Learning Japanese From Zero

[golyplot]

I'm wondering if you've tried Erin's Challenge? (https://www.erin.jpf.go.jp/)
Good luck.

I've never heard of it, but I'll take a look later. Thanks for the suggestion!

[golyplot]

I went through part of the first lesson of Erin's Challenge, suggested by devilyoudont. It seems like a pretty good resource, though it does demonstrate how far I still have to go as well.

Here's one line in the advanced skit that I puzzled over, which shows how hard Japanese can be.

*listening to skit*: Ken warned Erin to "be careful" about something about Saki, but I couldn't understand what.

*reading the script*: けんた： おこらせるとこわいから気をつけてね
so that's wake up - toko? - wai? - kara=from? - be careful

English translation:
Kenta ： Erin, you have to watch out for her.
Kenta ： She's pretty scary when she's mad.

<- Huh, that is not at all what I thought it said. Better go back and look again

* Oh wait, おこらせる probably means "to get angry", not "to wake up" like I initially thought. (it turns out that's oKIru not oKOru, something I often miss on WK. Why do all Japanese words have to be so similar sounding? )

* so we have get mad - toko? - wai? - kara - be careful
still doesn't make much sense

Oh wait, that こわい is kowai (scary)

get mad - and - scary - from - be careful

と usually means "and", so it still didn't make much sense, but after pondering it for a while, I vaguely recalled that と can also be used as a conditional. And kara also expresses the reason for something. So we finally have

[get mad] -> [scary] therefore [be careful]

Come to think of it, the らせる in おこらせる looks like causative form, although I'm not familiar enough with all the advanced conjugations to be confident about that. So maybe it means "if you make her mad, she is scary, so be careful".


Anyway, that was more or less my thought process. It shows how even with the English translation given, it still took me a long time to understand the sentence. Why does Japanese have to be so hard?

It also shows that reading a lot about grammar doesn't help much with actually applying it, although without all my recent grammar study, I probably would have never even remembered those rules in the first place.

[devilyoudont]

Identifying where written words begin and end is an area where your wanikani study will eventually pay off... when this phrase is written with kanji you can see why... the kanji basically perfectly marks the borders of bunsetsu (vocabulary words + all the sticky bits which attach after them). It's not like that every single time, but it is like that a lot of the time.

怒らせると怖いから気を付けて

Looks like you are doing ok with segmenting words when you hear them out loud tho, you were able to pick a known expression out of a phrase that was 2/3rds grammar you haven't studied/vocab you are working on learning in wanikani.

[golyplot]

Identifying where written words begin and end is an area where your wanikani study will eventually pay off... when this phrase is written with kanji you can see why... the kanji basically perfectly marks the borders of bunsetsu (vocabulary words + all the sticky bits which attach after them). It's not like that every single time, but it is like that a lot of the time.

怒らせると怖いから気を付けて

Looks like you are doing ok with segmenting words when you hear them out loud tho, you were able to pick a known expression out of a phrase that was 2/3rds grammar you haven't studied/vocab you are working on learning in wanikani.

Oh, I figured out that kanji nearly always mark the beginning of a word (apart from the honorifc o prefix) a long time ago. The problem is that that doesn't help when everything is written in kana like it was in this case. This line only had one kanji, and that was in the part I already knew.

けんた： おこらせるとこわいから気をつけてね

[golyplot]

I've been overwhelmed by WK again lately. I'm once again questioning my plan to go through it as fast as possible. Anyway, I finally got around to looking through the rest of Erin's Challenge lesson 1.

The part that stuck out to me was the morning routine video which showed a breakfast of toast, ham, and salad. I'm curious how common and realistic this is. It seems a bit weird to me by American standards, though doubtless there are people with stranger breakfasts over here.

Also, I was surprised by the way the girl held the toothbrush when brushing her teeth.

[golyplot]

As I've mentioned before, I listen to Japanese podcasts every day while eating, cooking, using the bathroom, and pretty much every other time I can. However, the vast majority of the time, it goes in one ear and out the other. It's just too easy to get distracted by my own thoughts.

Tonight towards the end of my meal, I finally managed to pull myself away from my own thoughts (imagining ideas for the videogame I'd like to make but probably never will) and actually focus on Noriko for once and was surprised to realize that I could understand almost all of it. Admittedly, that's not usually the case - even in the rare moments where I do manage to focus on the podcasts, I often can't remember enough of the vocab or grammar to really follow it.

However, this time episode 46 was playing and she was talking about input and output and the importance of output, and I managed to understand most of it. In particular, I recall her talking about a book recommending language learners do 30% input and 70% output. She said that she's lucky to have Korean friends to help her with her Korean studies and that you won't get good at Japanese if you don't try to speak and write it. Well, I guess I'm trying to prove her wrong there

The following episode was a lot tougher vocab-wise, but I could tell that she was saying something about her computer and her company's COVID-induced work from home preparations.

Anyway, that was a pretty nice confidence boost, especially since I've been pretty demoralized about Japanese the last few days. If only I was better at focusing. Although I do think that goes both ways. It's a lot easier to focus on something you can actually understand. Sometimes I find stuff like English radio in the background difficult to shut out rather than the reverse.

[crush]

I hadn't heard of Japanese with Noriko but that is a wonderful resource. The episodes are short, have transcripts, and are interesting and mostly intelligible. I'll definitely be listening to more of her stuff. This is probably a much better use of my time than anime which is still largely incomprehensible. Thanks for sharing this!

[golyplot]

I've mostly been ignoring Japanese lately, but tonight I did watch the first episode of Cannon Busters. As usual, I was kind of zoned out for most of it, but the show is mostly fight scenes anyway, so the dialog isn't that important. However, there was one moment that caught my ear.

When they put the counterfeit coin in Bessy, I thought I heard the word "gisou" (偽装), which I recently learned on Wanikani. However, Wanikani taught it as "camouflage", not "counterfeit". (Incidentally, I never knew how to spell camouflage correctly in English before hitting that exercise.) However, after reviewing the Japanese subtitles for the scene, I realized the word was actually "gizou" (偽造), which I also learned in the same lesson on Wanikani as "forgery". Forgery makes a lot more sense here than camouflage.



In other news, I read an article about how Satou is the most common family name in Japan. It mentioned that there's often multiple Satous at a school, which causes issues. I never thought about it before, but it does make sense when pointed out. Having multiple people with the same family name in Japan would be similar to having multiple people with the same first name in the west. Except possibly worse, because over here, it's common to disambiguate by using the full name or initial, whereas using the first name for disambiguation would presumably be considered infeasibly rude in Japan.

[vonPeterhof]

In other news, I read an article about how Satou is the most common family name in Japan. It mentioned that there's often multiple Satous at a school, which causes issues. I never thought about it before, but it does make sense when pointed out. Having multiple people with the same family name in Japan would be similar to having multiple people with the same first name in the west. Except possibly worse, because over here, it's common to disambiguate by using the full name or initial, whereas using the first name for disambiguation would presumably be considered infeasibly rude in Japan.

At one point we actually had three Satous in my department at work. People used various ways of disambiguating them, but most commonly we would default to referring to the most senior of them by surname+rank and the two others by their full names. Using just the first name wasn't entirely out of the question, just heavily dependent on the situation and the people involved.

[golyplot]

This morning, I watched the Advanced Skit in Lesson 2 of Erin's Challenge. The one part that stuck out at me was a moment where Kenta is shown weaving between groups of students who are sitting on the floor eating, blocking most of the hallway. I can't imagine something like that happening at an American school.

Do Japanese schools not have dedicated spaces for eating? All the schools I've seen in the US had giant cafeteria rooms for that purpose. Come to think of it, I don't recall seeing anything like a cafeteria in Cardcaptor Sakura. But in the rare cases where they were shown eating, it was always outdoors scattered among the school grounds, not blocking the hallways like in the skit from Erin's Challenge.