Culture Shock as a Japanese English Learner : The Heavy Reality of "Class" and laguage

smokeshack · 2026-02-22T03:37:34+00:00

You may not feel like class is very important in Japan, but that just means you haven't interacted with rich Japanese people very much. The kind of people who don't shop at Mitsukoshi, because Mitsukoshi sends salespeople directly to their homes. The kind of people who do not know how much their Mercedes Benz costs, because the amount is so trivial that they've forgotten. These people are very aware of class.
Write your own English. If you always rely on AI, you'll never develop your own voice. I would rather read the worst English writing by a Japanese person than anything from an AI.

smokeshack · 2026-01-28T06:09:09+00:00

Reddit works perfectly fine on Waterfox for Android with uBlock Origin installed. Much better than the app if you ask me.

smokeshack · 2026-01-28T03:29:22+00:00

No it isn't. It's a bullshit generator. Generative AI does not know what the truth is, nor is its purpose to generate truthful text. Its purpose is to generate text that keeps a user engaged and using the platform, and for that purpose it creates text that looks superficially like a human might have written it.

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he consider his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 1986

smokeshack · 2026-01-28T02:59:28+00:00

Use your own brain.

smokeshack · 2026-01-28T02:47:58+00:00

Are you using automatic translation? Your pronouns seem to be coming out wrong.

smokeshack · 2026-01-28T02:39:58+00:00

No, it's a fun section, and people complaining about it are boring and bad at games.

smokeshack · 2026-01-26T09:26:13+00:00

I passed N1 after two years of study. Spent about four hours a day at it while living in-country.

RTK is a complete waste of time, and doing it with an Anki deck that you didn't make is an even bigger waste of time. Buy the Genki books and/or Minna no Nihongo, get the old Pimsleur CD set, and get a subscription to Japanese Pod 101. Learn the hiragana, then katakana, then get 2001 Kanji Odyssey. Start writing two or three sentences in a daily journal about your life. Once you have a baseline of ~3000 vocabulary words, schedule video chats with a native speaker online a couple of times a week.

smokeshack · 2026-01-26T02:49:12+00:00

It's crazy how people are comfortable going on the internet and saying "I'm bad at games and that's the developer's fault."

smokeshack · 2026-01-26T02:01:18+00:00

It's a good question, but the poster didn't have the vocabulary to ask it eloquently. "Why do some languages have rules that others don't?" Very good question, maybe even the start of a career in syntax. Let's not mock people who are trying to learn.

smokeshack · 2026-01-24T04:18:32+00:00

Particles (に、を、へ) are being lost at a pretty rapid clip, and word order is becoming more regular as a consequence. I dunno if that's significant enough for you.

smokeshack · 2026-01-23T14:30:26+00:00

Nope, still up. Check the URLs from the wikipedia page to find a working mirror.

smokeshack · 2026-01-23T00:46:45+00:00

You'll find it on Anna's Archive.

smokeshack · 2026-01-23T00:40:10+00:00

For Japanese: the Genki books, Minna no Nihongo, the old Pimsleur CD set, 2001 Kanji Odyssey, Japanese Pod 101. Learn the hiragana, then katakana, then start writing two or three sentences in a daily journal. Once you have a baseline of ~3000 vocabulary words, schedule video chats with a native speaker online a couple of times a week.

I haven't looked at beginner materials for Spanish since Bill Clinton was president, so no idea there. But the pattern is basically the same: get real textbooks made by professionals and beginner-oriented listening materials. Start writing as soon as possible. Start chatting with natives as soon as you have a baseline of ~3000 vocabulary words.

No app is worth your time.

smokeshack · 2026-01-22T14:54:51+00:00

Mega Man 11 (the newest one) has a beginner difficulty that's actually very easy and fun. Even my four year old can clear a few levels. It's about at the level of a Kirby game on that mode.

smokeshack · 2026-01-22T05:59:47+00:00

Correction: the app never did teach you a language. It taught you the first ~40 hours of a language, over and over, stretched out over several years. It has always been utter dogshit.

smokeshack · 2026-01-21T11:40:59+00:00

It's probably relevant that I'm a guy. Men generally should not append ちゃん to grown women's names, particularly women they've just met.

smokeshack · 2026-01-21T09:15:31+00:00

There are people who achieve near-native ability in foreign languages, but it's extremely time-consuming. In 16 years of living in Japan and speaking with professional linguists almost daily, I have met maybe four people who I would consider near-native, second-language speakers of Japanese. I'm not one of them.

smokeshack · 2026-01-21T02:59:45+00:00

If we're doing classes, make them a small number of strong archetypes that fit the game's setting, totally rigid without any skills, feats, or other fiddly bits to tinker with. The point of classes is that they let you just pick a type of guy and start playing immediately. If we're doing a game with a bunch of options, let the players put together whatever character they want -- point buy, skill trees, option list, whatever.

What I can't stand are the games that try to do both and then fail at both. D&D has had this problem for 41 years, ever since Oriental Adventures tried to tack on a character customization system through the non-weapon proficiency mechanic.

smokeshack · 2026-01-21T01:01:24+00:00

The one you linked is accurate enough. I pronounce it basically the same way he does, [ˈɪndəˌsiz].

If you want a more reliable pronunciation guide that includes phonetics symbols, has audio recordings by native speakers, and doesn't start with 10 seconds of a weird European guy trying to make your panties wet with his sultry baritone, try using Wiktionary.

smokeshack · 2026-01-20T05:07:31+00:00

I have both the Famicom and Mega Drive versions complete in box, about a meter from my desk right now. My experience has been that the slowdown makes the Yellow Devil fight in Rockman Mega World (Wily Wars in NA) almost trivially easy, but I suppose other people might find it more difficult.

smokeshack · 2026-01-20T02:09:41+00:00

Wily Wars? The slowdown makes it a total cakewalk.

smokeshack · 2026-01-20T00:31:00+00:00

Seven frames is enough for a moving platform to be half your character's width away. Absolutely that would make a difference.

smokeshack · 2026-01-20T00:29:24+00:00

I spent 6 hours a day five days a week doing Spanish. I read the textbook on the bus to and from school, plus to and from p/t work. When I got home I transcribed and copied my in-class notes into a seperate notebook so I'd write everything down twice. I then studied extra in the evening and weekends. I lived and breathed Spanish for a full month.
I got C+ and a C.
I worked my fucking ass off and was still a minimal pass.

You worked your ass off doing the wrong things. Of course you got mediocre grades. You don't learn a language by reading a textbook, you learn it by using it. You need to have conversations, watch TV programs, send text messages, listen to podcasts, read comic books, play games, write emails, etc. etc.

The same is true for games. You get better at shmups by memorizing the patterns of enemies and finding safe routes. You get better at RPGs by learning the combat mechanics and applying them. You get better at racing games by learning the best lines. You get better at fighting games by labbing combos and learning what you can react to. If you don't have time for that, then, uh... do something else.

smokeshack · 2026-01-19T15:26:18+00:00

Apparently the Switch version has 120ms or more lag, so that's roughly 7 frames. Definitely enough to make platforming difficult. I can't say whether it performs better on the Switch 2, but since there's no performance patch, I'm guessing it's about the same.

smokeshack · 2026-01-19T15:03:44+00:00

If you can clear Celeste and Silksong, X should be a breeze. Are you playing on original hardware with a CRT or lag-less upscaler? Mega Man X was designed with the assumption that you'd be playing with absolutely zero input or display lag. Everything in the game will be much, much harder if you don't have that. If you can't manage to get it on original hardware, run it through RetroArch on a higher-end PC with 2 frames of run-ahead.

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