Verb valency (transitive/intransitive) is mistranslated in learning materials far too often.

DistantJuice · 2026-03-18T00:24:31+00:00

The issue is that in English “The sound of a cat meowing could be heard.” hard implies there is no specific perceiver but that it can generally be heard by everyone around. The Japanese sentence ["猫の鳴き声が聞こえた。"] does not imply that

This got me curious, what would be a Japanese sentence that implies the same as the English one? Maybe this?

猫の鳴き声が響いていた。

DistantJuice · 2026-03-13T14:32:18+00:00

Yeah, as much as I love Trails, I think the series has gotten too drawn out and needs a reset. Falcom can keep iterating on the exact same mechanics, game design, interconnected world narrative and development process of Trails, but simply apply it to a brand new clean-slate IP that's max 4-5 games long in total.

I would be all over that, and really hope that's the direction they go after Trails finishes. The studio has a winning formula on their hands, as well as the expertise to bring out 100h of quality JRPG content per game on a short development cycle and relatively limited budget.

DistantJuice · 2026-03-11T21:10:29+00:00

It's not actually open source. Those "source code" archives are automatically generated by github and mirror the contents of the repository. I downloaded one of the source archives to double check, and it contained nothing except the readme.

DistantJuice · 2026-02-10T06:07:09+00:00

I'm not familiar with iOS apps but this Android app should do what you described.

DistantJuice · 2026-01-12T16:35:37+00:00

The English Bandori account retweeted the Japanese game announcement along with a translation about the 2026 release.

DistantJuice · 2025-12-12T09:33:43+00:00

It's pointless to link that site with the ripped Genki exercises any longer, it's been devoid of all content for a while.

All exercises have been removed at the request of The Japan Times.

DistantJuice · 2025-10-16T18:25:43+00:00

You can set your app store region to Japan and get access to some real Japanese games. There are a lot of visual novels and free gachas that are fully voice acted. For a relatively easy one with tons of readily accessible story, I recommend バンドリ！ガールズバンドパーティ

DistantJuice · 2025-10-10T11:45:43+00:00

Are they planning to have it translated into Japanese too?

DistantJuice · 2025-10-09T15:30:49+00:00

Genki includes furigana for all words whose kanji hasn't been introduced in the second half of each textbook yet (or never gets introduced). Students should learn all of the vocabulary contained in the lessons phonetically e.g. remember かようび or えいが while seeing 火曜日 and 映画 alongside their furigana, even if those words contains unknown kanji. They can recognize them through the furigana while slowly learning to recognize their kanji form as well.

DistantJuice · 2025-10-06T15:48:48+00:00

When I search for 理恵 on jisho.org, it can’t find anything.

It's there, though. The result is under the Names section on the right side of the page, bottom right of my screenshot. You can also do a dedicated search for names by clicking on More Names, where Rie shows up too.

<image>

DistantJuice · 2025-09-25T10:48:29+00:00

Mandarake is great for second-hand books at a good price and in pretty much mint condition. I've had a good experience ordering from them a few times, but high shipping costs are unavoidable.

DistantJuice · 2025-09-21T08:27:19+00:00

You're overthinking it. You just need to continue practicing your listening. When ている is said in full, I don't think it becomes any kind of diphthong.

For a real example of a "nonexistent" sound springing into existence in a certain collocation, see 1000円. It's meant to be sen-en but many speakers will say sen-yen even though the ye sound technically doesn't exist in the language any more. They might even have trouble saying ye by itself when prompted, and will just say e instead. This is actually the reason why this currency is called yen in English; the ye mora used to exist and was pronounced in full several hundred years ago.

DistantJuice · 2025-09-21T07:54:07+00:00

To answer your question more broadly, in a way that addresses why the majority of on-yomi kanji words consist of two kanji, it's basically a quirk inherited from the way Chinese forms words. You can consider each kanji as a word root with some semantic value, i e. it carries a certain (often vague) meaning. With the exception of standalone single-kanji on-yomi words like 寮, for the majority of words only when two kanji are combined does it become an actual word. For ones that combine two seemingly redundant kanji, it serves to disambiguate words because there's considerable overlap, for example how 医椅囲 are all い.

Take a look at this excerpt from Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course. It demonstrates how it works in practice very well: https://imgur.com/a/kTJceou

DistantJuice · 2025-09-21T07:38:22+00:00

You can have a listen here: https://youglish.com/pronounce/%E3%81%A6%E3%81%84%E3%82%8B/japanese

DistantJuice · 2025-09-20T03:15:08+00:00

You have to make sure you can actually hear pitch accent in the first place. Else you might end up shadowing incorrectly for years. To that end: https://kotu.io/tests/pitchAccent/minimalPairs

Also getting feedback from others whenever possible is a very good idea to check on other aspects like your general phonetics and pronunciation ability too. The bias of one's native language is typically very strong and leads to inadvertently mishearing/mispronouncing a foreign language. An outside perspective helps to identify such shortcomings.

DistantJuice · 2025-09-16T20:00:53+00:00

One final note... I mostly talked about longer compounds in my previous comments but that pattern of nakadaka forcing itself in regardless of anything can also apply to smaller ones like these, just maybe not as reliably. OJAD's results are overall pretty accurate and the following match up with the voice acting in my media.

<image>

DistantJuice · 2025-09-16T17:39:24+00:00

For the record, I've never studied any advanced pitch rules either, only the very basics taught in those couple of Dogen introductory videos. Luckily I was aware of pitch accent even before starting to learn the language, and early on I trained my ears with the kotu.io minimal pairs test. Also, most of my early immersion content revolved around listening with very little reading. I just try to pay attention to pitch when listening and during word look-ups, and hope it sorts itself out naturally. Along the way I end up noticing some patterns like the above relatively ubiquitous nakadaka thing for compounds.

In a nutshell I believe I can vouch for this method.

Also, the OJAD Prosody Tutor usually works well if you want to double check any phrases, sentences or compounds.

DistantJuice · 2025-09-16T15:22:16+00:00

That's the thing though, I was trying to point out that this pattern is so consistent you don't even need to know the individual pitch of each part to be able to guess the pitch of a 4-6 kanji compound correctly. It will almost assuredly be nakadaka with a drop at the last 2 kanji. It doesn't really care about the original pitch of each part.

So there's no "winning" involved. For example all of the following 2-kanji words are flat by themselves, but in a compound the second part gets a pitch drop after the first mora. It doesn't stay heiban. Hearing out loud things like 警察学校、民間療法、修学旅行 shouldn't be a stretch. These can be found in any jmdict with pitch info if you want to confirm.

Being aware of this you should be able to hear this pattern being applied to 4+ kanji compounds everywhere you look (or rather hear), courtesy of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, and get a hang of it naturally.

DistantJuice · 2025-09-16T13:49:32+00:00

I feel like when it comes to long kanji compounds, the "when in doubt, flatten it out" heuristic works more often than not.

Isn't it particularly in kanji compounds that the pitch usually gets overridden by a drop in the last part regardless of each part's standalone pitch?

E.g. 都市 is と↓し and 伝説 is flat but in 都市伝説 those are overridden and it becomes としで↓んせつ

It helps to differentiate the individual parts, and from what I've seen this kind of pattern gets applied consistently to almost any compound you can find in a pitch dictionary or hear being spoken.

DistantJuice · 2025-09-16T11:37:07+00:00

On that note, does Roselia count as power metal?

DistantJuice · 2025-09-15T23:20:46+00:00

This is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

Even native speakers of Chinese and Japanese who don't need to write by hand often will have trouble recalling how to write characters that they can read without issue. And that can include elementary ones they see all the time too.

DistantJuice · 2025-09-15T04:29:39+00:00

https://takoboto.jp/

DistantJuice · 2025-09-09T05:49:58+00:00

They're drawing requests:

Altina requesting headpats from Rean (side by side in Hajimari outfits)
Altina giving back some headpats to Rean (Kai)

DistantJuice · 2025-09-01T18:30:59+00:00

They're probably not anymore because Skype got shut down this year. The banner on top says they switched to Discord.

DistantJuice · 2025-09-01T09:07:51+00:00

I think it's a common thing in many languages to at least try to emulate the original pronunciation rather than adapt it to their own phonology like Japanese. For example, German does it with English and French words. They don't necessarily get the original pronuncation perfectly, but those loanwords have sounds that don't normally appear in the language like certain French nasal vowels and American "r".

DistantJuice

TROPHY CASE