The Big Ass Superior Thread of Learning Japanese
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CornBurrito
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Ah neat. So now they -do- have a separate word for what American speakers would call green. But traffic lights and some other things still get called "ao."
Does wikipedia also have a list of Japanese counter words?
This is blowing my mind
Blue and green are so distinct, how could you not have different words for them?
Just compare grass and sky, they don't even look close to me.
I just thought it was a quirk of Japanese, but it's crazy that this is common...
Did you try searching yourself?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counterCornBurrito
Member
This is blowing my mind
Blue and green are so distinct, how could you not have different words for them?
Just compare grass and sky, they don't even look close to me.
I just thought it was a quirk of Japanese, but it's crazy that this is common...
Did you try searching yourself?
Yeah I briefly studied colors in psychology and some languages hardly distinguish colors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Cultural_differences
Of course they can see the difference, but it just isn't important enough culturally. Given how context based Japanese language is, they could probably get away with just using one word for two distinct colors. What's also crazy is according to that article, the difference between orange + brown and pink + red are not any more objectively different than light and dark green. Yet we consider light and dark green to be the same general color but can't fathom orange and brown being the same color. Or pink and red. Kind of crazy how our perception of color is impacted by language.
And thanks for the wiki link.
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Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
I never really had an issue with it as my native language is an Uralic one and we basically distinguish colors with "-ish". I've seen some Americans have a really tough time with the traffic light thing. It's one of those things you have to experience yourself to understand how to distinguish which. In my personal experiences with work, shades of yellow are much more difficult in Japan as they really don't have an "orange" color. You can easily get a taste of how their culture developed the names of the colors as they usually refer to animals or foliage.
CornBurrito
Member
No orange color in Japanese? Do they just classify orange stuff as being a shade of brown?
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Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
It's not that they don't have the color, it's just they have way more variants of red/brown than a culture like America would. You can sort of figure out why from common sense. The words for what a westerner would most likely consider "orange" are either daidai or just katakana orenji - the much more recent and prominent one for daily use. Which is really the key, for your everyday usage either of those will probably satisfy most needs. If you happen to need more descriptive classification you would rarely use orenji. I don't mean to keep using wiki as some academic source lol but it is convenient when it comes to lists. This will give you an idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_colors_of_Japan
CornBurrito
Member
Damn, that's pretty fascinating.
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Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
Just to expand the green/blue convo from above since we got this far into colors, ao isn't used as the end all be all blue either. You will use words like mizuiro just as often. Similarly with words like moegi for green. You wouldn't be "wrong" if you used ao or midori, but any Japanese person would pick up on you missing that native context. While, in my opinion, I don't think anyone in English would really mind if you used the word blue to describe a wide variety of colors. It actually kind of irks me as I use words like cerulean and cyan quite a bit and usually get weird looks from native English speakers.
I got this book for Christmas. Highly suggest it.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1880656906/?tag=neogaf0e-20
I've seen this book recommended a few times as well, and I remember flipping through it some time back. It looked pretty good to me.
CornBurrito
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Yeah cyan and cerulean would both be classified as blue. with distinction between them being unnecessary for the most part. Actually googling around, I don't even know anyone who would distinguish cerulean from blue.
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Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
I do. =/
I see...thanks for that
Dai is used to call a popular male figure skater called Daisuke Takahashi.
? That's not a タ, it's the 'repeater' kanji
"我々（われわれ）には"
so yeah it's a bit of an odd looking に
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Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
Swear to krist I was scrubbin back and forth lookin for this elusive ta. I don't see how that font is hard to read at all.
it's definitely readable, but it feels worse than comic sans... the "ni" looks weird, the "to"(hiragana) is strange as well. Doable, but just odd looking...
D
Deleted member 17706
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There's nothing odd or strange about any of it other than the fact that you probably haven't encountered the style before. It's really quite normal and perfectly legible.
I don't think it's particularly difficult either, definitely seen worse. I think the problem is if you're not a fluent reader yet you might still be looking at individual kana/kanji and strictly comparing it to whatever font you're most used to. Once you get more used to reading your eyes will kind of just glide over the characters and recognize words and sentences based on shape and what your brain expects to come next based on context (just like how you probably didn't stop to read individual letters in this post). It just looks slightly stylized to me but you can clearly make out what's being said.
when I say laughable I mean truly, but to be fair to myself I haven't exactly started to learn kanji yet (only know maybe several random ones).
I'll just go back after being in a situation where I couldn't study JP for 6 months to refresh on grammar, before starting kanji though...or well, at least that's the plan for now
I'll just go back after being in a situation where I couldn't study JP for 6 months to refresh on grammar, before starting kanji though...or well, at least that's the plan for now
Zoe
Member
I would say expand beyond writing just the charts... write out sentences and paragraphs, develop your personal handwriting
I'm still a novice myself. I don't think your level/proficiency at the language has an effect on reading fonts. You just need to be exposed to a wide variety of fonts and your eyes will naturally figure out what is what even if you're a novice or the most proficient person in the language.
So yeah, don't feel too bad about it, as you dive into Japanese media that may use different fonts (be it signs in anime/live action stuff or text in games or whatever), you'll start to figure out what is what regardless of the font it uses.
You may be right but I don't think it's necessarily required to be exposed to a font to be able to read it efficiently. Take this sentence for example:
You may have never encountered any of those fonts before but chances are you can read it quite easily without stopping to look at the individual letters and making sure that "r" isn't a "c". Rather you can read it relatively quickly based on the overall shape/length of each word and what you expect comes next in the sentence. Familiarity with the language will help a lot when it comes to small font sizes, messy fonts, or handwriting. Even if a に doesn't look like a に your brain will automatically fill it in because it makes sense that it goes there. Things like a grammar sense and context will help fill in particles and other words in these situations. For example it's often hard for newer learners of Japanese to play some DS games because a lot of fine details get left out of kanji or are almost impossible to see without looking very closely due to the low pixel density. I've even seen 濁点 get left out completely but you will always know there's a 99.9% chance it's ご褒美 instead of こ褒美.
Point is, I'm just saying it's not something you need to worry about or try to get exposure to fonts for. You will naturally get better at reading fonts as you learn the language, as you will with every other aspect/quirk. Handwritten Japanese like this will probably make a standardized font like in that KH video seem heavenly haha:
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Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
Very legible, looks like a kid's writing. If I showed you my wife's handwriting, I have a feeling you guys would be stumped.
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Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
Putting aside simply not knowing some of the kanji, what perorist wrote up top and what you wrote here is the reason you can't decipher some of the stuff. It's why you'd be stumped on something as trivial as the "koto ga ??ru." Though it's interesting you were you able to get the ki in the yoku dekimashita but not in the example above.
Most of those kanji I recognized because of RTK. But if I knew the words I think it would be way more easy to get everything.
And what? It's よくできました and not よいきました？ EDTI: Actually it looks like kute, but not kude.
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Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
I don't know >.>
Actually I tough that since the yo is far away it was よ、行きました
CornBurrito
Member
My Japanese instructor basically forces students to write as close to the "standard" font as possible. Points off if we deviate too much. She considers anything else to be "creating our own characters." Reading handwriting sucks due to that. I'm hoping she cuts that bullshit out after 101.
Also this isn't a question, but I had a crazy dream where I was in Japanese class and my teacher kept asking me "椅子はたのしいなんか" over and over. I had no idea what she was asking about a chair being fun, and no matter what response I gave she just shook her head and repeated the question. And then I woke up.
Oh and now for a question: Can someone explain the difference between "desu" de arimasu" and"de aru"? Are these actually all the same, but with different levels of politeness? Desu < De aru < De arimasu?
There's Core2k/6k, which is a vocab list based on frequency.
There's KO2001 (Kanji Odssey 2001) as well, but I feel that requires grammar and not that good straight after RTK.
Since I listen to a lot of Japanese music, I've been going trough their lyrics and putting the words on an Anki deck, which is pretty nice, since I couldn't stick with Core.
Well, kinda.
Brawly Likes to Brawl
Member
Maybe you could try reducing your daily new cards instead? Being able to get some basic vocab down while doing RTK is a good thing.
I hear people saying it's better to jump straight into RTK3, but IDK.
Zoe
Member
Never ever deviate from the correct stroke order, but everybody's going to develop their own look.
I personally think playing games, watching Japanese TV, reading Japanese books and magazines and listening to Japanese music is the best way to learn vocab but that's just me. Just pick up new words and write them down then try and use them when you can.
I agree with StayDead, but you could use that together with Anki, and it would work really well. Since you already know grammar you can put some phrases as well to fixate more.
Search for it on a dictionary, add to Anki deck. Rinse and Repeat.
I can't tell you about Anki, but if you need an online dictionairy this is fantastic:
http://jisho.org/words/
You can search Kanji you don't know by radical.
http://jisho.org/words/
You can search Kanji you don't know by radical.
shanshan310
Member
Anki is a great tool, but make sure you're doing more than just flipping through the cards. I used to do it that way, and let me tell you: Rote learning is really, really inefficient. Rather than just flipping through the cards I also try to write them down, and when a new word comes up I try to come up with a connection to another idea (similar to RTK I guess) and then use it in a few sentences.
No offence to you, but I think RTK is a very poor early learning tool because of this. Kanji is important but vocabulary is more important. Traditional kanji books teach you vocab with the characters, so I guess once you finish the first RTK it might be worth going through one of those. If you have the vocabulary it's generally pretty easy to pick up kanji in context.
Jisho is fantastic. Lots of slang words too, which has been ridiculously helpful.
The thing with RTK is that you have to understand what it is actually trying to do. RTK is a tool for memorizing kanji, for familiarizing with the writing system. Japanese is very different than most languages. Before RTK, kanji was just a bunch of lines to me, but it made me understand their construction, thus making it easy for memorizing them. It's great as an introduction to kanji. It doesn't even touches reading, or various meanings, but it's not necessary to what it is trying to do. The same way that you know this「み」is 'mi', because you're familiar with this, and saw it a bunch of times, RTK makes you know what「涙」is. You might not know how to say it, or what it really means (since theres a few kanji that the keyword given is not what the kanji means, and there's words in which the meaning of the kanji in it have nothing to do with the meaning of the word.)
And that's why RTK + Anki is great, because it exposes you to a lot of kanji everyday, and then you get used to it. (I learned kana by constantly drawing them while bored in class. I drew them many times that I got used to it and now I hardly have to think about what a particular kana means (katakana is the problem because I'm not exposed to it often enough so I forgot some of them. Plus fuck シツ＆ソン
If I was able to recognize these words that I just transcribed, than image how easy actually learning them is going to be? And it is. I'm learning vocabulary now, and it's way, way easier because I'm familiar with most kanji so it's easier to memorize them.
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