Learning Japanese From Zero

[golyplot]

Ten month update

I've been taking it easy this month, so there's not much to say, a big contrast to the giant update post last month. If anything, the biggest news is what I'm not doing. For example, I completely gave up on keeping up with NHK News Easy and have done barely any deliberate Japanese study at all apart from the ever increasing Wanikani reviews.

Wanikani
Level 47
Items Learned (Guru+): 464部首 1560漢字 4888単語

The main news is that I've now hit the fast levels on WK, so I have a lot more reviews than before. It can be quite exhausting sometimes when they pile up, particularly on Wednesday mornings, which are now pretty much solely dedicated to WK. On the bright side, it means I'm covering new kanji and vocab twice as quickly as before. Last night, I hit level 47, meaning that I've now officially covered all of the top 500 kanji and 996 out of the 1000 most frequent kanji.

Anime
According to this list, I only watched twelve episodes since last month, much lower than usual (compare to the previous month, where I watched 34 episodes!) The main reason is because I've mostly been taking it easy and watching anime with English subtitles, and I don't count that here since you barely learn anything when watching shows with subtitles on. I've also watched a few more Japanese youtube videos, which also don't get counted on this list.

Shows watched:
Complete:
Cardcaptor Sakura (70 eps)
BNA: Brand New Animal (12 eps)
The Dragon Prince (27 eps)
Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online (12 eps)
Hilda (10 eps)
Carmen Sandiego (19 eps)

On hold:
Cannon Busters (8 eps)
The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. (19 eps)
K-On! (2 eps)

Abandoned:
One Piece (4 eps)
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (1 ep)

[golyplot]

While reading the script for one of the EC videos, I was rather disheartened and puzzled by the line "だから、先に行っててって言ったでしょ". So many てs in so little space - how is that even possible?

I did some Googling to try to figure out the grammar of that phrase. As far as I can tell, it was formed by 行く -> 行っている (te-iru form) -> 行っていて (iru put in te form for some reason) -> 行ってて (casual variant of te-iru drops the i). And って is the casual quotation marker, but I figured that one out without looking it up.

I still don't understand the sentence or its grammar very well though. I wish there was something where you could put in a sentence to get a detailed grammar explanation, like a dictionary, except for grammar instead of words. I think it would also be really helpful if there was a good way to drill grammar recognition in SRS - sort of like a reverse Bunpro that tests recognition rather than recall.


Anyway, today I briefly watched some Suro videos following a recommendation on Reddit. However, I found her voice far too affectatious for my taste. She sounds like she's trying too hard to sound cute and play a character, and it makes her speech annoying and difficult to understand. And then sometimes she switches to different voices which makes things even more confusing and strange.

Also, like most VTubers, it looks like she mostly does livestreams. I think the main reason that Kizuna Ai is far more tolerable than most VTubers is because she posts pre-recorded, edited videos instead. Doing pre-recorded videos has the advantage that you can edit out the boring parts, making things much more entertaining. It also means you can properly animate your avatar. All the other Vtubers stream live and then dump the raw hour+ recordings on Youtube, and thus have avatars that are constantly jittering around and don't match up well with their speech.

I also tried watching a Japanese comedy skit that was linked on Reddit. I couldn't understand anything they were saying, although it was still pretty funny anyway. I'm sure it'd be a lot funnier if I could understand it.

[golyplot]

I saw Nihongo no Mori recommended recently, so I checked out a video this morning. I couldn't understand the actual lesson content, but it does seem like it'd be a good resource once my Japanese comprehension is more advanced. The chicken and egg problem rears its ugly head once again.

It looks like Nihongo no Mori covers N3-N1 topics. I wish they had N4 videos as well, but I suppose the assumption is that anyone at N4 wouldn't be able to understand the videos anyway since they're in pure Japanese. And given that I didn't, I suppose it's a fair assumption.

On the bright side, the videos do include Japanese subtitles, which was very nice. I spent most of the video looking at the subtitles, and a lot of the words looked familiar, even if I couldn't actually remember what they meant offhand, let alone recall them quickly and automatically enough to enable real time listening comprehension.

[golyplot]

Today, I finally worked up the courage to try to read actual Japanese, specifically the JA Wikipedia article on the Black Mist baseball scandal. However, I barely got through the first sentence before giving up. I can recognize most or all of the kanji but that's about it. To really read it, I'd need a popup dictionary and would have to look up nearly every single word. Pretty frustrating.

Edit: I looked it up on Jisho, and the first sentence of the article has no less than nine words I've never seen before, plus one that was technically covered by WK but written differently. By comparison, there were only three non-particle words in the sentence that I knew. Nearly every non-particle word in the first sentence was completely new to me! And it only gets harder from there. One of the words (八百長) confused even Jisho.

I also started looking up all the words in the Nihongo no Mori video from my previous post and learned the relevant proverb ちりも積もれば山となる (even dust piled up makes a mountain).

[tungemål]

While reading the script for one of the EC videos, I was rather disheartened and puzzled by the line "だから、先に行っててって言ったでしょ". So many てs in so little space - how is that even possible?

I did some Googling to try to figure out the grammar of that phrase. As far as I can tell, it was formed by 行く -> 行っている (te-iru form) -> 行っていて (iru put in te form for some reason) -> 行ってて (casual variant of te-iru drops the i). And って is the casual quotation marker, but I figured that one out without looking it up.

That's really confusing - but congratulations for figuring it out! Seems like you understand it well. I have seen before the って for quotation instead of the formal と.

I still don't understand the sentence or its grammar very well though. I wish there was something where you could put in a sentence to get a detailed grammar explanation, like a dictionary, except for grammar instead of words.

https://ichi.moe

Today, I finally worked up the courage to try to read actual Japanese, specifically the JA Wikipedia article on the Black Mist baseball scandal. However, I barely got through the first sentence before giving up. I can recognize most or all of the kanji but that's about it. To really read it, I'd need a popup dictionary and would have to look up nearly every single word. Pretty frustrating.

Welcome to the club!
The title of your log tricks me - it says "Learning Japanese by listening" but it seems that you work on reading (which is probably good).

Edit: I looked it up on Jisho, and the first sentence of the article has no less than nine words I've never seen before, plus one that was technically covered by WK but written differently. By comparison, there were only three non-particle words in the sentence that I knew. Nearly every non-particle word in the first sentence was completely new to me! And it only gets harder from there. One of the words (八百長) confused even Jisho.

I just remembered the interesting explanation that Devilyoudont had for 八百屋 - see this post.
I should pick up my Japanese study, which has laid dormant for some time.

[golyplot]

Welcome to the club!
The title of your log tricks me - it says "Learning Japanese by listening" but it seems that you work on reading (which is probably good).

Not really. This was my first attempt to do any reading practice in weeks. Hence why I said I finally got around to trying it.

[devilyoudont]

Japanese Wikipedia is pretty tough. I wish there was a やさしい日本語 version similar to the Simple English Wikipedia.

[golyplot]

Edit: I looked it up on Jisho, and the first sentence of the article has no less than nine words I've never seen before, plus one that was technically covered by WK but written differently. By comparison, there were only three non-particle words in the sentence that I knew. Nearly every non-particle word in the first sentence was completely new to me! And it only gets harder from there. One of the words (八百長) confused even Jisho.

I just remembered the interesting explanation that Devilyoudont had for 八百屋 - see this post.
I should pick up my Japanese study, which has laid dormant for some time.

I was about to argue that 八百長 and 八百屋 are completely different words, but out of curiosity, I looked up the etymology, and apparently they are related. Apparently, there was a greengrocer (八百屋) who was nicknamed 八百長 that was suspected of fixing Go games, and hence 八百長 came to mean match fixing.

[golyplot]

Yesterday, I watched the first video in Ayano's N3 grammar series on Nihongo no Mori. (This is the series that contained the video I posted previously, but that was #16, so I decided to go back to the start and watch them in order). Today, I watched the second video.

I could understand most of the actual lesson, but in the case of the first video, the grammar itself was completely new to me. It was kind of weird watching her explain the differences between similar grammar points when I had no idea what they were supposed to mean in the first place, and was just trying to guess based on the example sentences. The second video covered grammar that I had some previous exposure to, despite the fact that it's an N3 video and I never got beyond the first half of N4 on Bunpro.

Anyway, I'm not sure if it's an effective way to learn grammar, but it does seem useful as listening comprehension practice at least.

[golyplot]

Today I learned about an interesting Japanese cultural thing from Erin's Challenge - in fitting rooms, they have plastic head coverings so that you can put shirts on without worrying about getting them dirty from makeup. It kind of makes sense when you think about it, but I would have never even imagined such a thing.

Also, I completed my third go through the now 238 episodes of Noriko and started my fourth, and I watched the third episode of Nihongo no Mori.