satori Reader tonight, and already in ch1, there were two kanji that I didn't recognize (掟 and 窮). 窮 (and in fact 窮屈) are on WK (level 56), so I will (re)learn them eventually, but I didn't remember them from 2020. 掟, however, isn't on WK at all.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Fri Apr 15, 2022 12:34 pm

golyplot wrote:私が戻るまで、トムをここに留めておくつもりなのだと思っていました。
I thought you were going to keep Tom here until I got back.

How do you tell that this is talking about someone else, rather than the speaker's own intentions? There's no kureru.

I think the phrase 留めておくつもり only makes sense if it refers to the intentions of the person performing the action. If the speaker were talking about her own intentions it would have to be something like 留めておいてもらうつもり.

golyplot wrote:「とことんプライドを傷つけられた!

Why would they use the transitive form and convert it to passive rather than just saying 傷つく in the first place?
Probably the use of the adversative passive helps emphasize how aggravated the speaker feels, and/or that the cause is someone else's actions or some external process.

golyplot wrote:恐らくは父親なのだと思う。

I looked up the grammar of なのだ, and apparently the な is *already* a だ, which turns into na when the no is added to the end to nominalize it. So why not just say 恐らくは父親だと思う and skip the nano part? It seems redundant.

Tae Kim talks about the use of なの in interrogative phrases to ask for explanations, but it can also be used to provide explanations. It's hard to tell without context, but I'm guessing the sentence can be translated as "I think it's that he's a father" when the fact that the other character is a father is supposed to explain something.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Apr 16, 2022 6:00 am

Thanks for the explanations, @vonPeterhof!

It's funny because that の shows up constantly in writing. I can't count the number of times I've clicked on it on SR and seen "gives or seeks explanation" as the definition, but I never really understood what it actually meant. Hopefully Tae Kim's explanation and examples will help me actually understand it. He also said that んです is a sneaky form of the same thing, which I didn't realize. All this time, I've just been skipping over the random んs and のs since I didn't understand them.

In other news, I noticed Noriko describe the song Sakura by Naotaro Moriyama as "meikyoku". I learned the word 名曲 from WK early on in my Japanese journey, and as the meaning is obvious, I was never at much risk of forgetting it, but it's still interesting because this is the first time I can recall seeing it in the wild. (Admittedly, I've listened to Noriko's podcast like 20 times by now, so I've at least heard it there before). Incidentally, when I googled "Sakura song", everything that came up was about a Japanese folk song of that name instead, so I had to look up the podcast transcript to find the actual song information.


Speaking of which, I mistook 動詞 for 助詞 on WK yesterday. And that's after mistaking 右 for 石 for the second time in a row on WK recently. It's a bit embarrassing how even now, after two and a half years, I still confuse really basic kanji on WK sometimes. Although I suppose part of the problem is that on WK, you see words and kanji in isolation so you don't get the benefit of context.




会社を経営する上で、社員の配置転換を行う必要があります。
The furigana show 上 as ue here, but I wonder if that is another of JPDB's many misparses. It seems like jyou (from the standpoint of) would make more sense here. Incidentally, I just realized that that seems very similar in meaning to toshite. I wonder what the difference is.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Sat Apr 16, 2022 8:09 am

golyplot wrote:会社を経営する上で、社員の配置転換を行う必要があります。
The furigana show 上 as ue here, but I wonder if that is another of JPDB's many misparses. It seems like jyou (from the standpoint of) would make more sense here. Incidentally, I just realized that that seems very similar in meaning to toshite. I wonder what the difference is.

No, うえ is correct when it's a "verb + 上 + で" structure. じょう would make more sense if it were appended directly to a noun, like if it were phrased as 会社の経営上.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Apr 17, 2022 6:00 am

心は同じままに留められぬ

What on earth is the 留められぬ bit? I tried looking it up but couldn't find anything. When I googled it, I did discover that it appears in the Japanese name of the Magic: The Gathering card Unstoppable Ash. A quick Scryfall search showed that there are exactly two MTG cards with "unstoppable" in the name, the other being the recently released Unstoppable Ogre, and both have 留められぬ in the Japanese name, so it seems clear that it means "unstoppable". However, I still wish I knew the explanation behind it, and why it doesn't show up on Jisho.


もうちょっと栄養バランス気にした方がいいんじゃない?

JPDB has 気 furigana'd as げ here, but it seems like it should just be き. Was this a mistake?


 最終的にやりたいことは、体から切り離した状態にして母親(仮)が行ったようなふわふわと空中に浮かぶようなやつだ。

It was only while reading this in my head that I noticed that 離す has the exact same reading as 話す. Obviously, I'd studied them both on Wanikani, but if you're studying different words at different times, it's easy to not make the connection. Japanese has tons and tons of onyomi homophones, but kunyomi homophones like this aren't quite so common.



トムは40時間働きます。
Tom works forty hours a week.

WTF? How is 週 in the N3 deck? I assumed it would be some weird alternate reading or something, but nope, it was just plain shuu/week. How is such a basic common word not N5? For the matter, I was surprised that it wasn't already marked known due to Wanikani. But it appears that WK does not actually have 週 by itself as a vocab, presumably since there's no point in including single-kanji vocab when they have the obvious (onyomi) reading and meaning.


俺は横に動き、花が隣に並んだ。

正 is listed as "true; regular". I'm completely puzzled by the sentence though, and there's no translation provided. It almost makes me wonder if the 正 is just a misparse, but Jisho didn't list anything.


----

In other news, I finished 濁った瞳のリリアンヌ ch3 (the one called 続・生後2週間目, i.e. the second after the prologue) tonight. However, it got pretty boring and I've been struggling to get the motivation to keep going lately. Coincidentally, I've also been struggling to work up the motivation to read anything on Satori Reader lately as well. I blame Hole in the Wall having too-long chapters.

Wanikani:

I decided to stop doing the weekly Leech Reviews due to not being able to get the script working this morning. Hopefully, they’re no longer necessary anyway. I’ve been making such rapid progress lately that it sometimes feels like there’s no point to doing them anymore.

Anyway, got off to a rocky start on WK reviews today, but I did extremely well on my last session in the afternoon. I also hit two new milestones.

I now have only 5000 unburned items. This means that my review count will never go above 5000 again unless I do more lessons, even if I do no reviews for four months. Additionally, I have now burned 10 resurrected items (in fact, I hit 11 today).

Sat Apr 16 2022:
Time spent: 41m
Reviews completed: 220
Reviews remaining: 2977
Reviews in next week: 3492 (+515)
Reviews in next month: 4215 (+723)
Accuracy: 83.18% (183/220)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 1578
Guru: 1548
Master: 806
Enlightened: 1068
Burned: 2131
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kelvin921019
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby kelvin921019 » Sun Apr 17, 2022 7:36 am

golyplot wrote:心は同じままに留められぬ

What on earth is the 留められぬ bit? I tried looking it up but couldn't find anything. When I googled it, I did discover that it appears in the Japanese name of the Magic: The Gathering card Unstoppable Ash. A quick Scryfall search showed that there are exactly two MTG cards with "unstoppable" in the name, the other being the recently released Unstoppable Ogre, and both have 留められぬ in the Japanese name, so it seems clear that it means "unstoppable". However, I still wish I knew the explanation behind it, and why it doesn't show up on Jisho.


You can try to look up 留める(とめる). Once you can recognize the ending (the られ and ぬ) you can deduce the root form from it

留める (to stay) -> 留められる (potential form) (be able to stay / detain) -> 留められぬ (ぬ - archaic negation) (unable to stay / unable to detain = unstoppable)


golyplot wrote:もうちょっと栄養バランス気にした方がいいんじゃない?

JPDB has 気 furigana'd as げ here, but it seems like it should just be き. Was this a mistake?


I think it should be き since it's 気にした. 気 sometimes can be read as げ though (e.g. in さり気ない, 何気ない)

golyplot wrote:俺は横に動き、花が隣に並んだ。

正 is listed as "true; regular". I'm completely puzzled by the sentence though, and there's no translation provided. It almost makes me wonder if the 正 is just a misparse, but Jisho didn't list anything.


花正 is the name of a person (read はなまさ). If you look up 花正 in jisho it will return result of a name.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Apr 17, 2022 2:40 pm

kelvin921019 wrote:You can try to look up 留める(とめる). Once you can recognize the ending (the られ and ぬ) you can deduce the root form from it

留める (to stay) -> 留められる (potential form) (be able to stay / detain) -> 留められぬ (ぬ - archaic negation) (unable to stay / unable to detain = unstoppable)


Thanks. I already knew 留める, it was the られぬ part that I didn't understand.


壁の穴は、仏壇の後ろにある。

仏壇 is one of those words from the high levels of WK that I never expected to actually show up in the wild. I didn't realize they were a ubiquitous feature of Japanese homes - I assumed that it was just some obscure temple-related fixture. Anyway, it's on level 49 of WK, so I guess it won't be that long before I learn it again.

廊下を照らす朝日が眩しかった

Here, Satori Reader has another interesting cultural note. Apparently, 廊下 isn't just a "corridor". In traditional Japanese houses, they have a long corridor along the outer wall, with sliding glass doors to the outside on one side. Also, another non-WK kanji (眩)
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Apr 19, 2022 2:40 pm

Wanikani: It's funny how I did really well on WK Saturday afternoon, but have done poorly on every attempt since. Oh well, I'm sure my luck will change again soon enough. In the mean time, I've been focusing more on JPDB. I already studied a lot of the N3 vocab on Anki a couple months ago, so it's not so hard to go through it again.

I also haven't tried reading any web novels (i.e. 濁った瞳のリリアンヌ) in the last couple days, mainly because it got pretty boring.

---

I noticed Noriko say "nanmai" when talking about the hassle of having to prepare slides for work. It makes sense, but I still found it interesting that slides would use the flat object counter, since they have no physical form. It's interesting how physical world analogies get brought to the digital world, sort of like "folders" and "files" and "desktops" and so on. Thinking about counters also made me wonder what the counters would be for doughnuts and muffins. My guess is ko for normal donuts and hon for the long bar donuts.

I also noticed her say kezutte when talking about kakigoori. 削る is a word that I always struggled with on WK, mostly due to having trouble remembering the exact reading (though I sometimes mix it up with similar looking kanji as well). Mnemonics are rarely completely helpful for this - was "keys" supposed to be きず or けず or けす or what?. So it was interesting to see it show up in the real world.



---

このお供え物の炊きたてのご飯が、モチモチしていて、最高においしいんだ。

I had no idea that mochimochi was an adjective. I wonder if it is related to the springy texture of goods baked with mochi flour.

---

I also watched a few Japanese song videos last night and this morning.

This one, I found confusing because the singer is female but the onscreen lyrics contain 僕 and だろう, so I presume that the song is written from the point of view of a male.



Also notable was this song. I found it more difficult than normal to recognize the words, even though the lyrics are displayed on screen, like in many of these song videos. However, the reason I found it interesting is that at several points in the video, Hanafuda cards are shown on screen.

When I was a kid, my mom showed me a deck of Korean playing cards once. I was surprised to see them here, since I assumed it was just a Korean thing, but according to Wikipedia, the cards are actually of Japanese origin and brought to Korea in the 1890s.

Image
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Tue Apr 19, 2022 4:36 pm

golyplot wrote:This one, I found confusing because the singer is female but the onscreen lyrics contain 僕 and だろう, so I presume that the song is written from the point of view of a male.

僕 in particular is somewhat unreliable for telling the gender of the speaker in song lyrics, because many songs from a female perspective (like those by idol groups like 乃木坂46 or ももいろクローバー) use that pronoun seemingly for no reason other than rhythm, since a three-beat pronoun like 私 or あたし is often harder to work into a line. I wanted to link an example or two from idol songs, only to realize that I can't really a think of an idol song sung by a 僕 which is explicitly from a female perspective and can't be semi-plausibly reinterpreted as a male perspective song (and which isn't an anime character song sung by a female character who normally refers to herself as 僕, which is its own thing). The closest thing I can think of is the vocaloid song 少女レイ, because A) the official image accompanying the song shows two girls, and B) the whole scenario of the song becomes a lot less plausible if you imagine the viewpoint character as a boy.
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sirgregory
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby sirgregory » Thu Apr 21, 2022 8:24 pm

golyplot wrote:
kraemder wrote:My favorite resource learning Japanese was the Core 2k/6k/10k deck. Here's a link to the 2k one: (if you like pictures look for a different version with pictures)


Thanks for the suggestion! I'm already doing Wanikani, which seems to serve a similar purpose, but I might try Anki as well if I get bored sometime.


Update: I did two lessons on Lingodeer today and watched ep4 of Let's Learn Japanese Basic I. I recognized the book kanji (本) in the Lingodeer lesson, which I thought was really cool, since I learned it from Wanikani earlier today. It's neat to see stuff crossover like that.

I also watched ep2 of SAO tonight (with subs). I barely even bothered trying to listen to the Japanese this time. It's mostly for entertainment, rather than learning. But I do hope that I'll start picking up more of it once I'm farther along.


Let's Learn Japanese looks a bit like French in Action. How much of it did you get through?
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