You’re almost making me reconsider my decision to immigrate to the US instead of Japan
(Really that emotional labor comes from public reading material/TV in English rather than anybody I talk to in my daily life in the US though.)
I stuck to my ancient IDF-3000 electronic dictionary for a long time because it has the Super Anchor Eiwa /New Anchor Waei dictionaries, and those have example English/Japanese sentence pairs for most definitions. This dictionary brand seems really obscure but I recommend it if you can find it anywhere (and I’d like to hear where you found it if so, because half the pixel columns on my IDF-3000 are glitched out).
I didn’t manage to carry on doing 5 kanji a day, i stopped once i reached my target of going thru all the Grade 1 kanji. I think it was a general malaise, but also i was getting really sick of doing my japanese homework - really fed up with writing out sentences that ended in です and ですか .
Felt better over the last week, so started learning the kanji i don’t know from the JLPT N5 set (most i have already covered in the grade 1 set). Changed to 4 a day because 5 was taking me too long, and also so there is space in my notebook to write down example words.
I’ve been a bit frustated with the speed of my course, but last week we actually got thru quite a bit, and finally did some verbs. And without having a lesson every week i probably would have given up.
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If you had just kept going you would have learned how to use plain form … then you could just write だ or nothing at all…
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When your sentence construction is as simple as “Subject.” or “Subject?”, I’m not convinced writing out the whole thing is especially useful. But hey, I’m no educator. 僕の意見を気にしないで下さい
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The early -desu teaching bias is maybe a little dated in that it’s rarely used in manga, which is going to be most students’ primary practice material nowadays. It probably doesn’t matter that much one way or the other though.
i honestly feel like in casual conversations that です is used more to make a point or emphasize something than out of any particular politeness
It sounds like your main experience of conversational Japanese is conversation groups in America, that would bias your impressions. In Japan, even a 1-year seniority difference in classmates or coworkers often makes the polite forms kick in, as do e.g. a customer relationship.
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actually it’s talking w/ natives in casual settings on twitter or discords/ircs so…
i have basically never talked to other students, tbh
Yeah, I know you were talking about native speakers. My point is that you have no hierarchical or formal relationship to them. That’s actually quite unusual in Japanese daily life, especially given the fine gradations of hierarchy that Japanese society is attuned to, and how much social contact is framed in some kind of formal way (e.g. “clubs”).
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One of the faults of my now former school was I would approach any dialog running all the social calculations (and there are so many) so to say the right thing and then the teacher would just ask me to say it ふつ形 then get annoyed when i asked for the correct social situation language.
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For a long time i’ve had the sounds of this speech by 万骨坊 / Tengu lodged in my brain:
(previously - YouTube, which seems to have been removed)
I’ve never been able to decipher exactly what he says tho’. The japanese text is displayed so i thought it would be easy to copy down and work out the syllables but … i’m still finding it hard to parse. Tengu is like 1500 years old or something so it might just be he has a weird accent or pronounces things in an archaic way.
I think it displays “全ては我が戯言なり”, which google translate renders as “subete wa waga zaregotonari.” The last part doesn’t sound right.
(not expecting help, posting because i want to close all these tabs, i should probably get a blog or something)
Really interesting thread from a guy who lived in Japan exactly the same year I did (2002). The country has changed a lot since then, reading this made me realize my ideas about the country are out-of-date now.
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Lolo the first response is yeah but westerners are changing moar
I would kind of like to start making a serious push towards JLPT N2 and such. My experience with practice tests so far that I’m fine on vocabulary, good on listening, and absolutely godawful on the longer form questions. Primarily because they feel more like they are judging how you read the phrasing than how you read the content itself.
Does anyone know of any good resources for studying the higher end JLPTs? Not necessarily practice content.
Hmm, I did the legacy JLPT2 in 2008 and I remember it as overwhelmingly a vocabulary quiz, so it sounds like it’s changed a fair bit. One thing that probably hasn’t changed is that it’s a pure pass/fail test at the 60% mark so unlike with college classes, it’s totally OK to bomb one section. (I didn’t practice the listening part at all before going to the test and did quite badly on it, but managed to barely pass anyway.) So you might already be passing or close to it even without an additional study push based on what you said.
Yeah I had a few Chinese classmates that had N1 certification but were unable to say more than two word sentences because they coasted on Kanji.
Like if you grew up in the American school system you have a serious leg up because it is mostly about how to take a standardized test. If I can find another Japanese school I am looking to take N2 in the summer.
All the practice long form stuff I have seen which is from official practice books and old tests is double speak and circling back and using some obscure grammar form entirely to trip you up. The worst question is usually “which of these sentences belongs most in the essay.”
Also a problem is the questions are usually very relative. I and a couple of the other students had to argue (proving we understood the essay) that the question and the answers were bad and disengenious. So really getting two or three of the offical practice books and just working over them with the answers to get a feeling for what a “correct” answer is.
The word is N2 is harder than N1.
That is a lot of the feeling I had just looking at them! They didn’t feel like they were asking me to actually understand the content and the point of what I was reading but I was trying to guess what the question author wanted me to read from it.
And yeah, maybe I should just go directly for N1 instead. I’m looking at wrapping up kanji study over the next year and I know I need to fix up persistent grammar issues I still have, and would at least like to try to get a handle on what I’m being asked of.
I semi-jokingly said I should play through the Layton series in JP since they’re awful with word games in the EN releases, but maybe I actually should.
Dunno in what sense Rudie means N2 is harder than N1 because in a literal sense, N1 is a lot harder like you would expect. I leafed through a JLPT1 at the time and thought I could handle it, then when I actually started my first practice of it I realized my impression was misleading because the sentences are all low-tier vocabulary except for the main word you’re being asked about which is really obscure – not how real-life text works. So I downgraded my ambition to level 2. If you’re uncertain whether you can pass N2 without sustained study, you’re likely quite far from N1.
Btw I can pitch for the Kodansha’s Learning Japanese book someone posted above. There’s a very well made Anki flash deck based on that book as well. It’s very good for learning kanji imho because you are always introduced to a new radical or a component of a kanji and then that is immediatelly followed by other kanji that have the same component or a radical. In addition, all the new vocabulary items per kanji that are introduced combine the new kanji with previous kanji you have learnt. It’s an incredibly good and organic way to study it.
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