Learning Japanese From Zero

[dampingwire]

However, last night, I came across an article where I still had no idea what it was actually saying even after putting it through Google Translate.

Turn off the furigana (right hand blue button) and then drop it into https://www.deepl.com/translator ... it does a good job (afaict with my poor Japanese).

[golyplot]

Last night, I finished watching The Dragon Prince. I'm not sure what to watch next. I tried One Piece, but didn't like it much. Any recommendations for good shows on Netflix to watch in Japanese, ideally with short episodes (<30 minutes)?

In other news, I watched ep31 of Cardcaptor Sakura this morning. One thing that always struck me is how all the books are "backwards", with the front cover on the back and a right to left page order. It's so weird to see. But what struck me this time is how the books in this episode aren't backwards. They're left to right, Western style, despite being written in Japanese. Does anyone know why they would have done it that way?

I also noticed Sakura say さくら怪獣じゃないも! (Sakura is not a monster!) at the beginning. It's so weird to see people referring to themselves by name.

[vonPeterhof]

I also noticed Sakura say さくら怪獣じゃないも! (Sakura is not a monster!) at the beginning. It's so weird to see people referring to themselves by name.

Pretty sure that's supposed to be もん and not も (a less likely alternate interpretation could be "さくら怪獣じゃない！もう〜"; either way も isn't used like that).

And yeah, the name thing takes getting used to. On the one hand it doesn't exactly violate any grammatical rules, since Japanese verbs don't conjugate for person and the line between personal pronouns and nouns is already blurry (I recall seeing character sheets for some franchises indicating which first person pronoun each character uses, and for some of them it just said "own name"), so there's nothing inherently "third person" about referring to oneself by name like that. But on the other hand it's not exactly ubiquitous in everyday Japanese outside of fiction, as the only people who would unironically refer to themselves that way are either very little children or adults who are talking to very little children.

[golyplot]

Pretty sure that's supposed to be もん and not も (a less likely alternate interpretation could be "さくら怪獣じゃない！もう〜"; either way も isn't used like that).

Sorry, you're right. What's the difference?

[golyplot]

Yesterday, I did badly on my Wanikani reviews, averaging just 79.8% for the day. By comparison, I'd been averaging over 85% in recent days. It may not seem like much, but small differences in average accuracy have a surprisingly large effect on the subjective experience, especially if they compound over time. The exuberant successes of the last couple weeks (up until yesterday anyway) were separated by only percentage point or two from my near-burnout on WK a few weeks prior. Hopefully this was just a run of bad luck and not the start of a new trend.

I also watched the first episode of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure last night but didn't like it. It didn't suffer from the low quality and lazy animation of One Piece, but I found it impossible to get over the art style.

[vonPeterhof]

Pretty sure that's supposed to be もん and not も (a less likely alternate interpretation could be "さくら怪獣じゃない！もう〜"; either way も isn't used like that).

Sorry, you're right. What's the difference?

Not sure what difference you mean, but もん is an ending particle that usually indicates a reason or excuse for something, and is also used as a sort of general purpose emphatic proclamation of protest, especially by little girls. もう when used on its own is an exclamation of annoyance or bemusement, like "come on!" or "what the hell?" The particle も in the sense of "too" or "as well" is generally only used directly after noun phrases, which じゃない isn't.

[kraemder]

Six month update

As of tonight, I've officially been studying Japanese for six months, so time for another big status update. I'm halfway through my planned study period of a year, so this update should be more significant than most, and yet it feels like a strange time to do an update, since I've put Japanese on hold, and haven't done any Japanese study in almost a week apart from WK. So I guess I'll write about what I was doing before I put my studies on hold.

Overall, progress in Japanese has been much slower than I originally expected. On the bright side, I did finally start watching anime to practice Japanese, the original premise of this log, so at least it's no longer false advertising. But even before I took a break, it was beginning to feel a bit futile, like I can't actually understand enough to benefit when watching shows.

It seems like you're making better progress than I did in my first six months (maybe thanks to WaniKani?). I also really struggled to benefit from immersion and it drove me nuts. Watching Matt vs Japan's videos maybe I just wasn't stubborn enough. He seemed to benefit a lot from immersion really quickly. I didn't until much later. Much later. Anyway, good luck.

[golyplot]

It seems like you're making better progress than I did in my first six months (maybe thanks to WaniKani?). I also really struggled to benefit from immersion and it drove me nuts. Watching Matt vs Japan's videos maybe I just wasn't stubborn enough. He seemed to benefit a lot from immersion really quickly. I didn't until much later. Much later. Anyway, good luck.

Thanks for the encouragement. It's definitely a slow and frustrating process. I do notice that I'm recognizing words more often and more easily, even though I still can't understand very much. (Speaking of recognizing words, a couple days ago, I missed the WK review for 直接 due to completely blanking on 接, much to my frustration. Soon afterwards, I noticed the word come up while listening to Nihongo con Teppei. Such is the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.)

In other news, I watched the first episode of BNA: Brand New Animal last night. As with Cardcaptor Sakura, I read through the plot summary and subtitle file beforehand so I'd understand it better.

Episode 32 of Cardcaptor Sakura is also notable because Syaoran and Kero switch bodies, but unlike most shows, the voices do _not_ switch over. Instead, Syaoran uses Kero's Osaka dialect, and Kero speaks rudely like Syaoran apparently does. Sadly I'm not skilled enough at Japanese to pick up on such nuances. I didn't even realize that Kero spoke Osaka-ben in the first place.

This morning, I watched CS ep 34. I remembered from the subtitles that there's a scene where Sakura is surprised to see Touya at the competition and he responds "part time job", so I was expecting "アルバイト", but instead, he said what sounded like ばいとだ. I looked it up, and apparently, バイト is a common shortening of アルバイト. It can also mean "byte" of course, because that's not confusing at all.

[golyplot]

I watched ep 35 of Cardcaptor Sakura yesterday. It's interesting to see the cultural differences sometimes. The idea that kids would still be in school two days before Christmas was pretty shocking to me. There's also the thing where Christmas is seen as a romantic holiday in Japan, but I was already aware of that. Still, it was amusing to see Sakura ask Yukito to go to an amusement park for Christmas, since it's so different from how people treat Christmas here. I don't know if there are any amusement parks that are even open on Christmas here.

Anyway, ep 35 is the end of season 1. Apparently there's a movie that takes place between season 1 and 2, but Netflix doesn't have any of the movies (or the sequel series Clear Card for that matter), so I guess I'll just proceed with season 2.

In other news, I finally reached the 党 kanji on WK today, which means that I've now learned all of the 268 most frequent kanji. My kanji frequency chart is looking pretty full now!

[golyplot]

I was pretty pleased when I noticed the word 番組 while listening to Nihongo con Teppei this morning. It immediately stuck out as a word I'd seen on WK, but I had to think about it for a while to remember the meaning. It helped that I knew the episode was about watching Japanese TV, so I realized it must be "tv program". It's currently at Enlightened on WK, but I've struggled with that word in the past (hence why it's more memorable, well that and the seemingly random and impossible to guess meaning), getting it confused with 番号, 交番, 信号、etc. as well as forgetting the reading for 組 at least once. Hopefully seeing it in the wild will make me more likely to remember it when it comes up for the burn review in four months.

Likewise, I also (re)learned 発音. In that case, I wouldn't have been able to remember the meaning in a vacuum, but I immediately figured it out from context, since Teppei had been talking about how "Donald Trump" and "Boris Johnson" become "Donarudu Turumpu" and "Borisu" or whatever when he said "日本語の発音".

I finally started to remember that える always means you're not the one doing the action on WK after going through 絶える, 冷える, 燃える、見える etc, only to get hit with the review for 与える. Luckily, I was pretty sure it was "to give" rather than "to be given" or something in spite of the rule, so I still got it right, but it is a bit frustrating to get hit an the exception immediately after I became proud of myself for getting some of the transitive/intransitive pairs right.

Also this morning, I reached the WK lesson for "teriyaki". The lesson included a warning that it is "quite different" from what you get at teriyaki shops in West. I guess that's good to know if I ever manage to travel to Japan (which seems increasingly unlikely with the way the pandemic is going), though I'd probably end up trying it anyway just to see what it's like.