Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Tue Jun 02, 2020 1:54 am

eido wrote:We all have days where we feel down and things don't work out the way we planned. But that's okay, because there's always another day.


In fact, I've actually been feeling more positive about Japanese since that post. It's funny how it ebbs and flows.

eido wrote:(By the way, great username. Very clever.)


Thanks!

Fun fact: That wasn't my original username. When I first signed up, I set my username as "⠀⠀⠀", just to see if it would let me. But the mods decided that having a blank username would make things confusing and made me change it, so I had to come up with a new username on the spot.
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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1726
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Languages: Am. English (N), German, French, ASL (abandoned), Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Tue Jun 02, 2020 5:20 am

Tonight, Netflix was advertising the newly added Cardcaptor Sakura, so out of curiosity, I decided to watch the first episode, in addition to watching episode 7 of SAO Alternative. It was my first time watching something in Japanese that I had never seen before, not counting Peppa Pig, and I figured I'd be completely lost, unlike with SAOA:GGO where I can just sit back and try to pick out bits and pieces of the dialog since I already know what's going on. I'd also heard that Cardcaptor Sakura is actually a romance show with a side of action, contrary to Kids WB!'s old editing hackjob attempt to portray it as a gender balanced action series. Also, it's of course an older show, so the animation obviously wouldn't be as good as a modern series. I didn't expect to like it, but I figured I'd watch the first episode just to see what it was like. Surprisingly, it was better than I expected. I also understood more than I expected, although that's admittedly still not much.
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crush
Blue Belt
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby crush » Tue Jun 02, 2020 10:18 am

I go back and forth in that with Japanese, too. Way more than any of my other languages. I think part of it is there are just so many pieces to Japanese, not just vocab and grammar like in European languages. Some days i feel like i'm "almost there" and others it's a chore just to finish my reviews.

I haven't seen Cardcaptor Sakura, but i might put it on my to-watch list after i'm done watching my current series (though after watching Hunter X Hunter, long series kinda scare me, heh).
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golyplot
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Tue Jun 02, 2020 1:28 pm

crush wrote:(though after watching Hunter X Hunter, long series kinda scare me, heh).


Well, the episodes are only ~23 minutes each. I'm actually a bit frustrated that Terrace House episodes are much longer, since it's harder to fit them in.
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Wed Jun 03, 2020 5:01 am

This morning, I read an article on NHK News Easy. I still haven't found a reading practice site that I really like, but I've given up on Watanoc for now. I also watched episode 2 of Cardcaptor Sakura this morning.
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kelvin921019
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16306
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby kelvin921019 » Wed Jun 03, 2020 6:10 am

golyplot wrote:This morning, I read an article on NHK News Easy. I still haven't found a reading practice site that I really like, but I've given up on Watanoc for now. I also watched episode 2 of Cardcaptor Sakura this morning.

If you are looking for listening-reading practice, you can try Satori Reader. It has some free content and all sorts of reading materials from short stories to sample dialogues.
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crush
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby crush » Wed Jun 03, 2020 2:15 pm

golyplot wrote:This morning, I read an article on NHK News Easy. I still haven't found a reading practice site that I really like, but I've given up on Watanoc for now.

I've found the news super boring and draining to read. I just started reading Harry Potter in Japanese. I converted it to an HTML file and use Yomichan's pop-up dictionary to quickly look things up. I'm familiar with the story so even if i can't understand everything, i can still enjoy going through it. Perhaps you could try something similar, reading a translation of a book you've read (perhaps one you've read more than once) and enjoyed in Japanese.

Manga is another option, but it was harder to read and look up unknown words plus it didn't really pull me in the same way as a book does. Not to mention the fact that the vertical text made it so much harder for me to distinguish between つ and っ/シ and ツ. So that's probably something i'll come back to when i don't have to rely on a dictionary so much and i can figure out from context whether it's つ or っ ;)
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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1726
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Languages: Am. English (N), German, French, ASL (abandoned), Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Thu Jun 04, 2020 2:12 pm

kelvin921019 wrote:If you are looking for listening-reading practice, you can try Satori Reader. It has some free content and all sorts of reading materials from short stories to sample dialogues.


crush wrote:I've found the news super boring and draining to read. I just started reading Harry Potter in Japanese. I converted it to an HTML file and use Yomichan's pop-up dictionary to quickly look things up. I'm familiar with the story so even if i can't understand everything, i can still enjoy going through it. Perhaps you could try something similar, reading a translation of a book you've read (perhaps one you've read more than once) and enjoyed in Japanese.


My main criteria are to have quality (i..e not AI) English translations available, and the ability to easily look up words and grammar points, ideally without having to install a browser extension like Yomichan.

Watanoc sort of had this, which is why I tried it for so long. It has English translations of each paragraph, and you can mouseover (most of) the words to get definitions and grammar explanations. However, the English translations are often imcomplete and very loose, sometimes ignoring entire sentences of the Japanese text. The main reason I gave up though was that when I switched to the N4 tagged articles, the popup definitions became sparser and sparser. Typically, half the words in the article would not have definitions available, including lots of words I wasn't familiar with, so that's why I gave up.

Unfortunately, NHK News Easy doesn't even have any of this. I've tried copy pasting the text into Jisho and Google Translate to kind of make up for it, but Jisho doesn't understand context, so the definitions it supplies are less accurate, and it's almost hopeless when it comes to grammar. I've also noticed cases where it fails to even parse the word boundaries correctly, leading to gibberish suggestions.
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dampingwire
Blue Belt
Posts: 559
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Location: Abingdon, UK
Languages: Italian (N), English (N), French (poor, not studying), Japanese (studying, JLPT N3)
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby dampingwire » Thu Jun 04, 2020 4:44 pm

golyplot wrote:Unfortunately, NHK News Easy doesn't even have any of this. I've tried copy pasting the text into Jisho and Google Translate to kind of make up for it, but Jisho doesn't understand context, so the definitions it supplies are less accurate, and it's almost hopeless when it comes to grammar. I've also noticed cases where it fails to even parse the word boundaries correctly, leading to gibberish suggestions.


Google Translate ha always been rather poor at working with Japanese (it mostly does a really good job with German and French). However I've found that DeepL actually often does manage to do a good job. And even when it doesn't, it still leads you down the correct path so you can work out what is going on.

This from NHK News:

打ち上げが延期されていた、アメリカの民間企業が開発した宇宙船が、31日午前4時22分に、初めて宇宙飛行士を乗せ国際宇宙ステーションに向けて打ち上げられました。
宇宙船はロケットから予定どおり切り離されて打ち上げは成功し、31日夜遅く、国際宇宙ステーションに到着する予定です。
アメリカが自国の宇宙船で国際宇宙ステーションに飛行士を送り込むのはスペースシャトルの退役以来9年ぶりで、宇宙開発に民間企業が本格的に参入する時代の象徴として注目されています。


DeepL:
The spacecraft, developed by a private American company, was launched at 4:22 a.m. on the 31st, carrying astronauts for the first time to the International Space Station, after the launch had been postponed.
The spacecraft was detached from the rocket as scheduled and the launch was successful and is expected to arrive at the International Space Station late on the night of the 31st.
It's been nine years since the retirement of the Space Shuttle that the United States sent astronauts to the International Space Station in its own spacecraft, and it's being touted as a symbol of the era when private companies are entering space exploration in earnest.


I imagine that NHK Easy News won't trouble it too much.
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新完全マスター N2聴解 : 94 / 103新完全マスター N2読解 : 99 / 177
新完全マスター N2文法 : 197 / 197TY Comp. German : 0 / 389

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ryanheise
Green Belt
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby ryanheise » Thu Jun 04, 2020 5:24 pm

dampingwire wrote:Google Translate ha always been rather poor at working with Japanese (it mostly does a really good job with German and French). However I've found that DeepL actually often does manage to do a good job.


Wow! I didn't know DeepL had Japanese support, but checking their press releases, it looks like it was only added just a couple of months ago so it's great that I'll finally get use it for the language I'm learning.

It's almost certain that DeepL would have been made possible by Google's influential paper Attention Is All You Need but it's impressive that they've been able to outdo Google at their own game.
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