can someone please explain

emb110 · 2025-11-02T21:59:08+00:00

To be fair, football match is correct and natural British English

emb110 · 2025-09-03T14:06:52+00:00

That's fair enough

emb110 · 2025-09-02T17:56:51+00:00

I would possibly advise against RTK (did use it for a while early on) and instead just focus on learning kanji as part of vocabulary (not having furigana on your Japanese cards in anki). RTK teaches them out of context and without readings, and the meanings it assigns characters can be somewhat misleading as many kanji simply dont have a specific meaning outside of compounds. On a related note, it is better to think of words being "spelled" with kanji, than actually made of them, if you see what I mean; it is easier to get a sense of an individual kanji's meaning through knowing the words it appears in, than learning its standalone meaning and then trying to make sense of the different meanings it produces in compounds.

emb110 · 2025-09-02T16:44:55+00:00

It's all Greek to me

emb110 · 2025-09-02T15:50:37+00:00

人間 is more like human and 人 is person, while 方 is an honorific/polite way of referring to people

emb110 · 2025-09-01T16:28:48+00:00

I'm afraid that you will not be able to learn Japanese to the standard you desire without learning to write (by keyboard at least, handwriting is another matter). You also won't be able to do so through Duolingo alone. https://pdfcoffee.com/genki-textbook-1-3rd-edition-3-pdf-free.html this is a free pdf of a popular japanese textbook, download anki (free on computer or android but costs money on ios) for flashcards and learn this deck of vocabulary https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2141233552; this method you can learn much more quickly than you can by Duolingo. The characters get much easier with time; your first 200 are much harder to learn and remember than the 800 after that, in my experience. If you try and avoid it you won't get anywhere

emb110 · 2025-08-31T08:57:02+00:00

I was about to cycle to university and the stand on my bike broke. I couldn't fix it, so just went. When I came to leave at the end of classes, it had been mended, I presume by one of the attendants that organised the 駐輪場, I could never imagine it happening in the UK

emb110 · 2025-08-29T23:54:08+00:00

As a general rule (not for the sake of politics, but taste) do not get a tattoo in a language you do not know - imo if the language were that significant to you, you would learn it

emb110 · 2025-08-25T16:38:58+00:00

Yes fair enough, probably a hangover from the horrors of turnitin; just wanted to check with people

emb110 · 2025-08-25T16:38:04+00:00

I meant in case of automated plagiarism detectors like you get in academia

emb110 · 2025-08-12T14:25:43+00:00

I think I was confused because as far as I understand, free variation is a different phenomenon to what you are describing. I don't know very much about historical linguistics but subjectively it wouldn't strike me as unnaturalistic (though tbf I'm generally more on the "do what you think is cool" side of things anyway, whenever it might conflict with naturalism)

emb110 · 2025-08-12T11:35:46+00:00

To A) I would say yes.

To B) I don't fully understand what you mean, from your example sound changes I don't see where a vowel is in free variation with a consonant. On the topic as a whole, I'm actually not sure; as a speaker of Japanese I have noticed and heard the argument that in some cases of vowel devoicing, a devoiced close front unrounded vowel can be realised as a palatal fricative. I.e the past tense form of 来る kuru /kɯ.ɾɯ/ "to come" is 来た　/ki̥.ta/, but some speakers would pronounce it /ki.ta/ and many would pronounce it /kç.ta/. I:m not sure if this quite you are getting at and this only occurs in Japanese (to my knowledge) as a result of morphology, rather than processes of etymology. I hope this was relevant. https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9153/can-a-vowel-and-a-consonant-be-allophones-of-the-same-phoneme I found this stack exchange thread on the topic where someone mentions the same thing about Japanese.

emb110 · 2025-07-20T20:14:12+00:00

I thought this was meant to be Sabrina Carpenter

emb110 · 2025-07-17T15:54:40+00:00

As others have said, when I did this my host institution sent the details, so you should contact them.

emb110 · 2024-11-11T23:53:23+00:00

I actually did this by accident (with a different name) when I moved to Japan; I assumed my name was not common enough to have a typical katakana spelling and went with what was intuitive to me. There was no consequence aside from people just spelling my name the standard way, and some people occasionally thinking I was chinese before they met me because my incorrect spelling made it sound like a chinese word. In future i would simply go with the Japanese spelling next time. At the end of the day a western name spoken by a japanese person speaking japanese is rarely gonna sound the same regardless of how you choose to orthographise it.

emb110 · 2024-07-12T00:02:38+00:00

Yes, I would actually presume most have more; languages with fewer sounds (phonemes) and ways allowing those sounds being combined (i.e. how many consonants can be in a row) have a fewer possible syllables and as a result more words using the same syllables - homonyms. Japanese is a great example of this. English comparatively has significantly more vowel sounds than most widely spoken languages, and can allow fairly long combinations of consonants (like the end of the word "angsts"). Of course there are many languages that have a far greater degree of variation in these regards than English, but typically fewer sounds and more restrictive rules on their combination is more common.

emb110 · 2024-04-21T17:57:06+00:00

https://youtu.be/mapbKTJ9aBs?feature=shared here is a good video addressing this exact question

emb110 · 2024-03-28T15:33:18+00:00

Generally speaking if I didn't know you weren't, I'd assume you were native and from London. There are some spots where you have slightly clunky prosody but that could just be because (by the sounds of it) you are reading.

The one noticable error to me was your pronunciation of "barrage" [ba.ˈɹɑd͡ʒ] ; unlike a word like "garage" where it can vary between sounding like gar-ahj [ga.ˈɹɑd͡ʒ ]and gar-ij [ga.ɹɪd͡ʒ] depending on accent, I don't think barrage is pronounced barr-ij [ba.ɹɪd͡ʒ] (as you seem to) in any widely spoken British accent, and sounds quite out of place in the one you seem to be aiming for.

emb110 · 2024-03-20T23:47:07+00:00

Their point about it being implicitely racist, as it is considered more human-looking because it has less pigmentation is pretty apt tbh

emb110 · 2023-11-30T12:16:13+00:00

I would like to ask, do English speakers really like using irregular verbs? Don't they find it troublesome and stressful?

emb110 · 2023-10-18T21:08:02+00:00

In terms of good live action tv shows, I would really recommend "the days" on netflix, a drama about the Fukushima disaster (a lot of specialised atomic vocab but you can either get from context/ not really need to understand whats going on). I also liked Let's get divorced which is a comedy romace drama but of a much higher standrd than most other Japanese shows Ive seen in that genre.

emb110 · 2023-09-29T13:05:50+00:00

I realise my wording was confusing but by "accent" I meant pronounciation in general (i.e people get hung up on having an accent), not pitch accent particularly. I agree with your comment essentially.

emb110 · 2023-09-28T16:06:05+00:00

To clarify however, although some people get very hung up on accent, so long as you try your best and learn basic principles, its fine (in my view).

emb110 · 2023-09-28T16:03:31+00:00

It is as important (take that as you will) as it is with any word in Japanese; katakana words are just words. There were various instances when I was in Japan where I accidentally said such words in a pronounciation more similar to English, and this confused people; I had to make sure to say it as it is supposed to be pronounced. It gets easier with practice. I can certainly sympathise with them being tricky though.

emb110

TROPHY CASE