Japanese Language

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ようこそJapaneseLanguageへ! 日本語に興味を持てば、どうぞ登録して勉強しましょう!日本語に関係するどのテーマ、質問でも大歓迎します。 This is a community dedicated to the Japanese language. Feel free to come in and ask questions or post your thoughts and opinions about this beautiful language.

Feel free to check out the web archive of r/LearnJapanese's resources if you're looking for more learning material or tools to aid you in your Japanese language journey!

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Remember that you can add furigana to your posts by writing ~{KANJI|FURIGANA}~ like:

~{漢字|かんじ}~ which comes out as:

{漢字|かんじ}

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Hello everyone, I realised we don’t really have an introductory or meta thread for this community, and I thought it might be wise to create one.

So first of all, you might be wondering what japaneselanguage’s particular scope is and how it might be different from other Japanese communities in other instances.

Generally, I don’t like to think that we will be competing with other instances, but rather that we will be filling a niche for people that might be interested in discussing the language itself rather than it’s study methods. This community isn’t going to be a place to discuss the speedrunning or the efficiency of learning Japanese as there are other communities dedicated to those subjects.

Instead, this will be a place where we can discuss how the Japanese language works, it’s phonetics, it’s writing system, calligraphy and other related topics, our handwriting, as well as all other sorts of topics.

Learning materials, media, and literary discussion are very much welcome and encouraged! The only subject that will be discouraged (though not downright banned) is discussion of study methods exclusively without also including discussion about the language itself. So threads in the style of “how I learned 1,000 Japanese sentences over a three-week period” and similar threads focusing more on the methods than the language will probably belong in more specific communities.

Thank you very much for browsing this community and I hope we will be able to build a fun space for all of us who love Japanese.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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maybe it's another Duolingo bullshit they push upon us or maybe a typical thing in Japanese? namely in phrases like けんさんは二年生ですか it could mean both "Is Ken a second year student?" and (according to duolingo) "are you a ~~second year student~~sophomore, Ken?" how do i know if it's directly addressing the person? which is which?

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So for 2-3 years I have been using flash cards to get to 1000 kanji and then switch for full immersion and extrapolate meaning with some dictionary. I only know around 150 kanji.

This method already worked for english and russian but without flash cards part. I learned first 1000 words + grammar in school by osmosis thorough textbooks.

My routine is 30 min a day for two weeks and then 2 week break due to boredom or some other factor. It makes my backlog huge and discouraging and my retention seems terrible (60-70%)

For the past 6 month I didn't make any new flashcards to remember. only reviews of old ones.

Do y'all have some better method to get to 1000 kanji inefficiently? Because it seems efficient method doesn't work for me.

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Like "radio" or "fantasy" or "game..." They're basically the same in Japanese (radjio, fantaji, gaamu) so if I just said them in English pronunciation, would someone with no experience in English still be able to tell what I'm saying?

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Hi, I use Rikaichan/Rikaikun at the moment but I'm not sure how to turn on pitch accent if it has it. Does anyone use a pop-up dictionary that has pitch accent, by any chance?

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相席(あいせき,) means "sharing a table with someone you don't know (e.g. at a restaurant)" (Takoboto).

What other fun words have you all encountered that just don't translate well to English or require a short explanation?

I'd like to make a sentence that's very long in translation, and/or read a silly sentence like that.

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({凸|のの})

{Testing, 1 2 3|Look I made a face!}, I just want to try this in a post.

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I am designing a tshirt with a friend and we wanted to put some japanese on it. Since my japanese is extremely basic (こんにちは、ミカです) I wanted to ask whether the symbols DeepL gave us mean what we think it means. We want to have a skeleton inside a water bottle and the text should read "stay hydrated" and we got these symbols: 水分補給. Do they work in that context? Or are there any better suggestions we could use? Thanks in advance!

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cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/11661821

"〇〇だったば、...." is this legitimate?

I want to say "If it was 〇〇, then... ", is "〇〇だったば、..." the right clause?

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Or 華金? Well, either way: TGIF!

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In the car on the way to a castle (お城) with my host family's kids, no less. They thought it was hilarious that I was excited to see the お尻 (butt).

Any other gaffes out there? 🙃

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救急救命士(きゅうきゅうきゅうめいし / paramedic) is one of my favorite Japanese words because it has きゅう three times in a row.

Any other fun words like that?

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I met two Russian people who were running a booth at a festival. One greeted me and tried to converse with me in English, but it soon became apparent that that wouldn't get us very far. So, we switched to Japanese, and made small talk for a few minutes before I made my purchase.

Not a huge deal overall, but I thought it was super cool to be able to make use of Japanese in a novel context. It was also interesting to meet someone where the best language for communication for both of us was an L2. As a native English speaker, that doesn't happen very often.

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聾者(ろうしゃ) looks like 龍(たつ・りゅう / dragon)+耳(みみ / ear)then 者(しゃ/person)

Etymology-wise, it seems the "dragon" part was added just for the pronunciation, not because of dragons.

It means:"Deaf person".

That said, 耳の不自由な人(みみのふじゆうなひと / not-free-ear people)・耳が聞こえない人(みみがきこえないひと / ears-can't-hear people)・聴覚障害者(ちょうかくしょうがいしゃ / hearing disabled people) might be more common terms. Deaf people themselves prefer 聾者 - and I can see why! Who wouldn't want to be a dragon eared person? I like the character.

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I love the visual aspect. They areでこぼこ and おうとつ and mean bumpiness.

If I understand this 使い分け explanation, the core meaning (bumpiness) is the same. However でこぼこ is spoken and can be used in more ways: to mean miscellaneous, as an adverb, or as an adjective. おうとつ is written, and strictly a noun about bumpiness.

Anyway, I still like these characters because they're awesome!

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吉(き↑ち↓)= Lucky (especially from a fortune)
不吉(ふ↑きつ)= Unlucky

Why is it not ふきち!? Makes me want to quote Atsugiri Jason: WHY JAPANESE PEOPLE WHY!!!

/rant

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many mistakes were made

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こんにちは皆さん! 久しぶりですね。このコミュニティが結構静かで少し復活しようと思っていました。

それに従って、これから(できる限り)日本語の週刊練習スレッドを始めます。

何でも書いても大丈夫ですから、ごゆっくり自由に日本語を使って、チャットしたり、自分にノートを残したり、なにか最近勉強した文法を練習したりしてくださいね!

Hello everyone! It's been a long time. This community has been pretty quiet for a while, so I've been thinking about reviving it.

Therefore, I've decided to start a weekly (as much as possible) Japanese language thread.

You can write anything, so use Japanese as you please, chat with others, leave notes for yourself, or even practice any recent grammar you've learnt.

よく考えると、なんかこのポストを書くのも自分にとって練習になって草

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