Learning Japanese From Zero

[crush]

I also wasn't sure what おいしそう meant, but after looking at the translation ("That looks delicious..."), I realized it must be oishii + sou (seeming). I guess they chop off the i in this case. I recall having a hard time back when I was doing Bunpro trying to keep straight which grammar points used which forms of the preceding words. Especially since in some cases there are distinct grammar points using the same ending word with only subtle changes in the form of the preceding word. All those sous and yous and mitais and the like get really confusing.

I think these are the sorts of things that immersion (watching anime/whatever and reading) will help cement in your brain. They're very common. I like reading on my phone using Yomichan like a little ebook reader, later i may try using my actual ebook reader but those dictionaries are a lot slower than Yomichan (which is almost instant) so probably better off for when i rely on it much less.

[golyplot]

I think I'm beginning to understand Japanese with Noriko better again. This morning while listening, the word kyuuhyaku jumped out at my. My thought process went roughly like this

Kyuuhyaku... ten hundreds? Maybe that's just a fancy way of saying a thousand. Wait no, she said ni sen kyuu hyaku so that can't be it. Two thousand ??? - oh it must be two thousand nine hundred.

The impressive part is that I managed to subconsciously recognize the sounds and keep them in my memory long enough to puzzle that out, despite mixing up the words for nine and ten. I think it shows how there's a long process of training subconscious sound recognition and chunking before you can get anywhere interesting.

Also, I was thinking about subscribing to Crunchyroll to watch Polar Bear Cafe since I constantly see it recommended for beginners everywhere. However, I looked at r/crunchyroll a bit and discovered that most of the subreddit is people complaining about server outages and constant buffering while streaming. Yikes! It's a shame they can't get their act together and provide a usable service. One person joked that the only reason to subscribe to Crunchyroll is so that you don't feel bad when pirating the shows.

Also, I got bored and gave up on trying to keep up with NHK News Easy today.

[dampingwire]

Also, I was thinking about subscribing to Crunchyroll to watch Polar Bear Cafe since I constantly see it recommended for beginners everywhere. However, I looked at r/crunchyroll a bit and discovered that most of the subreddit is people complaining about server outages and constant buffering while streaming. Yikes! It's a shame they can't get their act together and provide a usable service.

I watched it without a subscription. If you don't care about HD, then it works fine (or at least it did for me). I used Firefox on Linux and it didn't even interrupt it with adverts (which it did the last time I watched something there - no idea what changed). Anyway, you can at least try it out and see if you like it enough to pay for higher definition cartoons!

Oh, I could switch off the subtitles too. Again that seems to be a new feature.

One person joked that the only reason to subscribe to Crunchyroll is so that you don't feel bad when pirating the shows.

AFAIK crunchyroll pay the producers for the right to broadcast the shows. crunchyroll choose to let you see them for free (for the usual "get you interested" reasons I guess) so you can watch for free with a clear conscience if you want.

[golyplot]

I feel like I've reached "escape velocity" with Japanese Noriko. I obviously can't understand everything, but I feel like I can understand enough know to usefully learn things from listening to it. I feel like I could probably figure out everything from context if I concentrated hard and played it over and over enough times.


Following a grueling Wanikani review session this evening, my brain was too fried to want to deal with anything Japanese, so instead, I decided to start watching Sword Art Online: Alicization (aka season 3) with English subtitles. I watched the first two episodes, but for some reason, the first episode is basically two episodes back to back, so it was like three normal episodes.

Also, I found out about the VTuber phenomenon last week. I tried watching some videos briefly, but couldn't see the appeal. It's basically like a normal gaming stream, just with a picture of an anime girl on the side. It didn't even seem to be synchronized with the streamer's speech like I expected. It's crazy to think that some people are learning Japanese just due to vtubers. I saw a comment on Reddit saying something like "anime is all subtitled but vtubers often aren't".

[genini1]

Also, I was thinking about subscribing to Crunchyroll to watch Polar Bear Cafe since I constantly see it recommended for beginners everywhere. However, I looked at r/crunchyroll a bit and discovered that most of the subreddit is people complaining about server outages and constant buffering while streaming. Yikes! It's a shame they can't get their act together and provide a usable service. One person joked that the only reason to subscribe to Crunchyroll is so that you don't feel bad when pirating the shows.

Polar Bear Cafe is up on animelon if you don't want to deal with Crunchyroll. It also has the Japanese subs so if you want subtitles, but don't want English ones it's nice.

[vonPeterhof]

Also, I found out about the VTuber phenomenon last week. I tried watching some videos briefly, but couldn't see the appeal. It's basically like a normal gaming stream, just with a picture of an anime girl on the side. It didn't even seem to be synchronized with the streamer's speech like I expected. It's crazy to think that some people are learning Japanese just due to vtubers. I saw a comment on Reddit saying something like "anime is all subtitled but vtubers often aren't".

As someone who only "fell down the rabbit hole" within the last month, this does seem to be a common first reaction to the whole thing (and I was never really a fan of normal gaming streams in the first place! haven't even played a single game released within the last decade or so..). From what I've seen, few people start out as fans of the vtuber as a concept; the interest is usually piqued by exposure to a particular personality via things like highlight videos, fandom news and crossover memes, and the next thing you know you're up at 5AM in the morning to tune into a collab stream you don't expect to understand much of anyway (hasn't happened to me yet, although the existence of Hololive ID is tempting me to resuscitate my dormant Indonesian ).

The synchronization technology is all over the place, with some pro vtubers actually having pretty decent synchronization (and some fans lamenting tech upgrades due to the loss of some of the "wonky charm"). And the translation situation is certainly very reminiscent of the heyday of fansubbed anime, with a lot of the translators being somewhere in the intermediate levels due to the advanced people mostly just enjoying the content in purely Japanese spaces (and that's just for the pros signed to agencies Hololive or Nijisanji, good luck finding any sort of translations for indie vtubers). It's actually somewhat entertaining to see this process develop in the other direction with the successful launch of Hololive EN and a ton of videos of Japanese subbers doing their best to figure out the nuances of English gamer lingo.

[crush]

I've never heard of "VTubers", do you have any examples of what you're talking about? There really isn't any regular Japanese content that pulls me in. I like some channels that repair and upgrade old gaming consoles (GameBoys, SNESs, etc.) but due to the nature of their content they aren't updated too frequently (with interesting --to me-- content). It's basically impossible for me to sit online and get lost wasting time in Japanese stuff like i can do too easily in English/Spanish.

From what you all are saying, i'm picturing some version of Cure Dolly playing video games.

[vonPeterhof]

I've never heard of "VTubers", do you have any examples of what you're talking about? There really isn't any regular Japanese content that pulls me in. I like some channels that repair and upgrade old gaming consoles (GameBoys, SNESs, etc.) but due to the nature of their content they aren't updated too frequently (with interesting --to me-- content). It's basically impossible for me to sit online and get lost wasting time in Japanese stuff like i can do too easily in English/Spanish.

From what you all are saying, i'm picturing some version of Cure Dolly playing video games.

Kizuna AI is probably by far the best known virtual youtuber. She was probably the first character designed and promoted that way, or at least someone who popularized the concept. I don't think that gaming streams, or any kind of live streams, are a significant part of her content though - in fact I'm not quite sure what her content even is, as I've never felt interested enough to check out. By contrast, the agency Hololive has been primarily oriented on live content using motion capture technology from the start, making money primarily via YouTube's superchat donation system. While their characters all have an official kayfabe backstory and corporate-approved character quirks, I think it's the moments of the streamers' real personalities seeping through the cracks (as well as the occasional deliberate drop of the mask) that really endears the characters to the audience.

I have been hearing about several vtubers and their associated memes for a while here and there, but I think it was Inugami Korone who first piqued my interest. She tends to be the subject of crossover memes both due to her interest in retro games and willingness to engage the English-speaking audience, but what I find most interesting aside from her exuberant personality is her unusual ideolect. I would love to read some serious linguistic analysis of her pitch accent patterns, because the most the Japanese fans managed to deduce is that it's probably a mix of at least two regional dialects, one from the rural region her IRL personality grew up in and another belonging to her grandmother, who apparently had an outsize influence on her upbringing. And speaking of linguistic curiosity, there's apparently a hobbyist polyglot in Hololive's Indonesian branch!

Unfortunately I'm not too familiar with the other major vtuber agency, Nijisanji. I do know that they had a TV anime last year, but apparently it's so full of inside jokes it's basically inaccessible to anyone who hadn't already been a fan at the time of airing. The only indie vtuber I have any familiarity with is Nanahoshi Suzu, mainly because of her reviews of my favorite manga.

Edit: noticed I accidentally linked the Gura clip twice, corrected the link in the "seeping through the cracks" bit.

[golyplot]

@vonPeterhof, thanks for the insight. I'll check out those clips later.


Anyway, yesterday I finished my second time through the now 230 episodes of Japanese with Noriko and began my third playthrough. This morning, one moment jumped out at me. When she was talking about udon, she said that ramen was "zenzen chigau". Zenzen is almost always used in a negative context, so my brain automatically translates it as "not at all". It was so odd to hear it used positively. Obviously from context, she was saying that ramen is completely different from udon, not not at all different.

It's interesting how mental associations can become ingrained. Whenever Noriko says "sakura", I immediately think of Sakura Kinomoto from CCS, rather than actual cherry trees.


In other news, I've long noticed that katakana are much harder to read than hiragana. I figured that it was probably because katakana appear much less often and so are harder to remember, but I've also long suspected another reason - that katakana are used to write sounds which don't appear in normal Japanese, so it's a lot harder to sound them out in the first place. Today, I ran into the lesson エッフェル塔 on Wanikani. I couldn't figure out how to even type the ふぇ into the answer box. I had to copy paste the correct answer from the lesson notes to the answer box to even proceed. (Spoiler: The way to type it is to type "fe").

[golyplot]

The last couple days haven't been so great, missing tons of reviews on WK, barely understanding Noriko even when I pay attention, not devoting much time to Japanese activities, etc. However, there was one bit of interest.

I noticed Noriko say usui when talking about seasonal clothing. WK taught me that it means "thin", but I had assumed that since it uses the "dilute" kanji, that this just meant thin as in paint. But apparently the actual meaning is much broader. Per Jisho, not only can it be used for objects like thin coats, it can also mean pale, sparse, or slim as in a slim probability.