Daily Japanese Thread - DJT # 1885

Cornucopia of Resources / Guide
Read the guide before asking questions.
djtguide.neocities.org/

Discuss the process of learning Japanese, things you like/hate about the language, goals, etc.

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Probably not correct but let me try

>つまらぬことをきく
listening to your foolish question...

>ボクはアルルだ
I am Aruru

>それいがいのなにものでもない
Nobody other than me

>have played through multiple (easy) RPGs in japanese (aka pokemon) while understanding roughly 75-85% of the dialogue
>couldn't pass the JLPT N5 practice test
what does it mean by this

what's the point of the N5 test except proving that you can barely do anything?

Are you just guessing the grammar based on the nouns and verbs or something?

>understanding roughly 75-85% of the dialogue
You probably don't understand it as well as you think you do.

In this sentence きく means "ask"

truth be told I just googled "n5 practice test" and did a real quick cursory run through

google for い抜き言葉

「抱えてる」は、「抱える」の進行形「抱えている」のイ抜き言葉で、意味は全く同じです。
これは、連母音「ei」が「e」になる音韻変化によるものです。
例えば、「笑ってる」と「怒ってる」は、標準語(規範文法)では「笑っている」と「怒っている」ですが、そのように発音し、最近は、書き言葉でも、そう書くことも多い。

次に、「かかえてなら」は「抱えてるなら」から更に「-r-」と「u」が脱落したものです。
しかし、これには、「抱えたなら」か「抱えていたなら」と同様のnuanceも感じます。
contextからも、本来は「かかえてたなら」と言うべき所を、「かかえてなら」と言ったとも取れます。

過去・完了の助動詞「た」は、本来、完了の助動詞「たり」であり、完了の結果と継続も意味します。正確には、現代語には過去の助動詞はありません。あるのは「完了」の助動詞「た」だけです。
例示すれば、「抱えた脚」=「抱えている脚」、「破れた本」=「破れている本」、「折れた腕」=「折れている腕」となり、この「た」の連体形は「ている」の連体形に置換できます。
完了の助動詞「た」には、連用形がないため、接続助詞「て」が連用形のような役割をするということです。実際に、接続助詞「て」の語源は上代の完了の助動詞「つ」の連用形「て」だと言われています。
ですから、話者の心中では、完了のような意識があるのではないかとも思われます。

結論は、「脚を抱えてなら」と「もし、脚を抱えている(の)ならば」との差異は、「脚を抱えてなら」が「もし、脚を抱えていた(の)ならば」というnuanceを含むのではないかということです。つまり完了を用いて「そうしなくて、残念」だという後悔の感情を強調しているのではないかということです。
しかし、そこまで精緻な読み取りは、必要ないと思います。因みに、男言葉では「脚を抱えりゃ、回せるんだがな」で、「抱えれば」と同じことです。

There's one on the JLPT website. If that's the one you did you're screwed.

Japanese.

この歌声はずっと遠いどこかで誰に宛てるでもなく奏でられているもの
What does でもなく mean here? This "For someone, or maybe for no one, the sound is being played somewhere far far away from here" translation is correct?

仕事、はじめ!

誰に宛てるでもなく

I don't know if that's correct term grammar wise, but you can think of this part as an adverd modifying the 奏でられているもの, so a song that's not adressing anyone (in particular)

To be fair it's kind of hard in a couple ways just because it has words in kana which means you actually have to know the words well as opposed to vaguely recognizing them.

誰でも
anyone
誰にでも
to anyone
誰にでもなく
to no one
誰に宛てるでもなく
addressed to no one

I'm watching people talking in youtube videos a lot and I'm not getting fluent fast enough. Should I watch them at 2x speed to get fluent twice as fast?

...

Doubling the speed is obviously not gonna help. You should just put several videos on at the same time. It's like a conversation then and you'll pick it up much faster.

I can score roughly 80% in the N5 test from the JLPT site, but I can't read for shit.
Teach me your secrets.

I'm trying to write a short introducting of myself in Japanese, but I'm unsure about what level of politeness to use. It seems weird to me ending every sentence in ます and です. How do people usually do it?

For the user asking how to watch youtube videos not available in your country, replace "tube" by "pak" in the URL.

depends on your audience, in germany we use "Sie" instead of "du" as polite speech, it's not as complex as japanese politeness, but I think the time of its usage is comparable

>people who are (visibly) older than you
polite
>formal setting/work
polite (unless visibly the same age)
>people iinstitutionally/socially above you (teachers for example)
polite

but there are also occassions where you would address someone younger than you polite, if it's an grown up looking person you're not familiar with in a formal/public setting

Use the polite form for talking to strangers, generally. My professor always makes us use polite form when talking to her so I'm really used to it. I don't think it is weird at all to end every sentence with ます or です. When I've been with a japanese friend and they introduced me to one of their friends who was my age, then I used the short form. I speak in short form with my online friends, too.

To elaborate a bit more, I'm making a profile for a penpal site, so I wouldn't say it's too formal, but still polite.

This is actually the first time where I'm actively producing Japanese (rather than just consuming) so it feels extremely difficult (which is why I'm looking for penpals).

Here's a draft I've written so far, which has taken me much longer than I expected:

初めまして、
私は userでドイツ人です。夏から日本語お勉強しています。ペンパルになりませんか?あなたに英語とドイツ語お教えましょ。私は日本語が少ししか話せないので返事が多分おそいです。
でも、助けてくれて、ありがとう。
よろしくお願いします!

I realized that making compound sentences is extremely difficult for me still.

I'd use polite speech like you do, otherwise you would probably come across as arrogant

Trying to avoid that if I can, but I'm sure people will be a bit lenient with a beginner.

Do you think my introduction sounds okay?

yea it gets your message across and I think it should reflect your skill level anyway so I wouldn't even start nitpicking

Good point. Thanks for the advise.

ill just do 1.25 speed, faster is too much for me

Millennials like you who don't see the value in hard work and who won't put the time needed into something in order to succeed simply can never learn japanese. There are no shortcuts to this, simply buckle down and be patient.

wait, don't tell me you're serious

hell i listen to lectures at 2x when I watch them in English, as long as I'm understanding some of it I think it's okay.

>注意欠陥多動性障害
today I learned a new word

add I assume
俺も初めて見た

一年間勉強してないせいでやっぱり日本語ダメダメになってる。来月日本いったらまたうまくなるといいけどね

二倍高速でビデオを観ると多分はやく日本語を習えないじゃないかと信じ始めるかもしれないが、実際に何も引っ付かないと僕が思う

動画の中の話がどれほど早いかによるんじゃない?
慎重に、遅いスピードで話してる人だと、倍速で見ると最悪でも普通に聞こえるだけ
でももともと早口の人を倍速にするとなにも聞き取れなくなってもともこもない

とにかくほとんど理解できるんなら話の密度が高いほうが効率いいと思う。一番大事なのはなんでもいいからとにかくたくさん聞けってのは認めるが

When referring to the palm of one's hand, what is the difference between 平手, 掌, and 手の内?

>掌(たなごころ)
literary
>手のひら
normal, opposite is 手の甲(こう)
>平手
"flat handed" as an adjective for slappin
>手の内
inside of your hand as a location, or maybe also referring to the inside of your fingers and such rather than just your palm

oh yeah, and read more

I see thank you

What are some good video games for a beginner to practice Japanese with?

anki

I do 1.2 hours of anki a day now give me a game

mirai nikki

wait no shit that's that manga

yume nikki

I'm a massive pussy
Is this going to scare the shit out of me?

probably not you're mostly just walking around slightly creepy landscapes

it's kind of a joke though since there's probably less than 100 words in the entire game. You're better off just listening to some corny slow japanese songs to reinforce some vocab.

youtube.com/watch?v=_Q5-4yMi-xg

Anyone here know anything about college Japanese courses? I need a credit and I'm taking one next semester for shits and giggles, I already study Japanese on my own.

It's Elementary Japanese I, do you think it will even cover all of N5? Will I spend the first month of class learning hiragana again? Tell me about your Japanese class experiences.

Assuming you're at a college that isn't a complete joke it should at least cover half of Genki 1 or the equivalent in another series. Still pretty slow but not nothing.

Looks like genki 2 doesn't cover enough material to bring a student to n2, maybe not even n3

What do colleges teach after they teach through these?

tobira probably
then they fuck around failing to read native material for the 4th year.

Someone asks どっちが愛しくなった? (I think "which one of us has gotten lovely?"), and the person they are talking to responds with 私のが全然君のこと愛しい.

I don't get the latter sentence (also as a note, 私のが全然 is possibly it's own utterance. Not sure due to spacing)

>as long as I'm understanding some of it
>some of it
Nigger, I sometimes watch English videos at 2x, but only if I manage to grasp everything being said, if it's not possible I'll slow it down to 1.5, 1.25 or just conform myself to 1.0 and go for the full ride.

Instead of saving yourself 50% of the time you'd spend, you throw away 100% of it. Congratulations. Might as well throw away your remaining lifespan since you're not going to use it.

I think I understand both sentences but I'm just a beginner so I don't want to feed you with bullshit

Here, I'll give you this, hopefully someone helps you

...

この「も」は「は」と同じ「係助詞」で、節の後の「ない」に係ります。
肯定文なら「も」はalsoですが、否定文では「ない」と対になりnot evenの意味になりますが、不定称と直接結びついた場合は「なんでもある」全面肯定allや「なにもない」全面否定not anyの意味になります。
で、この場合は、「でも」=格助詞「で」+係助詞「も」:時・場所・手段など情況について、同類中の一つを示す用法で、否定文中では「そういうことさえなく」の「ことさえ」と同じ意味です。
ですから、
「どこかで誰に宛てるでもなく」=「どこかで誰かに宛てることさえなく」
even not to address it to somebody somewhere
で、不定称と結びついた全否定ではなく部分否定に近く
not to address it to anybody anywhere
とは全く異なります。結果が同じになりますが。

I think it's "For no one in particular"

What in the world does this mean? Context is they're playing hide and seek.

It's a parody of the saying 灯台下暗し. It means
>it is darkest under the lamp post
>it's hard to see what is under your nose

I'm guessing that because she's a kid, she heard "灯台下暗し" and substituted words that she's more familiar with, like people saying "Doggy dog" instead of "Dog-eat-dog" and whatnot.

Ah, thank you very much. Damn kids.

...

I figured it out by now anyways.

As someone who has taken 3 semesters of college japanese, it's really slow. Expect to spend the first two weeks learning the alphabets. Then expect to be slowly introduced to grammar points. I don't know what caliber your university is, but the intro class will probably be a mix of students, most of them into anime/manga or japanese games. Expect to hear a lot of cringy pronunciation. If there are any Japanese/Korean/Chinese people in your class, make sure to sit by them and become friends. They'll learn a lot faster than whitey and will have better pronunciation and intonation, so it's good to be partnered for speaking exercises. If the book is genki there will be a lot of speaking exercises. I don't like the way Genki 1 introduces grammar at all, it basically teaches you how to say Japanese things in English. Tae Kim's guide is so much better for gaining a solid understanding of basic Japanese. Honestly I'd just take advantage of the class as an opportunity to be around a native speaker.

That was pretty much my plan, glancing at genki I've learned two semesters of Japanese in the 4 months I've been studying.

I won't get my hopes up, but maybe the professors can point me to some extra study material that's closer to the level I'm at.

Something funny I found while enrolling for the class was Elem. Japanese I was packed full of students, I got the last seat. But Japanese II only had 5 people enrolled in it. Weebs I guess.

My school has a Japanese language club, the club photo reveals it's about 50/50 Japanese people and white people studying the language, I'm thinking about joining it but Japanese students in real life seem like they are super cringy, I'm afraid it would be some kind of circlejerk with the language learners jerking off the Japanese people the entire club meeting.

Doggyというmemeは、そういうことだったのか
単なる幼児語だと思っていた

Time and time again I always better understand a difficult phrase or sentence upon simply reading the next couple pages, yet I never fail to panic and do everything I can to try to perfectly understand whatever language I'm stuck on. I need to stop that.

If you're only through the end of Genki 1 you still have plenty of grammar to cover in tae kim and other resources here at DJT. Japanese II is probably empty because the courses run on cycles, so people take 1 and 3 in the fall and 2 and 4 in the spring generally, not as many people take the courses in the "off" semesters.

I would give the language club a shot, in any group of weeaboos there are bound to be a few outlier cringy people, but most people just have an interest in the same stuff you and I do, and that makes it easy to make new friends. Not all the Japanese people will be fluent. A lot of Japanese Americans grow up speaking some around the house, but if they don't go to sunday school and talk to their parents in English they lose a lot of it and take classes in uni. Just have a positive attitude, opportunities arise for those who look for them.

I've read all of tae Kim, all of Japanese the maga way, and went on to study n3-n2 grammar

Is that post-genki 2 stuff?

Well you said you only covered two semesters of japanese in 4 month, but tae kim covers more than just the first genki book. I don't know exactly how they line up.

げんき1&2 are said to roughly cover N5~N4 grammar points

Keep in mind that people who go through textbooks in class probably know the grammar points a lot better than someone who has just read about them a couple times in Tae Kim.

Classes are still a garbage way to learn a language, but people who take them do usually know a lot more than people who self study given the same level of vocab/grammar progression. The difference comes from the fact that if you self study you can learn more vocab in a month than classes teach you in a year.

The difference comes from the fact that most classes isolate you from input and self-studying does the opposite if you're not an idiot.

There's dialogues and native sentences in textbooks.
Even if you do nothing but core though you're still doing better than most people in classes. Most people can never access real native input because they take forever to reach the ~4k words point where easier native material starts seeming accessible, much less the point where you can just pick up a manga and read it with a couple quick lookups on your phone.

Textbook examples are finely tuned and cause extremely inefficient language acquisition as a result. Input needs to be roughly tuned to be effective.

>Most people can never access real native input because they take forever to reach the ~4k words point where easier native material starts seeming accessible
Except you can totally start reading with 500 words if you start with simple manga or use a dictionary, and even if it's hard it's much more effective than what classes put you through.

>Except you can totally start reading with 500 words if you start with simple manga or use a dictionary

Yeah, but you need to be really motivated. People in classes probably know something like 700 words after a year but you can bet they don't feel like they can read anything. If you know most of the vocab it's a lot less of a struggle.

>and even if it's hard it's much more effective than what classes put you through

This is true though.

I mean the amount just isn't enough for whatever the fuck you're talking about to matter much. Language learning comes with hundreds of hours of comprehensible reading/listening, and for that to go smoothly you need to know more than 1000 words.

>I mean the amount just isn't enough for whatever the fuck you're talking about to matter much. Language learning comes with hundreds of hours of comprehensible reading/listening, and for that to go smoothly you need to know more than 1000 words.
Worked for me, o cancerous ankidrone.

>I mean the amount just isn't enough for whatever the fuck you're talking about to matter much. Language learning comes with hundreds of hours of comprehensible reading/listening,
Why the fuck did you bring it up if it's pointless? Stop posting until you have a cohesive argument.

>Worked for me, o cancerous ankidrone.

Wow great argument there.

I'm probably the only person in this thread who has tried both methods on different languages and can actually compare.

You probably are, ignore those two retards

>still arguing about learning methods
Just watch anime already, it's the best method

You're not and you can't. Only a scientific study that controls for variables like "How similar is this language to the ones they already know" and "Is this person used to learning this way" and "Is this the first, second, third, etc non-native language the individual has learned" can compare.

If you only care about what the science says then why did you post your anecdote based opinions in the first place?

I've watched anime for years and I only know about 20 words.

You've probably watched a lot less than 10000 hours though.

I only watched around 70 series/OVAs. That's more like 500 hours. But I think watching stuff only improves language skills, but if I don't have any skills I won't learn a thing.

I learnt just fine from watching anime, starting with 0 understanding of Japanese

Interesting. How much could you understand after 20 days of "Time Wasted"?

You watched it with jap subs?

Probably simple words that were said on their own, if even that since I didn't care about actually learning Japanese

関係

99% with English subs and 1% raw

Is this kanji grid chart for the core deck? and how do i get it?

Consider this: He watched so much that if he learned and remembered a single japanese word from each episode he watched, he would probably be fluent by the end of it (assuming fluent just means fluent and not "near native level")

Wait I'm wrong. A single japanese word for every THREE episodes he watched.

をワイと結ぶ
尻を向けろ

I don't think I learn 1 word per 3 episodes. I think it's because Japanese sounds like nonsense to me. But I'm not talented in languages.

You just need to listen to more Japanese, eventually it starts making sense. Will be faster if you know some words already so you can start picking up those words from the mess of sounds you are hearing

Maybe not, but that's an average. It could be one word per 10 episodes at first then slowly speed up to 1 word per episode by the time he knew 4000 words or so,then slow down again later. 10000 hours is a lot of time.

Like, every if every time you watch anime you learn the words that are said as single word exclamations like おいしい! and ひどい! and nothing else, you'll still probably be learning at least 1 word per 3 episodes for quite a while.