Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Nov 05, 2021 3:17 pm

なんだか、みんなのお荷物になってしまうかもしれない

I was very confused by this one, since it seems like it said "somehow might become everyone's luggage", which made no sense. But apparently, 荷物 means "burden" here, not "luggage" like I was taught.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Nov 06, 2021 1:40 am

This evening, I was listening to 4989 American Life without paying much attention as usual and thinking about other things (i.e. my recent argument about RTK with AllSubNoDub :D), when suddenly the word 手応え jumped out at me. I was especially proud to randomly notice it because 手応え is a word I recently learned from Satori Reader. It's cool to see connections like that.

I looked up the transcript to confirm, and sure enough, there it was. (It's about six minutes into ep126 in case you want to follow along).

I also looked at the transcript for the beginning of episode 91 while I was at it. I thought I heard the new word kanpeki (which I wrote about before) there a week or two ago and wanted to confirm it. I was surprised to see that Utaco wrote 聴く the first two times when talking about people listening to her podcasts, instead of the more common 聞く. However, later on she does use 聞. Does anyone know why?


Anyway, the big news is that for the last three weeks, I've had a lot of things going on in my personal life and haven't had much time to devote to Japanese study, (particularly Wanikani - I was still able to listen to podcasts a fair bit). Anyway, that's all behind me now, so hopefully I can get back to Japanese with a vengeance starting tomorrow! (famous last words)
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vonPeterhof
Blue Belt
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1237
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Sat Nov 06, 2021 7:35 am

golyplot wrote:I was surprised to see that Utaco wrote 聴く the first two times when talking about people listening to her podcasts, instead of the more common 聞く. However, later on she does use 聞. Does anyone know why?

In theory 聞く is used to mean "to hear" and 聴く to mean "to listen". In practice however this distinction only exists because those are two different words in Chinese, whereas Japanese speakers still perceive them as fundamentally the same word and go with the simpler 聞く more often than not. The same applies to 見る vs. 観る: I remember when I once wrote a lang-8 post consistently using 観る to talk about watching a show, and one of the native speakers corrected it to 見る, saying something to the effect that I didn't have to be that pedantic :)
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Nov 08, 2021 6:13 am

I realized that one mistake that keeps holding me back on WK is thinking that the reading of 余 is jyo rather than yo. The readings of 除, 徐, and 叙 are all jyo, which must be why I subconsciously learned that 余 is jyo as well. But 余 itself is yo rather than jyo. Why Japanese people, why?!?


Anyway, the big news today is that I spent over two hours in total doing WK reviews today and made a massive dent in the review pile, so I'll just link to the post on WK in case anyone is curious.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Nov 09, 2021 3:20 am

息をむような、広大な景色だった

Another new kanji on SR today (呑)
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Sumisu
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby Sumisu » Wed Nov 10, 2021 1:46 am

golyplot wrote:息をむような、広大な景色だった

Another new kanji on SR today (呑)


I read somewhere that highly educated native speakers often know 3,000 or even 4,000+ kanji. I try not to think about this too often.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Wed Nov 10, 2021 6:03 am

I ran into another example of Wanikani’s frustrating inconsistent mnemonics today. The kanji 翔 came up for review today, and I missed it due to putting “kei” for the reading. All I could remember was that the mnemonic was something involving “cake”, and Wanikani uses “cake” whenever the reading is “kei”. But of course it was something completely different (kake) in this case. And it was even a burn review too!
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Nov 13, 2021 4:31 am

マイケルさんが、「湖までは、ここから往復2マイルぐらいだ。みんなの疲れはどんな感じ?湖まで下りて、ランチを食べる?それとも、ここで食べて帰る?どっちがいい?」と聞いた

I was surprised here because someone told me that 往復 is only used in writing and is not used in everyday speech, but here it appears in a quotation. What's up with that?

Also, I was pretty proud that I managed to guess the reading for 下りて despite never seeing it before, just by guessing that it would have the same reading as 降りる.


In other news:

Six Month Wanikani Update

It’s officially been six months since I first started this challenge. Obviously things didn’t quite go as I expected…

When I first started out, I expected to make rapid progress and mostly be done with it in a couple weeks or so. Instead, I found that I could barely remember anything, especially the high level items, and that it would be a horrible slog. After a month and a half, I was forced to give up and reset. I ended up resetting all the way to level 46.

Since resetting, I’ve been doing better, but it has still been a long and hard slog. Even after six months of doing lots of reviews every day, I’ve only made slow progress. On the other hand, I am making progress. For example, I burned 1248 items in the last six months.

In the ~4 months since I reset to level 46, my review count has gone from 5214 all the way down to 4668. And that’s despite adding 51 new items to the pile because Wanikani has been slowly adding new lessons, so the real reduction is more like 4617. My average accuracy rate has also gone up slightly over the last few months, and my Apprentice count is now down to 2911 from 2997 when I reset (and an all time high of over 3100), again despite adding 51 to that number in the middle.

Fri Nov 12 2021:
Time spent: 22m
Reviews completed: 85
Reviews remaining: 4668
Reviews in next week: 4928 (+260)
Accuracy: 77.65% (66/85)
Accuracy on resurrected items: 91.30% (42/46)
Accuracy on non-resurrected items: 61.54% (24/39)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 2911
Guru: 1326
Master: 474
Enlightened: 737
Burned 1599
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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1726
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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 » Tue Nov 16, 2021 3:34 pm

充実 is one word I always struggle to remember the meaning of on Wanikani. Ironically, after failing a BBO review of it once again last Saturday, I went on a walk and heard it come up on a podcast immediately afterwards. Utaco was talking about English words she had trouble with, including "fruitful", and gave jyuujitsu as the translation (as in "a fruitful day"). Hopefully, that will help me remember it. Although strangely, that translation doesn't appear to be in the dictionaries anywhere.

In other episode, while talking about getting a classmate's phone number, Utaco said "とても自然に電話番号をゲットしました。ふふふ" (I looked up the transcript to confirm - I didn't pick up on the particles when actually hearing it). Anyway, what really stood out to me was her saying "fufufu".

I know it's supposed to be her laughing, but it just sounds really strange when you actually say it instead of laughing, especially since it doesn't actually sound anything remotely like actual laughter. Incidentally, I remember seeing characters say "fu fu fu" in the Pokemon games as a kid and being a bit confused by this - I didn't know at the time that it was the Japanese equivalent of "ha ha ha". (Of course, nowadays, people just saw www or 笑).


On an unrelated note, someone recently posted a Portuguese video here, which I watched part of out of curiosity. I studied Spanish for a while, but hadn't studied Portuguese at all, so it was very odd. It sounded like they were speaking Spanish except that I couldn't understand a word they were saying!

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Nov 18, 2021 3:21 am

Yesterday, I finished 4989 American Life and started listening to Noriko again. I listened to podcasts while eating lunch as usual, and as usual, I didn't pay any attention to the podcasts or the food and instead zoned out thinking about programming language design the whole time. I even came very close to eating an extra muffin at the end, despite no longer being hungry. Therefore, I was shocked after I finished eating and actually paid attention to the podcast briefly to discover that Noriko was talking about Mindful Eating. What an ironic coincidence! I felt personally attacked.

This evening while out walking, (I barely paid attention as) Noriko talked about her husband's epic flight to Atlanta, and the talk of airports suddenly reminded me of how my Japanese journey started. I officially first started studying Japanese while at an airport on the way home from holiday vacation on Jan 1st, 2020. It's pretty crazy to think that in all the time since then, I've only flown once. Things sure have changed a lot since that day!
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