Why Are People Hostile In This Sub? We’re all here for the same goal

30 comments

1. Many people on reddit are not nice

2. Ah, that is because a not-so insignificant portion of persons who are learning Japanese are in fact a bunch of colossal losers who are lonely and bitter and are only interested in the Japanese language because of the amount of cope cartoons coming from Japan where some ultra bland self-insert suddenly has all the friends and romance he could dream of for reasons unexplained and they wish to consume that without the need of the evil localized subtitles or something.

3. I could think of few:

   * repetitive questions
   * lack of own research
   * but mainly, some people are just mean and gatekeeping… they need to feel unique

4. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Reddit is open to the entire internet, and you are bound to get immaturity mixed in. Personally I think it is not worth the effort to make a post about. Focus on the positives and ignore the otherwise. That’s a skill in itself.

5. I looked at your thread and it was fine (?)

6. The bigger the reddit, the worse is the community, and here’s not a exception.

7. There were a good amount of helpful comments on that thread but I understand that the negative ones will stick out most. Specifically with this sub you see more traffic because of how far Japanese culture reaches on the internet. Because of this the sub sometimes gets flooded with people asking if they can do the impossible. Now a well adjusted person would just ignore it or give some advice but you’re on reddit and the majority of people on here are ill. Basically people want you ask novel questions and not something that could’ve been found off a 1 min google search.

8. Elitism

9. I think some folks see titles of threads and mentally reduce the content to something they’ve seen before. The immediate reaction is then “goddamnit, this crap again, why can’t people use the search bar or join a thread already made.”

   And while I understand that to some degree with functional, closed-ended questions with specific answers, I think it really makes conversation about general topics very hard. Language learning is a pretty wild ride, and I can definitely see where some OPs put a lot of thought into what they’re saying before it gets fussed at for being a repeat.Comments to topics don’t always get engagement or replies, so the most surefire way to get that is making new posts and I think it just ends up being a cyclical issue (as with many things on reddit).

   Take heart, OP, I think the Internet is just extra heated lately and people are not really pulling any punches at the moment. I’m sorry your post didn’t land well initially, but hopefully you can have that convo somewhere!

10. Not just this sub but a lot of the Japan related subs have hostile feels to them. Like a bunch of people trying to one up each other on how to appreciate Japanese language, culture, food, etc. It’s amazing how many people choose to be a jerk instead of simply downvoting and scrolling on. Like someone’s stupid question has personally attacked them. Try not to let it discourage your learning or interest in Japan, most people (especially off Reddit) are happy to share knowledge about all the topics mentioned above.

11. Oh, was it “How many vocab words are you learning a day?” – I scoffed at that one too, but I didn’t feel like getting into it. I’m afraid that I would have been guilty of giving a different answer depending on the sub I saw it on.

    With the regular language group I probably would have said something like “vocabulary doesn’t quite work like that. You can know all the words in a sentence and still have no idea what the sentence means. You’ll probably burn out or hit the wall of diminishing returns before you even get through most of that.” Because things vary language-by-language and since every language has different hurdles and stuff I can only give a generic that hopefully covers as much as possible.

    But in the Japanese sub… I probably would have been more sarcastic. And that’s partially out of experience, partially from people coming in here telling US what’s “efficient” and doable (and then ignoring us when we say it doesn’t work like that), or people who literally have NO IDEA the pool they’re jumping into — and sometimes also don’t give 2 shits what a more experienced person has to say.

    With Japanese there’s just a lot between you and 28 words a day. And it gets unruly and unattainable real fast. I once had a guy… same speaking and understanding level as me… in the same duration of time… lecture me about my method and tell me how inefficient I was. He then started coughing up all these numbers like “People can learn up to 300 words a day. If you anki that much and do the JLPT level books book cover to book cover you can get this much gain in” blah blah blah.

    What the 300 number… and even the 28 number… fail to take into account is retention. And retention in Japanese is a BITCH. With European languages at least part of your daily quota is going to be cognates. With Japanese you’ve got nothing to hold on to. You can “learn” 28 words a day, but by the next day you will have forgotten 27 of them. Early on I hit a point where I stopped having any retention with daily reviews for words. A couple of problem words for me were 想像 (souzou) “imagination” and 様子 (yousu) “state of affairs/ appearance”. I reviewed those cards DOZENS of times. Sometimes even back-to-back with themselves and I could never retain them. It was my breaking point with flashcard vocabulary. … I learned those words later through immersion.

    And that doesn’t account for words with a bunch of different meanings. One real problem child is 掛ける (kakeru) which can mean “hang up” “pay for” “take a phone call” “sit down” “vacuum” “argue” “hold on to (an emotion)” “make a bet” “lock” AND MORE!!! There was someone yesterday who found out that 出る (deru) is not just “leave” or “exit” but also “appear” and “come out” … and it also has some 20 odd definitions.

    So it’s hard not to be like “no. No you’re not”

    And even if you did, you’d still be up the creek without a paddle. There are SO MANY sentences I’ve come across in Japanese where I know all the words, and I understand the grammar, and I still don’t know what the sentence means. So there’s a whole extra layer of having to learn and orient to how words work with each other.

    That and, everyone is so hung up on # of words…in my experience it’s been less about the amount of words you know, and more about WHAT words you know. You may only need 3,000 words to understand some things or get by certain situations. But if you don’t know the right 3,000 words for your situation, you may as well not know the language at all. As another example, I can watch slice of life things no problem! But if I change the channel to a crime show, for most of it I might as well not know Japanese at all. It’s kind of expected that your foundation of Japanese words is going to comprise of certain things, because that’s just what learning resources prioritize across the board… but from there we’re all kind of left to flounder around and fill our vocabulary with what we need the most. And sometimes you find out that you were taught 椅子 (isu) “chair” when IRL you only ever hear 席 (seki) “seat”…. which was never taught to you.

    It’s a whole mess. So, really, there’s just nuance when you get into specific languages as opposed to blanketing all of them.

12. Japanese learning community has been the most toxic language learning community since the dawn of time.

13. Short answer: Reddit. Long answer: it’s Reddit.

14. I’m not complex I’m a simpleton

15. There’s a strange level of hostility from mods which carries to members, across a variety of Japan-related subs, including forums and facebook groups. I agree, it’s weird. You’ll get shut down for asking simple questions or posting anything other than queries about buying tickets to Harry Potter or Tokyo Disney. Makes the communities very insular and not that useful for getting information otherwise.

    I’ve been shut down on several occasions by auto mods for asking questions that have already been answered, even though I’ve gone searching for relevant topics. Or, for asking about things that have been discussed before, but where the information in those older posts could be out of date.

16. I have seen many comments or posts with the same sentiment about Japanese learners specifically, but I honestly didn’t have that negative experience at all. On the contrary, I have been lucky to have mostly wholesome, encouraging interactions in this sub.

17. Was anyone actually being rude though? I skimmed your thread, and of the 200 comments, most were on topic. Only one semi-long discussion had some people questioning your methodology and they weren’t being particularly rude from what I saw.

    Not that this sub doesn’t have negativity, but a lot of it is:

    * People asking low effort questions that are already covered in the starter guide
    * People asking questions that should go in the daily thread
    * People answering questions that they don’t know the answer to
    * People recommending AI for learners, which has a lot of pitfalls
    * That one guy constantly proselytizing his special learning method

    If you post in public, someone is bound to get triggered if the thread is popular enough, no matter how unreasonable their point is. I would just ignore the outliers and look at the plethora of responses you’ve gotten.
    And if someone is being nasty on purpose, you can report them.

18. Ironically, this is one of the most negative/toxic posts I’ve seen thus far

19. On “How many new vocab words are you learning a day?”, you got over 170 comments, most of which were positive and helpful. Someone said that you’re setting yourself up for failure, and your response was “I totally agree”.

    I didn’t read all 170+ comments, but honestly speaking, the most negative and demeaning thing I’ve read over the past few minutes has been your post right here targeted towards people in this sub.

    If you want 100% head pats and 0% negativity, I honestly think it would be simpler if you considered stepping away or unfollowing the sub all together rather than everyone that you’re complaining about doing that.

20. It seems like most of the interactions on this sub are about defending an idea “japanese learning orthodoxy”, rather than helping people. I’ve made thoughtful posts and comments on this sub and been inexplicably downvoted, talked past, or openly belittled. Members are often responding to some trigger that my comment reminds them of, without interacting with the content of the comment itself.

    I’ve learned a lot from the good stuff on here, which is why I haven’t abandoned it altogether, but I’d say that the toxic trait of many of the people here is that they have forgotten what it was like to be the learner, and rather than help people with questions, they look down with scorn from their throne of “native content”. 頑張って！The end result is that I often have a question that I would love to ask here, but I take it elsewhere or don’t ask because I don’t want to invite that.

    >If you are genuinely unhappy here, tired of repetitive questions, and only here to linger and be negative, you should seriously consider stepping away or just unfollowing the sub all together if it really makes you that unhappy.

    I agree with this and feel like it needed to be said. I wish the mods would step in when the threads get unhelpful, and encourage good content.

21. People get super defensive/touchy for no reason when it comes to Japan/Japanese. Pretty much all Japan-related subs are like this, unfortunately.

22. People on Reddit think they’re better than everyone else when in reality they’re not 😔 Don’t mind those people they’re probably mad that they can’t read yet and wanna take it out on people. People in Reddit can be such bitches and then act all snooty like dude this is REDDIT.

23. Because jcj is gone

24. My guesses would be…

    First guess. Japanese is one of the popular ones to learn,

    Second… Japanese happens to be one of the most difficult ones out of the popular ones. Natural elitism will accure.

    Third. I assume that due popularity a bunch of the ppl have Japanese as that the first language they try to learn… meanwhile in r/languagelearning I assume that users have experience of learning different languages and have much more chill approach… like on this video – https://youtu.be/o_XVt5rdpFY

    Fourth… This is reddit, filled with nerds who love to argue. There are some absurd posts on r/languagelearning too,

25. Honestly, thank you for pointing it out.

26. Maybe you need to step away yourself. Not saying that to be mean. But this post and the comments was a lot of time and effort for something that you could have just closed the app to accomplish the same thing.

    I mean you must have spent at least an hour of your day here on this thread. You aren’t winning any hearts or minds and you are waiting lots of time and energy on something that doesn’t really matter. The people you are upset about will go on being upset. But now your upset too.

    Stop scrolling reddit for a few days and take a break. It’s clearly getting to you in a bad way to make you spend so much time on this one thing.This post here was the only negative thing I’ve seen today on my entire feed. See how that works? It’s a cycle that only stops when you close the app and refresh your mind elsewhere. If everybody did that instead of engaging, you’d see a lot more positivity.

27. My teachers in elementary school always taught me that children who belittle and bully others must have very high self-esteem. So obviously, the people belittling you must feel very good about themselves and their Japanese language skills. Otherwise, they wouldn’t feel the need to belittle others.

28. Sometimes I think about making a post talking about how I use romanji for study just to see what type of mayhem would happen

29. Being unhappy here makes a lot of people happy.

    Also, the Japanese language is their identity, thus the gate keeping and shaming.

30. People flex a lot because they no life this language and make progress quicker than people with lives

    That’s a pretty significant reason