Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Sep 10, 2022 3:02 am

@Sumisu Thanks, I'll have to check those out. I actually tried to find Belle in Japanese before, but didn't have any luck.

My strategy for finding the classic Disney songs in Japanese is to first search for the movie on English Wikipedia, then go to the sidebar to switch to Japanese, then find the list of songs and copy paste the song names into Youtube. This has mixed results, since it is reliant on what people happened to upload, but I was able to find the Aladdin songs for instance, and this is also I found the "I'll Make A Man Out of You" video I mentioned earlier.

Anyway, the most interesting bit was not the songs themselves, but something I noticed on the Japanese Aladdin page. For most of the songs, there are no Japanese pages, so the article instead links to pages about them on the English Wikipedia. However, for "One Jump Ahead", they linked to the English Wikipedia page for "When You Wish Upon a Star" by mistake.

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Anyway, when I was looking for Disney songs earlier and talked about how Youtube would only ever recommend songs from Tangled, Moana, Frozen, Frozen 2 and occasionally Encanto, and Coco, I noticed that all the recommendations were from the channel DisneyMusicJapanVEVO. Or rather, all the relevant recommendations were - the majority of Youtube's recommendations were actually completely unrelated Disney songs and videos in English.

Anyway, I decided to check out the DisneyMusicJapanVEVO page and was surprised to see that it has a bunch of videos that never came up in Youtube's recommendations, despite being on the one channel it is willing to recommend things from. Specifically, it has among other things, three songs from The Princess and the Frog as well as "Summer" (Olaf's Song) from Frozen. The last is particularly bizarre since Youtube was happy to recommend all the other Japanese Frozen videos. I wonder why it is so parochial and inconsistent.

Incidentally, it's amusing seeing how Disney movie titles changed in Japan:
Frozen -> Anna and the Snow Queen
Encanto -> Mirabel and the Magic-Riddled House
Moana -> Moana and the Legendary Ocean
Tangled -> Tower Top Rapunzel
The Princess and the Frog -> Princess and the Magic Kiss
Turning Red -> I Am Sometimes a Red Panda
Luca -> That Summer Luca
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Sep 10, 2022 5:44 am

For a long time, I was watching an episode of anime, but since I finished Orbital Children on the 28th, I haven't gotten around to watching any anime, except for when I watched 5CM/S on the 30th. But for the last ten days straight, I haven't watched any anime at all.

Tonight, I decided to try to finally break my streak and start watching anime again. I saw David27 recommend Stein's Gate on his log and decided to try it without knowing anything about the show. After watching the first episode, I still barely know anything about the show. It was weird and boring. Hopefully it gets better later.

The main character appears to be a chuuni wannabee mad scientist. The chuuni appears to be an almost-obligatory stock character in highschool comedy anime (seen in Saiki K, Komi, etc.), but I have yet to see an adult chuuni anywhere, so this is a first. The show also appears to have time travel elements, but that just meant I was distracted the whole time, thinking about better works out of boredom. Specifically, it made me think of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle a really awesome (English) mystery time travel novel that everyone should read.

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I haven't managed to study Japanese much lately. I think the heatwave made it hard to focus, and I also just keep getting busy and distracted by other stuff. Today I woke up late and had a headache in the afternoon, so I skipped Wanikani entirely.

I've also been struggling a lot with JPDB despite making it a priority to complete my reviews and do new cards on JPDB every day. Last night, I decided to lower my max new cards per day from 17 to 16 in order to hopefully reduce the future review load and make it less overwhelming. However, it was a bit irrelevant since I didn't do any new cards at all today anyway, for the third time in a week after breaking a three week streak.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sun Sep 11, 2022 4:44 am

I tried to find a video for the Japanese version of "Touch the Sky" from Brave, but I ran into the problem that the Japanese Wikipedia page for Brave doesn't list the song titles at all, and I didn't manage to find any videos searching by just the movie name. I also tried searching for Belle's Song again, but had little more success than last time. The closest I managed to find was an audio-only version of the song.

Incidentally, Brave is yet another example of Disney's pithy one-word movie titles getting expanded to Character Name and the X Y for the Japanese market. In this case, Brave became Merida and the Terrifying Forest. Surprised it wasn't anything about bears or curses.

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Today I tried reading それでも、ハッピーエンド again. (But in a nice, left to right and copy-pastable format this time). Despite having spent the last month studying all the vocab from the story, it was still a huge struggle to read. I took lengthy breaks between every paragraph and section, meaning it took all day to read. I ended up mostly relying on DeepL to actually understand what was going on, though I noticed some mistakes in DeepL as well. I'm still not convinced it is even actually any better than Google Translate, despite the frequent claims everywhere to that effect.

After I finished reading 月王子 a couple months ago, I was jubilant and excited. After finishing それでも、ハッピーエンド the second time however, I just felt relieved that the torment was finally over.

Incidentally, after I finally finished reading それでも、ハッピーエンド tonight, I put my Japanese music playlist on shuffle, and in an unbelievable coincidence, the first song to come up was ハルジオン (the Yoasobi song based on それでも、ハッピーエンド), despite the fact that there are 25 songs on the playlist, and thus the odds were only 4%.

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I watched Steins Gate ep2 tonight and I'm still not sure whether I like it, though at least it is getting more interesting.

Also, today was the second day in a row that I didn't do any new cards on JPDB, although that was largely due to being preoccupied with (not) reading Soredemo Happy End.

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Another interesting note from SR. I'll have to look out for that ga pattern in place names in the future.

Setagaya-ku is the most populous ward in Tokyo with a population of nearly 900,000. The name appears frequently on the news and in popular literature, so it's worth learning.
(A ward, by the way, is a municipal government within the Tokyo metropolis. It's basically like an independent city, except that there is also a Tokyo metropolitan government, which provides services to all the wards, such as waste disposal.)
Looking at the kanji 世田谷, it's easy to see where the se, ta, and ya come from, but you might wonder which character is contributing the ga. The answer is that it has been abbreviated out. Before the Setagaya we know today came to be, there was a Setagaya Town, and the spelling of that town's name was 世田ヶ谷. Notice the character that looks like a half-size katakana ke. That character is pronounced ka or ga (ga here), and one of its roles was as a possessive particle -- it means the same thing as modern no. That means that Setagaya breaks down as "The Valley of Seta."
You'll see this ga a lot in place names, where the pattern is usually <name or thing> ga <geographical feature>. For example:
Hikari ga oka, "Hill of Light"
Jiyuu ga oka, "Hill of Freedom"
Seki ga hara, "Field of the Gatehouse" (site of famous battle)
In modern Japanese, many names that incorporate this funny-looking ga have either changed it to a hiragana ga to make it easier to read or just removed it entirely from the official spelling, which is what has happened with Setagaya.


And another explaining demoaru, which I completely misinterpreted. It's so frustrating how it seems impossible to guess when demo means "but" and when it is just de+mo like it is here. Incidentally, I've seen a lot about summer festivals from anime and manga and I've never heard of karoke tournaments being a thing there. How common is this?

夏祭りの風物詩でもある、カラオケ大会は、7月25日に行われます。

"The karaoke tournament, which is also a summer highlight"
Let's break down de mo aru together.
A more formal equivalent of da is de aru. For example:
Benri de aru, "It is convenient."
But now imagine that we want to say "It is also convenient." Where does the mo go? We actually insert it between the de and aru:
Benri de mo aru, "It is also convenient."
What this means is, it is convenient in addition to the other things that it is (affordable, readily available, etc).
Here, the clause ending in de mo aru is modifying karaoke taikai, so it means "the karaoke tournament, which is also a summer highlight."
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon Sep 12, 2022 4:46 am

Today, I tried to find a video of "Friends on the Other Side" from The Princess and the Frog. I was surprised to see that the song was re-named to ファシリエの企み (Facilier's Plot). I wonder why they didn't just keep the name as the refrain of the song (秘密の仲間).

I also found a video of "Bring Honor To Us All" from Mulan. What I found really interesting is one point where the onscreen subtitles say いく when the singer very clearly says ゆく. I wonder why. The lyrics seem like they might have been added by a fan and maybe they just made a mistake while doing it.

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Stein's Gate ep3: One thing I've been wondering about a lot is Mayuri referring to herself in third person. Obviously, this is something that girls commonly due in Japanese - young girls. It seems weird to see a grown woman doing this. Presumably, this is a deliberate affectation to make her seem more cutesy, but it just comes across as a bit disturbing.

Incidentally, I just looked up Mayuri's character page on TvTropes while writing this, and I accidentally discovered some major spoilers. Specifically, that SERN kills her, causing Okarin to loop time endlessly in a futile attempt to save her, but she's apparently fated to die no matter what he does. I also learned that she is actually in high school. TvTropes calls her Older Than She Looks, but I'd say the opposite, since I assumed she was an adult.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Sep 12, 2022 8:03 am

golyplot wrote:What I found really interesting is one point where the onscreen subtitles say いく when the singer very clearly says ゆく. I wonder why. The lyrics seem like they might have been added by a fan and maybe they just made a mistake while doing it.

I wouldn't really call it a mistake because the pronunciation ゆく is so customary in songs that most singers default to it regardless of whether the lyrics say ゆく or いく (compare the pronunciations of 横切っていく in the second line of this song in the original version sung by a vocaloid and the anime version sung by the singer LiSA).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue Sep 13, 2022 5:20 am

Yesterday, I started studying the vocab for Tabun (the short story that the Yoasobi song also named Tabun was based on). I actually didn't like the song much, but that was next on kelvin921019's list, and I figured I might as well try it and see. Maybe I might even like the song better after reading the story it was based on.

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Not much Japanese today, but I did watch Stein's Gate ep4 tonight as usual. Fortunately, it's not too bad now that the plot has picked up. The bit I found most interesting though was the cute cartoon catgirls on the empty can disposal thing. (I assume this is for disposing of empty cans, though I may have misunderstood the label). I recently read about Kawaisa on TvTropes and this seems like a perfect example.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Wed Sep 14, 2022 5:57 am

Back when I was searching for classic Disney songs, I noticed that the videos I found were almost always uploaded by the same guy, so I decided to just cut out the middleman and check out his channel, starting from the bottom.

Today I watched A Whole New World. I had actually searched for that before by doing the "look it up on JP Wikipedia and search for the name on Youtube thing", but had only been able to find an audio-only version before, so it was nice to find a video version of the song.

Anyway, I noticed that the moon is shown as just a sliver halfway through the song, and then a big crescent at the end. Not exactly the biggest issue in a cartoon where they see the Sphinx under construction and then visit ancient Greece (and all in one night!), but I did find the lack of continuity amusing.

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Stein's Gate

I noticed the word "genkin" here, and replayed this line several times. I think he said "genkin na yatsu da". I looked up genkin to see if it had any meanings about changing your mind easily, but it seems pretty firmly to just be about cash. Jisho does list one alternate meaning as "mercenary" though, so perhaps he was calling her that here.

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Here, I noticed the voice say "hatsu meiru" and was reminded of the word hatsumoude (first shrine visit of the year) that I learned a while back, also from some anime. It seems that it must be a word meaning "first", and checking Jisho shows that sure enough, it is. It's interesting, since it's not something I've seen before outside of 初詣, which I previously assumed to be a weird one-off. It's especially interesting because はつか means "20th day of the month" rather than the first.

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Edit: I just realized that 初メール is also written on screen here. Then again, I would have never guessed the "hatsu" reading part if I hadn't heard it spoken, and I probably wouldn't have noticed at all anyway due to focusing on the English subtitles - this is only the kind of thing you notice if you happen to pause and take a screenshot.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Sep 14, 2022 12:35 pm

golyplot wrote:I noticed the word "genkin" here, and replayed this line several times. I think he said "genkin na yatsu da". I looked up genkin to see if it had any meanings about changing your mind easily, but it seems pretty firmly to just be about cash. Jisho does list one alternate meaning as "mercenary" though, so perhaps he was calling her that here.

I've yet to watch this anime so I don't really know, but are you sure he wasn't just saying 元気なやつだ? That way it makes some sort of sense in a sarcastic sort of way (energetic -> jumping around a lot -> switching opinions right away).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Wed Sep 14, 2022 2:32 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:I've yet to watch this anime so I don't really know, but are you sure he wasn't just saying 元気なやつだ? That way it makes some sort of sense in a sarcastic sort of way (energetic -> jumping around a lot -> switching opinions right away).


You're probably right. That didn't occur to me as something that would make sense to say and I doubt I'd have been able to hear the difference.
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Sumisu
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby Sumisu » Wed Sep 14, 2022 10:08 pm

golyplot wrote:
vonPeterhof wrote:I've yet to watch this anime so I don't really know, but are you sure he wasn't just saying 元気なやつだ? That way it makes some sort of sense in a sarcastic sort of way (energetic -> jumping around a lot -> switching opinions right away).


You're probably right. That didn't occur to me as something that would make sense to say and I doubt I'd have been able to hear the difference.


I looked this up in my Meikyou paper dictionary and it gave the following secondary definition:

目先の利益によってすぐに考えや態度変えるさま。

If we translate 利益 as "gain" or "advantage" rather than profit, you get the sense of changing thoughts/attitudes based on personal advantage. So maybe you heard it right after all?
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