Learning Japanese From Zero

[devilyoudont]

Try copying and pasting that into jisho and it will more accurately break it down into words and particles, and provide dictionary lookups for each word and particle. It's not always perfect, but it will still do a much better job of identifying the word boundaries than you can as a learner.

https://ichi.moe/

This website which is in alpha is the best I've found at breaking sentences into words for beginners... At the very least it makes different errors than Jisho, so people can try plugging a sentence which they cannot segment into both Jisho and Ichi Moe and maybe one of the two will be correct.

[golyplot]

Not much to report. Apart from WK, I've mostly been focusing on Lingodeer lately, trying to rush through the lessons before my subscription ends. Currently, I have nine lessons to go until I complete Japanese I. I figure I might as well make use of it while I can. Without review, it won't really sink in, but hopefully it will at least be familiar when I see the grammar elsewhere later.

Apart from that, I've tried reading The Crystal Hunters a bit (currently up to page 8). I can understand a decent amount of it, though I wish I could select the text so I could easily look up unfamiliar words and phrases.

[crush]

Ah, The Crystal Hunters was a great confidence booster! Hopefully they continue with it. They have a grammar guide, too, with a vocabulary list of all the words (it's on page 8). Just keep that open on the side while reading it. It only uses some 80 words or so in the whole manga, so you'll see each word over and over. If you're familiar with hiragana/katana, an alternative is just typing that into jisho.org (e.g. 怪物=かいぶつ, so just type "kaibutsu" into jisho.org) as each kanji has the furigana above it.

[golyplot]

I gave up on my "watch at least one episode of Peppa Pig every day" plan yesterday. The problem is that the Youtube channel just endlessly uploads random selections from a small number of episodes and I finally got tired of watching the same episodes over and over. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any alternatives.

Today I finally got around to trying The Crystal Hunters again. This time, I used the accompanying guide to look up unfamiliar words and read it all the way through. Of course, the language is obviously unnatural and repetitive, but hopefully it's still better than nothing. It feels less like reading and more like pattern matching "ok which of the five words in the story are they using this time".

[crush]

Yeah, the problem in my opinion is that it's a single issue. If there were a wider selection available it'd be a great way to get used to reading in Japanese and start to internalize common structures (assuming they grow in vocabulary size and can start using more natural-sounding speech). Overall, i enjoyed it for what it is. It's not terribly useful as a single issue, if it grows i can see it being a nice alternative to graded readers, but they said they can produce them at a rate of about one every three months, so it's not very likely that it'll be a terribly useful resource for you and me by then.

[golyplot]

I finished the Japanese I course of Lingodeer this morning. I also ran into another annoying bug which I only managed to fix by uninstalling and reinstalling the app. But complaining about bugs in Lingodeer feels like gratuitous nitpicking at this point.

This evening, I "read" my first article on NHK News Easy. My process is for each sentence, I first look at the sentence by myself, then I put it into Jisho and look at the definitions of all the words, then I put it into Google Translate to find out what the sentence actually means .

The real problem is grammar. Thanks to Wanikani, I already know many of the words, and Jisho makes it easy to look up the rest, but Jisho really struggles when it comes to grammar words, and particularly for particles. All it can do is show you a dozen possible uses of that particle. It doesn't tell you how that particle is used in the context of that particular sentence. I can often guess the meaning of the sentence pretty closely just based on my pre-existing knowledge (since they're all about コロナウイルス, which I also read about in the English language news) as well as the content words I can look up on Jisho. But that's just guessing and filling in the blanks and doesn't feel much like actually reading.

I was also amused that Google Translate translated "ＷＨＯのテドロス事務局長は２３日、ウイルスが広がるスピードが速くなっていると言いました" as "WHO Secretary-General Tedros said Tuesday that the virus is spreading faster." Presumably, the tendency of English language news to refer to recent days by the day of the week while Japanese news apparently prefers to use the day of the month meant that Google Translate learned to translate the later into the former randomly. Though to be honest, I would have been scared if it managed to correctly translate ２３日 as Monday, since that requires contextual real world knowledge.

[golyplot]

Today I read my second NHK Easy article. Unfortunately, even Jisho was barely sufficient to get the vaguest understanding of the article. The main problem is Jisho's inability to help much with grammar, but I was also disappointed to discover that it sometimes gets words wrong as well. For example, Jisho failed to properly segment 少しせきが出て into words, resulting in useless definitions, and it didn't even provide a definition for そのあと at all. On the bright side, I did get to practice a couple kanji I recently learned on WK.

Earlier this week, I finally finished watching Sword Art Online and its spinoff (with subtitles). Tonight, I started watching Beastars (with English subtitles). Hopefully by the time I finish that, I'll be far enough to start practicing watching things without subtitles.

[ryanheise]

Unfortunately, even Jisho was barely sufficient to get the vaguest understanding of the article. The main problem is Jisho's inability to help much with grammar, but I was also disappointed to discover that it sometimes gets words wrong as well. For example, Jisho failed to properly segment 少しせきが出て into words, resulting in useless definitions

It seems ichi.moe does a better job on this one. (thanks to devilyoudont for the recommendation).

[golyplot]

I haven't been doing much Japanese lately. Partly due to getting busy to other stuff, and party due to discovering that Miraculous Ladybug season 3 part 2 is now on Netflix, so I was watching that instead of Beastars. Also, I've barely made any progress on Lingodeer, since it turns out that the Japanese II lessons are much harder than Japanese I.

Anyway, it's crazy to think that I've now been studying Japanese for almost three months. As far as progress goes, I have now learned 492 kanji, which seems pretty impressive to me for someone who started from nothing three months ago. I do sometimes get similar looking kanji mixed up though. As far as grammar goes, I've covered all the N5 grammar in Lingodeer, but I probably don't remember most of it. Hopefully it will sink in better once I start reading more. I'm actually kind of curious whether I could pass an N5 exam right now. My guess is that I'd ace the kanji section, but fail miserably when it comes to the listening section.

Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to make more time for Japanese now. I'm trying to cut back on how much time I waste on social media, which should help a lot. (Then again, it's hard to resist endlessing discussing the coronavirus news in these times).

[golyplot]

In honor of having studied Japanese for three months, I decided to try taking a n5 practice test. I started the one here. It's funny, because I started by trying to read the sentence at the top, and spent over a minute puzzling over it before realizing that it was probably just the instructions, and that the actual question was probably just asking for the reading of the kanji below, which I knew instantly. Luckily, I was able to deduce what it was asking just by looking at the question, so I didn't actually need to understand the instructions. Anyway, I got the first two questions easily, since they were about kanji, but I missed the third question, which was a vocabulary question, so I stopped there. The word they were looking for was うるさい which WK covers (as 煩い)... at level 60!