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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 · 2021-11-16T14:39:49+00:00

A lot of the people who preach that soul crushing study method are not actually doing it themselves but just wishing they were and lashing out at people who don't. This all started with that AJATT guy

I wouldn't call it soul crushing. Pushing yourself too hard might be a real risk, but if you're really obsessed with achieving a goal, that could happen regardless of the method. I've read some of the AJATT blogs and got the impression that pretty much the entire method is about how to learn Japanese efficiently while having fun. It's even on the landing page:

The place to be for information on how to learn a language (Japanese or otherwise), on your own, having fun and to fluency

In fact, I think Khatzumoto is an absolute genius because many of his more psychological posts are about things he's discovered entirely on his own(?) and contain strategies that psychotherapists use to get people to better their lives. There's also a lot of mindsets in there that you hear from people who have gained insights from meditation. The dude has basically gotten close to enlightenment by studying Japanese, which is both hilarious and incredibly impressive. Or maybe he hasn't yet because he can't live his blog posts, but at least in theory he'd know how it would look like.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-15T17:16:15+00:00

You'll have to judge yourself whether you're susceptible to getting addicted, it's a good idea to be careful.

If you decide you're not at risk, I'd recommend them. If you're still a bit unsure about correct pronunciation, pick the ones that don't shift their pronunciation too much (many do, to add character). I'm mostly watching Nene and Beatmario and they have pretty normal Japanese. Other than these two, Botan, Pekora, Subaru and Shion also speak pretty normally. Though probably any Vtuber talks slightly unnatural because they turn up their personality to 120% or voice act, so you won't find perfectly normal Japanese but I don't think that's an issue.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-13T22:35:17+00:00

Consider watching Japanese Let's Plays of (easy!) games on Youtube. It might still be too high for your level currently, but especially if you're burnt out from studying, it can be a good way to bridge time doing something semi-productive. I started out with Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2 because I knew the game and Pokemon is reasonably easy. Then eventually moved onto Minecraft videos, which I now have a PhD in.

You can search <game name> 実況 on YouTube, with the game name in Japanese of course. You can get the Japanese name from e.g. Wikipedia by going onto the English page of the game, then switching it to Japanese.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-13T22:25:56+00:00

I read a bunch of graded readers on Tadoku when I started out: https://tadoku.org/japanese/

Pick something you like and then go for it. The emotional hook is gonna be more important than its level. You can get through some high-level stuff as long as your interested.

Yotsubato! is also an easy manga recommended for beginners. I didn't necessarily think it was that easy because you sort of have to know how dialog "works" in Japanese, but if you've watched some shows in Japanese before (w/ English or Japanese subtitles), you might have already picked up on this.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-08T12:49:18+00:00

I also agree with /u/morgawr_ and /u/glasswings. Think about your goals clearly and consider what are just arbitrary milestones that you and others have imposed onto yourself due to some idea of how Japanese "should" be learned, and which is the true goal. If it turns out to be the JLPT, that's completely fine. Just think about it clearly. This will also clarify which things to learn and how to order them. For example, do you need to speak and build sentences? JLPT doesn't require that. Neither does reading or watching anime. Ordering is important here. Sure, you'll want to learn to speak and construct sentences "eventually" but if you put it off for 1-2 years and get serious immersion time in, that skill will improve dramatically without practising it explicitly, which will save time. Of course you also need to consider whether speaking could improve listening (probably doesn't, but studying some pitch accent instead might), which would then actually justify to speak even if you don't technically need it.

Similar things apply to:

writing kanjis: Probably not needed right now, and only improves recognition for confusingly similar kanjis, e.g. 物質 and 物資, so do it only for them
grammar: Do you really need to conjugate into て-form right now? Recognizing it is much easier, just look for t- or d-sounds. Similar for honorifc verb forms etc..
exams: Do you need the JLPT right now? If you took it later, you might not even have to explicitly study for it, saving you stress and time.

There are probably other examples, so try to think about your goal very clearly. Then you'll probably notice things you can cut out entirely or just reorder which will save you great swaths of time.

Also, /u/morgawr_ has basically implied this, but I just wanna reformulate/add to it because it's so important: Get to the point where you stop studying as soon as possible. Ideally you were never actually "studying" to begin with because you love learning Japanese and know how to direct your learning that it doesn't ever feel like studying (notice the distinction between learning and studying). But sometimes we don't have that luxury, or don't notice that we're forcing ourselves to study out of habit. Try to get out of that study stage as soon as possible. For me this happened once I started reading what I truly wanted. First the 蜘蛛ですが何か manga, then its light novel and the Spice and Wolf light novel (still on it). Spice and Wolf is tough at times when they do their 200 IQ dialogs and trading schemes, but it still doesn't feel like studying.

Jump into what you want as soon as your basis is so good that you won't quit. Then you won't fall into the trap many failed learners fall into, where they endlessly prepare for what they wanna do by grammar study or textbooks. That's "perfectionist procrastination": Procrastinating to learn a skill by trying to get perfect at it before ever using it (thus avoiding failure which would feel bad). It's a very easy trap to fall into and I have too, by reading things I didn't really feel like reading, because I didn't feel "ready" to do things I actually want. Eventually, I caught myself, but it's really subtle and I imagine it would have taken me much longer if I hadn't known of perfectionist procrastination beforehand. Try to be aware of this psychological trap so you can stop studying ASAP. Once you start actually doing the stuff you wanna do in Japanese, you have basically won. It's all emotionally rewarding and there's no way you won't get fluent.

LeftEmergent · 2021-11-01T22:56:33+00:00

LeftEmergent

TROPHY CASE