Learning Japanese From Zero

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TopDog_IK
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby TopDog_IK » Fri Jan 06, 2023 3:03 am

golyplot wrote:
księżycowy wrote:Haven't seen Toradora in a while. Nice.


Neither have I, unless you count last night, when I rewatched ep19 in honor of Christmas.


One of the best anime episodes of all time.
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Wed Jan 11, 2023 4:49 pm

There was one notable vocab question on the practice JLPT N3 where I got very lucky, since I didn't really know any of the answers.

Back in late December, 4-6 days before I took the test, I at one point randomly decided to try entering in different syllables into Jisho doubled to see what, if any, mimetic word it would be. One I tried was karakara, which turns out to mean "parched; dried-up; bone-dry". However, I learned from Jisho that it is also the Japanese name of Cubone. I was surprised and looked it up and found out that in Japanese, Cubone's evolution Marowak is Garagara, a similar mimetic word.

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Anyway, on the JLPT, there was one vocab question asking about a restaurant where the food isn't very good (and thus is presumably empty), but the choices were all just four onomatopoeias I didn't know. The only one that was even vaguely familiar was がらがら, which I had just seen for the first time due to randomly looking things up on Jisho a week before.

I vaguely remembered seeing on Jisho that in addition to "dry", it had some feeling of "empty", and decided to guess garagara, since I didn't have any better options. As it turns out, I was thinking of karakara, which Jisho lists as "empty; hollow", but it turns out that garagara has an alternate meaning of "almost empty" (as in a restaurant), so I got lucky there in multiple ways.

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あー、それは参るね~。ラーメン屋に行くぐらい、スッピンでいいじゃんね。

I was surprised to see 参る here, as it is a word I learned early from Wanikani, but I learned it as "to come" from WK. I had no idea that it could also mean "to be defeated" (or in this context "to be utterly annoying").


I noticed Noriko talking about 二枚舌 on her podcast yesterday. That is another word I learned from WK, but WK lists it as "forked tongue". However, it sounds like it actually means "duplicity", which I did not know. Presumably, this is a metaphor, like "two-faced". If you call someone two-faced in English, you aren't saying they literally have two faces.

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I watched this video yesterday and was happy that I could understand a fair bit of it.



This also shows how difficult it can be to look things up in Japanese. I mostly didn't look things up, but there was one word that caught my eye which I was curious about, 不摂生. Unfortunately, I was unable to correctly guess the reading and thus couldn't find it in Jisho (I tried fusesei and several variations, but didn't think of fusessei).

Then I tried looking on Wanikani to see if the unknown kanji in the middle was on WK. After a couple tries, I managed to find it by looking through all the kanji on WK with the "ear" radical. Fortunately, it is on WK and thus I learned the reading is actually setsu and thus was able to finally find it on Jisho.

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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 12, 2023 6:19 am

Today, I watched another of the Disney songs on Nobuyoshi's channel. I was surprised to see that unlike nearly all of this other videos, this one had comments enabled. I assume that some sort of rights holder for the Japanese dubs of Disney movies has disabled comments across Youtube (oddly other languages do not have this problem), but I guess whoever it is missed Robin Hood for some reason.

Anyway, I was surprised to see that the captions frequently said 永久 while the lyrics said something like "towa". But per Jisho, apparently towa is in fact an alternate reading of 永久. WTF?!



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I also watched another episode of My Little Pony: Make Your Mark dubbed in Japanese without subtitles. One of the nice things about it is that it is relatively easy to follow along and I don't feel so bad about missing out on all the details since I don't care *that* much about the show. It is a good source of Japanese practice though.


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I finally finished Alice in Borderland s2 last night, and thus decided to start Million Yen Women tonight (after seeing it mentioned in Lavengro's log last month). My first thought was to wonder how the main character avoids getting suspected of money laundering by the banks, given that he's being paid 5 million yen a month in cash under suspicious circumstances.

I was surprised to hear kikkake here. It's a word I've heard a lot before, but always in the context of e.g. "why did you decide to learn Japanese?", so I figured it was more like "motivation" or "reason", but here it is being used in a completely difference meaning, like "opportunity".

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There's one point where a character calls Shin "Lousy Novel", and I actually rewound briefly and turned on Japanese subtitles to try to figure out what exactly it was she called him, but even seeing it in the subtitles, I still couldn't figure it out. I tried putting different parts into Jisho, but nothing came up. Anyone know what the line means?

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Lastly, I found it interesting that the prostitute that Shin visits asks him to hug her, since I had read that Japan does not have a hugging culture. Maybe it's seen as a more intimate gesture there?

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Also, I completely failed to recognize 餌 when it came up for review on JPDB today, so that was pretty embarrassing and frustrating. Though to be fair, I bet I would have known it if I saw it in context while reading. It's a lot harder to keep track of kanji when just drilling them individually with no context.
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Jan 12, 2023 3:17 pm

golyplot wrote:Lastly, I found it interesting that the prostitute that Shin visits asks him to hug her, since I had read that Japan does not have a hugging culture. Maybe it's seen as a more intimate gesture there?

Just out of curiosity, do they actually go no further than a hug afterwards? And does she say ハグして or 抱いて? Because the latter has a long history as a euphemism for sex, to the point where the loanword ハグ is used more often nowadays when people talk about literal hugging. The suggestive nature of 抱く often leads to hilarious results, as seen in the clips here (here ハグ couldn't be used either way because it would break the high fantasy immersion, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the double entendre were intentional on the creators' part).
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 12, 2023 4:11 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:The suggestive nature of 抱く often leads to hilarious results, as seen in the clips here (here ハグ couldn't be used either way because it would break the high fantasy immersion, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the double entendre were intentional on the creators' part).


I'm curious about the onkei/onkyuu thing in the second part of that video. Jisho says that 恩恵 (onkei) = blessing, but it looks like in the actual subtitles, they're using a different, "kyuu" kanji instead of 恵. What's up with that?
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Jan 12, 2023 4:52 pm

Apparently 恩寵 is pronounced おんちょう. It's not a very common word, so I guess Botan misread it as おんきゅう due to getting the second character confused with 窮.
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Jan 13, 2023 6:19 am

vonPeterhof wrote:And does she say ハグして or 抱いて?


Turns out the answer is neither.

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I also went to another Japanese Talk Time (online) meetup. I pretty much just spent the whole time watching silently, but I did briefly respond a couple times when people asked me questions.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Jan 14, 2023 5:59 am

As of yesterday, I finished going through all the vocab in my Satori Reader decks that is in the top 10k frequency on JPDB (currently up to top 10300).


Tonight, I noticed that the example sentence on JPDB had different furigana than the "correct reading" listed by the card itself. WTF? Oh well, into the blacklist you go. kind of frustrating to realize I was wasting time reviewing it all this time unsuccessfully trying to remember that *this* word happens to use shi, when it turns out both readings are acceptable anyway.

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Million Yen Women:

When Minami says "I bet you're a virgin", it sounded like she just said "shojyo desho" in Japanese. I was surprised, since I thought shoujyo (少女) just meant "girl", but I looked up "shojyo" on Jisho and it turns out that it is a different word, 処女, which means "virgin".

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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Jan 15, 2023 6:13 am

社会に出た時に役立つことを、たくさん学べると思うの。

I misread 社会 as kaisha (company) here. It's annoying how often I still make basic mistakes like this. But of course, when reading, you normally aren't puzzling out every character, because that would take way too long. Instead, you just sort of guess based on context and overall appearance, leading to mistakes like this, even with the most basic kanji. It's also a demonstration about how reading practice is about a lot more than just learning words and kanji.

I also automatically read 役立つ as yaku ni tatsu, and didn't notice at all that there was no に there until I ran into the note from Satori Reader a paragraph later explaining the difference between yaku ni tatsu and yaku datsu (which I had never seen before) and went back and checked. But at least in that case, the meaning is the same.

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I also read ch16 of ふわふわ日記 this evening. It ended with a note from the author in which I misread 社会 as kaisha again, despite writing about that same mistake this very morning.

これからは、この『ふわふわ日記』と並行して、明奈ちゃんと翔君が大学を卒業して、社会人になった後のお話を書き始めようかななんて思っています。あくまで予定ですが…。


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Million Yen Women ep4: Wow, I definitely see why Lavengro talked about them coming and going so much. There's one scene in this episode where Midori says ittekimasu three different times in one scene.

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I also learned a new word - muramura (horny). One thing that is nice about Million Yen Women is how it seems like it is relatively slow and the dialogue tends to use a lot of very short sentences. I watch it with English subtitles but try to pay attention to the Japanese too, and short sentences give you time to quickly read the subtitles and also hear the dialogue afterwards, making it a lot easier to see what is being said, compared to the shows and anime I've watched before.


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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Jan 16, 2023 6:06 am

One thing that really annoys me about Japanese vocab study is all the Guess That Rendaku! coinflip questions. For example, this morning on Wanikani, I missed 稲田 and 小包 due to guessing the reading coinflips wrong (I put inata and kotsutsumi, respectively). Yes I know those aren’t technically all rendakus, but you know what I mean. jin/nin and tai/dai are also major offenders.

Also on Wanikani this morning, 代わり came up and it suddenly occurred to me that it was probably related to かわりに (in place of, in exchange for), a phrase I learned last fall from JPDB. It's cool to make connections like that.

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Today, I finished catching up on The Jam Maker on Satori Reader and plan to tackle my first "Advanced" difficulty story, Closeup: Obon Society, tomorrow.

Speaking of misreadings, I misread 坂 as ita (board) here. To be fair, they were talking about construction, so "board" seemed likely from context.

おばさん、この坂を下りた所にある、竹内さんち、知ってる?

I also misread 後 as ato rather than go here, but I think that's just cheating, since there's basically no way to guess and it is usually ato.

それから数か月後、裕二君は中学校を卒業した。

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I also read ふわふわ日記 ch17 this evening. I'm hoping that the more reading I'll do, the more my reading stamina will build up and the faster and more easily I can read things. Right now, I can read a lot more easily than six months ago, but I still have to pause for breath after every paragraph (literally - when reading, I stop frequently and close my eyes and exhale and so on).

I recognized two words (頬張る and 俯く) that I had learned from JPDB, so that was cool.

I was confused by "スイーツバイキング", and searching Jisho initially didn't find anything. I had to put the two halves into Jisho individually in order to make it work. Apparently "viking" is Japanese for "buffet". Now that's a waseieigo!


Another part that really confused me was this part, specifically the grammar around "かわいそう".

「翔が、台所の材料見て、明奈ちゃんにはこんな量じゃ全然足りない、もっと作ってあげなきゃかわいそうだ、って言ったんだよ。明奈ちゃんは翔の2倍食べるって聞いてるよ。」

Fortunately, someone on Reddit explained it for me. The basic form of "must do" is conditional + bad stuff, e.g nareba + ikenai. きゃ implies the second half, which is why I've always seen it by itself and got really confused when it was followed by a random different word here. However, it turns out that while きゃ already implies the "bad stuff", you can instead add one explicitly if you want to. It also turns out that かわいそう can be used as the "bad stuff" in this construct (in this situation, not in general). I would have never guessed.
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