Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Mon Jun 05, 2023 3:26 am

vonPeterhof wrote:Like I said earlier, in these cases the furigana usually shows what the character says out loud while the main text is what they're thinking, although sometimes it's the other way round.


Thanks. Although in this case, I still have no idea what it's supposed to be saying, on either side. I tried searching for 復警 on Jisho but nothing turned up.

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Here's yet another obscure kanji spelling of a kana-only word that you wouldn't think would have kanji, "gochisousama" in this case. Although oddly, the "sama" is still in kana for some reason.

「あ、はい。ありがとう。ご馳走さま」

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I watched the "Uchiage Hanabi" video again today and noticed three words with unknown kanji in the subtitles, 渚 (nagisa/shore), 夕凪 (yuunagi/evening calm) and 攫う (sarau/to sweep away). The first, I easily managed to guess the reading and find on Jisho. The second, I had to rewind the bit several times and it still took me several tries to get close enough to the reading to find it on Jisho. The third, I couldn't manage to guess at all, and I was only able to find it by googling for the lyrics of the song and checking that instead.

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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Jun 05, 2023 5:06 am

golyplot wrote:Although in this case, I still have no idea what it's supposed to be saying, on either side. I tried searching for 復警 on Jisho but nothing turned up.

It's 復讐.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Thu Jun 08, 2023 3:43 am

I'm on vacation for a week starting yesterday, so I haven't done much Japanese study, but tonight I watched another Fermi Comics video in the hopes of helping me to fall asleep at least (sadly not successful).

I noticed semi (cicada) show up in kanji, which I hadn't seen before. Jisho doesn't say "usually written in kana only" or anything, so it is presumably a common kanji, but I'd always seen it written in katakana before anyway.

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AndyMeg
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby AndyMeg » Thu Jun 08, 2023 3:37 pm

golyplot wrote:I noticed semi (cicada) show up in kanji, which I hadn't seen before. Jisho doesn't say "usually written in kana only" or anything, so it is presumably a common kanji, but I'd always seen it written in katakana before anyway.

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JPDB shows its frequency as follows: 蝉 (40%), セミ (34%), 蟬 (20%), せみ (4%).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Wed Jun 14, 2023 4:19 pm

I've been on vacation for the last week and so haven't done much, but today I did watch another episode of My Little Pony G5 dubbed in Japanese (without subtitles). One weird thing I noticed is that when they're singing, the song is dubbed in Japanese, but for some reason they also put subtitles up which say something completely different to what they're singing.

Yes, I understand why subtitles and dubs usually don't match, but what really puzzles me is why they would add subtitles in the first place if they're just going to dub it anyway. It's not like they had subtitles for the whole episode, just this part.

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I also encountered a new Japanese idiom: a sparrow's tears (meaning "drop in the bucket").

「そんなもんかけたって誰も来やしねーよ。
年中事件だらけでずっと働かされてその割に給料は増税されたせいで雀の涙なんて、誰も働きたくないだろ?
だから俺も程々にしか働かないって決めたんだ。
どうせ全部の事件を解決する事なんて出来やしないし」
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Fri Jun 16, 2023 5:30 am

I got back from vacation last night, and on the flight back, the person next to me watched John Wick 4. At one point, I happened to glance over while it was doing an establishing scene montage of the Osaka canal district, showing among other things the Glico Running Man and the giant crab, which I recognized from back when I was researching tourism to Osaka last month, so that was kind of cool.

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An amusing example sentence on JPDB for "目に入る":

なんで汗が目に入ると痛いの?
Why does it hurt when you get sweat in your eyes?

JPDB defines 目に入る as "to catch sight of; to come into view; to happen to see", but the example sentence they have refers to stuff literally getting in someone's eye, which isn't even one of the listed definitions!

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Also two more kanji spellings of kana-only words that I hadn't seen before.

hazu:
 かと言ってあの我が儘なユーリが今の生活を手放す筈がない。

shiwa:
アンドリューが眉間に皺を寄せて聞いてくる。
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Sun Jun 18, 2023 5:27 am

On Thursday (the 15th), I finished listening to Utaco's podcast for the 11th time and started listening to the Yuyu podcast for the second time. Back when I started Utaco's podcast again, she'd been on hiatus since Feb 13th for some reason. She finally returned on May 8th, but the post return episodes each have an ad in them, which is a bit annoying.

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I did a bunch of Japanese study this afternoon, including reading two more chapters of Jinsei 180. Out of boredom, I decided to take the N3 practice JLPT test again, though I got distracted and stopped halfway through.

Also this evening, Youtube recommended me a video of some random VTuber playing a game called "Aquariums Don't Dance" of all things. VTubers are annoying and the game in her video was just a little box that was impossible to see, but I got curious about the bizarre name of the game and searched Youtube and found a real Let's Play series of the same game and watched the first part.

I learned that 縁 can mean "fate" or "relationship" in addition to the usual listed meaning of "edge", though it uses the onyomi in that case (e.g. in "goen"/ご縁).

The line I found most interesting however is when the aquarium staff asks Suzzu for her ticket and she replies "onegaishimasu". It's interesting how Japanese often uses "onegaishimasu" in cases when one would never just say "please" in English.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Mon Jun 19, 2023 7:27 pm

While I was on vacation two weeks ago, I went to a Japanese restaurant and ordered tonkotsu ramen. I was surprised to see it listed as "tonkotsu" on the menu rather than tonkatsu, which is how I thought it was spelled. I checked Jisho afterward, and apparently Japanese uses both tonkatsu and tonkotsu. They're two different words for two different foods (pork cutlet and pork bone broth, respectively). I always assumed they were both the same word and hence constantly got it wrong. It's nice to finally have that cleared up.

Crawling to a brutal JLPT beating in December 2023

I decided to take the 2012 N3 JLPT practice test again, which I previously took a year and a half ago, and then again a year ago before I got frustrated by my poor scores and ragequit.

I'm hoping to sit the N2 in December, so I would hope that I am well beyond the N3 level now. As it turns out, the N3 was still really challenging, but I did at least do much better than when I took it a year ago, so that was nice.

My new scores were
Vocabulary: 30/33
Reading and Grammar: 30/39
* Grammar: 14/23
* Reading: 16/16
Listening: 19/27
* Task-based comprehension: 3/6
* Point-based comprehension: 4/6
* Summary: 3/3
* Utterance expressions: 2/4
* Quick response: 7/8

For comparison, here were my scores the first two times I took the test way back when:
Vocabulary: 28/33
Reading and Grammar: N/A
* Grammar: skipped
* Reading: 13/16
Listening: 17/27
* Task-based comprehension: 4/6
* Point-based comprehension: 5/6
* Summary: 3/3
* Utterance expressions: 3/4
* Quick response: 2/8

Vocabulary: 23/33
Reading and Grammar: 25/39
* Grammar: 12/23
* Reading: 13/16
Listening: 14/27
* Task-based comprehension: 3/6
* Point-based comprehension: 5/6
* Summary: 1/3
* Utterance expressions: 2/4
* Quick response: 3/8

On the language knowledge section, some parts were stupidly easy while others were still challenging, e.g. I (still) couldn't figure out what the correct sentence for korobu was or remember the onomatopoeia for walking (burabura). Fortunately, I did manage to get a couple more questions than before, scoring 30/33 compared to 28 and 23 before, so that was nice.

Grammar has always been my weakness on the practice JLPT exams, and taking it again was still torture, even at just the N3 level. However, I did score a bit higher than before (14/23 vs 12/23), so that was nice at least. It also took me only 28 minutes this time, compared to 39 minutes before. Still, I really wish there was a way to study grammar and get better at this.

The reading section was a pleasant surprise, as I managed to get a perfect score for the first time! (after getting 13/16 both times before)

Finally, on listening I did well on the quick response section for the first time, but still struggled with the rest. This is another place where I really wish there was a better way to study for it, especially those darn Utterance Expressions. It's especially hard because it feels like if you miss even a single moment, it is often impossible to answer the question.


Aquariums Don't Dance

I encountered a new word with new kanji, ukatsu (careless). Jisho says that it is normally written in kana.

Also, the game translates fugu to English as "swell fish", which seemed like a dumb mistake to me, as I'd never heard that before. But apparently, "swellfish" is a real term that some people use.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby golyplot » Wed Jun 21, 2023 3:46 am

I encountered 包帯 (bandage) while watching Aquariums Don't Dance yesterday and looked it up and thus was able to recognize it when it came up again while reading Jinsei 180 this morning, so that was pretty cool.

 私がそう言うと、アンドリューは棚から綺麗な包帯を取り出した。

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Tonight, I finished part 4 of Kagemaru's Aquariums Don't Dance videos.

In Aquariums Don't Dance, the text is often rendered as unintelligible gibberish, presumably to indicate the speech of sea creatures that Suzzu can't understand. However, sometimes, there are fragments of Japanese mixed in with the gibberish.

In this case, the turtle says "daijyoubu kano", and after reading that out, Kagemaru commented "goroujin", which made me think that "kano" must be a speech pattern characteristic of the elderly and he was commenting that the turtle sounded old here. Does anyone know if this is the case?

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After (spoilers!) Chris dies and a giant anglerfish appears in the background, Kagemaru shouted what sounded like "chigau! chouji ankou da!". It took me a bit to figure out what he said, since Jisho wasn't helpful here. But given the context, he was probably talking about anglerfishes, so I looked it up on Japanese Wikipedia instead.

Back when I first started learning Japanese, I read about the word "ankou", an Ainu-derived term for monkfish. In all my years of studying Japanese, I never thought I would see it actually come up though. There was a false positive where I thought I heard Teppei and Noriko talk about spreading "ankou" on toast for breakfast, but they were actually talking about "anko" (red bean paste). I assumed "ankou" was an obscure word that would never come up in the wild, but here it is, for the first time.

Of course, I had no idea what a "monkfish" actually was either, and was confused about why it would be used here for anglerfishes but Wikipedia says that monkfish is actually just a specific kind of anglerfish. TIL

The "chouji" part was much harder to figure out and I couldn't find anything on Jisho. Eventually, I decided to just search the Youtube comments for "アンコウ" on the off chance that someone had quoted that bit. Fortunately, I was in luck, as one of the comments read

"続き楽しみにしてましたし、気になる終わり方ですね… チョウチンアンコウの説明で人間って入ってたのはフラグだったんでしょうか… とても辛いです。"

It seems that he was actually saying "chouchin" rather than "chouji" like I thought. The funny part is that I technically was aware that chouchin might have some connection to angerfish thanks to Pokemon and the Orbital Children. I played Pokemon a lot as a kid and I remembered the anglerfish pokemon Chinchou, but I didn't realize the pun behind the name at the time. It was only when I watched The Orbital Children last year that I discovered that "chouchin" means "lantern" and realized that "Chinchou" must be a pun on "chouchin". I guess it's even more of a pun now that I know that anglerfish are apparently called "chouchin ankou" as well.


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gsbod
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Re: Learning Japanese From Zero

Postby gsbod » Wed Jun 21, 2023 8:20 pm

I saw your post about your JLPT N3 practice test scores on that other thread and thought I should comment here to keep things on topic.

Those are good scores. Converting them to JLPT results style marks out of 60, you'd be getting something like the following scores:

Language knowledge: 47/60
Vocabulary: A
Grammar: B
Reading 60/60
Listening 42/60
Total: 149/180

That's a really comfortable pass, considering you need 19/60 on each section, and 95/180 overall to pass the N3.

Back when I was a JLPT test taking machine, I sat N3 in the summer and passed with a comfortable 139/180 and then sat N2 in December and passed with a much less comfortable 100/180. But a pass is a pass, I'll take it.

I think you should crack open an N2 practice paper to see where you're at there.
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