日本語は話せます 🇯🇵

猿も木から落ちる

ナイス！

The Duolingo Japanese course from English is so-so, but the Progress Quiz is actually quite challenging.

Okay, the Manabi app for learning to read Kanji now allows you to click and search in your dictionary apps

彼は私に泳ぐよう強要した。

Can’t figure out quite how the よう works here.

I’m not sure the よう is necessary, where did the sentence come from?

Duolingo Reverse Tree

English for Japanese speakers

それは私にはありえません。
Translated as:
It is not possible for me.
Can’t quite parse this one either, same source.

On the first one it could be a really bad mis writing I of the volitional 泳ごう。 making it ‘He made me want to go swimming’ which seems a bit weird, but ok could work.

That last one you posted I just don’t know. I do get the sense that some of the less popular corners of Duolingo don’t get proofed very well. There’s a quite a few errors in the later levels of LingoDeer as well.

My reading is coming along by leaps and bounds I can recognise 750 kanji and I’m starting to do pretty well with teenage novels and manga.

Duolingo just significantly upgraded their Japanese course, wondering if this addresses any of our concerns, tend to doubt it.

There do seem to be a lot more kanji in the lessons, I’ll give them that

I took a peak and it didn’t look any different. Not going to waste my time on it.

Yes, I figured you were too far along for it to be of use to you.

Also, they have been doing A/B testing so maybe you still have the old tree.

The new Norwegian tree has been in A/B testing for a a few weeks but I still see only the old tree.

https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/9688/volitional-%E3%81%A8-verb

なければならない, なければなりません, なければいけない, なければいけません, ねばならぬ, ねばならない, ねばなりません, なければならぬ, なけばならない
 
expression
have to do, must, should, ought to

See also ないわけにはいかない

火のないところに煙は立たず。
There is no smoke without fire.
Il n’y a pas de fumée sans feu.

色々言語を勉強する代わりに日本語を勉強に集中するべきです。

I finally learned/looked up how to type づ

It’s just “du”

Also the little ヶ which is used for some counters and is pronounced “ka” every time I’ve seen it, such as in ヶ月, is typed “ke” like it’s big brother ケ.

Aargh “its”

Just type いっかげつ and １ヶ月 will come up as one of the options.

Thanks, but I was going the other way, where I had the kanji but didn’t know how to pronounce it.

https://japanese.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1624/how-to-type-these-%E3%83%B6-%E3%80%85

So “lke” goes right to the little ヶ.

You can also type ‘x’ before things to get the small letter, or at least you can in Apple world so xke gets you ヶ

ぇぃぅぉ ょヶ

頑張るしかない

一千三百漢字が覚えったので日本語の雑誌が読めます。

本当に？

May finally try this wanikani thing

It’s good, I got all the way to level 60 and I’m on the run out. It’s helped my reading a lot.

Highly recommend the unofficial iOS app, Tsurukame, which is a much better interface than their web one.

Also didn’t get sucked into doing it as fast as possible. Stuff really starts to pile up once reviews start coming back at you. I had to take two substantial breaks to get through it all and I think it would have been more effective if I’d just set out at a more gentle pace. It’s a marathon not a sprint.

Yeah, looks good, someone else recommended it as well. Seems to be well-organized. And yeah, I just binged on the first 20 radicals it gave me, I guess I'd better be careful going forward, as you say.

In theory you can get it all done in a year, but you better have a lot of spare time every 4 hours if you want to do that, and be pretty sure you will get everything right.

How do I keep from getting sucked in or it snowballing, as someone else said, just don’t do too many new lessons when they pop up?

maybe limit yourself to 10 new lessons a day? no matter what you do you'll have days where suddenly 150 reviews land in your queue.

i did the first 8-9 levels quickly and then hit a wall and have made very slow progress since though that's more on me than the program

Thanks!

Tsurukame
Got this. Seems like I had previously had a predecessor app called WAniki which seems to be gone now.

So it hasn’t gotten bad for me yet- still only on Level 1, with no vocabulary unlocked yet- but can well imagine the tsunami of combinatorial explosions that is coming soon.

if you already know some vocab then the first several levels are gonna be pretty trivial and having to learn names for the radicals is kinda obnoxious

I pretty much know all the vocabulary that is coming up but I don’t always know the pronunciations they want for the kanji and/or I mistype them so I guess that’s useful practice. I am trying to cross check their names for the radicals with other lists. Well one at least.

Like what they call the drop is usually the dot, and construction is usually craft.

Also usually know the Japanese readings, which I still might mistype, but not necessarily the Chinese readings.

Unfortunately the only thing that can stop yourself from getting buried is self-restraint. It’s very tempting to think I have some spare time I’ll just learn a few more things. If you get that urge, I would recommend going and finding something to read in Japanese.

Keep in mind that I followed none of this advice, but i am now quite good at reading stuff in japanese so YMMV.

The default Lesson Batch size is five. Does that make a difference, did you have it higher?

Like I just had 21 new lessons show up. Maybe I will just do five for now....

But already did ten...

once the vocab starts hitting you'll never get through it all 5 at a time, theres like 100+ per level