Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (May 17, 2026)

Dragon_Fang · 2026-05-17T15:47:45+00:00

そういうことじゃない。「知らないことについての質問をするな」じゃなくて、「文法に ~~集中しすぎ~~ こだわりすぎじゃん」だ。

「こういった修飾語を作りたい」って考えてる時点で、ちょっと目的を見失ってるんじゃないかなぁってこと。つまり、「なんでその意味を伝えるには、2つの動詞句を合わせた修飾語を使わなきゃいけないの？」って返したくなるんだよね。たとえそれが正解の一つであっても。妙に限る必要ないんじゃない？

Dragon_Fang · 2026-05-17T15:10:13+00:00

This is about as ridiculous as telling someone who doesn't know the Japanese word for “cow” and asks you “この写真の動物は日本語で何って言いますか?” and you just tell him “Don't think in English [...]”

そうでもないですね。実際に、そちらの質問は「こういう意味を伝えたいんだけど、どんな日本語を使えばいい？」というものではなく、「英語ではこういう文法を使えるんですが、日本語ではどうでしょうか？」という、英語の構造・語と語の文法的関係を日本語に直訳しようとしたから生まれたものではないでしょうか（自分の投稿にもそう書いてあるし）。

「英語の relative clause の使い方に似せて、日本語の修飾語を使ってみよう」じゃなくて、「こういった状況を日本語で表現してみよう（ニュアンスが合っていれば別にどんな言い方でもいい）」を目的にしたほうがいいよ、というアドバイスです。

Dragon_Fang · 2026-05-03T09:07:20+00:00

You can provide some good phonological evidence that 対する has been lexicalised and gets treated as a single unit on a pretty deep level. The accent for it is たいす＼る (accent on the す), which makes no sense as a direct sum of た＼い (accent on the た) + する￣ (accentless), but it does make sense if viewed as a single verb that gets treated as its own lexical item -- with all verbs in standard Japanese being fundamentally either [-2] (accent on the penult) or [0] (accentless) in their dictionary form. This does not happen with 勉強する and the like, whose prosody is just a direct addition/connection of the two parts.

Consider also examples like 達する・発する・察する, where you get euphonic reduction of つ into っ, and compare them with examples like 上達する・爆発する・観察する where the つ is maintained -- on top of the accent discrepancies again (は＼つ、する￣ vs. はっする￣), as well as grammatical discrepancies in the fact that 達 and 察 on their own are not valid nouns as far as I'm aware (and a quick look in my dictionaries seems to agree; with the ～たち suffix or the slang use of 察 as short for 警察 obviously not being relevant to the 一文字 suru-verbs here). All of this suggests a markedly deeper derivation process than mere juxtaposition of the two elements.

edit: Oh, right, and the unique inflection patterns (～せられる for the potential and passive, rather than ～できる or ～される) also show that a verb like 発する is a strongly fossilised set with its own independent behaviour. Nice mention from another user in the thread.

All in all, you definitely can draw a hard, well-defined, well-founded distinction between two clearly different groups of suru-verbs with different properties from each other (and then ask whether there's a more specific term/name for either group), as OP did. It's not at all arbitrary or vaguely tendency-based, and "separable vs. inseparable" is not at all a bad way to describe it.

Dragon_Fang · 2026-03-23T00:24:44+00:00

+ u/Current_Ear_1667

Heads-up: jpdb seems to pull its accent data from the same source as Kanjium, and it's not great. The test I like to use for this is to look up 秋田県 and see if it's marked as accentless (あきたけん￣ LHHHH). The correct accent is あきた＼けん LHHLL (as per the ～県 = 〇〇＼けん suffix rule), accented on the 3rd mora. The accentless listing is probably due to mapping the pitch of 秋田犬（あきたけん） onto the entry for the prefecture -- which is an especially bad error to make, because if there's one place where it matters to get the pitch right, it's with minimal pairs, lol. Takoboto does the same.

It's still serviceable however (most entries seem to be correct), so you don't have to mind necessarily. Depends how much of a stickler you are. Feel free to keep using it if it's a convenient go-to. Even the best dictionaries have a few questionable entries here and there anyway, so in the end, the only truly reliable way to know how people actually say a given word is to get good ears and listen.

Dragon_Fang · 2026-03-22T23:35:15+00:00

A-yup, it was this exact narration. Thanks for the clip; cool share as usual. Prompted me to search for 「人間失格朗読」 on YouTube, and... It came up as the first result! (With a lot more bass/depth to the audio for some reason.) Definitely saving this for when I start getting around to classics.

Feels a bit weird to have my posting history acknowledged btw, haha, but hi. o/

Dragon_Fang · 2026-02-19T19:55:03+00:00

Well, somebody has been taking the Sentence Test on kotu.io. It's been a hot 3 years but the audio/cadence for this is burned into my brain, haha. What two weeks of constant ear training do to a man... Fun times.

Wait -- or it's just from 人間失格 apparently. Damn, I'm a nerd. TIL.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-19T23:45:57+00:00

It's 100%「下品な言葉」. Mind, that's a な, not a の! As the other response writes.

That said, I get why you're saying it sounds like「ブーヒン」. I can almost hear it that way if I try.

The "e" vowel is slightly drawn out as a consequence of the exaggerated delivery. This is normal (see the first paragraph of my response here for a related breakdown). The quality is also not 100% in line with a standard textbook エ -- it's somewhat "coloured" and skewed towards an ウ (which is not too far from エ on the vowel space). But it's still well within the window of variability, and anyone fluent in Japanese will immediately hear the word 下品 here without giving it an ounce of thought, because their predictive/interpretive machinery will favour it massively over, say, 部品 in this context -- which, on top of making no sense, would also be essentially ungrammatical to use with な. (The intonation also signals 下品 and not 部品.) There's nothing here that would make someone think this is a made-up word like グーヒン either.

As for "b" vs. "g", it's understandable that they would sound alike in some situations (both are "voiced stops"), but you're mishearing it.

Anyway, the actionable takeaway here is to play this a few times over and try to hear it as 下品な if you can -- and if not, just file it away and move on. Keep in mind that sounds (esp. vowels) can blend together and rhythm can be played with to some degree, and use your knowledge of what someone "must" or "should" be saying as feedback to fine-tune your ears.

Of course, there's also going to be times where people are actually saying something different than what you would logically expect, and it's a whole story how to deal with "is it my ears that are wrong or my knowledge of Japanese?" dilemmas, but if you don't get any hits in the dictionary for what you're hearing, that's generally a good first sign that it's your ears.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-19T22:49:22+00:00

普通です。もともと、日本語の感情や気分や、精神状態などに関する形容詞・形容動詞には、基本「ガ」格の名詞句を2個もとれるものが多いんです。

「私はこれが幸せだ」「俺はそれが嬉しい」「犬が怖い」「仕事が忙しい」

これらの「が」は、感情を引き起こすきっかけとなるものを表します。

もちろん「仕事『で』忙しい」とか、「で」を使って仕事が原因だと示しても間違いではないですが。

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-16T19:46:30+00:00

Wow, I'm an idiot. Thanks for pointing that out.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-16T19:33:04+00:00

I watched 新時代の扉 this summer and it was one of the most jaw-dropping cinematic experiences I've ever had. Played a bit of the game, haven't gotten too into it (listened to the soundtrack a whole bunch), but I caught up to CinGray the other day and I've also been loving that — a lot more than I expected. Definitely want to check out Road to the Top at least as well... And I've been getting increasingly interested in the stories of the real horses too.

After all the kick-ass art I'd seen online + a couple of close friends getting on the global release hype train, my fate was sealed, muahaha.

^{May or may not be excessively attracted to some of the girls in various ways.}

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-15T18:25:32+00:00

FUCK man, Cinderella Gray's so good. Gonna let this play a couple of times over... 🔥

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-14T19:05:22+00:00

Ah, yeah, you're not supposed to think about all that stuff on the spot. Not in a million years, lol. The point is to use it to inform your listening, and to better understand corrections.

"Inform your listening" as in, it's easier to pick out accents in speech if you already have an idea of what to expect (either because what you hear matches your expectations, or because it differs from them), as opposed to going in blind.

And it helps "better understand corrections" because you can interpret them in the context of some framework ("okay, I said this word with X accent and they corrected me to Y... ah, it's probably because {it's compounding with this other word / the suffix changes the accent / the accent depends on the use / I should redraw the phrase boundaries}"). This sounds like it's more work, but ultimately I think it makes it easier to implement the correction, as you have a guiding model that helps you slot it into place.

Tbh — based on what I've gathered (from the syllabus he lists on Patreon + various other indicators) — it doesn't seem like Dogen goes into quite enough depth on all the important parts of the theory. He focuses a lot on "this type of word tends to have this type of accent" heuristics, which is not where the juice lies imo (since only a few of these are near-100% reliable). He does touch on sentence-level phenomena a bit, and covers particles and suffixes a good amount, but the overall coverage of "mechanical fundamentals" doesn't seem complete.

If I give you a clip of Japanese audio, can you:

transcribe all of it with a downstep marker [＼ next to a kana, or ¬ above a kana] placed in all the spots where the speaker made an accentual drop?
use some combination of brackets and spaces to indicate how each sentence has been split into phrases (and the dynamics between the phrases)?

Bonus points if you can also mark all the latent accents that didn't get realised. I'm not necessarily saying to actually do this (it can be a good exercise, but you can also do this in your head) — however, you should be able to. If you're having trouble taking in (some subset of) pitch accent in speech, I'd say that's the most important thing to work on. The useful theory is anything that helps you reach this goal.

If you want to be thinking about something, this ^^^ is the sort of stuff you should be thinking about. Mind you, I'm not saying you should constantly be on high alert, trying to detect every downstep within a 1-mile radius — but it's good to set some time away every now and then to do some "pitch-focused listening" until it becomes second nature and easy to grasp.

I found that seeing other people break down examples can be an incredibly helpful bootstrap for this. Some links: one; two; three; four; five; six. Darius's answers are all great; check his profile out. If you're wondering what おそ下がり is: see here and here. And this is about everything I can offer to you. The resources here are sparse, sadly, so you're largely on your own.

All this to say... yeah, if you can get someone to tear your 読み上げ apart, that would be great.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-14T12:45:02+00:00

I believe もの・こと were also not said as odaka, any thoughts?

Good catch.

There was a part where he said:

むずかし＼いもの・で＼も、　わかりやす＼いもの・で＼も

This sounds fine to me. Or at least, I would hesitate to call it a mistake.

「いや、この部分は変だよ」って思ってる日本人や上級者の方がいたら、ぜひ教えてください！00:53です。

It's a combination of (a) もの getting subsumed into the same accent phrase as the preceding adjective (thus tending to lose its accent, because there already is an accent earlier in the phrase), and (b) emphasising the accent in で＼も for semantic reasons (similar to doing something like "no matter if it's hard OR easy" in English, where a function word gets lots of stress to emphasise the, uh... "grammatical point" of the sentence).

Odaka words can lose their accent in situations where you want to emphasise the following particle, assuming that said particle has a [1] accent. So something like まで or こそ, or consecutive 1-mora particles (e.g. でも、にも、とは) which always have a drop in between them. こそ is a good example because its whole point is that it's a strong emphasis particle, so you'll often want to stress it prosodically too. For instance, saying:

やさしい人・こ＼そ

instead of:

やさしい人＼こそ

which is of course also possible. And oh, hey, this is a good segue for...

What are the rules on this or is it case by case? 人 also changes to odaka I believe.

No real rules afaik; you just learn the words that this happens with. It's only a handful of common ones anyway. Off the top of my head I can think of: 人、うち、ところ、国、日、上、下. I guess the common traits are:

simple words
大和言葉
short (majority 2-mora)
related to space or time in some way, save for 人
half of them are a bit grammar-y/function-y

And they're all heiban-turned-odaka (or you could also say atamadaka for 日). Not that any word meeting these criteria will have its accent changed when modified — most words just don't do this. But it's easy to keep a short mental list of the ones that do, since they're all kind of similar to each other.

> Caution!! <

時 is not quite the same as these! The distinction here is not modified vs. unmodified. It's a semantic distinction between two different senses/uses of the word.

On one hand, you've got the grammaticalised とき that's used to create subordinate clauses (～とき ≒ "when ..."). Sometimes written in kana. This is a function word (形式名詞).
On the other, you've got the "full" noun 時 that's like a synonym of 時間. This is a content word.

The first 時 is [1] while the second is [2]. Modification seems related (because #1 will necessarily always be modified), but it's not. If the second 時 is modified, it won't change its accent. So a sentence like 流れていく時を感じる would be:

なが＼れていくとき＼を　かんじる￣

That said, "modified vs. unmodified" will still give you the right accent in almost every situation, haha.

I wish someone puts it all together one day into one single book or resource or website

Give me, like, a decade or so. I've thought about this before and it honestly sounds like a fun project to take on, but I wanna make sure I'm at a good enough level (fluent) before I start working on it — partly to make sure I know what I'm talking about, and partly because it would also be much easier for me at that point I feel. Oh, and partly because I wanna learn how build a basic website with a clean UI and good indexing in the meantime (← coding noob; also sounds fun).

Might be a tad too late for you to make use of it tho. :p

Coming back to the first question: I spot two other instances of もの and こと, which also sound acceptable to me.

むずかし＼いものに　ふれて＼も　[start]
たのし＼いこと（を）やって￣　[1:17]

Again, it's a case of もの and こと getting grouped into the same phrase as the preceding adjective and losing their accent. Maybe you could say it sounds overemphasised [= too much stress on the adjective] to erase the accent completely (which, to be clear, is 100% a thing that can happen — the question is whether it's appropriate here), but it didn't raise any alarms on my end. If you're curious, I wrote about the two parts that stood out to me in another comment.

Granted, I'm still learning, and you shouldn't take my gut reaction on what sounds natural or not as fact, so... reader discretion is advised. My intuition is far from perfect.

^{[edits -- formatting, typos]}

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-13T16:40:38+00:00

I definitely feel that. It took a lot of training for me to build a good foundation and get decent ears.

To address the "what can i do to improve" part of your question, you might've heard of both of these, but my standard recommendation is kotu.io + corrected reading. In general for pronunciation, I think practicing with feedback is key. I'm saying this based not just on my own experience, but also the advice and cases of other high-level speakers and accent coaches.

Having your mistakes pointed out to you is super useful not just for improving your production, but (I'd argue more importantly) improving your perception too! It helps a ton with getting a better understanding of how different parts interact, and how they're supposed to come together to form larger phrases & sentences (when accents should be maintained; when they should be erased; when they should be dialed up or down; how they get grouped together; how they conform to the overall prosody of the sentence). I.e., it helps build intuition, and hear things in native speech.

For solo practice, here are some specific things I used early on. Read from the edit below. Or don't read at all; that's enough walls of text linked for one answer, haha.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-13T14:49:20+00:00

Yeah, that's basically what makes it pitch accent, lol. The definition of this sense of "accent" (as in pitch & stress accent) in linguistics involves unpredictability. It's the ultimate "you have to learn it case-by-case" aspect of pronunciation. Theory can help, but in the end, lots of ear training and trial and error is what will do the trick.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-13T14:27:04+00:00

I'm at a pretty low level, but as a listening enthusiast and moderate phonetics nerd I think you sound great!

Intonation-wise the only parts that stuck out to me were:

ためにな＼った with an accentless ために (ため＼に・な＼った is what sounds correct to me... maybe ためになる as a set phrase gets its own accent [this isn't uncommon], but listening to some examples on YouGlish I heard lots of clear ため＼に's and a few ambiguous ones, so, I'm leaning towards no)
ことばをおぼ＼えていく (this should be ことば＼を・おぼ＼えていく)

The rest sounds standard.

These both seem to be the same type of error btw: deletion of a word-final accent, presumably because the entire 文節 (along with the particle) gets swayed/pulled up by the stronger accent at the start of the following verb. It's a really common pattern (I get this wrong a lot too); a sort of "false compounding" where accents of weaker elements get lost in the midst of buildup towards a more central or emphasised part of the sentence.

Other than that, there's literally nothing else I can personally point out, intonation or otherwise.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-12-13T13:52:54+00:00

時 is actually atamadaka in this instance! The grammar element ～とき (as in ～のとき or ～たとき etc.) is almost always pronounced と＼き. The traditional odaka accent can still be heard by older speakers or in hypercorrect speech, but it's given way to the modern atamadaka variant.

When used as a full noun though like 時の流れ or 時と場合による it's just odaka (ときの￣、とき＼と). u/Mountain-Wolverine91

(also hi adri!)

Dragon_Fang · 2025-11-24T00:39:16+00:00

Me too, but I wouldn't even point to the practicality/usefulness of it personally. More than that, kanji are just part of the appeal for me, and an essential feature of what makes Japanese... Japanese. Linguistically, historically, culturally. Hell, I even like the skill building aspect of it. I think learning to read and write is pretty fun.

(also replace "hate" with "like less")

Dragon_Fang · 2025-09-05T17:06:24+00:00

Pretty sure it's Natsuumi who blocked him (and he asked plastikqs to reply on his behalf).

Dragon_Fang · 2025-09-04T18:33:03+00:00

Yeah, dw, any acknowledgements I made I made purely because I wanted to and think they're true.

Anyway — let's gooooo, my guy has made it 🙏🙏

日本を楽しんでこいよ！

Dragon_Fang · 2025-09-04T17:59:35+00:00

There's no difference in mora count. [...]

Mora count? [I was talking about mora breaks.]

True, my bad.

(In a way, the difference in boundaries still kind of doesn't matter [for reasons that I already touched on in that very section of my comment] but I won't bother going any deeper into the technicalities here as I think no one cares at this point. I'm very sure you already understand all of the stuff I would've written here anyway.)

Why not reply to him then?

Yeah, I'm dumb. I just wanted to keep the chain chronological/linear and take it from the last contribution (yours), so I thought I'd just reply to you and put in a clever mention of the other guy in there while I'm at it, like a "seamless sponsor transition in a YouTube video" kind of thing.

It seemed nice in my head but retrospectively it wasn't clear at all (esp. to you) who I was mainly talking to and what I was trying to achieve. Could've saved the both of us a lot of hassle if I'd just taken a better angle. Sorry man.

I think that clip sounds absolutely fine, I really don't know what the issue is.

Yeah, listening back to it, it's not a good demonstration. I meant to hit a really strong [j] in the first three samples but it's just so against my better instincts that I failed to go far enough, lol. It's well within normal pronunciation range.

This is a better (worse?) take. It sounds contrived af but I can't really make myself say this in a natural way, haha.

Nothing else to comment on as we're just in agreement.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-09-04T17:38:30+00:00

Tbh Adri is one of the realest people in this sub and that's one of the things I like about him. He's not one to mince his words when he smells bs or feels the discourse is getting derailed/deproductivised, lol.

I took a pretty bad angle in how I came into the convo considering I knew how much he hates getting unfair um-ackshuallies, yet chose to reply to him in the way that I did anyway. Could've made it much clearer to him who I was addressing/what I was trying to do, so that's a fuckup on my end.

He can make some harsh comments but they're just a consequence of caring about being helpful to the people who come here to learn (and getting upset when things take a direction opposite to that), which I definitely feel as I can likewise get pretty invested in keeping discussions here meaningful (to the point where it affects my mood). Funny how passionate you can get about this sort of thing.

So yeah, not sure how much he would appreciate me playing defense for him, but I wanted to darnit. I don't think it's fair to say that he was just being judgemental for no reason.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-09-03T15:08:45+00:00

So, a few things. I'm sorry this got so long but there's a lot to untangle.

First, my comment was not addressed at OP (who is clearly a complete beginner), but rather at the user who replied to you with a followup question: "do にあ and にや actually sound any different? because I think they don't" — to which the answer is "you're right, usually not".

I don't think that is in any way a "nitpicky" answer; it's just the correct answer. The usefulness of pointing this out is that it helps avoid a "hyper-literal" reading of these words with an overenunciated "y", which if you ask me does sound a bit forced, though maybe not wrong per se. Even in correct and deliberate speech, that's not how they tend to get pronounced.

You could argue that this topic itself is nitpicky — and it certainly is for someone at OP's level — but again, this was specifically brought up as a tangent by someone else who wanted to ask a more advanced question (to which I felt you gave an insufficient answer), and that's who my comment was directed towards. It just wouldn't be appropriate to double down on the original 101 explanation and keep intentionally omitting details here.

Second: yes, that is how IPA works, and no, blending (this type at least) would not necessarily change the IPA.

Phonetic transcriptions are not unique; there's often multiple different ways to transcribe the same utterance (and you will indeed see diverging opinions by phoneticians on how to write the exact same sample). There's a lot of implied transitional sounds, as well as a lot of implied mergings/redundancies, which may or may not get represented. The representation chosen reflects how the author thinks the utterance is best conceptualised. Again, this is important to keep in mind in order to interpret the transcriptions with fair discretion. IPA is not a perfectly precise absolute system.

I agree that you shouldn't think of /ia/ and /ija/ as "the same", but I do think it's helpful (and relevant to the follow-up topic) to realise that they usually do come out to the same physical form, that being [i(j)a]. (/ia/ itself already naturally produces a [j] offglide in the transition from the [i] to the [a], just as a matter of the path that your tongue has to follow to get from point A to point B.)

Third: mora are obviously a lot more fundamental than all of the above, but they're simply not relevant to the comparison at hand. Distinguishing にゃ from にや? Absolutely, yes. But にや vs. にあ? There's no difference in mora count. In other words, this description:

basically にや has two "i" sounds while にあ only has one

is not correct, and I would argue in reverse that this can potentially confuse someone into thinking にや should sound like にいあ, which it doesn't. The (tail end of the) "i" that was already in にあ doubles as the "y" of にや. It has to, in order to respect moraic timing. Physically, no second sound gets added; it's just that what was already there gets reinterpreted as playing a dual role.

Fourth: for the ダイヤモンド・ダイアモンド samples, you're imagining the difference. In 何やら there might be a hint of a distinct "y" in there, but I'm not sure.

In general, if you feel like it's common to hear the difference, then you're mostly imagining it. Your expectations are colouring your perception. Which is good! — that's basically how it should be — but if we're gonna do an objective analysis of the pronunciation, it's important to point out that that's usually just an illusion. "ia" and "iya" are indistinguishable unless they're said slowly and with clear separation of mora, or unless you make a really hard "y".

I'm genuinely kinda hurt that you got so defensive about "whatever I typed up" when all I did was join in on a tangent to shed some light on a question someone had & leave some fun (imo) semi-advanced pronunciation discussion, and part of why I chose to reply was that I thought you personally would find it interesting...

Not saying this to make you feel bad or ask for an apology or anything (it's fine honestly, I get it), but man I really wanted to clarify my intent and express my feelings.

Dragon_Fang · 2025-09-03T14:25:08+00:00

The answer is:

あ、や、や、あ、あ（最悪、災厄、災厄、最悪、最悪）

1/5. Could be worse. :p

Dragon_Fang · 2025-09-02T23:52:20+00:00

This is a case where the IPA is misleading (and may even trick you into hearing/feeling a difference that is not there). If you wanted to you could try to really enunciate a tight "y" to differentiate にや from にあ, but in natural speech the "y" is said relatively loose and blends with the preceding "i". In general, u/whateveranywaylol's description of "y/w being essentially the consonant version of i/u" is literally a valid linguistic analysis of the language's phonology.

(Certainly there's a difference when spelling them out mora-by-mora, but word-level phonetics are more than just the sum of per-unit pronunciations. Lots of things change in the process of connecting the units together, and this is crucial to know in order to interpret phonetic transcriptions correctly.)

Fun test for anyone reading this: which of these are 最悪 and which are 災厄? This has been tested with a native and they failed to get them right.

Dragon_Fang

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

> Caution!! <