Your point on accent is something I wholeheartedly agree with; it’s too bad that people around me don’t. I’ve been receiving complaints about my English (in particular, how I spell the letters B and D), and these people are saying ‘don’t use English if you can’t speak like them’. I’d say ‘it’s part of the charm’, but these people won’t get it.
Saving this for further reading, thank you for the insight.
The “Genki” 1 textbook had Hitler in there at some point lol
Can we get the English and Japanese speakers in this community to form a language group?
I’ve been on HelloTalk, and it’s not hard to find someone to voice-chat with, but I find it hard to find a partner who shares my interests, so I struggle to keep the conversation interesting. There probably aren’t many Japanese people who want to compare oshimen idols for half an hour.
Honestly if people want to get good at a language, just start reading as soon as you can. Some think you need to learn thousands of before you should start to make it easier to jump into but reading is going to be a struggle when you first start no matter what and the only way you’ll improve is by doing it.
I waited until I knew around 1000 words in Anki before I decided to struggle through my first visual novel (時計仕掛けのレイライン) with the Yomichan pop-up dictionary which was my first attempt at reading anything and starting off I’d read and comprehend lines so slowly as it was my first exposure to a lot of grammar outside of Tae Kim’s grammar guide that I had read and by the time I was just over a week into it, I was already regretting that I hadn’t started sooner because it really does just become easier the more you do it as your brain starts to accept the language for what it is instead of trying to place English concepts in Japanese.
I know its far outside of probability, but wouldn’t it be really cool if vtubers caused English to become a mixed language?
I know japanese already has a lot of borrowed words, and it’s cool seeing at least meme english borrow japanese words for (mostly) appropriate usage.
Imagine if one day, English and Japanese is just grouped together and mutually understood by speakers of both languages.
Excellent post about properly learning a new language. I think for me though I just want to understand. Everything else is secondary. Similar to how children understand and learn to speak before they learn to write. Lemme just get to that level lol. It’s my way of keeping the goal as simple and attainable as possible. If I reach that point I’ll see where I go from there. Realistically I know I’ll have learn a least a little bit of writing and that’s ok.
To me it feels more “natural” this way. Like I guess it’s how every child learns their first language. First recognize common words and phrases. Then learn how to repeat things yourself and later learn to construct sentences/ideas on your own. And finally at the very end we learn to express ideas in writing. So while writing is tremendously helpful and I’m not discrediting learning it along side everything like you’re supposed to, I don’t feel it’s necessary for a really basic understanding.
But maybe I’m doing it wrong. Who knows?
As someone who have self-learned Japanese, there are a few thing that I think could be handy for others who are looking to do the same.
A bit of personal note, after a few years of learning Japanese I realize that it followed a similar pattern of how I learned English: I wasn’t really keen on learning English back in school, but eventually build up my knowledge by exploring out via hobbies and such. You can get pretty far in terms of daily conversation without rigorous textbook training. That being said, the one drawback of context-only learning is the difficulty of handling material such as grammar and sentence structure.
And of course, the satisfaction of realizing your improvement during the beginning phrase can be a huge motivator as well.
The section about the Humanity of Languages remined me of a couple of things. One is Conlang Critic the show that gets facts wrong about your favorite conlang. The other is The Chaos, a poem about the many irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Of course, most of those irregularities come from English’s habit of stealing incorporating words from any language that even thinks about using the Latin alphabet without bothering to bothering to do anything more than dropping diacritics.
It’s a trade off. On the one hand, horrible spelling and pronunciation rules. On the other hand, easily incorporated loan words that preserve the origin of that word.
I’ll never forget ま again
My first reason to learn japanese is because Im a degenerate and consumed anime regularly. But I started to want to learn Japanese because I want to read other peoples messages and understand their feeling is when I joined this community. Thanks for your efforts
I tend to mix up traditional English with American English.
Commonwealth English isn’t “traditional English” in any sense.
One thing to add about poetry and songs - the poem and song often matter more than the grammar & pronunciation.
As a result, you’ll often end up with deliberate mispronunciations (or just different or awkward pronunciations)
A classic example of this - Shakespeare. He wrote in iambic pentameter, which starts with an unsurpassed syllable and then follows with a stressed syllable, and repeat.
That pattern is king. Even if you have a set of words & syllables, that, normally, would be read “unstress stress stress unstress”, you would change the pronunciation so it becomes “unstress stress unstress stress”
In music, this happens a TON, especially with Hip-Hop (both to create rhymes or to achieve a certain timing with the beat):
Take “Beef Rap” (with color-coded rhymes)
At one point, “squares” and “cares” are deliberately mispronounced so that they will rhyme with “gears”, “fears”, “years”, and “beers”. Tbh, he mispronounced both sets of words, seemingly using a sound that meets in the middle instead.
MF Doom in general does this a TON
The line is “IVs on top of IVs, obviously the coroner between the sheets like the Isley’s” where IVs & obviously are made to rhyme in a way they normally don’t.
People talk a lot about two similar looking words in English being pronounced entirely different (“police” and “lice” in this thread) but it’s honestly really common in hip-hop to see examples like this being pronounced the same way for the purpose of a rhyme.
Basic little video if youre sorta interested in this
I feel as well received this post has with as us here who are learning EN->JP, this post will sadly have poor visibility for our NihonNiki as Reddit isn’t their primary media of choice when discussing HoloLive. Perhaps you should consider reposting it on the more popular JP Social Media sites so it reaches the other half of your target audience.
Updoot for Abroad in Japan.
As for mobile dictionaries may I suggest Takoboto (android/PC) and Imiwa (iOS). I’ve used them both for many years and find them very good and extensive.
Spanish is useful for americans due the proximity with a lot of spanish speakers, like literally almost all of central and south america
Its Important to have goal you say
Is watching a Rabbit build a gundam with perfect understanding a good one?
Oh lord, this is amazing
Great post! I’m originally a spanish speaker, but i’m proficient with english and currently learning japanese. I can’t read japanese yet, but even the english parts where really helpul so um, thanks a lot. You clearly put a lot of effort on this.
This is an insane effort post. Who would have thought the largest and most informative post I’ve ever seen would come out of /r/Hololive.