Japanese Language

@japaneselanguage On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being great and 1 being horrible, how good is Duolingo for learning Japanese?

@japaneselanguage I like how Japanese is simply structured. Especially as a programmer, I have been able to pick up Japanese due to how sentences are structured.

(I don't have a Japanese keyboard.)

watashi wa (
niji ni (
hirugohan o (
tabemasu
)
)
)

Everything can be broken into blocks which is really nice. This is what programming languages do, so this feels very natural to me.

My native language is English, but I am thinking of moving to Japan.

I listen to a lot of podcasts in English, and I've been trying to find good, interesting podcasts in Japanese as well. Audiobooks are also good.

I found すずめの戸締り, but I'd love to hear about other resources that people have found.

I've found that any time I'm interested in a game, looking up let's plays in Japanese has helped me make a lot of connections between the game's contents and Japanese vocabulary.

I'm linking a good example of that with Metroid Dread, which is a game I played last year and I spend a few weeks watching let's plays and reading online content about it in Japanese, mostly because I loved the game, but I also thought that doing so might be a good exercise for intermediate learners as well.

The key to searching for a let's play is to just enter the Japanese name of the game (for example: バイオハザード４ or ダークソウル３）and then adding 実況 which is the keyword here. Any popular game followed by 実況 is likely to yield tons of results, so give it a try if you're into games, and you may learn a lot of vocabulary from it!

Hey all, I barely passed the December 2022 N3 and last month, I went to Japan for the first time and spent two weeks there.

Overall, I was both disappointed and pleased with how far the N3 got me (note I'm talking purely about my skill level -- at no point did I ever show anyone in Japan my N3 certificate lol).

On the one hand, some might say that N3 is enough for anime and conversations with normal people. As someone with a 31/60 on the listening section, this is categorically not true. I never got the chance to, nor do I likely have the ability to, hold a long everyday conversation with anyone in Japan. It's not like I was surprised at my lack of skill by the time I was on the ground in Japan and talking to people, but I did expect to have been able to do so by the time I got an N3 back when I first started studying. So I am a bit sad that that expectation was off.

On the other hand, wow does real immersion make a huge, gigantic difference. When I first landed I had to ask people to repeat themselves slowly two or three times for me to get what they said, and people would often switch to English before I put together what Japanese words (that I already knew) actually corresponded to the sounds I was hearing when they were speaking Japanese earlier. But by the end of the first week, my conversation skill was enough for dining in restaurants, shopping in malls, speaking to hotel staff, and small talk with tour guides 100% in Japanese. It was incredible how comfortable I felt talking about non-trivial upgrade options or specific observation site locations, and it was also incredible how much nicer people treated me when I was speaking Japanese with them vs when my wife would talk first in English. It was absolutely 100% worth it for me to get to this level of skill, and it really made me feel like my work has finally paid off.

To conclude, if you're like me and you grinded almost nothing but Anki all the way to around N3 level, you probably have the same mix of okay vocab/grammar but extremely shitty listening comprehension. If so, I highly recommend greatly increasing the amount of listening practice you do on a daily basis. I'm still not sure what's the best way to study that, but I definitely could have used more of it before my trip. But at the same time, don't despair if you're going on a trip without that. You'll be fine -- trust your subconscious brain and enjoy the huge comprehension gains!

Source: https://twitter.com/shamo0301/status/1456534675376119808 with an omake in the replies! 😊

As the title says: Why is e.g. 靴を脱いだとしたら、家に入り下さい considered unnatural and 靴を脱ぎ終えたら、家に入り下さい is the more natural way of communicating "Please enter the home after you have finished taking off your shoes"

If all V[過去形]としたら are unnatural usage — what is the deeper grammtical reason for it being unnatural?

Hello everyone, and welcome to our (kind of) daily JLPT thread! I'm sorry I couldn't post one of these for the past week. I was busy with work and couldn't get the time to prepare an entire review of a new structure. I'm back and hopefully will be posting these more regularly again. With that said, let's get started!

本日の文法：JLPTN3の「～（という）わけではない」

～わけではない Is a pretty common expression that you're going to find in a lot of media such as anime, manga, manzai and dramas. It's also used in everyday conversation, though, so you will get a lot of mileage out of this one.

For the most part, its meaning is close to "it's not like..." or "...doesn't mean that...", so basically, it's an expression for a partial negation of a statement. You'd use it when you don't want to fully deny something, but still want to point out that something isn't quite correct.

So a few example sentences would be

お金があるから、必ず幸せにるというわけではない。"Having money doesn't necessarily mean you will be happy."

成績が良かったから、他の生徒に教えるのが得意なわけではない。"Having good grades doesn't mean you will be good at teaching other students"

So right now there are a few additional things you may be wondering:

First of all, what is という in this instance, and why is it optional? Is it really always optional or does it have a more nuanced use most of the time?

Generally speaking, where you can use a simple わけではない, you can also use a というわけではない. They're grammatically equivalent in that sense. However, they do have a very slightly different meaning, where という gives the impression that you're taking a less opinionated and more objective approach to the conversation. You would use というわけではない when you perhaps want to make a general statement. Looking at our first example sentence, you will notice that we're talking about a general perspective "money doesn't mean happiness in general", and as such, it doesn't feel like you're talking about anyone in particular, and you're just making a statement. But for our second sentence, you may notice the situation is most likely referring to a successful student that has decided to teach the rest of his class, and is probably not great at it. In this case, leaving out という makes the comment slightly harsher, almost like a criticism to a specific person in question.

So do keep those differences in mind.

Also, it's important to point out that わけではない is a rather stiff way to use this expression, and you may want to use わけではありません in formal contexts, or わけじゃない in more casual contexts. わけではない sounds a bit academic, kind of like the one speaking is a figure of authority. The type of speech you would find in textbooks, newspapers, academic research and similar scenarios.

Some examples for different settings would be

この道まっすぐ行ったら、すぐに図書館に到着するというわけではありません。その前、公園も渡らなければなりません。"You will not reach the library immediately if you walk straight down this road. You have to cross the park first as well."

いや、別に俺の妹が天才なわけじゃないけど、結構頭がいいし、頑張れる人間だから。"Nah, it's not like my sister is a genius or anything, but she's pretty smart, and she works hard."

The first example could be someone giving directions to another person, presumably a complete stranger. In this scenario, using full-on 敬語 would probably be overkill, but using a more informal form would come off as rude. This is why a polite form like this one might work.

The second example is far more informal, but you will also encounter a lot of this in every day life. I've personally found myself speaking to many of my co-workers like this in the office. Definitely not to my boss or other superiors, though, so watch out for that.

I think that will be all for today! Hope everyone is having a nice day, getting ready for JLPT in only 12 days!

This one is a bit tricky, in fact. What it means to say in English is "when the coffee is empty, we won't refill it".

In Japanese, instead of こちらのコーヒーが it should say こちらのコーヒーは. With the は it's correctly implied that the こちらのコーヒーは refers to 終了になります, therefore "the coffee is over (when it's empty)". With the が, even though the mistake is obvious to an experienced speaker, it could be theoretically implied that こちらのコーヒーが refers to なくなり次第, therefore leaving the subject to 終了になります vague/dangling: "when the coffee is empty, [something else] is over".

この先 could be vaguely translated as "from this point onwards", which usually has a temporal meaning "from now on", but in this case it's meant to be spatial, "don't walk past this sign".

I don't know if the mods of /r/LearnJapanese planned on migrating their stuff over to a lemmy instance. They seem to be permanently private as of right now, so I just wanted to link to the internet archive of the subreddit's language learning resource list.

Keep in mind that the links on the internet archive lead to other archived sites. For example, archived google docs don't load properly, so after clicking on one, you will need to copy/paste the link into your address bar.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker nor fluent in Japanese. So please take everything said here with a grain of salt. Also, this is my first time creating a post on Lemmy, so I hope I don't make any mistakes.)

I made a post about this topic on Reddit some time ago. I think it's interesting enough to post about it here as well to get the community going.

The Wikipedia article on 無生物主語構文（むせいぶつしゅごこうぶん）describes a difference between Japanese and English (and probably many other languages') sentence structures.

While in English it is okay to have an inanimate subject in a sentence with a transitive verb, a direct translation into Japanese would sound unnatural.

Here is an example: The English sentence "This medicine will make you feel better." can be naturally translated as 「この薬を飲めば、気分が良くなりますよ。」

The inanimate subject in the English sentence ("this medicine") becomes an object in the Japanese sentence, and the "you", which is an object in the English sentence can be thought of as the subject in the Japanese sentence (which is not explicitly mentioned in this case).

Unfortunately, I don't have an easy to follow rule on how to translate such sentences into Japanese, but many examples are translated with simple conditional phrases or something like ～のため or ～のせいで.

Note that all of this only applies to 他動詞. 自動詞 on the other hand can take inanimate subjects without the problem of sounding unnatural.

A google search will yield many more examples.

グーグルで検索してみれば、例文がたかさん見つかれます。

It wanted to give out a message of freedom, but the mistranslation ended up meaning "we are free of charge".

Can't remember where I saw this picture, but it's definitely not one I took.

Image source: https://twitter.com/enaha1025/status/1644292458837323778

Doesn't seem to be available in zlib, and ones I've found online are in very low quality.

I love this podcast. They discuss a lot of the more mind-blowing quirks of language from a Japanese perspective. It has led to some truly mind-blowing moments for me, where I have understood English from a completely new perspective, and I really enjoy it.

The catch is that it gets pretty hard at times! But if you want to discuss it here, that could be pretty fun! This episode was particularly interesting.

For some additional context: they're discussing how amazing "vocabulary" is, and they start the podcast joking around a bit before getting into the subject matter. Hope some of our most daring members give it a try!

Hello everyone, and welcome to our daily JLPT thread! Let's hope we keep growing as a community. I've seen a lot of growth in this sub, and last thread even got one comment, which is already pretty impressive for such a grassroots place! Let's talk about more Japanese grammar from now on!

本日の文法：JLPTN3の「～によって」

～によって Is a structure that you're going to be seeing quite frequently throughout your Japanese journey. It is used in all sorts of contexts, from the very informal to the academic and highly complex. It has a few different meanings that are mostly unrelated to us, non-natives, so let's take a look at them.

～によって As "depends"

If you've ever wondered how to give some nuance to your speech, によって is a great way to do it. Sentences like "depending on the circumstances" or "that depends on the weather" can be constructed using this structure.

A few example sentences for this could be

明日の天気によって、散歩に行きます。”We'll go for a walk depending on tomorrow's weather.”

どんな家族によって、子供の教育が変わっていきます。”A child's education will change depending on their family”

～によって As "using / by means of"

Another common use of によって, is to indicate the means by which you achieve something. It can be similar to the particle で in some cases, but it might be perceived as a more formal alternative, frequently found in academia and formal writing. Let's look at some examples:

人間は、言語によってコミュニケーションする。"Humans communicate using language."

教科書によって、新しい知識を得ることができる。"You can obtain new knowledge using a textbook."

Do keep in mind this does not replace the verb "to use" and it's not equivalent. If you want to emphasize the usage aspect of that verb, you will need to use the verbs 使う or 使用する, and build a different structure. In these sentences we're using によって because the mentioned nouns (言語 and 教科書 respectively) are a means of achieving something, and that's what's important. So always keep in mind "do I just want to say 'use' as a verb, or do I want to explain how this item helps me accomplish a particular goal?"

～によって As "by (authorship)"

This one is very simple, but still really important. In Japanese, when you want to mention the author of a specific work or text, as well as the person that brought a specific project to completion, you can use によって。Let's look at some examples:

この面白いファンタジーシリーズは有名なイギリス人の作家によって書かれた。"This fun fantasy series was written by a famous English author."

韓国人の漫画家によって描かれた漫画は日本の漫画と違うところがかなりあります。”Manga written by Korean authors is considerably different from Japanese manga."

～によって As "due to / as a consequence of"

Finally, we have another form frequently used in formal speech, particularly in news reports, journalism and similar scenarios. I frequently imagine reporters using this form to explain current or ongoing events. Here are some examples:

東京における今晩のイベントによって、会議が中止されました。"The meeting was canceled due to this evening's event in Tokyo."

25日の地震によって、国中のいくつかの道路が非公開になっております。"Several roads in the country have been closed to the public due to the earthquake on the 25th."

These are the most common uses you'll find for によって, though as always, try not to approach grammar as a 1:1 equivalent for English structures, and instead make sure you pay attention to the different contexts in which you'll see it used, so you can get a better feel of how this structure works.

PD:

Let me know if any of you have a request for future structures or grammar that you think would be fun to discuss in its own thread, and I'll be happy to oblige.

That would be all for today, hope everybody has a very nice day!

Hello everyone, and welcome to our daily JLPT thread! It’s insane seeing the community grow up to 20 users. I want to keep these posts up in hopes of building an active community that focuses on what the Japanese language is, and how it works. It really is a fascinating subject to study!

本日の文法：JLPTN4の「～くらい/ぐらい」

～くらい/ぐらい Is a single word that is most commonly found when talking about approximations or approximate values. Keep in mind that both くらい and ぐらい are the same and 100% interchangeable, so it’s up to personal preference you how say and spell it. This word has a few more uses that may be more idiomatic and make your Japanese sound more natural as well, so let’s look at some examples.

A few example sentences for this could be

明日のテストは30分ぐらいかかります。”Tomorrow’s test will be about 30 minutes long.”

彼女の息子は前回会った時、身長がもう120センチぐらいだったよ！”Last time I saw her son, he was already around 120cm tall!”

Although this form is rather casual, and for more formal speech you would use other forms, it is still extremely common, and you can find it in a lot of places, from media, to casual speech and even advertising. This isn’t even the only casual way to mark approximate values, but I think it might be the best to learn first, as it’s both versatile enough, and quite useful to know.

Now, some uses of ぐらい may be a bit confusing for a student at first. This is because a second common use for the word is as a level indicator. That means, as a word you use to emphasise the degree of things.

Let me show you a few examples

こんな簡単な文章ぐらい、小学生でも読める。”Even a grade schooler could read a text as simple as this”

And for a more complex one, if you want to challenge yourself:

お寿司は世界中の何百万人も食べたことがあるぐらい有名な和食です “Sushi is a Japanese dish so popular that millions of people around the world have tried it”

In both of those sentences くらい is used to indicate the degree of situations. In the first case it indicates just how simple a text is (simple enough for a grade schooler), while in the second case it indicates how famous sushi is (famous enough to have been eaten by millions around the world). I understand this specific use may be a bit more challenging, so feel free to create your own examples to practice and play around with it as you get more comfortable! Remember that writing and speaking are important parts of learning a language as well.

That would be all for today, hope everybody has a very nice day!

Hello everyone, and welcome to our daily JLPT thread! As the tests get nearer and nearer, I'm thinking on focusing on N4-N3 grammar for a few days, since I think those are probably the most popular tests, and the bulk of potential readers will fall under that level most likely. That said, let us begin!

本日の文法：JLPTN3の「～のように・のような」

～のように・のような Is a very common structure that could translate to “just like” or simply “like”, implying resemblance or any commonalities between two things. It's especially common when you want to use someone's attributes or features to link them to someone else.

A few example sentences for this could be

弟は、父のような優しい人ではない。 “My brother is not a gentle person like my dad is”

彼女は、状況をよく理解できる方のように説明しました。 "She explained it like someone who understands the situation very well."

It's not a particularly formal or colloquial form (although it might be more unusual in highly formal speech), but it does change depending on how it's being used.

Notice that the first sentence is linking two nouns 「父」 and 「優しい人」, and thus のような is used. The structure would become NOUNのようなNOUN.

For example: 「師匠のような先生」"A teacher that's more like a mentor" or 「太陽のような光」"A light like the sun".

However, you can also change the structure to のように to make more specific comparisons. We can modify our previous examples to make them evaluate a specific feature or quality about someone or something.

For example: 「師匠のように話する先生」 "A teacher that speaks like a mentor."

「太陽のように明るい光」 "A light as bright as the sun."

Hope everybody has a very nice day!

Hello everyone, and welcome to our daily JLPT thread! The July tests are coming up quickly, so I thought we could have a daily thread where we discuss questions, or talk about what we've been practicing. In this thread I will also be sharing one graded grammatical structure every day, so feel free to use it for your own reference.

本日の文法：JLPTN1の「～極（きわ）まりない」

～きわまりない Is a very interesting structure that could translate to "extremely" or "as can be".

A few example sentences for this could be

図書館で大声を出して騒ぐなんて、迷惑きわまりない。 "Speaking loudly and making a ruckus at a library is as annoying as it gets"

昨日、彼の態度は失礼きわまりない "His attitude yesterday was extremely rude"

This structure could be considered relatively similar in meaning to 「非常に」 though naturally the way it's built is different. In this case you mostly just attach it to a noun. That makes it relatively easy to use! Remember that this is a relatively literary or formal structure, so you probably won't be hearing it too much when speaking casually or colloquially.

Hope everybody has a very nice day studying for your upcoming test!