日本語は話せます 🇯🇵

The dictionary app simply called Japanese has a color tagging feature that I am finding really useful at the moment.

Okay, so just leveled up to twelve. I will know a lot if this thing doesn't pull me under.

It takes me at least a couple of days to internal the weird readings and nuances of meaning of the vocab which us why at this point I always start the radicals and kanji first in the vain pursuit of the next level up.

Always feels kind relaxing being in the eye of the hurricane when that two day pause comes before the radicals and (most or some of the) first batch of kanji go to Guru.

Eye of the typhoon, I should say

Is there some rule of thumb about a/e vowel sounds and transitive/intransitive or am I just imagining

I seem to see a lot of pairs where the e vowel is transitive, to act upon, and the a vowel is intransitive, to be acted upon.

Unless I’ve got that backwards.

Anyway, just found my copy of this book
https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9784872179408-us.jpg
flipping through which demonstrates that the Kanji reading is much improved.

I seem to see a lot of pairs where the e vowel is transitive, to act upon, and the a vowel is intransitive, to be acted upon.

Just found this

This is an intransitive verb, meaning it happens on its own. The かる ending is a hint, because verbs with かる as okurigana (kana added to the kanji) are usually intransitive.

That’s under 受かる

My main problem with learning Japanese grammar is that I have no idea what English grammar is or how it works. It's like I have to learn a third language to learn the second. Doesn't help that my brain seems to immediately shut off when I read things like "intransitive verb".

I wouldn’t worry too much about not knowing English grammar or grammar terms, they map poorly in any case.

I recommend the Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, once you get past the odd 3D avatar and squeaky voice there’s some great teaching on how Japanese works.

Here’s the one on Jidoushi and Tadoushi. Be wary of trying to look for patters is which is which, there are always exceptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELk1dqaEmyk

Ed is correct as usual. Japanese grammar is completely unrelated to English grammar, unlike Indo-European languages, in particular close relatives such as Germanic and Romance languages.

So I have all five fonts installed in Tsurukame. Knew that if I long pressed it would show the standard font but just realized I can swipe left and right to iterate through others.

When I went through (most of) the reverse Duolingo tree I actually came across many Japanese terms for English grammar. Of course in the lessons there were multiple ways in Japanese to convey various things that were represented in the English tenses.

Did the bare minimum on Wanikani yesterday and today started with a stack of close to three hundred reviews. Dang!

Almost dug myself out. Also just realized that 例えば is tatoeba!

こんにちは！ every year or so i decide that i'm going to learn japanese and then get burnt out after a few months. each time i learn a little bit more and i think i'm on track to reaching my goal in about 20 years.

i'm feeling good about the strategy this time which is to focus on reading. my ultimate goal is to be able to play japanese video games (lol) so i'm thinking that i don't need to get too hung up on memorizing the various kanji readings. some various thoughts:

* the kanji learner's dictionary is a fucking game changer. what used to take 20 minutes to find an unfamiliar kanji now can take as little as 5 seconds with the SKIP indexing.
* the dictionary of basic japanese grammar is a good reference for the most part, but i can't for the life of my find super basic shit like what exactly the ます form is despite it being used in all the entries. i'm thinking i'm going to need to supplement it with a more general textbook... probably genki?
* this time i'm getting as much japanese in front of my eyes as i can and let the pattern recognition neural pathways form. so far this involves playing japanese games and just reading the text to myself whether or not i understand what it's saying. i'm starting to notice patterns and phrases already so i think it's working pretty well!
* it was a real eye opener for me when i realized that text with kanji is easier to read. i was trying to play dragon quest v but it's text is mostly hiragana. really frustrating to not know what something says, only to look it up and realize that it's one of the 5 kanji you actually CAN recognize but just written in hiragana.

I have and like the first edition of the Kanji Learner’s Dictionary but I have to say I hardly ever use the SKIP method, although I see that it could be useful.

そうですか。

Almost had a wanikani breakdown but managed to right the ship, pull back from the brink.

had a 200+ review session earlier to get it under control, afterwards felt like I used up all my brain power for the day
some things I just keep fucking up again and again, like when to use getsu or gatsu or tsuki for month in vocab
or kanji for pause vs suspension

Yes, exactly!

Once I have too many to review I kind of nibble at it: ascending or descending SRS stage or lowest level first, and then when I finally have a chance I just plow through but can’t give it nearly the attention I would for a smaller review

So I just found out the reason most dictionary apps have the same definitions and examples is that they are all based on the same thing, the Tanaka Corpus.

http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Tanaka_Corpus

Which is now apparently embedded in Tatoeba.

勝敗は問題ではない。

Easily confused:
願-がん
源-げん

Forgot to mention
原-げん

地図
地区

ah the map made out of cheesu
I've been messing around on Duolingo just for passively learning sentence structure but damn everyone seems to be so competitive in these dumb league tables they have

Renshu grammar is really good for sentence structure once you get past the baffling setup.

The gamification is in the form of a virtual gatchapon.

Sorry, I hated that interface so much I just gave up on that thing.

Forgot to mention
原-げん

Think I have a further elaboration of common transitive/intransitive pair patterns.

If the pairs end in す／る, the first tends to be transitive, the second intransitive.

If the pairs end in える／ある, the first is usually transitive, the second intransitive.

DO U SEE?

Then there is
苦しむ
苦しめる

But
伝える
伝わる
which fit the pattern

流す
流れる

海外旅行なんて無理よ。

コロナなんかですか？

Tsurukame audio feature now broken due to Wanikani file format change :(

No Covid news is good news, thanks. Actually some relatives just got it, but some others tested negative.

Further discussion on the Wanikani community board. Hoping a fix will come soon.

Developer taking a look as of half an hour ago.

…and it is already fixed on TestFlight

会社 and 社会 is driving me nuts, I can never remember which one is which

So many like that, including that pair.