Sumisu's Japanese Log

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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Tue Mar 22, 2022 3:36 am

Tonight I took a little break from listening practice and focused on reading. I read a news article about current Japan-Russia relations and saw something that I'd never seen before: the words ソ連 and 日ソ (Soviet Union and Japan-Soviet Union). In both cases, the katakana ソ is the character associated with the former Soviet Union. Up to this point, I'd only seen countries represented by kanji, e.g. 英, 米, etc. The katakana-kanji compound looks very strange to me, and I wonder if there are other such combinations, or if this is unique.

I've also started handwriting kanji again, maybe 30-40 per day for the last few days. I don't think it's necessary to handwrite kanji to learn them, but I enjoy doing it, especially with a felt pen, and think it helps to cement them in my mind. I also find that knowledge of the stroke order helps when reading unusual or cursive fonts.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby vonPeterhof » Tue Mar 22, 2022 6:13 am

Sumisu wrote:The katakana-kanji compound looks very strange to me, and I wonder if there are other such combinations, or if this is unique.

You do sometimes see single katakana abbreviations used for country names whose kanji versions are either non-existent or obscure. The Soviet one is technically the latter, since it does have a kanji to represent it - 蘇, but I don't think I've ever seen it actually used that way in a text. Aside from that apparently some authors and editors insist on using the katakana ロ for modern Russia and keeping the kanji 露 reserved for the old Russian Empire, but that's far from universal (the Japanese foreign ministry, for example, uses the two interchangeably).
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Sun Jul 17, 2022 4:45 am

I haven't updated this log in a long time, but I'm continuing to study Japanese every day, albeit with a number of personal and work issues pulling me in multiple directions. Unfortunately I haven't made any progress on the Intermediate Japanese textbook that I bought several months ago, having completed only two chapters earlier this year. I've been completing my Anki decks every day, but have not added many new cards lately. I'm not at all happy with my level of Japanese. On the one hand, this attitude could be seen as negative, but in fact my motivation is actually fairly strong, as I continue to want to improve. I'm just often overwhelmed by this overwhelming language.

Tonight I did the thing I occasionally do: wander down a rabbit hole that will do little to improve my Japanese, but is nonetheless educational. I explored the rare kanji 叚 (false) and its offshoots. This form is not a radical/primitive, but it appears in many characters, unaltered, with one huge exception, to be described shortly. The most important thing about this kanji is its 音 reading: カ. It shares this reading with many (all?) of the kanji that it appears in. Most famously, it appears in 暇 (free time/time off), whose 音 reading is カ, found in the common word 休暇 (キュウカ).

The form appears in not one, but two different kanji both meaning "shrimp:" 蝦 and 鰕. 蝦 is a Jinmeiyou kanji, and it wouldn't surprise me if one or the other of these often appears on restaurant menus, so it's probably good to be familiar with them. Their reading would either be えび if appearing alone or カ if combined with another kanji.

This form also shows up in 遐 (distant), 葭 (reed), and 瑕 (flaw), all of which are pronounced カ.

But the most important kanji this appears in is actually in a highly altered, simplified form, unrecognizable from the original. That is the kanji 仮 (sham/provisional). This kanji was originally written as 假. As you can see, the key elements are the 人 and 又 radicals. The remaining seven strokes were simplified into the two-stroke "cliff" (厂). However, despite this seemingly massive alteration, the kanji maintains the all-important カ onyoumi reading - a modern echo of its ancient origin. This reading distinguishes it from the many kanji that contain 反, none of which, so far as I'm aware, share the カ reading, as they have different genealogies.
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:47 am

Over the last week or so, I've been spending 2-3 hours per day reading news articles in Japanese. Sometimes I'll just skim through an article to try to get the gist of it, while other times I look up every single word. I struggle with deciding what to look up and what not to look up. I'm not at a high enough level that I can really "enjoy" a news article without looking any words up, with the exception of things like weather reports, which aren't particularly enjoyable even if completely understood. Lately I've been erring on the side of just looking up everything, even words I think I know already. This is incredibly inefficient but I enjoy doing this from time to time, although I always end up burning out after a while...

The most ridiculous kanji I came across this week was 鬱. I can't believe this 29-stroke monstrosity is a jouyou kanji. According to Jisho it's not even in the top 2,500 most common kanji in newspapers. And yet there it was, in the word 憂鬱. 憂鬱 was used to describe the gloomy feeling felt by shoppers due to rising grocery prices.

I've been supplementing reading these articles with listening to NHK news radio, as the vocabulary often overlaps. NHK radio is incredibly boring, but I keep coming back to it because they speak very clear Japanese and they put out an endless amount of fresh, free, topical content. As with the reading though, if I listen to too much of it I get burned out and discouraged...

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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Mon Aug 08, 2022 3:12 am

I've been able to maintain my habit of 2 hours or so per day of newspaper reading. I've been slacking off on listening practice, but have managed to watch the first four episodes of Attack on Titan over the past few days. I'm watching it with English subtitles. Sometimes I'm able to get the gist of what they're saying but most of the time I'd be completely lost without the subtitles.

I just realized in trying to figure out how long I'd been learning Japanese that this month is actually my four year anniversary. On the one hand, I feel like I should be at a much higher level than I am now after studying for so long. But I only have so much time each day to study, and I'm actually really happy with my reading ability, which is my main focus and goal. I can get at least the gist of most newspaper articles and am now working on expanding my vocabulary, while also delving deeper into the multiple meanings of individual kanji. One issue I'm running into is the Heisig keywords that I've learned are actually starting to become somewhat of a hindrance. The "meaning" of most kanji changes and morphs depending on the context and any other kanji they're paired with, and it often has absolutely nothing to do with the English keyword that I associate it with. Heisig himself talked about this, acknowledging that "learning" the kanji via his method was just the first step in a much larger process. Indeed, I see now that one could (and some do) spend a lifetime studying these characters.
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby koolawant » Mon Aug 08, 2022 4:02 am

Super late response but I’m regards to your shrimp kanji, you will probably never run into that. The kanji used for shrimp is 海老, believe it or not! I was totally confused when I first moved to Japan and saw it on menus.

I think it’s amazing that you’re reading newspapers! I don’t like them in my native language abs wouldn’t read them in Japanese even if held at gunpoint :lol:

Edited for clarity*
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Mon Aug 08, 2022 6:16 am

koolawant wrote:Super late response but I’m regards to your shrimp kanji, you will probably never run into that. The kanji used for shrimp is 海老, believe it or not! I was totally confused when I first moved to Japan and saw it on menus.

I think it’s amazing that you’re reading newspapers! I don’t like them in my native language abs wouldn’t read them in Japanese even if held at gunpoint :lol:

Edited for clarity*


Thanks for sharing this word (海老): I wouldn't have recognized it on a menu, but will now.

I don't know why I love reading newspaper articles, but I can't help myself. I can say that it's a great way to learn kanji, including non-joyou kanji.
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Sun Aug 28, 2022 3:39 am

I've spent the past two weeks watching Forest of Piano, and finished the final episode (24話) tonight. I discovered this show thanks to golyplot, who mentioned this on his page, although he didn't like it as much as I did :lol:

This is a show about a classical music competition. It's probably not the best show for language learning purposes, because there are long stretches in each episode that feature no dialogue, only musical performance. This becomes even more pronounced in the second season, as we hear Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 three different times, each time hearing portions of all three movements. I think in all three cases, the second movement is played almost in its entirety.

I'm probably the rare person who this show was designed for - I am both a Japanese learner and a fan/player of classical piano. Incredibly, the last classical concert I attended was a performance of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 - the centerpiece of this show. It is a great piece, and I guess if I were to criticize the show, it would be that seeing this type of thing in anime requires quite a lot of suspension of disbelief. After all, the characters aren't actually playing these pieces. What we hear are recordings from top pianists, specifically, from what I can tell by googling, recordings by Vladimir Ashkenazy. The show spends significant time having the audience and judges dissect the minutiae of each individual performance but, in fact, you're hearing professional recordings by a single artist. I was able to suspend my disbelief, however, and enjoy the show. The ending was very satisfying, and went in a surprising direction.

One consequence of this show is for the first time since I started seriously learning Japanese, I've started playing piano again. I gave it up completely because language learning and learning an instrument are both so incredibly time consuming, and my time is limited. But I think I may be in a place where I can do both. We'll see...
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby golyplot » Sun Aug 28, 2022 5:37 am

One thing I'm curious about is how much of the style stuff the show talks about is actually accurate. When the characters play different versions, they make a big deal about copying Ajino's style or not, or how Kai plays in an unorthodox style, while Shuuhei plays everything perfectly by the numbers. But of course, as a layman, I couldn't hear the difference at all. I'm curious whether they got whoever was doing the recordings to actually perform in different styles like that and whether trained pianists can tell.
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Fortheo » Sun Aug 28, 2022 12:15 pm

If you like music themed anime, I recommend のだめカンタービレ. It's about university students at a music school. You do need to suspend your belief, but it's quite good. They also made it into a live action series that was good, too, and the musical performances were fun to watch as well.

Another personal favorite is a 12 episode anime called 坂道のアポロン. It's basically a coming of age story about a high school kid who was trained in classical piano, but ultimately stumbles upon another student that Is a jazz drummer. It's a nice coming of age story and has great jazz music throughout.
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