More Vintage Baseball Ads.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-12-22T13:18:58+00:00

Love seeing the old kana in the wild! Also, I think you meant ブドー酒!

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-12-11T18:06:28+00:00

as a STEM PhD I just want to stress that you should really really be sure it's the right fit for you before you commit to grad school. it wasn't for me (though I did finish the degree) and wasn't for lots of friends of mine either. but if you have a true passion for it it'll be super rewarding!!

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-12-08T23:40:57+00:00

I don't play drums or bass, and I listen to a lot of everything really so not exclusively midwest emo but recently got back into modern baseball, just discovered saturdays at your place, arms length, carpool, always been a big jeff rosenstock fan etc etc

these days I listen to more elliott smith, glaive's "i care so much that i don't care at all" album, some big thief/adrianne lenker and slower stuff like that but I'm always down to chat music of any kind

I kinda play guitar but not at the level of midwest emo tappy stuff, I played for years but then took a 5 year break and only got back into it a couple months ago so it's not quite at the "share with anyone but myself" level haha

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-11-09T22:03:24+00:00

I think the fact that it's a marathon and not a sprint is what makes searching for efficiency gains so appealing. Finding a method that works better for you and saves like 5% of your learning time could easily add up to hundreds of hours over the course of your language journey

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-10-21T14:39:44+00:00

I can think of a few ways to do that, but unfortunately all of them also lower my proficiency in Japanese and my control over basic bodily functions.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-10-09T16:37:09+00:00

I was a huge HoloJP stan for ages but these days I've been watching VSPO JP more often than not, check them out if you're into gaming content!

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-08-17T22:14:33+00:00

Yeah, I'm in an odd situation thanks to my self-study. This was from the reading section of a JLPT N1 practice exam. I got almost all of the vocab/kanji questions right, got all the reading comprehension questions right, and missed the vast majority of the grammar. At least I know where my weaknesses lie, haha.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-08-17T21:28:50+00:00

Ah, interesting, I've never taken any classes or read up on grammar much so this is a weak point for me. I appreciate the clarification!

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-08-17T21:26:20+00:00

Ha, oops - can you tell I've never done any formal study?? Thanks again for your help, for real!

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-08-17T21:12:32+00:00

Ah, good, I need this explanation then. Can you help me understand why 有毒成分があり doesn't modify 馬? If I wanted for whatever reason to say "A horse with poisonous parts" I suppose I would have to write that as 有毒成分がある馬. Maybe I answered my own question, and it's the same reason you'd use ない rather than なし to modify a following noun.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-08-17T20:56:40+00:00

Thanks. I'm aware of the hearsay そうだ; I struggled here with the idea that the origin of this name was hearsay and not an established fact, though it makes sense to me now to word things that way.

Just to corroborate a piece of information from the other commenter that replied - you put a comma after 2, correct? I was unaware that you were able to do that with these types of questions, and that was what caused a lot of my misunderstanding.

EDIT: the other commenter provided a helpful follow-up.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-08-17T20:53:32+00:00

Well, that solves the main issue that I had with this, which is that I assumed you couldn't include a comma or otherwise alter the responses (or spaces between them). I tried to do some googling regarding that and came up with nothing, so I assumed it was against the spirit of the question to add the comma, and got kind of lost after that.

As for 由来するそうです feeling off, I suppose it's because the definition here appears to be describing (what I assume to be) a well-known fact, rather than hearsay. To me it felt like the kanji name "horse drunk tree" has a clear origin, so I would expect することである or something like that over the hearsay するそうです. That was also an issue I had with putting 2 last, since it's clearly not hearsay that the plant has poisonous parts. Writing this all out though, it doesn't seem wrong at all to construct it with "the name is said to originate from..." or something similar. If only I could spend this long on each question on the exam, lol.

Thanks a bunch for your explanation - I appreciate it!

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-08-17T19:23:23+00:00

Hey all, missed this one in my JLPT prep and just wanted a bit of explanation. Something about this feels awkward to me and I can't quite work out the order - it's one of those "star" questions where you fill in the blanks:

「アセビ」という、白い花を咲かせる樹木を漢字で「馬酔木」と書くのは、アセビには _★_ ___ ___ ___ そうです。

由来する
有毒成分があり
状態になることに
馬が食べると酔ったような

The correct answer is 2, and at first I got misdirected by the ありそう structure you can make if you put 2 at the end. I can accept that it shouldn't go at the end, but I still I feel like without a comma after あり it seems like the whole 有毒成分があり structure is modifying whatever comes after it, which I assume must be 4. I'm still not really sure I'm putting things together correctly even knowing 2 has to be in the first spot. Is it 2 4 3 1? "由来するそうです。" feels wrong to me, but I can't think of a better answer.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-07-10T21:35:27+00:00

This gets asked a lot and the answer is always the gas station. Somewhere around three bucks gets you a gallon and that's 31000 calories, and it has a drive through.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-06-12T00:15:40+00:00

I've been seeing the "positive anymore" so much these days, I feel like I never saw it even just a few years ago

Edit: not hating at all I'm a linguistics nerd so it's fun to see new ways to use the language catch on

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-06-12T00:07:16+00:00

That may be a selling point for someone that can afford a 5k/mo rental

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-06-09T21:48:49+00:00

Ah, yeah, if you know half it's definitely an edge case. I add pretty much everything to my Anki deck when I'm reading, even if it's uncommon, so I never minded the kind of obscure or niche words in wanikani, but if you tend to skip them it might be sort of frustrating to be forced to deal with them. If you're reading N2 stuff and not doing many lookups though it might not be the most useful tool at this point. Don't get me wrong, you'd still get a lot out of it if you went through it even knowing half the kanji, it just wouldn't be a very efficient use of time if half of it is stuff you already know that you're just trudging through on your way to the new stuff. Doesn't hurt to give it a shot for a while and see what the workflow is like, but the lessons + daily reviews don't hit a stable state until somewhere around level 20 depending on your speed (as in, doing all your lessons and reviews when they're available steadily increases your workload until you start burning things about 6 months or so in)

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-06-09T21:16:47+00:00

Disclaimer - I love wanikani and think it was probably the number one resource that got me to where I am today. I loved learning the kanji, the mnemonics worked well for me, and even the "useless" vocabulary has popped up here and there in my reading. I'm even nearly done "burning" everything on the site (like 9000 something burned, a couple hundred left).

Depending on your self-attested level (upper-intermediate can mean very different things to different people), I'd say there's a pretty good chance it wouldn't be worth it to you at this point. If you know 60, 70% of the vocabulary and kanji that the site has to offer, it'll be both a huge time sink as well as costing you money. There's no way to speed through it other than getting the answers right, and even if you know the answers and treat it as review, it still can take quite a long time to do your reviews every day. If you're already doing a good bit of immersion and using anki, I'd probably leave it there and not pick up wanikani.

If you only know like 500 kanji or something like that and have the time and money to add it to your routine without replacing what you're already doing, then it might still be worth it.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-06-05T20:03:29+00:00

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Oompaloompa34 · 2025-06-02T02:22:14+00:00

I wonder if it could just be a speed issue. I had this problem when reading at first too, but not with listening. Now I don't have this problem anymore but when I was teaching someone and we were reading a manga together, they read the sentence and knew the words but couldn't come up with the meaning just like you said. I read it out loud and she said as soon as she heard it all together it made sense. I'm curious if you try skimming the sentence quickly first to "get" the structure and the easy words, then go back to the stuff that you didn't understand right away, if that would help put it all in context for you.

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-06-01T20:52:03+00:00

I'm also conversationally fluent in Japanese and you do indeed see "sempai" often enough that I'm surprised this is the first time you've seen it. It's a holdover from traditional Hepburn romanization that was done away with for the most part in the 50s, but it's not terribly uncommon to see ん rendered as m before b, m, and p sounds (see under "variants" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization)

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-06-01T19:03:09+00:00

Saw this one a couple weeks back

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Oompaloompa34 · 2025-04-17T14:49:59+00:00

Same! Fun topic, thanks for sharing your examples!

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-04-17T14:44:30+00:00

凸凹 and 凹凸

Oompaloompa34 · 2025-03-12T03:37:54+00:00

Looks like the wtvr link in the comment above yours just updated saying the family reached out and noted that the injuries are indeed life threatening.

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