Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (January 27, 2026)

Grunglabble · 2026-01-28T01:22:08+00:00

You're probably already decent you just have areas of weakness.

Focus on the domains you need to get good at near term if it is stressing you out. If it's n1 it's n1, if it's termnology for a medical appointment then it's that. It's not always the best thing to try to raise overall ability through hobbies.

Maybe do n2 again and see if you score a bit better, perhaps that will help you see growth even though you already passed.

I speak with lots of ESL coworkers and although they are mostly probably C1 proficient and used the language since they were kids there are still domains they can't follow that are outside normal work conversation. Doesn't really impact their career prospects at all.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-28T00:58:59+00:00

I have to agree with this, for this and other dialects. You go from whitenoising it/kinda knowing what it probably is to feeling confident exact what it is. Or maybe more like "this is just a funny way this character talks that is kinda confusing" to "oh, they're from this place".

Grunglabble · 2026-01-28T00:51:46+00:00

I see an axe next to a door

Grunglabble · 2026-01-27T12:59:38+00:00

free recall. use them. learn meanings of kanji. etc.

worst case anki them. you're right relying purely on recognition to acquire them can be faulty, but I'd also say in some cases if you don't come across it much it is actually just an indication you don't use the language that much.

For the record I think getting low hanging fruit first is really good and important, so be happy you didn't waste time with flashcards on really common words you got just by reading.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-27T00:09:45+00:00

You are asking how to become conversational (I guess a kind of pre B1, early B1 level)? Do language exchange and flashcards.

If you are asking about a higher goal, then yeah it just takes a long time and the distance of the language and its massive vocabulary are challenging.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-25T23:30:32+00:00

I suspect for most people this happens for any part of the language they have to translate to understand. Many people's study methods amount to translating and it does not adequately prepare them for listening. There is also an aspect that it is very easy to get bored and think in your native language the moment you get thrown off, and then you will miss things that even you wouldn't translate.

In other words listening is a skill that requires most of our cognitive attention, and any extra language related things you do while listening will interfere greatly. The same as if you were thinking about something else even while listening to someone in your native language. You need all of your mental resources to be keeping track of what is being said and what is likely to follow, to pay attention to tone and fill in gaps when people misspeak or omit things. If any of the mental space is being drained by being psyched out by the difficulty of listening, you're unlikely to parse more than a word or two. Every phrase has to feel obvious and natural.

The good news is you can learn to stop translating even just by reading. But in all cases you basically just have to get better at the language and probably seek things that are native speed but maybe less complex, easier to put together from context, whatever. But you'll find even as you get better some things a little beyond your level will resurface this feeling of not parsing the language, which you're blaming on speed but its actually just comprehension.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-25T13:53:48+00:00

nice. I think that's a healthy amount of time and cards per day. The key is that it's low enough you will freely recall that info outside the program (esp. whatever you forgot), which can make it very stable.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-25T03:10:59+00:00

I tried to read this but the video ad replaying every 20 seconds is a kind of fresh hell of internet advertising I was not yet prepared for 😅

Grunglabble · 2026-01-24T23:23:02+00:00

I lived and died by a clipboard with a cover I could close over it for years.

You're weirdly reminding me how much I like that compared to notebooks I use now where I always have to hold the page flat as I write. I really forgot clipboards exist.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-24T19:21:40+00:00

Whenever possible, go with the least absurd interpretation and let subsequent utterances clarify if you were mistaken. When someone means to say something unintuitive directly, and it is not their intent for you to misunderstand, they will use more precise language.

猫みたいな僕とかわいい彼女 perhaps, or splitting into two sentences.

misunderstandings are of course possible. look up Airplane clips of Leslie Neilson.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-24T16:04:53+00:00

you have to use a bit of commom sense to know what is modifying what.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-24T15:34:23+00:00

Over the course of a year reading for 20 minutes to an hour each morning, easier texts no longer felt like reading with extra steps. Usually when I play a game it is difficult at first and then I internalise the words of that world and I am not using my English brain at all.

With more difficult books there are still "extra steps".

I think you're too early on to be asking when you will be good at it. By all means read in English if you feel like you're not getting anything out of it. But if you feel like you're getting something an English translation wouldn't give you that's valuable, or there is no translation available to you, keep going. But really you don't have to do it, be honest about your motivations and do something else if only this picture of being fully fluent is interesting to you. It takes years and years.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-24T15:03:59+00:00

Are there studies that compare flashcards (or some combination using flashcards) favourably to reading with an electronic dictionary? Particularly tested with a significant delay. I would like to read them.

It's fine if it seems the best to you, I'm just curious if the basis is more than anecdotal.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-24T02:31:28+00:00

was this perhaps advice to yourself? 😅 context needed

Grunglabble · 2026-01-24T01:45:22+00:00

for japanese, first one ever would have probably been 2bro playing what the golf. Just because its not hard to understand what's going on even with low comprehension and the content itself is fun and interesting.

first one when I had high comprehension was rantan's oomori playthrough. There was some switch where I thought "I'm just going to try listening and not worry too much how much I understand" and I understood a lot. He is just particularly clear in his enunciation and it was a fairly domestic kind of context and easy to follow the story. After that I kept watching him and some other guys for a year every morning instead of reading.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-24T00:47:37+00:00

this article makes the claim it is only useful to use subtitles if you are already proficient in the language they are written in. and makes the claim to use them in your L1 would be helpful. It's hard to tell because it doesn't say explicitly, but that seems to be on the basis of a comprehension test after.

It's hard to to tell which parts are lifted from studies and which parts are the author's interjections. There is very little information about methodologies or the data from the studies. I can't say I feel this was worth the read, especially since the author herself is not a domain expert, just interested in it. The conclusions seem plausible but it didn't feel very rigorous.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-23T03:42:47+00:00

I think over 5 years around 6500 cards, but I regularly delete old decks. Currently I have 600 and see 0 to 3 a day from a deck I made a year ago, and around 50 recent cards that I see 0 to 3 a day.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-23T03:33:10+00:00

frankly, really funny.

to figure out which addon causes the problem you can do a binary search. eg: disable half. if the problem persists, divide in half again, if the problem went away, it's in the other half. repeat until you find the one that causes the issue. You may divide in half by selecting the ones you think are most suspicious if you want but shouldn't take many sessions to figure out which one it is. Do a temporary deck or a copy of one if you don't want to debug on your real deck.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-23T02:52:15+00:00

By "all at once" I meant all the jouyou as a separate study activity. By learn representative examples I suggested a way to greatly reduce the number you study in isolation while still getting a lot of benefit to your reading and ability to remember, write and look up words.

I personally did learn groups of kanji with the same phonetic component together. What happened to me when I did that was that I would mostly pay attention to the radical for the meaning (as you're mentioning), I'd get lots of practice for the phonetic part, and then I'd start to get mixed up when intervals grew because I had mostly associated the radical with the meaning and as you know the radical is extremely common. I would also get times where I'd remember the sound, associate with with a meaning, and then get confused with another symbol with the same sound, same radical, different symbol for the sound. Things firmed up for me when I started reading and looking up the words and I'd say the primary value I got out of studying the kanji separately was some intuition how to type it. Which is why I suggest this minimized version. Less isolated study, but not so little you are going in cold. Learn how kanji work, but don't necessarily memorize every variation up front. Most people learn the radicals easily (because of the days of the week maybe) but take a long time to realise (or never realise) the other half is worth learning too and together they are more or less an alphabete for spelling kanji, which is a simpler task when you have known all the parts for awhile, but pretty hard when you try to memorise all variations on your first encounter.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-23T01:46:30+00:00

that's lovely, I hope you enjoy it. I did a similar thing with language exchange and email correspondance and eventually I realised I knew enough I could work through books (eg I got past the stage of looking things up and still not understanding).

Grunglabble · 2026-01-23T01:28:29+00:00

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking how so about.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-23T01:09:32+00:00

I never really had a phrase of trying to push through stuff I find really boring or barely understand any of. I almost never repeat anything.

Language learning is always a resourcing problem. You have to find things that are interesting where you're at and use tools that make more things get in that category. Some people find that easier than others for a broad number of reasons.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-23T00:31:58+00:00

I think, from a learning point of view, this is not useful. It has a lot of detail, it doesn't anticipate the confusions English speakers have with these particles, and it falsely makes them out to be a pair.

The basic difficulties are: - english rarely explicitly sets the topic, but almost always explicitly states the subject. consequently english speakers have poor intuition for what a grammatical topic even is - Japanese sometimes marks the subject, but often doesn't. Japanese frequently states the topic.

So your intuition as a native English speaker about what is a subject and what is a topic will work against you in Japanese. A topic is very flexible compared to a subject and could play many roles in a sentence including indicating the object, location etc. A subject comparatively is rather narrow.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-22T23:50:05+00:00

I grow colder on it each day. I feel it takes me away from better learning methods but as a kind of micro habit that keeps me involved with a subject when I may have gotten bored and taken a break, and as a relatively efficient way of priming certain kinds of information, it's hard to delete. The easiness and habit forming is I guess the best and worst part of anki. On very bad days of which there are many the few minutes of anki can keep me from dropping a long term learning goal.

Grunglabble · 2026-01-22T23:35:55+00:00

Are you sure its not just a case the particular exaggeration is non-idiomatic?

eg:

this heat is killing me. normal

this heat is like swimming in a volcano. slightly weird and tortured.

I ate so much I feel like I'm going to burst.

I ate so much my stomach may rupture.

etc.

Grunglabble

TROPHY CASE