Can we talk about how fucked up 卒業 is?
Like I told my school I am quiting today and the teacher asked if I was “graduating”. I don’t think I will ever get over how obsence and loaded they make that phrase.
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Does anyone have any OCR software they use for photos, scans or screenshots of Japanese? I’m kind of tired of kanji search by radical or stroke-order based handwriting recognition and surely OCR is a thing by now? But I haven’t found anything decent by googling.
What’s so bad about it
The dictionary translation is to graduate and it is the word you use when you graduate high school, college, etc.
But it is also used widely in entertainment to mean quiting/retiring. A girl doesn’t leave an AKB48 group, they graduate. They have a big farewell show to announce this is the graduation of this girl from the AKB life. She might soon be going into porn or broadcasting or obscurity because of some scandal but she has graduated.
I have been rising the ranks in this school, but I’m nowhere near done. That the teacher asked if I wanted to “graduate” from the school offended me. I hadn’t reached a milestone or certified my Japanese ability just that I was going to stop going to the school was enough to qualify me for “graduation” and participating in the graduation ceremony.
Which uhh changed my view on what it meant that five of my classmates were graduating. My class level is roughly a 6 on a 10 step program. It is just a ceremony to announce they are not going to the school anymore. Not a notification of success.
Like there are words for retire, quit, drop out, fired, forced out. Using graduate is some real 1984 double-speak that clearly makes me real unconfortable.
完
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yeah sotsugyou is ‘graduate’ technically but i feel like ‘moving on’ would be a better colloquial translation most of the time. we’ve had some good times with [xyz] but it’s time to sotsugyou. and other memes.
dictionary translations are mostly useless, need real world contextual uses to actually figure out what they mean
i’ll often just google a word if i have no idea and look at images. (preferably on google.co.jp since it tends to filter out chinese…) this has led to some, err, unexpected discoveries before, but generally it helps a lot.
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I’ve used the Google Translate app as an improvised OCR tool before. The meanings it finds are useless junk, but you can copy and paste into other, more helpful tools. Only really works for a one-off lookup here and there, of course.
I had a revelation recently that I have way more free time than I think I do…or I would if I was more effective at getting things like work and household chores done.
I’m going to try to be more effective and recapture my free time, and I’m going to use that free time to learn Japanese.
Thanks for listening everyone okay bye
EDIT: I used Heisig to memorize about 1000 Kanji like 6 years ago, but I fell off and also never learned the kana and so none of it meant anything to me. Gonna try that Kodansha Kanji Learner’s course and also learn the kana this time.
It sounds like you’re approaching this writing-first. That’s a little odd, but there’s mostly no wrong order or emphasis, except that I’d say you should make sure to learn the proper pronunciation from recordings before/at the same time as you learn kana. As you learn the kana you’ll be vocalizing it in your head. The romaji representation will tell you roughly how it’s pronounced, but your guess may be wrong. If you internalize the wrong pronunciation, it may be unnecessarily challenging to retrain.
i really, really dislike heisig learning method. a lot.
always really skeptical when people say they learned a million kanji in a month whatnot, since often it’s without any meaningful context to the practical world so none of it actually has any meaning.
i heard from a random person on a stream the other day that they learned 500 kanji in a couple weeks and now all they need to do is just read a lot of jp and they’ll know the language bam.
color me skeptical.
learning’s hard, long work, a marathon, and you need constant exposure and connection to it. learning in a vacuum has its merits but often means you’re generating an island of knowledge disparate from practical usage thereof, and will have to spend another long period hooking it up to get use out of it.
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So, you’re not wrong, but here’s the counterpoint, as someone who used to be a Heisig evangelist. What I dislike, a lot, is the learning method of jumping into reading text without having studied the kanji per se, and even moreso, travelling to Japan for language immersion without having much studied the grammar. Then everything flies over your head and all the exposure is wasted. There are so many Westerners who have lived in Japan for years and can barely speak Japanese because of that trap. They went there before anybody told them that Japanese is not like a European language where immersion on its own is good enough, and then they never found the time for formal study.
The opposite trap, of only doing Heisig or reading grammar textbooks, I haven’t really seen it result in any huge problem. As you say, it only takes a couple of weeks or months. That’s nothing in the scale of how long it takes to learn Japanese. And it might make the kanji feel less overwhelming, and give you some of the foundations and mental “pigeonholes” to start learning the kanji for real. Japanese teachers can be bad at structuring their lessons this way because they learned when they had a child’s learning superpowers, but Heisig is a foreigner with a feel for methods that foreigners need.
You don’t value it because focusing on foundations is self-evident to you, you think this is a pretty bad foundation, and you found a way to mix that in efficiently with your exposure. But a lot of people haven’t learned to learn and they might benefit from something, anything like Heisig to rescue them from unstructured and futile attempts at memorizing raw information with no reference points – while there is little to lose on the flip side if Heisig doesn’t work.
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Anyway, I get being irritated by takes about Heisig that treat it as miracle snake oil with instant learning benefits, with anime fans on Twitch chat boasting about their fake kanji gains just like they boast about their muscles or bitcoin. In reality though, I don’t think many people actually have the misconception that their Heisig-“learned” 2000 kanji are more than half-learned, and probably less.
And if they do think it was a miracle snake oil, hey, people might need the confidence boost and feeling that the kanji aren’t so intractable after all.
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i suppose!
i just feel like it’s not at all a good option if you’re actually serious about learning, and, uh, bear in mind i’ve been involved in doujin/niche gaming stuff for at least a decade now so I’ve seen a lot of heisig learners come and go in those circles, almost all fitting the same pattern, and it’s kind of grown to be something i distrust.
it definitely works for some people, i will give it that, but i’m very skeptical.
I really enjoyed learning Kanji via the Heisig method, and I also realize that it was also a boatload of useless information. I want to contextualize it better this time. I think I’m in a better position to do this now mentally, but I’ll def. be asking for guidance.
But I want to get a bit under my belt. I really hate being completely unable to understand something - I’d like some sort of foundation before I just dive in.
Learning Kanji completely outside of anything useful was still, somehow, very rewarding to me on its own. And that’s what I want first and foremost - a rewarding learning experience.
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I really can’t understand this sentiment, but hell, if you’re having fun…
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Makes sense. I never met anybody like that. I was the only one I knew who used Heisig, and I spoke the best Japanese of the ~30 or so Western exchange students in my cohort in Japan, and more importantly, my Japanese improved much more rapidly over the course of my year there than the other students. To be honest, that’s mainly because I was insanely motivated, not because of Heisig. But I was certainly inclined to feel Heisig was a factor.
The reality is that the vast majority of Westerners who start learning Japanese fall off, no matter what method they use. Even I fell off, later. (I had committed too hard and burnt out.) So the success rate of any given method will appear poor.
I found the kanji so fun and rewarding too. Maybe it’s that Heisig turns learning the kanji into a kind of videogame. It’s really satisfying and not particularly applicable to the real world.
Like The Witness, but for kanji. You’re on this path of applying all your brainpower to master this gorgeous system, and in a flow state the whole time. In that light, it’s no coincidence that I was completely engrossed in The Witness too!
I’ve never had any kind of formal lessons, and I basically never attempt to speak or write Japanese. So my learning efforts are basically pointless, but I don’t really have the energy or the drive to try and make more progress than the very casual amount I’ve been on for… years now. So I guess I really have no ground to tell people off for ineffective or pointless study tactics.
For all of us who took a mostly arbitrary fancy for the language and don’t plan to live in Japan, no matter what level of fluency we reach, there is a deep sense in which learning Japanese is always “pointless”. It’s satisfying in itself, it allows us to form relationships in a new way with new people and gain cultural exposure to fascinating stuff, and – for fan translators – generate cultural works that are unlikely to feel like “necessary art”. All of that is still “pointless” and largely its own reward.
To continue the videogame analogy, different activities you can engage in with Japanese are like mastering a roguelike, playing a multiplayer videogame or making a custom level for a game and sharing it. Maybe you haven’t had your first ascension in the roguelike yet, but the time you spent is still as worth it for its own sake as a master of the game.
i’ll be honest, of all the skills i’ve tried to learn over the past decade (japanese, drawing, various esoteric programming styles, how to not be a totla dweeb), japanese has been the most rewarding.
because i can talk with people who are completely and totally disconnected from our frankly deranged american culture and know nothing the day to day insanity we live here.
it’s like, wow. i don’t have to constantly hear about the politics topic of the day! yay!