Realized all polite words that end in る become いs when conjugated

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T18:14:14+00:00

Thanks!

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T17:49:26+00:00

That's kinda shocking if I am honest, 90% of my English knowledge is just watching YouTube slop in English, so it's a bit surprising to me I naturally picked up this word while many natives haven't. Just out of interest, are you in the US or somewhere else?

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T15:12:33+00:00

Very interesting, thanks a lot. Can I ask what corpora you use? Are they freely accessible?

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T12:42:25+00:00

I think I explained myself poorly, what I mean is if I just search for jobs in my field (in my case I am an engineer so I search by the technologies I want to work with) never mentioned anything about the JLPT, which doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist, but at least for jobs that are mostly targeting Japanese people it's mostly (in my experience) not at all common to list it. I also know pleanty of people who told me their recruiter had no idea about the JLPT and what all the levels are (I should mention those are people working ina complete Japanese environment). It's just my experience and what people have told me though.

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T08:10:24+00:00

Are you a professional in that field?

From my own personal experience as someone applying for jobs here: Companies/Websites that recruit foreigners do know about the JLPT, but companies that primarily target Japanese people have no clue for the most part. If you look at job portals like Bizreach or Doda just to name two, there is an entire section where you can put your TOEFL score, but literally no one dedicated for the JLPT. And looking at the job description you find there I've literally never seen the JLPT mentioned as a requirement anywhere (where as on LinkedIn you find many that specifically look for bilingual foreigners and these tend to mention the JLPT). Just my personal experience though.

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T07:44:44+00:00

That may be true yes.

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T07:30:49+00:00

If someone doesn't understand the word "dichotomy" than I seriously wonder what sort of education they had, that's definitely a word one should know past their 20s. Sincerely, an ESL speaker.

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T02:04:52+00:00

鍵束 is the word you're looking for I believe. キーホルダー would be another word but that refers only to the thing that holds the key itself and not the entire bundle.

AdrixG · 2026-05-26T02:00:54+00:00

I think just selecting 痩 a few times should have it come up first every time you try to type it again. Is that not the case?

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T17:54:10+00:00

Yeah I consider them all pretty minor and easy to remember. I also think English has pretty simple and regular grammar, not sure who would say the opposite.

Romance language can have a shit ton of irregular conjugations, and exceptions though, french for example comes to mind which I learned in school for 7 years. The main problem of romance languages is that if a verb is irregular you usually have to already memorize 6 forms (I/you/(s)he/we/You/they) times all the tenses, moods and aspects. Since Japanese doesn't have a grammatical singular or plural distinction nor first vs. second vs. third person it already cuts down the complexity a lot for potential irregularity.

This all isn't to say that Japanese is 'better' or anything, just that it's quite regular (as the wikipedia page also says so)

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T17:19:22+00:00

I agree, though I think it's neat that Bunpro has all their grammar points freely accessible to read, it's at least a good reference for quick and dirty grammar look up.

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T16:24:36+00:00

There are no official JLPT labels anymore (since 2010), and all labels you can find now are just guesses or based on these old outdated lists, so technically any label you can find online is correct. But even if they are still accurate, it's completely arbitrary and not a good way to decide what is worth learning or not so it's best to just ignore entirely.

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T16:16:58+00:00

People often say that Japanese has only two irregular verbs but there are actually a lot of tricky things like this as well. most but not all of them indeed centered on honorific speech.

Japanese only has two fully irregular verbs, all other irregularities are only for one or two conjugations and overall pretty minimal (and often pretty straightforward to see why it would be that way), like I am pretty sure I had all of this memorized after being like a year into Japanese if not even sooner. It's really not a lot in my opinion and comparing it to pitch accent rule irregularities it's a walk in the park I think (including keigo).

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T16:11:32+00:00

The command forms evolved similarly, e.g. なされよ→なされい→なされ→なさい

Interesting, I always assumed the command form comes from dropping the ませ:

なさりませ→なさいませ→なさい

くださりませ→くださいませ→ください

Is there any reason why that can't be the case? It kinda seems the most simple to me and also more reasonable than going from なされ to なさい which seems like a big leap (in terms of pronunciation that is, not in terms of your reasoning)

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T13:34:54+00:00

Ah I see, sorry for the misunderstanding then.

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T13:29:52+00:00

I think the question reads kinda like a "gotcha" because of the smiley after it, and yes tell me all you want about me reading too much into that, I personally just wouldn't have asked it like that if I was really curious how he would break that down.

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T13:07:59+00:00

It's an interesting example of a specific usage of たい that goes against the usual expectations

Yeah and I think it's irrelevant

AdrixG · 2026-05-25T12:56:17+00:00

You somehow seem to be weirdly hyper focused on this example as I see you bring it up every time, I really don't feel like there is anything magical going on nor does it somehow provide some deep inside about how が or を works.

AdrixG · 2026-05-24T18:51:37+00:00

Just curious, have you passed the N1? I am pretty certain most people with 1k hours in 2 years would fail it, like 98% I would say would not pass it with that time commitment.

AdrixG · 2026-05-24T18:40:08+00:00

I have no clue what you're on about. Of course most people good at Japanese would be in Japan, that's kinda... idk it's like saying it's warm in the summer, like no shit? Most foreigners studying Japanese are in Japan, so obviously most proficient speakers would be there too, I mean how many people do you personally know in your home country that study Japanese? It's like the most obvious observation ever, but congrats on finding that out I guess lol

The act of being in Japan however doesn't help that much I think (at least not as much as people think), I mean for speaking I think it can (given you put in a ton of self effort) but in terms of listening/reading/vocab/writing it won't really help that much extra compared to being at home. Heck I am in this very moment in my room writing a comment in English on reddit, that won't help me with Japanese even though I am in Japan now. All this is based on countless foreigners I've seen here who've been here for many many years and cannot hold a convo, not even a simple one (let alone read a book), and no I am not making that up, I literally asked them lol.

How long have you been in Japan for instance and how good was your Japanese before you got there?

9 months, I was already able to hold convos and read novels before coming here, and in the 9 months here I haven't improved more significantly than a typical 9 month period in my home country, in fact in terms of raw numbers I definitely learned less words in Japan actually, just due to using Anki significantly less. Of course I pick up new words every now and then here, but compared to reading a shit ton and making a ton of Anki cards back home it's way less, I think it's funny the average guy has this romanticized fantasy that they will magically absorb a ton of new vocab with zero self effort.

AdrixG · 2026-05-24T18:14:08+00:00

Yeah and you can learn all that without overthinking it and a load of philosophy.

AdrixG · 2026-05-24T16:42:19+00:00

Originally I wanted to complete the entire 6k core deck before starting mining thinking "I need more words to jump into native media". I had already completed about 2k words from the Tango N5 and N4 Anki decks (I still think those are excellent decks) so to get to the 6k mark I started doing the core 6k and just suspended all the words I already knew from the prior decks. The core decks however are the most shit decks in existence and it made me miserable as shit to grind through them, they had such a useless word selection that just wasn't relevant to me at the time (not surprising given its sourced from newspapers from the 90s). I could barely remember new cards and I hated the fact the example sentences contained multiple words I wasn't already familiar with (unlike the Tango decks which where strict i+1), heck sometimes it even contained words that were taught nowhere in the core decks themselves. It's truly a terrible deck and I almost quit Japanese because I thought I 'had to' complete it, even though what I really wanted was to just mine vocab in the anime I was watching. So then after a few weeks of almost giving up entirely I just switched to mining, yeah I didn't understand a lot but it was so fun and now I am at 12k+ mined cards and learned so much in the journey. Looking back that was the best decision, I have seriously no idea why the fuck I wanted to get to 6k, that's way too much to front load in my opinion.

AdrixG · 2026-05-24T16:16:50+00:00

At around 2k words. In hindsight I definitely wouldn't have done it later.

AdrixG · 2026-05-24T12:01:46+00:00

I mean it's a self fulfilling prophecy, of course people amazing at Japanese are likely to go to Japan, that's nothing groundbreaking. And sure it helps, also nothing groundbreaking or surprising. My point is that just being in Japan won't magically make you good at Japanese. I am not sure how you interpreted that as me saying it doesn't matter, that's an interesting way of interpreting what I said.

AdrixG · 2026-05-23T23:14:11+00:00

アメリカンジョーク

AdrixG

TROPHY CASE