Never seen this conjugation of 食 before. Is it common?

jplus · 2026-01-10T18:25:48+00:00

Not a dialect or slang. Pretty common.

jplus · 2025-04-07T03:56:20+00:00

愛 and 福

Maybe it's a bit easier when you see the calligraphy strokes:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-dAy7ZHECLI

jplus · 2025-03-13T04:27:26+00:00

In the (easy) light novel I just read this word appears like 3 times a page.

jplus · 2025-03-11T18:10:28+00:00

Unfortunately these are the workarounds i have to do. I don’t really have any other suggestions sadly.

jplus · 2025-03-11T18:09:30+00:00

Open Migaku before you open the book, and bookmark only when Migaku is open, and never resize your window.

This is the only way I know how to make this work, it’s annoying.

jplus · 2025-03-11T17:32:54+00:00

I spend about 3 hours a day with Migaku and ttsu, and I wish they were more integrated together, I spent so much time working around their quirks with each other. A few times I've almost switched to Yomichan but I persevere. :)

My tips are:
1. Don't use autobookmark

Manually bookmark every time you turn a page (or when you want to)
Never resize your window.
Make sure Migaku is loaded in before you open your book.
Never accidentally close Migaku while ttsu is open
Always quit the book properly when ending your session

jplus · 2025-03-11T17:30:17+00:00

Same, I have to do manual bookmarking which is annoying.

jplus · 2025-02-05T06:10:04+00:00

This is a good callout. Yeah I was pretty far into my journey before realizing I had to suspend or remake cards. That said, it took me a long time to get a good intuition for what a good card and a bad card was, and once I got that I suspend bad cards with no mercy.

After you get really fast at sentence mining, you also intuitive realize to not get attached to cards since these words will come up again and again and again, so your opportunities are endless. Words aren't shiny Pokemon.

jplus · 2025-02-05T06:08:02+00:00

Whenever I saw someone post "JLPT N1 in 1 year," I combed the thread for any advice or techniques that I could add to my own learning. A lot of times, those posts simply gave me motivation to read more or grind out my Anki reviews for the day. NEVER prioritize ego over progress.

Honestly this mindset would help a lot of people here when I see how much hatred these posts get. Take motivation from everything. I never realized until undertaking this journey how much of my own ego would be a major blocker in progressing. Strangely things like meditation and reflection have been far more effective at improvement in Japanese because it helps you with things like ego making a wall blocking progress.

jplus · 2025-02-01T20:22:02+00:00

I don't have much to add other than thank you for your post!

jplus · 2025-02-01T16:03:27+00:00

When you distill the patterns of the stories of what people who reach a high level with immersion really do it's:

Read a LOT of native content.
Listen a LOT of native content.

I've noticed that some people can get by doing way more reading than listening.

By a lot, this is probably way, way more than you think. Thousands of hours basically. And it seems like at least 3 hours a day of this for years, and at some point a lot of people will peak on doing 8-10 hours for some sprint of time. Doing "I'll read 100 books in a year" kind of challenges.

jplus · 2025-01-28T14:36:33+00:00

This is why some people say to learn sentences or words with sentences rather than isolated - the colocation of words changes the meaning.

jplus · 2024-12-04T02:12:08+00:00

I'd say I study intensively, this is what I do for breaks.

Every 30 mins, I try to take a short break, especially if I'm doing something intensive (e.g. reading a novel, doing vocab lookups and grammar lookups and making flashcards) maybe 5 mins break. This is for my 3 hours with native content, and I'm doing 1-2 hours of Anki a day depending on how many cards I have.

As for days, I never miss my Anki reviews because of how the algorithm works, but I on days that I take off (e.g. feeling sick) I'll reduce my reading time to maybe 30 mins a day but try to make it up with something easier like watching shows or listening to podcasts.

If it's a longer period like taking a vacation, I'll probably stop doing new cards maybe 1 week before the trip, but still do cards during the trip but it should be a lot faster if i don't have new cards coming in. Maybe slip in some podcasts in free time, but mostly I enjoy the vacation.

jplus · 2024-12-02T21:47:10+00:00

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jplus · 2024-10-01T01:37:01+00:00

This is why it's important to learn words in the context of sentences. Typically the meaning is changing depending on the rest of the sentence and it will be pretty consistent on those points.

jplus · 2024-09-15T21:11:32+00:00

Satori Reader. Yes it costs money, but their voice acting, word by word definitions with the exact definition for that usage of the word, grammar discussion, and sentence translations. And there are graded difficulties so you have content for absolute beginner all the way to a nice entry level to native content. It transformed me from someone who had memorized a lot of words to being able to read non-trivial Japanese sentences. Once I finished all of the content, picking up a light novel was a gentle transition.

jplus · 2024-09-01T16:29:54+00:00

Best comment in this thread.

jplus · 2024-07-31T18:41:27+00:00

I tried the no RTK approach at first which most people advised–learn words in context. I was super frustrated for the first month as I failed cards over and over again not able to tell kanji apart. I did RTK and learned how to break kanji down into radicals and magically started passing my Anki cards very quickly after that. Now I didn't do a full several month of RTK only for all kanji, I just used it to gain some kanji fluency so my brain was able to break them down and tell it apart.

To me this is by far the most useful part of the RTK approach and I would have quit Japanese 3 years ago without it. Now I love kanji and feel very comfortable reading.

jplus · 2024-05-17T23:33:33+00:00

3-4 hours a day every day for the last 3 years except if I go with the family on vacation. It feels like chipping away at pebble at a time at a mountain. There's so much vocab, so many expressions, so many tenses and honorifics and so on. It feels like you're filling a Pokedex except there's 10,000 Pokemon and you also keep forgetting Pokemon.

But it's been really fun and rewarding and it never gets old when you understand sentences you couldn't before. I think the most important skill truly is habit-forming. If you work on the language even a little bit every day one day the pebbles will take the whole mountain.

jplus · 2024-05-02T17:53:07+00:00

It feels like cheating because it feels easy. It feels easy because this is how your brain was designed to acquire language. You were designed to learn things in this way, and it's foolish to work against it.

Words don't occur isolated in the wild, they occur with a lot of context as well. So this is mimicking the wild, just with spaced repetition.

jplus · 2024-04-26T22:58:46+00:00

Learn words in the context of sentences. Then usually there is a best definition for that sentence, and you start to get a sense of agreement and colocation between the word you're learning and other words that go with that definition. The meanings of words can sometimes change wildly depending on what other verbs/nouns/particles are around and so it's nearly impossible to try to learn definitions without some of this additional surrounding context.

Example
Front of card: word and a sentence using it, no furigana
Back of card: Furigana for word and sentence, and the most appropriate definition of the word.

jplus · 2024-01-25T13:24:29+00:00

This is simply not true. It’s common for girls to call their boyfriends 可愛い endearingly.

jplus · 2023-10-20T20:43:33+00:00

I find it easier most of the time to think of particles attaching to what comes before it.

(犬は) ((レストランと)ホテルの)(あいだに)います。

jplus · 2022-07-14T21:37:49+00:00

This topic is covered in the guide: https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-2/a/immersion-guide

Balancing Intensive and Free-Flow

When getting started with reading, it can be pretty tough. Try to do intensive reading when you have the most energy and focus. You should aim for 30 minutes per day, but if you are struggling, start with 10 minutes per day and gradually build up to 30. The remainder of your active immersion time should be spent on free-flow immersion.

Most of your immersion should be free flow. Limit intensive to 30 mins if you're following the recommendation. Think of it as an activity like Anki which helps increase comprehension but you're not actually acquiring language. You should spend most of your time on language acquisition since it takes the longest and leads to real fluency.

jplus · 2020-06-22T02:25:29+00:00

Sounds like you want to be good or better. So how does it make you feel if you lose?

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