Learning Japanese From Zero

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brilliantyears
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby brilliantyears » Sat Apr 22, 2023 8:36 am

golyplot wrote:Yesterday, I briefly started researching my Japan trip again. I'd long had a vague idea about going in September or maybe early October, but had decided to avoid any trip planning until after the layoffs. As I've now survived yesterday's layoffs, I started researching travel again.

I first looked up the climate and discovered that summer extends later than I'd thought in Japan and that it would still be warm in September. I also learned that 紅葉 season is a lot later than I'd thought. Most likely I'll be going in mid-late October then, and even that is on the early side for 紅葉. But I don't want to push it later because then it will be bumping up against Thanksgiving travel, and I don't want to bunch up my trips too much. It's already pretty inconvenient that Thanksgiving and Christmas are so close together.

I see your problem. I went in late October-November many years ago and had to head a little bit north for 紅葉. If you're ok with traveling further north, you should be able to see it earlier in the year.

I do love traveling around October. Even if you won't see 紅葉, the weather is absolutely perfect. Still a nice temperature but no longer humid, not too wet... Perfect time to travel imho. During that October-November trip, on my last day there (November 18th!) I was waiting for a friend and spent the time napping in the sun in a park in Tokyo :lol:

(I'm heading to Japan myself in October this year :D )
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Sun Apr 23, 2023 6:04 am

Friday night, I read about the shinkansen on Wikipedia. I'd always imagined flying in to Tokyo and then going to Kyoto for a while and back, not only to visit two places, but so I could experience riding the bullet train. I was disappointed to learn that the fastest line is Tokyo-Shin Aomori, which reaches 200mph, while the Tokyo-Kyoto route tops out at 177mph. Obviously, that is still really fast, but I feel like I'll always be disappointed knowing at the back of my mind that it isn't the fastest one.

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This morning, I checked Youtube to see if there was anything that looked interesting in the recommendations, and while as usual I didn't find anything to watch, I did notice that one video title contained the word 恥辱, a word I'd unlocked on WK a little under three months ago. It's cool to see high level WK vocabulary show up in the wild like that.

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The title also contained the word 告る, which I guessed was read "tsuru". However, it is apparently actually "kokuru". Interestingly, when I pasted it into Jisho, Jisho listed it as "noru", even though Japanese Wikipedia confirms that "kokuru" is correct.

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Furareta:

Last night, I "read" ch4, but as before, it felt like I was just forcing my way through didn't actually absorb anything from it. This morning, I reach ch5, which fortunately went a bit better.


 喪失感とは別の、少し強い感情が私の中にあったことに、ようやく気付く。
 その正体は……嫉妬?

I'd learned 正体 as "true character", a translation that didn't quite seem to fit here. I guess she's talking about her true feelings or true motivations or something.


「光くんは彼女いるんだよね?」
 私は確認する意味で聞いてみた。
「んー。いたけどちょっと前に別れて今はいないよ」

As I've mentioned before, I put every paragraph or two into Google Translate after reading to try to find out what the parts I didn't understand were saying, but even when I do think I understand it well like here, I still translate it to see if there was anything I missed or misinterpreted. Of course, Google Translate doesn't always help. Here's a case where I saw it make a major mistake, translating this as simply

“Hikaru-kun has a girlfriend, right?”
"I asked to confirm."
“Hmm.


It completely failed to translate the last line at all. I know DeepL would often just ignore the output and fail to translate things, but Google Translate seems to do that less often. However, as this example shows, it does still break sometimes. I'm a bit disappointed and frustrated that Google won't roll out a proper LLM based translator. Based on how much people have been talking up GPT lately, it sure seems like machine translation should be way more advanced than this, so presumably they're still using old, obsolete methods for some reason.

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So, uh, WTF is up with this furigana?! The main character is named 細川光, and all this time, I had assumed it was "Hosokawa Hikaru". However, ch5 inexplicably furiganas the entire name as "hikaru", which makes absolutely no sense. The only thing I can conclude is that it was just a mistake and the name actually is supposed to be Hosokawa Hikaru anyway.

It's also weird that the furigana randomly appears in ch5. Normally in stories, they put furigana over a character's name the first time they appear, and in fact, this story did furigana the names of three other characters in ch1 the first time they are named, so why did it take so long for the main character to be named? I guess maybe ch5 is the first time his full name has appeared and he was always previously referred to as 細川 or 光君 in the story, but still, it seems like it would make more sense to put furigana over each individual name the first time it appears if the author worried that the reader wouldn't know, rather than making the reader randomly wait until ch5 to find out, and then using the wrong furigana anyway!


光君はとても辛かったろうに……悲しかったろうに。

I was confused by the ろうs here. I assumed it was some variant of だろう but wondered why the だs were missing. I asked on Reddit and someone said that this is an older form of だろう.


 光君には……もっと素敵な女性がふさわしいのかもしれない。
 こんな愚劣な感情を抱く私よりも、きっと良い人がいる。

"Maybe Hikaru-kun... might be better suited for a nicer woman."
"I'm sure there's someone better than me who harbors such stupid feelings."

Here's another case where I found Google Translate's offer amusingly broken. This time, it at least translated the entire input and is mostly correct. However, the English sentence is very misleadingly worded. An English speaker reading it would assume that "who harbors such stupid feelings" refers to "someone better than me" rather than "me", and thus the meaning of the sentence is flipped from the intended meaning. This is actually pretty good by the low standards of machine translation, but it would still completely confuse anyone actually relying on it to understand the text. I guess it's a good thing that my Japanese skills are good enough that I can sometimes understand things better than Google can. :)

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Having finished Hi Score Girl, I took a break Friday night and watched Secrets of Summer ep3. I was disappointed at how much of the Spanish I couldn't understand at all. Tonight I started watching my next anime, Aggretsuko. I already watched Aggretusko in the past, but left off on s4e3, so I resumed with s4e4. Unfortunately, I barely remembered what happened before due to it being so long.

In any case, it was interesting to see Director Ton get de-facto fired by being "promoted" to a made-up job with an "office" that is just a storage shed on the roof. I'd heard that Japanese companies would traditionally get rid of unwanted workers by reassigning them to made up jobs with no duties rather than actually firing them, and I guess that's an example of this in action.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Apr 23, 2023 7:01 am

golyplot wrote:The title also contained the word 告る, which I guessed was read "tsuru". However, it is apparently actually "kokuru". Interestingly, when I pasted it into Jisho, Jisho listed it as "noru", even though Japanese Wikipedia confirms that "kokuru" is correct.

告る isn't really a "traditional" verb, but a slang contraction of 告白する.

golyplot wrote: 喪失感とは別の、少し強い感情が私の中にあったことに、ようやく気付く。
 その正体は……嫉妬?

I'd learned 正体 as "true character", a translation that didn't quite seem to fit here. I guess she's talking about her true feelings or true motivations or something.

Since その refers to 感情, in this case the meaning of 正体 is closer to "true form", or "true identity" in a more metaphoric way.

golyplot wrote:So, uh, WTF is up with this furigana?! The main character is named 細川光, and all this time, I had assumed it was "Hosokawa Hikaru". However, ch5 inexplicably furiganas the entire name as "hikaru", which makes absolutely no sense. The only thing I can conclude is that it was just a mistake and the name actually is supposed to be Hosokawa Hikaru anyway.

It's also weird that the furigana randomly appears in ch5. Normally in stories, they put furigana over a character's name the first time they appear, and in fact, this story did furigana the names of three other characters in ch1 the first time they are named, so why did it take so long for the main character to be named? I guess maybe ch5 is the first time his full name has appeared and he was always previously referred to as 細川 or 光君 in the story, but still, it seems like it would make more sense to put furigana over each individual name the first time it appears if the author worried that the reader wouldn't know, rather than making the reader randomly wait until ch5 to find out, and then using the wrong furigana anyway!


This is a pretty common use of furigana in fiction, not so much to show how the word or name is pronounced but to introduce different ways of referring to the same thing or person. In this case it seems like the kanji of the full name are there to show how the character is "known to the world" while the furigana shows what the narrator specifically knows him as. Other times this is used to show how two different characters would refer to the same thing, or to imply a discrepancy between what a character thinks and what they actually say out loud. An example of this that's been so common that it's hardly ever used unironically any more is writing 親友 and giving it the furigana ライバル.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Wed Apr 26, 2023 5:20 am

Last night, I passed 5000 known non-redundant vocabulary on JPDB! Woohoo! Also, I decided to further reduce my session length from four minutes to only three minutes in the hopes that doing three minutes at a time would not be quite as arduous.

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Furareta:

I read Furareta ch7 tonight. Out of all the stories I've read in various places, this is the first one I've read to explicitly refer to sex, and thus this chapter had a bunch of new vocabulary related to sex. It also marks the first time I've seen 抱く used to refer to sex. It's funny because I've seen warnings about 抱く being a euphemism for sex many, many times, but this is the first time I've actually seen it used as a euphemism for sex. I also encountered the kanji version of hotondo for (I think) the first time.

One other weird bit is that there was one point where there were dots over two characters. Does anyone have any idea what this could be about?

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Last week, I read an article about an American who went to Japan to apprentice under a bonsai master and about how brutal and harrowing the world of bonsai is. But what is notable is that there is one point where the article mentions that he was chastised for calling Kimura sensei rather than oyakata. Oyakata is a word that I've studied on JPDB and always had trouble with (doesn't help that the kanji makes it seem like it should be "parent") so it's cool to see it in the wild, even if only an English language article.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Apr 26, 2023 9:54 am

golyplot wrote:One other weird bit is that there was one point where there were dots over two characters. Does anyone have any idea what this could be about?

Image

It's basically just for emphasis, like underlining.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Thu Apr 27, 2023 4:56 am

I was too busy today, so nothing Japanese-related to report, but I did spend a while last night reading more Japan trip reports on Reddit. One person recommended the Osaka Aquarium, which apparently has a whale shark, and I'm thinking about going. Up until now, I'd only been thinking about just visiting Tokyo and Kyoto, but now I'm tempted to take an excursion to Osaka as well. Looking at the map, it's not even much of a detour like I had assumed. Osaka looks to be about the same distance from Kyoto that Enoshima is from central Tokyo, and I was already planning to briefly go out to Enoshima as well.

Another trip report was by a guy from Hong Kong who mentioned going to Krispy Kreme, Burger King, and Wendy's because they don't have those in Hong Kong. Obviously not relevant to me or my trip planning, but it was an interesting thing to learn about HK.



vonPeterhof wrote:It's basically just for emphasis, like underlining.


Thanks
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genini1
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby genini1 » Thu Apr 27, 2023 10:55 am

It takes about an hour to get to Osaka from Kyoto iirc and you don't even need the shinkansen for it. That aquarium was nice though. Osaka has tons of stuff to do and is well worth the trip. If I had one day/night I'd probably do Osaka castle and dotonburi though.
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Sat Apr 29, 2023 5:58 am

Last night, I finished listening to Yuyu's podcast for the first time and started listening to Utaco's podcast for the 11th time. (Well, I say "listening", but 99% of the time I'm just ignoring it in the background).

Surprisingly, Utaco hadn't released a single new episode since I last listened to her podcast back in February. In fact, the last episode was February 13th. She did have a brief hiatus last year (with a gap from Sept 26 to Oct 31), but this is by far the longest she's gone without updates. I wonder if the podcast is dead for good now.

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妻が、「お正月に、日本に帰るもんじゃないわね。

An interesting note on Satori Reader today about how "X mon dewanai" is a pattern that means "One shouldn't do X". In this example, it means one shouldn't return to Japan at New Years (because you have to pay lots of money for otoshidama).

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I read Furareta ch8 tonight, though as usual, I was forcing myself through it and relying heavily on Google Translate.

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I (re)watched Nobuyoshi Takeuchi's upload of "When Will My Life Begin?" from Tangled in Japanese tonight and noticed something very strange. At the beginning, the title says "Rapunzel", which is neither the Japanese title nor the English title. In fact, I looked it up, and apparently, out of dozens of different languages, the only language where the title of Tangled is "Rapunzel" is Dutch.

It's really weird though, because if Nobuyoshi Takeuchi did in fact rip video from the Dutch dub of Tangled, why on earth would he do that when he would have to replace the audio with the Japanese version anyway? Why not just rip the Japanese dub directly? I really wish I knew what happened there.

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I previously wrote about how back on Monday night, I finally passed 5000 known non-redundant vocabulary on JPDB. You might think that if I do 5 new cards a day, I'd be at 5020 now or something. However, that's apparently not how it works. The "known non-redundant vocabulary" swings up and down quite a bit. In particular it tends to go up when I do my reviews for the night and then go back down overnight, so there were a couple days when it would swing back and forth across 5k.

However, even besides the daily variance, it also dropped significantly the last couple days. I think it must have to do with how many items to you get right or wrong during review. Today, the count was down to 4927 before I did my reviews, and still only 4989 after doing the nightly reviews.

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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Sun Apr 30, 2023 6:04 am

I read more trip reports today, this time focusing on the Kansai area. Kyoto seems to be a bit "on rails". Seemingly every single person who goes to Kyoto visits the exact same set of attractions, Gion -> Fushimi Inari -> Arashiyama Bamboo Grove + monkey park. I also learned that Kyoto tourist sites are always very crowded and that it is important to get up very early in the morning (e.g. 6am) in order to avoid the worst of the crowds. Also, apparently Kyoto primarily uses buses for transport rather than trains like in Tokyo.

I also saw someone mention getting maple leaf tempura, which really makes me curious, so I'll have to look for that and try it. Google says it is a tradition in Minoh, apparently a small city near Osaka, but presumably they also show up in other cities in the area (this person mentioned eating them in Nara, IIRC).

As far as off the beaten path, one thing that I surprisingly haven't seen mentioned anywhere in any of the guides or reports I've read are the kofun (ancient keyhole shaped mounds). I'd been thinking about going to see one ever since I happened to read about them on Wikipedia a year or two back, but it seems ominous that not a single tourist guide ever even mentions them. Even the people I've talked to haven't heard of them. The fact that noone goes to see them makes me worry that they aren't actually suitable for tourists. Maybe the reason noone sees them is because there is not actually anything to see there.

In pure coincidence, this morning I unlocked the lesson for 古墳 (kofun) on Wanikani this morning, so now I know the kanji spelling as well.

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Satori Reader:

妻のお母さんが、ケーキを取り皿に分けてくれました。

取り皿 apparently refers to the small plates that you put slices of cake onto when serving to a large group. It's interesting that Japanese has a specific word for this concept, since we do the same thing in the US but there is no word for it. You would just say "plate" with nothing more specific than that.

一口食べて、思わず声を出しそうになりました。

I saw the X sou ni narimasu pattern and attendant explanation in a previous story, so I already understood it here without looking at the note, but it's still nice to get a reminder, as this seems like a useful pattern to learn (it means "X almost happened" or "it seemed like X was going to happen").

天井や壁、棚の上、部屋の電気の傘のような、高い場所にたまったホコリや、くもの巣などを、ハタキや掃除機を使って綺麗にしていく作業をします。

Apparently, light fixtures and lampshades are known as "electricity umbrellas" in Japanese.

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Furareta:

I read Furareta ch9 today. It seemed easier to read than usual, although I skipped over a lot of unknown words and still relied on Google Translate for a lot, and there were some points in the story I couldn't understand even with the help of Google Translate.

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Aggretsuko:

The last two episodes of Aggretsuko season 4 have some weird moments. Episode 9 suddenly turns into a spy movie, with the characters crawling through the suspiciously large air ducts and doing a Mission Impossible style drop, which was odd to see in a series that is otherwise a realistic grounded story about office life and the tribulations of adulthood.

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However, this has nothing on episode 10 (the season finale), whose climax involves Retsuko randomly firing a laser out of her mouth and blasting everyone out the window. No, I am not making that up. The spy stuff may have been silly, but at least it is "realistic" in the sense that nothing supernatural was happening. This on the other hand... I've got nothing. The show even confirms that yes, it really did happen in universe, it's not just artistic embellishment or something, because the window is smashed and Himuro is later shown recovering in the hospital.

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Also in episode 10, there's a moment where Ton's phone reads "Koshikake" (in latin script). Back in season 1, Ton would often call Retsuko "short-timer" per the subtitles, but I never knew what he was saying in Japanese. However, having it spelled out on screen like this together with the subtitle means I can finally know. I checked Jisho, and apparently it is spelled 腰掛け and is slang for "temporary job while looking for a better job or until one marries".

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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Apr 30, 2023 1:27 pm

golyplot wrote:As far as off the beaten path, one thing that I surprisingly haven't seen mentioned anywhere in any of the guides or reports I've read are the kofun (ancient keyhole shaped mounds). I'd been thinking about going to see one ever since I happened to read about them on Wikipedia a year or two back, but it seems ominous that not a single tourist guide ever even mentions them. Even the people I've talked to haven't heard of them. The fact that noone goes to see them makes me worry that they aren't actually suitable for tourists. Maybe the reason noone sees them is because there is not actually anything to see there.

I actually tried to go and see the largest kofun in Sakai and yeah they're not really tourist attractions, at least not ones supposed to be visited in a traditional sense. You can read the information stands and look at the moats, gates and bridges, but the actual tombs are somewhat understandably off-limits, and from where you stand across the moats they don't really look like anything more impressive than heavily wooded hills. Luckily when I was standing there an older gentleman who was showing his son and grandkids around the city noticed me and told me that if I wanted to get a good view of all the kofuns I should get up to the observation deck on top of Sakai city hall. They even offered me a ride there, and the kofuns definitely looked much better from above.
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