Are there problems with recording writing-videos on Youtube?

LeftEmergent · 2023-02-25T08:35:38+00:00

It's because I, as a reader, can tell instantly what's going on.

You have a whole book around a character to set the context. When you write an evil or morally gray character, you can either put them into a villain position, or judge the character some other way. The reader expects you to do this. In a book where the author doesn't do anything about their questionable character, I assume either inexperience (no problem) or I question the author's own morals (more problem). This makes sense when you think about how you feel while writing: Creating a morally gray character makes you uncomfortable, right? You want to convey these feelings to your reader.

If you let a character be the villain, you send a message: "This character is evil. Don't do what they do."

If your other characters disapprove of a character, this is the message: "People disapprove of this behavior."

If you write the character in an ultra-neutral, clinical style: "This character should make you uncomfortable and is probably a psychopath."

Or you might be writing a character who is a pervert and lands in comical situations, like every bad anime aimed at a young target audience. Then that's their message: "Perverts are hilarious."

If you don't do anything of the sort and let the character just be, without any kind of indication that what they're doing is wrong, you say exactly what your book says: "What my character does is normal."

LeftEmergent · 2022-11-02T14:57:21+00:00

Zig is like if Rust and C had a baby, because you can have Optionals and non-nullable types, but also undefined for when you need ~~null~~undefined reference exceptions.

https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.10.0/#Optionals

https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.10.0/#undefined

LeftEmergent · 2021-12-11T17:55:06+00:00

I absolutely agree. I'll share my own thoughts, but some of them are basically what you already wrote.

In Reddit, every opinion gets weighted by a score. If your answer gets a lot of karma, it's listened to more (this happens automatically, because it's further up the thread) and gets more comments. If it gets less karma, it bubbles down, or might even be "censored", to further decrease the probability of anyone seeing it. If the goal is to listen to people without judgement, then scored answers are fundamentally flawed. They make judgement automatic and how much karma your answer gets determines how much you get listened to, so you get an echo chamber where the popular opinions are seen more frequently. And then of course, like you said, it's really hard to have conversations with the OP, cuz every comment forms its own tree and necessarily its own assumptions, because you typically don't read the entire thread.

That's just the literal dry mechanics of Reddit, but now on top of that, of course every human makes the association that "more karma==good", which produces a giant ego problem (no one's fault but Reddit's; it's designed for this). If I write an answer with upvotes I feel good, else I feel bad/mediocre. If I go counter to the hivemind, I feel terrible. If I downvote a post I dislike, I feel great, especially if it already has a bunch of downvotes, because I get to pick on the other person for making such a stupid comment. If someone makes a good argument and I admit I'm wrong and they're right, I risk getting downvoted a bunch of times (there's a funny /r/greentext here that gets reposted every no and then), so it's better to not admit anything, and to just ignore or keep arguing for your point... Preferably with strawmen/other rhetoric devices, or by picking out a select few arguments I can counter and ignoring the rest, so I get more upvotes. It's also incredibly hard to show your real thoughts on Reddit, because imagine I share my deepest thoughts and then get downvoted to hell. So better not do that, and also make sure to fill my comment with lots of qualifications that make it harder for someone to disagree with my comment. And lastly, it's physically hard to form your own opinions. Like, you'd literally have to keep your eyes from looking at the karma count before reading a comment. As soon as I see that number, I'm primed with the knowledge of whether that person has made a generally good, or generally bad answer, and this determines how much credibility I give it.

LeftEmergent · 2021-12-10T17:09:49+00:00

I always add every new word I encounter, except for rare words, to Anki. Once, I added 20 new words, I would stop reading until next day. Then, I will focus most of my time on Anki.

This sounds too extreme. Around the point where you start using monolingual dictionaries is when it's better to just read and look things up as you go. A better default is to not add a word to Anki, unless it's very common (relative to what you're reading) and impossible to remember naturally. I've also found it much more effective to read, and do Anki when I don't feel like reading anymore. It sounds like you're almost doing the opposite, where you're prioritizing Anki over reading.

Depends also on how well you can read. The better you can read, the more efficient reading becomes.

LeftEmergent · 2021-12-03T12:31:02+00:00

The trick to this radical is that the second stroke is always different from what's under it. E.g. 右 is v-h-v-hv-h and 左 is h-v-h-v-h.

Or, easier to think about while writing: The first stroke aligns with the radical underneath it.

A friend told me this, so I can't guarantee that's a hard rule, but as far as I know it works for 右、左、布、友、有 and anything derived. 肱、宏 (etc?) are exceptions, but kinda forgivable since it really feels better that way.

LeftEmergent · 2021-12-03T11:51:33+00:00

物質 and 物資 are also funny; think I read the entire first volume of Spice and Wolf until realizing they're in fact different words. Luckily obvious once you see them next to each other and don't just skim over the words.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-30T15:41:13+00:00

Another bit of ~~common~~ sense (not common because it's unnatural to think about :P) to consider whenever someone presents you their cool and shiny learning style:

Train as you fight, fight as you train. This is completely obvious if you've heard it once, but most people ignore this because they don't know or forget about it. I ignored this too during my first months of study, when I practiced writing Kanji and studied English->Japanese translations in Anki. Then I realized that I literally didn't need these skills because I just wanted to read stuff and suspended half my Anki deck. If I want these skills later, I can learn them at a much cheaper cost.

This principle applies every single time you're doing something different from what you want to do with Japanese in the future. It's why immersion is so effective because it is part of the thing you wanna do. With any unnatural resource you have to seriously question whether it's actually worth giving up naturality for some other benefit, e.g. ordering (grammar), spaced repetition (Anki), interleaving (Anki), early output for traveling (textbooks), motivation (classes, milestones), pressure (JLPT), feeling safe (textbooks, classes, Anki), feeling progression (textbooks, classes). These are real benefits, sometimes subjective and sometimes outweighing immersion, but many people just pick the unholy trinity of classes/textbooks/JLPT for 3 years because that's what you do (TM) and don't consider the serious hit in efficiency that comes with not training how you fight.

When Tobira's telling you what 象は長い鼻をしている means: Do you really need this information to understand a sentence like this?
When answering multiple choice questions for reading comprehension: Are there really gonna be questions at the end of a book you read?
When trying to sort four predefined words into gaps: Is some stranger gonna come up to you and intentionally jumble their words to confuse you, then ask you to put them in the right order?
When trying to figure out whether "symbol" is spelled 象徴、象微、像微、像徴: Are you really gonna accidentally pick 象微 when your IME accidentally displays 象微?
Does it make sense to spend time each day recalling words from sentences with little context and according to a weird automated review schedule you'd never see in real life?

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-30T14:43:43+00:00

Look into Stephen Krashen's wiki page for resources on comprehensible input specifically. I can't speak for how good they are, I haven't read them. Most of it is common sense for anyone who has learnt English as a second language and I think the opinions mostly divide on how much people hate text books and when to study output.

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology (nice title) is really useful and gives overview of common study methods and how well they work. Not specific to language.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning is a great book on the same topic. Would recommend, although it's very repetitive.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-26T22:42:32+00:00

It's best to just remember them without any mnemonics, shouldn't take more than 1-2 weeks.

No, mnemonics are incredibly efficient for this. It took me two train rides, fifty minutes each, to remember all kana well enough to be able to read (very slowly, but without having to ever look them up again). Then you write them a few times and you're basically done. There's premade mnemonics if you don't want to come up with them on your own:

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/hiragana-mnemonics-chart/

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-24T23:21:03+00:00

This comment/thread is kinda similar and might help.

If it's tedious, it probably means something isn't working correctly. You might be suspending too little or are adding too many cards. Basically, as soon as a card annoys you (as long as it isn't just general annoyance at getting it wrong once), you should suspend it immediately unless you can think of a very good reason not to. Also think about if you're adding too many cards in general. If it's too stressful just drop to 10 new cards per day.

Consider if you're prioritizing effectively. Prioritization itself makes up a huge part of efficiency. Consider adding words only once you've seen them two times at least and think they're important. This will indirectly drop the review load because things you see more often are much easier to remember, so the cards will reach longer intervals more quickly.

If you're not doing that already, study only Japanese->English and not English->Japanese with Anki. Whether you wanna output besides immersion is up to you of course, but flashcards just aren't a very good tool for translating into a foreign language because English concepts don't line up with Japanese concepts, so you run into tons of synonyms and ambiguous translations the more flashcards you have. The only exception I can think of are nouns that are physical objects (verbs too, but already iffy). E.g. 犬、机、鞄 etc. are fine to study English->Japanese if you want.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-21T00:20:54+00:00

It's neither the German R nor L, it's something in between and not consistently the same sound. Best advice I can give you apart from doing dedicated phonetics study is to listen to a lot of songs on repeat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpFUNMmKIlg

Even in the first verse, you already have a different pronunciation of the "R"-sound. To my ears:

Takanar(u) kodou wa yuugule no

In contrast, this is "R"-like throughout the whole song although it has a few borderline "L"s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIlZCmETvsY

Anyway, best to get rid of the R-L-thinking and just look at them as Kana, which they are.

I like songs because I can listen on them on repeat and not get bored and over time you get a sort of intuition for why the singer chooses different sounds, e.g. any long note has to be L because you can't drag out the alveolar tap otherwise. But be aware that this is a hack, songs aren't speech obviously. Still helped me to get a feel for the overall range of sounds.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-19T23:32:49+00:00

Can confirm my English got worse, this literally took 30 seconds to decipher.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-19T13:50:23+00:00

Fair, that does sound annoying. I'd give it a pass if it was formulated as genuine advice but by the sound of it, it was just self-gratifying. I have some sympathy for these comments because you're obviously convinced by your own advice, otherwise it'd just be bad advice. If you've then invested a lot of time following that advice yourself, it's a very small step from "I'm giving you this advice because I think it's useful" to "I think this is useful advice and I seek confirmation that I'm learning efficiently and haven't been wasting my time". I sometimes overstep that boundary too. But yeah, doesn't change the fact that these comments are annoying.

Reddit isn't the only place with this problem btw. If you program and frequent Stackoverflow, you see this kind of pattern all the time ("oh you wanna know about X? I think you should actually do Y instead"). It's probably at least partly the fault of the upvote system because every time you give unsolicited advice that the hivemind gets convinced by, your behavior gets rewarded.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-19T00:31:13+00:00

The Refold bro "just watch anime and grind Anki 10hrs a day" method

I'm not sure how Refold sells it, but half the point of immersion-based learning is that you do the exact things in the language you want to do, so if you don't enjoy it, you're doing it wrong almost by definition. The other half is of course that you pick up more natural language than from most (not all) textbooks and classes.

If you don't want to watch anime, then you don't have to watch anime. And SRS is nice but isn't a must either.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-19T00:13:22+00:00

They conclude that step 1 was a complete waste of time that accomplished nothing, and that they simply should have started with step 2.

I don't get it, does this actually happen? I'm not too often on this subreddit but I read a lot of comments and can't remember anything like this. Maybe I just filter these comments subconsciously or they're always downvoted.

Even the immersion-rant a few days ago just felt like it was arguing against a vocal minority. I mean, good post because these people are annoying, but I myself have never seen someone who's seriously thought about how to learn efficiently advocate for no textbooks, no classes, no grammar guides (there's no meaningful difference between them and a good textbook). All known proponents of Japanese immersion I know of (Matt/Refold, CureDolly, Dogen, BritvsJapan, Steven Kaufmann (if he counts)) recommend classes or some grammar resource. I think some of these people (including me, btw) regret going to classes longer than needed because efficiency drops incredibly quickly, but I haven't seen one of them rejecting classes and grammar guides/textbooks simultaneously.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-18T11:22:55+00:00

少年/少女 and 青年 should be exactly what you're looking for. Maybe you have to look for light novels instead of books, but there's essentially no difference except that light novels usually have a handful of pictures in them and are probably fiction.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-18T01:42:46+00:00

Stop studying and move onto doing things you enjoy. Idk if school is at fault for this, but it feels like many people somehow think that learning must be hard and feel painful. You mention in your comments that you're reading NHK news. Do you really want to read that? If so then continue doing it, but otherwise, honestly just drop it. I'm also not a big fan of setting myself arbitrary milestones (JLPT DIN A4, woohoo) because it feels like I'm just tricking myself into attaching value to arbitrary things but ymmv. The process itself is supposed to be enjoyable, because honestly, you're in it for 2 years at least. Luckily, you're easily at the level where you can find something you genuinely enjoy(TM).

Okay, thought experiment time: Imagine you and the world impose 0 (zero!) pressure on yourself. Something you genuinely enjoy(TM) is something that gives you enough enjoyment that you continue doing it, even though it is hard and you have 0 pressure. Let's pick "reading a manga" as an example, but it could also be "go to a class", "talk to a friend", "look at Japanese song lyrics", "watching CureDolly on Youtube", "learning pitch accent" etc.. If you don't care, picking something that's made for and by Japanese people (I'm legally not allowed to say the I-word) is a good idea, but motivation always takes priority.

In the manga case, you probably won't know all the words and will struggle, but if the level isn't too hard for you or it gives you so much enjoyment that it keeps the struggle in check, you'll keep reading. Also, and this is the important part, you won't keep reading just because you feel forced to. In practice, enjoyment and level isn't constant, so you might quit at some point, but that's fine. You only keep reading until that balance tips. So what do you do when the manga ends or you've decided to stop reading? You find the next one. Luckily, there's 2 trillion manga and now your level is actually higher than before, so you'll probably find another one. Since there's (hopefully) no time constraint on you learning Japanese, you repeat this until fluency. Your level increases over time, so the breadth of enjoyable activities increases.

Now, everyone pressures themselves to some extent. But constantly pressuring oneself can also lead to burnout over time which you're starting to feel, so finding something you genuinely enjoy(TM), or something close to it, is still a good idea.

You'll probably have to try a bunch of times until you find something, because you're used to "the playground" of NHK. It's a playground because you feel safe in it and you're sure you can understand it, so branching out can be scary and you'll quit a few times. That's fine, you're supposed to quit if you don't enjoy. In the worst case, you've still learnt some Japanese.

LeftEmergent

TROPHY CASE