Japanese Language

Or 華金? Well, either way: TGIF!

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? 🙃

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?

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.

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.

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!

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

many mistakes were made

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

Where should I go to chat with natives?

When I encounter a new vocabulary word, it is often useful to see how that word is used in other contexts. Previously, I would use Jisho.org and do a sentence search for the word, but they really only have sentences from tatoeba.org, which are not always the most natural, and sometimes, there just aren't very many. I've found yourei.jp to be significantly better, as they take example sentences from real books and display them in order of readability.

Compare (example word: 円満)

• Jisho.org
• yourei.jp
• weblio.jp

One disadvantage is that yourei.jp doesn't provide English translations, so if you need those you might be better served elsewhere.

(For this particular example word I chose, weblio.jp seems to have decent results, but it overall seems to be hit-or-miss. For instance, ぼかす. Lots of sentences, but they're all basically useless. Most seem to be excerpts from technical manuals.)

I've been semi-casually studying Japanese for around 5 years. I currently live in Japan, but since I already have a remote job for an English-speaking software company, I've never had an interest in getting a job for a Japanese company, and having a good level of Japanese was really only ever a matter of convenience and personal achievement.

On a whim, I participated in a mock JLPT session that was held by a local university. To my surprise, I passed the N2 level. Not with flying colors, but with enough margin that if it were the real thing, I probably would have passed.

This is a win, because I have never passed the JLPT before, and haven't done any test preparation. I mostly just read books and participate in daily life. I have some Anki flashcards, but I'm far from consistent with it.

I signed up for the December test!

I watched a TV show with Japanese subtitles, and noticed the sentence: "秘密にしててほんとごめん。"

I was a bit confused because didn't know why there was a second て after the te-form of する. Because I didn't know how to look this up in my textbook or on Google, I asked a certain AI chatbot about it.

It tells me that してて is actually a contraction of していて (te-form of する and いる).

秘密にしててほんとごめん。 meaning "I'm really sorry for keeping it a secret."

秘密にしてほんとごめん。(without the second て) would only mean "I'm really sorry for making it a secret."

Is this correct?

One trope you’ll see repeated all over anime, manga, novels and even in real life is that of the ボケ (the idiot) and ツッコミ (straight man). Once you know a bit more about its dynamics and some of the more famous 芸人 duos, you start seeing it everywhere.

Downtown is one of the more famous ones, but if you want a shortlist of some of the most famous and relevant duos, the M-1 Grand Prix as well as the contestants of the Documental streaming series are great places to get into Manzai.

Manzai is certainly one of the most relevant media in Japanese, and it is so important you start to see language trends as well as cultural shifts reflected in manzai performances. At the same time you also get to see manzai actively shape Japanese culture and set new trends. It’s a great step if you want your Japanese to improve considerably and get closer to real Japanese humour.

There's a dish in Japan called 親子丼（おやこどん） which is a chicken + eggs rice bowl. 親子（おやこ） can be translated as parent and child, which was a bit disturbing the first time I knew about it.

This week, I didn't have chicken to prepare it so I searched for alternatives and found two:

• 他人丼（たにんどん）which replaces chicken with pork and means strangers haha. Also called 継子丼（ママコどん） meaning stepmom bowl.
• 開花丼（かいかどん）which is the beef version. Meaning "blooming" bowl.

Do you know any other interestingly named dishes like this?

For example in this episode's poem:

天（そら）に響めく（どよめく） まやかしの

捉う心（とらうこころ）にはしる旋律（せんりつ）

For me it's interesting that the kanji used for そら (sky/heaven) is not the usual 空 but 天 which is never read そら, usually read てん, but it conveys the meaning of heaven more than 空.

I've seen Bleach doing it several times in the poems

Has anyone used Italki or a similar platform to aid in their studies?

I'm considering taking weekly lessons with a tutor, the main goal in specifically improving my speaking.

I've lived in Japan for a few years and work in a Japanese company and while my comprehension is okay, my output is terrible and I always hesitate to speak.

I'm hoping a tutor would give me some real-time feedback on my speaking and help build my confidence.

I don't need a professional teacher / structured lessons and I guess my budget would be around ¥2000 for the hour (is it reasonable?)

Please let me know your experiences.

I've been doing it since day one, but I fear that if I don't do it carefully enough, it might cripple my accent later on.

Also, saying the words out loud kind of demotivates me from doing anki as it's a lot more work and gets stressful since I don't want to pick up bad speaking habits, so not saying words out loud would actually be a relief, but I want to do what is most optimal for learning.

I've gotten into reading Japanese books a lot more recently, and I prefer e-books as their built-in dictionaries are a god-send for foreign language learners.

I've only used Google Play so far. The integrated dictionary is fine, but one annoyance is that it can't detect any word that uses furigana. Are Kindle, Kobo, or any other platforms any better?

Is there any free or paid software or browser extension that can read japanese text?

We've been working on a guide to help players on all major GNU/Linux distributions play visual novels for the past few weeks. The main focus is on getting Japanese-only visual novels to work, because they tend to be much quirkier.

This guide is designed to be used by both beginners and experts, with minimal need to touch the command line.

openSUSE wins the award for "never had to touch the terminal" and "simplest setup instructions", but Fedora is a close second.

While there are a few existing visual novel guides for GNU/Linux around, we've tried to fill in the gaps we noticed. We've put a lot of research into this guide and ensured it is accurate while remaining simple and approachable.

If you're interested, start here!

We have an extensive Troubleshooting section on our Problems page if you're having trouble getting visual novels to work, too.

I wrote this guide with a lot of help from two other people, including /u/neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space. It’s available on our community wiki, https://wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, meaning you’re free to share, remix, and build on the content as long as you credit us.

We also have some other pages you may find useful:

• If you're looking for something to play, check out our Recommendations page.
• If you want to know where and how to buy a visual novel you want to play, our comprehensive Buying page will help you out.
• And if you want to read a visual novel in Japanese, our Reading in Japanese page offers a lot of advice and points you to some useful software to make the process easier.