Daily Japanese Thread - DJT #1912

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

Discuss the process of learning Japanese.

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ded

>Install a Japanese IME
>Even when it's not the active keyboard layout my password manager's auto-type feature will fuck up typing passwords like 50% of the time
Is this the universe giving me a sign so that I don't continue learning Japanese?

Just arrived. Cool

Nice job user, how long have you been studying Japanese?

>Australia
>USA flag

Which are you

I just finished RTK now what?
Also

What's your studying routine? What other media do you use to supplement your studying (movies, manga, newspapers, etc.)?

About 1.5 years at the time I took it

USA, was in oz visiting relatives

I don't really do much pure studying anymore; just watch TV, play games, and read while taking note of words or kanji that are unfamiliar along the way. I also write in Japanese a lot, and that seems to help in both retention and alerting me to what I've forgotten.

Hello, sorry I'm new on this board so sorry if I come with a weird question but I don't know where else to ask.

I suck at being self-taught so I'm taking Japanese classes on my local university. I haven't have any problems with the teaching nor anything, but I have come with something that bugs me.

We learned how to write ふ some weeks ago with 4 strokes, and in the book it says the third one must be upstroke, so that's how I have been doing it. But looking closely to how my teacher writes it he does a downstroke instead (he also does one stroke instead of the first 2 but I already know that is an optional deal). I searched on the internet and I only saw one video that did the upstroke, and even one page said doing an upstroke was incorrect. So what is the truth?

Pic related is a photo of how the book shows the strokes.

nigga who the fuck cares

Wey, no importa mucho hacia donde va la raya, solo que se note, pero la gran mayoria lo hace hacia abajo. Si es hacia arriba es una herencia de cuando se escribia con brocha
En que universidad estas estudiando?

I do, call it autistic if you will

Universidad de Sonora

Unison? Que estudias? y como te dijo el Aleman, a nadie le importa con que se noten los trazos, cuando empieces a aprender Kanji vas a darte cuenta de lo "meca" que esta tu pregunta.

spics out

The instructions in your book are likely "correct", but such things (stroke order and direction) are guidelines. Like you learned how to write the alphabet as a child, it's important to learn it as a beginner so you can get as close to the original character as possible. However, with practice, you'll likely find different ways of writing each hiragana and katakana that are faster and more comfortable for you. At that point, you really don't have to care about which stroke comes first or whether it goes up or down.

Look the board you are writing

Ya me gradué, estudié Diseño Gráfico. Las clases de japonés se llenan al toque y si eres estudiante universitario te toca inscribirte cuando ya los extrauniversitarios ocuparon como el 70% del cupo así que después de varios intentos de "esperar a que alguien se de de baja porque el que estaba enfrente de ti en la fila tomó el último cupo de las clases" decidí estudiar hasta después de terminar la carrera. Gracias por la respuesta.
>Kanji
Oh God.

I see then, thanks for the explanation. And sorry to bother with a silly question.

It's easy to get carried away worrying over such things when learning a language so different from your mother tongue. Any and all questions are welcome!

がんばってね

>tfw learning Japanese is making my English grammar shittier since Japanese is more context based
Either that or I'm bad regardless

Nicely done, someday I hope that I'll be able to make that post

>>About 1.5 years at the time I took it
1.5 years of study to pass N1? How would you have rated your level of comprehension of just general Japanese content you were interested in reading at the time?

I haven't been learning or doing reps for 2 weeks now.

I kinda lost my motivation, what do?

Fuck motivation, buy a shock collar you stupid sauerkraut and get to it.

Stop doing boring studying and watch anime instead

i have a hour and a half round trip to work everyday, what is the best way to study while in my car?
And if you recommend the resource list of the guide, what would be the best audio book for a beginner?

Noice, mate.

The standard recommendation for a complete beginner would be the Japanese Pod 101 files in the guide. Later you can start listening to radio and drama CDs or whatever.

alright, thanks

Your problem is that you're driven by transient motivation rather than persistent discipline. I failed at learning Japanese before because I was the same way, until I woke up two years later and realized that if I didn't actively change the way I was going about things, I was just going to waste my life away having not learned Japanese (or accomplished other, similar goals).

Thanks mates. To americafriend: without trying to sound humblebraggy, it's really not as hard as you might think, if you just keep consuming content you're interested in you will get there sooner than later. It is not testing whether you know how to read Bocchan, but just whether you are reasonably functional in typical reading and listening comprehension. All the "N1 is impossible" posts just come from sour grapes University of Rosetta Stone grads.

Depends on what exactly you mean by level of comprehension. For reading, I basically solely read visual novels. I got good enough at grammar that if I knew every word in the sentence I basically had 100% comprehension, even if it was at 1/5 English reading speed. Slowing down to go "wait what the fuck did I just read" became a thing one every thousand lines instead of one every ten. But there were (and are) still tons of vocabulary words I don't know; for those I just hover over them with my firefox text hooker setup (use text hookers, they're not a crutch, they just make lookup faster) and if I feel like it I add the word/sentence to Anki.

For listening comprehension I'm still bad, I don't know how I got as high as I did on the test. Planning to fix that with a bunch of anime

>that kid in the Japanese class who uses 「俺」 even when talking to the teacher
>that kid in the Japanese class who never learned any kanji so he only uses hiragana
>those girls in the Japanese class who added a verbal tic to every sentence they say
>those girls in the Japanese class who wore cosplay to class
Anyone else have experiences like this?

Didn't mean to post that pic

1.5 years still sounds expedient as fuck. I've been at it for 181 days (according to Anki), with maybe six months worth of reading scattered out over the course of a couple of years before deciding to focus and study daily. To be honest, taking even N2 within the next 12 months sounds too far-fetched.
Based on your experience from the exam, at least the reading/grammar elements, what sort of content would you say is around a similar level of what was assessed in your N1 exam? Newspapers, novels?

Another user passing N1 is cool. You're the third or fourth user I've seen post N1 passing results on djt.

A chilean guy was always trying to add some weird american accent to the words.

I didn't really believe I could pass N1 at 6 months either. At 6 months I hadn't even begun reading, I was still grinding out vocab to give myself a headstart when I did begin reading. Honestly I can't give better advice than read visual novels since they're basically the perfect study material with mostly reading but also listening comprehension. Once you've finished 5-10 non-Hanahira ones you will be at or around N1 level.

Admittedly the reading on the exam is significantly more challenging than your typical VN fare. But you can totally get an idea of what to expect. The JLPT people put out an official practice test, the practice tests in Shin Kanzen Master are all pretty representative of what the actual test is like, and there are tons of other third party ones you can buy on amazon.jp. I actually bought one but didn't get around to doing it before the test.

Basically what is being tested as far as reading goes is articles, usually with some social or political commentary. If the ones in the practice tests aren't enough, articles from Asahi's Tensei Jingo (asahi.com/news/tenseijingo.html) are another good idea of what to expect. You can read 1 a day for free or access them all with the monthly subscription. I am surprised no one has bought a subscription and downloaded the entire catalog to upload on the CoR yet, guess there's not much interest.

But while reading a few of these to get an idea of what to expect is a good idea, I would advise not to go ham on reading tons of them unless you actually are interested in the subject matter. Otherwise you'll just bore yourself for little actual benefit. The best thing to do is read/watch stuff you are interested in, and lots of it. My only addendum to that would be that if you are a huge manga fan, manga is totally fine, but try to read some LNs or VNs or actual novels as well since if you get used to 100% dialogue you won't get good at reading lengthy, descriptive sentences.

Would you mind providing a list of your top 5 or 10 VNs? My problem is that I never know which ones to read.

Thanks for the insight, 先輩。

Any time!

Here is my entire VNDB list from highest to lowest score: vndb.org/u110389/list?c=all;v=0;t=2;o=d;s=vote It's pretty short, so I can't even do a top 10. Instead I will just give a little bit of info about how I felt about each one. The number indicates what order I read them in. A beginner could pick any of these unless I note otherwise.

>#8: Subahibi
Incredibly mixed feelings. I don't think it's a 10/10 masterpiece like most people but it certainly is unlike anything else you'll find in the medium. While I felt it was brought down by some very low lows, at its best it is really great. Note that it would be inane to read this as your first or second VN, it's complicated enough when you understand all the language.


>#5: Tsuriotsu
The biggest flaw in Tsuriotsu is that Luna is too cool so you won't want to bother with any of the other girls. Fun read - note the prologue is way harder than everything else in the VN, get past that and you'll be good. Still noticeably more difficult than most of the others on this list though. Probably a little too hard for your first VN.

>#3: Harukuru
If you don't know anything about this going in, all the better, stay unspoiled. I believe it's worth the read, but be warned there is a massive 15-odd H-scene wall in the beginning section of the game. Get past that and you will probably have fun. There is some more difficult language late game but it's not unbearably hard by any means.

---power gap---

>#1: Hanahira
An actually underrated VN. The perennial DJT recommendation, but it is not nearly as shit as everyone says. Excellent starter VN, very plain (generic) light yuri story that makes it very palatable for beginners.

>#7: Evenicle
First third or so is great fun, starts getting a bit repetitive for my taste the rest of the game. Very nice soundtrack. The ero sucks. Try this out, if you get bored then go ahead and stop, you won't be missing out on Shakespeare.

(cont.d)

>#6: Himawari
Going by VNDB scores I am certainly in the minority thinking Himawari is pretty mediocre. I rated it 3/10 when I first finished it but bumped it up later because I felt that was a bit harsh, because it's not awful. The Aqua route has some cool stuff - but the rest feels like filler, and it's about 4x too long. But like I said most people think it's great so maybe you should try it. If you do, you should probably play the doujin version with the voice path rather than the remake. Better music, better system, in my opinion better art. Only downside would be no protagonist voice and not-so-great ero scenes.

>#4: Root Double
Root A (the first route, about 25% of the VN) is awesome. A rollercoaster ride of fun through the closed facility scenario. Actually great. Then Root B (next 25%) starts and it's still all right but not as good. Then Root D hits (last 50%) and the pacing dies and it gets sucky. Soured my whole experience, but there are far more issues beyond just the ending. I'd advise you try it out just for Root A but then you might get hooked and play the whole thing and I don't know if that's worth it.

>#2: Nanatsuiro Drops
This just wasn't my thing. If you like bubbly vanilla mahou shoujo then this is your jam, it wasn't mine though. I got really bored and only finished it since I thought it would end at the 7th chapter (and then it went on to chapter 13).

Lastly, I also would recommend Fate and Phoenix Wright that I read years ago in English. But Fate is probably too long and full of magic jargon and Phoenix Wright, being a DS game, can't easily be texthooked. Pick your poison. Sorry I don't have a big list of solid beginner recs.

I study Japanese for fun and one of the hardest things about studying JRPGs is how annoying it is looking up the kanji over and over


Is there any way to get the text files from emulators and just read them from there?

Lets say like dragon quest 4 on snes...obv that is a long game with lots of text.

Is there any way to extract the text onto a notepad or a website so it can be read from there?


Also what are some good jrpg soundtracks if you boys are into that.

Hook Any Text will be your best bet, if that doesn't work nothing will. But it is a pain in the ass. It would be easiest to just learn from other stuff until you don't have to do lookups very often when you play JRPGs.

and they wonder why people pirate their games

Hello friends, guy who's doubtful on his ability to learn any language (including japanese) here. just wanted to ask a couple questions. These will be generally more for native English speakers who were EOPs and learned japanese or whatever, but anyone can feel free to answer if they'd like.
How long have you studied Japanese (in hours and in terms of years)? And if so how fluent are you?
Also how "fast" can you recognize and recall japanese characters?
The problem I'm having right now is that I can't seem to really recall what the characters look in my head when I imagine something like 'ka' or 'se' or whatever. Will this straighten out the more I expose myself? I've always told myself I had a shit memory (which probably makes it more shitty the more I say that) so I'm kinda on the fence if I'm genuinely retarded/not able to memorize things.

Recall and recognition are two different types of skills. Furthermore, imagining something in your head and producing it by other means are also different. For instance, there are some kanji that I can't really imagine in my head but if I start to write them my hands do the rest. Sometimes to imagine a kanji in my head I have to visualize a sort of virtual stroke ordering of the kanji... like I build it step by step in my mind.

My advice for anyone having trouble remembering shit is to change your strategy. I've found that to memorize kanji I need to hand write them. I couldn't remember shit before I started handwriting, and even though it takes a little bit longer my retention rate is now consistently above 95% even while doing upwards of 20 new words (mined) a day.

How long have you been at it? tbqh your concerns seem like uber beginner anxieties. Just take it ez.

I looked at hiragana and katakana a couple years ago but I've mostly forgotten them since then. I've only begun doing hiragana again a couple days ago for like 30 minutes but I stopped again because I lack discipline and confidence.

Have you ever properly studied in your life? I had literally never studied in my entire life before starting Japanese. Just study hiragana for 15-30 minutes every day for the 7 days, you'll probably be able to memorize the entire set. It's a pretty cool feeling, bro.

Motivation is useless for long-term projects. You need discipline.

Motivation is what you use to teach hamsters tricks - "oh look I get a treat if I do it!". It's a short-term relation between action and reward. If there's a substantial time between action and reward, then the hamster part of your brain fizzles out on it ("huh, no treat? Ok, whatever. Let's go do something else that does get me treats!"). Motivation won't get you anywhere that's farther than your hamster brain's attention span. Learning a language takes a long time, just like learning how to play the violin, or learning how to paint. For that, you need discipline: a routine that steadily lets you advance, without being so hard as to require motivation to do it.

>不良 1. bad; poor; inferior
lol - it is litterally ungood

Japanese is certainly a long time commitment and should never be rushed or you will see your self fizzle out. I burned out multiple times and now I'm in my longest stretch of continuous learning. Two months lol. It's funny but I never practiced or studied anything routinely like this and I'm taking it all the way to my N2 test in December. Wish me luck boys.

Haha nope. I've never actually studied in my entirely life, which is why this is so hard and frustrating for me. I'll keep it at it tho, thanks.

Thank you for the list and the link to your vndb user. These are greatly appreciated. I wish vn's wouldn't burn me out so quickly. I can get through about 50 text boxes but then my head starts to hurt and I have to stop for the day.

...

It can also mean deliquent for some reason.

四六時中

>dropped your reps
It`s ogre. Pull the trigger already, less painful than getting back.

So who is the most successful person in your country engaged in business related to Japan, je?
Who do you wanna be like je?

おはよう

まりしゃはこれからおやすみなのじぇええええ!
おめめがさめるようなごあいさつはしちゃだめなのじぇええええ!!

がんばって!!

A delinquent is a bad person, so it's easy to see how that happened.

今晩は

>tfw can now do 30 words a day since you know most of the kanji by now and can guess by context


Dont give up boys..well actually go learn a real marketable hobby...i still f-ing suck after almost 4 years but whatever. I took some breaks because life but still theres better hobbies out there.

God tier way of studying Japanese is using anki and learning the basics so when you enjoy your choice of media something you would do anyway you're learning.

Just my opinion tho but im a dumb brainlet girl lmao

>1.5 years
confirmed autism

>girl
So now you are a tranny?

Im trying. Im ugly tho im late transitioni uwu

>trip
>memespeak
>illiterate in his native language
>4 years and still doing Anki
>4 years and still hasn't learned Japanese
And that's why you give these people (You)s. They might not have too much else going on for them.

Don't forget to livestream your suicide

Ding dong diddly cringe.
Always so mean finny~

先受験した物理学試験に絶対に滑った、せいぜい65%だった

死にたい

I'm just starting to learn a bit of kanji. Is there a good way to learn it without overrelying on furigana for pronunciation? It feels like cheating

Are you using Anki?

Mnemonics, son. And tons of reps. Until you're so fucking sick of them that your mind tells you the meaning before you have to think about it.

No, I'm studying Tae Kim for now

It seems to fit

悲しいぺぺバンプ

>ぺぺ

No reason for you to worry about kanji then. Tae Kim is just for learning basic grammar. You'll get plenty of exposure to kanji without furigana from Anki and reading.

うん、そのチャラは「ぺぺ」と言います

「キャラ」ね

When か行、さ行、etc. are used to denote the set of items that start with a certain sound in a list or what have you, how would you pronounce "か行"?

>don't learn Japanese by translating, learn by patterns
i keep seeing this when i google questions about japanese but what the fuck does this even mean? i haven't learned shit from watching anime

If you're still here, how many kanji do you think you knew when you passed N1?

Why can't remember a fucking thing?

How many new words a day do you guys do on Anki?

Sail the high seas without shame, user.

For sure. I couldn't handle large amounts in the beginning either, it gets easier. For that reason I would recommend Hanahira, it is very short as far as VNs go and has fairly simple language that should be easier on your brain.

Due to my new school semester starting shortly after the N1 I have done hardly any Japanese since. So basically the same as pic related, minus like 20 kanji maybe. But I am a kanji fiend, 3200 is way overkill for N1. You will be fine knowing just the jouyou as any non-jouyou kanji on the exam are going to have furigana.

I've been reading visual novels but I'm at about 2600 kanji right now and still missing 80 jouyou. It's getting harder to find new kanji recently.
Maybe I'll try the N1 next summer.

Don't worry about the "hard jouyou", as long as you know what I'd call the "jouyou jouyou" (常用常用), you will be fine. A few of the jouyou are just in the jouyou list because they're in the Japanese constitution and are rarely actually ever used. If you are at 2600 kanji then you are absolutely fine for the N1 kanji-wise. The bigger things to worry about would be grammar, reading, and listening.

>「その日、今年も私、仕事が入ってるんだ…」
>「…TVじゃなくて、ライブ…」
>「へえ…。すごいじゃない、クリスマスイヴにライブなんて。よっぽど人気がないとそんな日にできないよ」
I'm a little confused on what 日にできない means here, besides maybe saying "There won't be a day when you won't be popular." Is that the right interpretation?

か ぎょう

よっぽど人気がないと
Unless you're really popular (lit. if you're not really popular)
その日にできない
you wouldn't be able to get a gig on that day (lit. you can't do it on that day)

Pretty much, if you get a gig on Christmas Eve, it means you're a pretty big deal.

Thanks, that didn't even cross my mind. I also had another question from a line earlier:
>「何かあるんだったら今のうちだよ」「もう、冬弥君」口調から俺がその日をキープしているのを感じ取ったらしく
I'm translating it as "From her tone of voice, I felt like she kept that day open." But what is the らしく doing here? Is it just adding another layer of uncertainty?

30 for me, senpai. Takes ~2 hours per day to do the whole catch-up on the old words plus the new words.

>From her tone of voice, I felt like she kept that day open.
I think you have the characters backwards.
It seemed like (here's the らしく part) she gathered from my tone of voice that I'd kept that day open.

I do my reps on the city bus with my ubuntu and no internet.

Meaning that I cannot look up the kanji that I do not know amd make connections...is there anyway to make libreoffice or notepad be able to accept Japanese characters so when I get home I can study/look them up?

I just started dabbling in linux and phones are garbage.

That makes more sense looking at it, I was twisting what らしい could mean to fit context better here. But the 今のうちだ makes sense with your interpretation, thanks.

>is there anyway to make libreoffice or notepad be able to accept Japanese characters so when I get home I can study/look them up?

Yes.

ペニス

I can't fucking learn kanji, how do you do it

Anki and mnemonics.

Thank you.