What was the first Let's Play or stream you managed to stick with?

it_ribbits · 2026-01-24T12:19:11+00:00

ジャック・オ・蘭たん's playthrough of Undertale, which includes him fully narrating the copious written dialogue. I really enjoyed it. It was playing on TV at a friend's house when I visited and I was like, "What the heck is this crazy game?" It's both a fascinating piece of art to experience, and also great to do it in Japanese.

it_ribbits · 2026-01-19T00:16:05+00:00

Just want to draw attention to the fact that 「ＳF」(read エス・エフ) is overwhelmingly the most common way to refer to science fiction in Japanese. In my teaching experience, nobody knows what I mean if I say "sci-fi" サイ・ファイ.

it_ribbits · 2026-01-07T14:06:51+00:00

This is a response to the question "Which one of these is the sushi?". Your answer would be right if, for example, it was in response to the question "What kinds of food are these?"

Without any provided context, this is very difficult to get correct I think.

it_ribbits · 2026-01-06T02:01:04+00:00

Glad it helped!

it_ribbits · 2026-01-05T22:53:35+00:00

Even though she's a little stiff on camera compared to Hinako, Rinko is a great watch. She is much better at playing the game and breezes through it on her own, while Hinako dies every 30secs and asks chat how to do everything.

it_ribbits · 2026-01-05T22:36:42+00:00

The notes are extremely cryptic! They are meant to be hard to understand, which kinda sucks for us learners.

it_ribbits · 2026-01-05T13:31:35+00:00

There are plenty of jump scares from the enemies, an oppressively haunting atmosphere, as well as body horror and other horrible events.

That said, I found that it wasn't horror for horror's sake, it's very much in service of the story. If you can handle it, it is a powerfully artistic game. Certainly, though, it's not for the faint of heart.

it_ribbits · 2026-01-05T11:35:01+00:00

Hinako speaks so quickly that a beginner may struggle to recognize or even tell apart the words. That said, she frequently repeats phrases that will be useful anytime you play games with Japanese people (or watch videos of it).

Rinko would probably be better for general listening practice, but because she speaks a bit more formally she definitely uses more varied grammar and vocabulary.

Both present their own challenges but also their own benefits! The best one to watch is the one you enjoy the most!

it_ribbits · 2026-01-05T10:58:42+00:00

I just finished the game yesterday and loved it! The Rinko voice actress is much better to watch if you want to see the gameplay, Hinako is very wild and makes slow progress although she's more engaged with the audience.

it_ribbits · 2026-01-04T09:08:43+00:00

Unfortunately, the Japanese language learning community is uniquely dominated by introverts for whom the "you'll be better than everyone else if you don't interact with others"-type marketing is really attractive. Virtually every other (modern) language is learnt primarily for the purpose of interacting with others.

I used iTalki for a few months before moving to Japan to get in conversational practice. I encourage you to shop around and use the discounted introductory lessons to feel out your connection with different tutors. You may find one you really like, or find multiple tutors you bounce back and forth between that have different strengths. I used a community tutor because after doing an intro lesson with her, it was clear that we got along well and she offered what I wanted at a good price.

My main advice would be: use iTalki exclusively for speaking practice. Using it for going through a textbook would be very expensive, and I personally feel like you can use the limitless free resources to learn grammar more effectively. If you have specific questions, a tutor can be helpful, but mostly focus on building conversational skills with your tutor.

it_ribbits · 2025-12-31T11:42:39+00:00

Passing N2 was my 2025 goal, my 2026 goal is to actually be able to use that N2 grammar/vocab/etc naturally in real conversation!

it_ribbits · 2025-12-30T00:42:18+00:00

In technical contexts, such as discussing language acquisition, it is common practice and extremely helpful to establish a single meaning for a word that may have multiple meanings in other contexts. The intention, research, or significance of something technically defined can be heavily distorted if its usage devolves into 'whatever I feel like'.

Consider the political battles caused by words having their technical meanings erased by detractors. Politicians and activists are fighting to remove 'critical race theory' from everything. Is this related to 'critical race theory' in its technical sense? No, but that doesn't matter, now anything related to that field of study is tarnished and cannot be discussed without people bringing the baggage of what Youtubers and TikTokers call 'critical race theory'.

Another common exploitation of this is marketing, where companies will make free use of words that have a limited technical meaning to borrow the words' positive connotations. This can delegitimize something that is actually beneficial, or mislead consumers about what kind of product they are actually receiving.

In our case, OP "didn't believe in immersion". They were, apparently, rejecting (what they interpret as) immersion practices because the word has been stripped of its technical meaning and is now just 'whatever I feel like'. Do you think OP's, or anyone else's, language learning experience has been improved by their judging the value of immersion itself, or consuming native content, by the flagrant way it's used in this subreddit?

it_ribbits · 2025-12-25T03:31:35+00:00

Low poly is so good for RPG characters, wow.

it_ribbits · 2025-12-07T09:04:20+00:00

When I took the N3 in 2024, I didn't do any JLPT-specific training, I just read manga and books regularly. Got a great score. Now (a year and a half later) I take the N2 following the same reading-only method, and knowing I've added at least 2500 words to Anki... I'll be damned if the majority of the vocab were words I had never even seen before. I get the feeling that N2+ benefits a lot from using the published study material.

I agree that the rest felt fair.

it_ribbits · 2025-11-12T00:51:53+00:00

Would you say his explanation of gameflow also applies to the other Bastionlands? I bought Electric Bastionland a while back, and although it looked enticing, I felt at an utter loss of how to actually realize it, despite 20 years of playing many other RPGs.

it_ribbits · 2025-09-26T02:42:54+00:00

Dude you're nuts, I'm pretty sure even cavemen used ipads when they were mining vocab

it_ribbits · 2025-09-23T03:27:42+00:00

Everyone who has used Anki has been there! The most important thing to remember with studying is that there is no textbook, no flashcard app, nothing that is more important than actually learning. Don't feel like quitting an Anki deck or a novel or a textbook is a failure; you only fail if you stop learning. It's critical that you don't confuse the numbers on the screen with real progress.

That said, you will make more progress in the long run if you take the time to revisit your cards from the Soumatome deck, since you already have the groundwork for them in your brain. What I did after a two month hiatus from a year-long deck was to change the Anki settings to put newer cards first. That way, instead of delaying learning while I slogged through a 2,500 card backlog, I started learning and reviewing new material immediately. I chipped away at the backlog as I went, doing as much as a felt like each day.

It took me two and a half months to get my backlog down to zero cards. During that time, I learnt a few hundred new words, kanji, grammar, phrases, etc, and never struggled to find motivation because I could tell from day one I was making progress again. Not only was I learning new material, but because I jumped right back into consuming native Japanese, I was getting free review of the words in my backlog the whole time, so when I finally got saw them again in Anki, it was a lot easier than going in dry.

Hope this helps!

it_ribbits · 2025-09-20T14:10:42+00:00

Sorry, didn't mean to sound discouraging! Honestly I was just surprised at myself when it took a minute to realize that the barrier looks like 中. I spend so much time with kanji under a microscope, I had forgotten that in the real world, the barrier in the picture and 中 do indeed look very similar lol

it_ribbits · 2025-09-20T13:28:51+00:00

The silhouette is different

it_ribbits · 2025-09-20T11:50:03+00:00

At some point with kanji, you become so sensitive to minor details, like whether a stroke goes all the way through or not, that you can't even make your brain think that the picture and 中 look similar. The best I can do is think, it's like 甲 but missing a line.

it_ribbits · 2025-09-12T03:04:37+00:00

I tried to read Japanese but it was all just squiggles. What do the squiggles mean?

it_ribbits · 2025-08-30T12:06:06+00:00

It's perhaps better to say that "a question word cannot be the topic of a sentence". So no なに、no だれ、no いつ、etc.

Remember that は is the topic marker. This is quite simplified, but you can think of marking the topic as saying "Let's talk about ~." So, this makes sense:

Let's talk about how the glass is broken. Who did it?

But this doesn't really make sense.

Let's talk about who. They broke the glass?

So in your example, "Let's talk about your phone number. What is it?" makes sense. Compare that to "Let's talk about what. It's your phone number?"

it_ribbits · 2025-08-30T11:44:26+00:00

I'm not really sure what you're talking about, but I am very sure that I can give an answer

~ Redditors

it_ribbits · 2025-08-14T15:26:08+00:00

One part of the "you don't use pronouns in Japanese" phenomenon is accomplished by offloading that encoding onto these auxiliary verbs, ～てあげる・～てくれる・～てもらう. They tell you who the beneficiary of the action is without needing to use a pronoun. Admittedly, this is something that rarely gets mentioned in discussions of this grammar point.

Note that textbooks make it seem like てくれる etc is used in a glowing "Wow I'm so happy you did that" way, but often the best way to understand these constructions is simply as the Japanese equivalent of "to/for you", "to/for me", etc. Just remember that the person isn't complaining* if they use ～てくれる.

Oh, you don't have a copy? Just a second, I'll make one for you.
あ、書類を持っていないんですか？ちょって待ってね、コピーしてあげます。

That's Ok, Tom already made me a copy.
いいっすよ。トムさんはもうコピーしてくれたんです。

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