LLearn Japanese

Daily Thread: simple questions, comments that don’t need their own posts, and first time posters go here (February 21, 2025)

  • February 21, 2025

This thread is for all simple questions, beginner questions, and comments that don't need their own post.

Welcome to /r/LearnJapanese!

Please make sure if your post has been addressed by checking the wiki or searching the subreddit before posting or it might get removed.

If you have any simple questions, please comment them here instead of making a post.

This does not include translation requests, which belong in /r/translator.

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Seven Day Archive of previous threads. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

by AutoModerator

5 comments

  1. Does anyone have a good resource for setting up Anki? I’m relatively new to learning Japanese and have seen a lot of people talk about it but it is so confusing to set up. Any help is appreciated!

  2. I am currently viewing a bag of snack food — [here’s a pic of what I see](https://images.app.goo.gl/7M7j7pJnFQewncu26) — that labels itself **和なおやつ**. None of my dictionaries acknowledge 和 as a な-adjective, and casual web searching only shows examples of 和のおやつ, more in line with what I would expect.

    Is this some sort of commercial language? Like spelling “snacks” with an x in English?

  3. Thanks for all the responses yesterday, I got a surprising amount of new insight about pronunciation which, because I’m trying to follow others’ advice when speaking flashcards out loud, has also helped a little with parsing what NS are saying.

    This was going to be part of that post but I fell down a mini rabbit hole.

    え is just a massive mystery to me. It seems inconsistent, even with NS, when to use /ɛ/ (“eh” in “meh”) instead of é. I was thinking that “eh” would make a native English speaker obvious, but NS saying 変 usually has the /ɛ/ while 周辺 has the é. Meanwhile the same NS might speak the first kanji of 全然 and 全員 differently.

    And really, the more I thought of it, the more it seems like a kind of spectrum. With the above four kanji I tend to hear on average from NS:
    “`
    変: /ɛ/ [–*————-] é
    辺: /ɛ/ [—————*] é
    全: /ɛ/ [——*———] é
    然: /ɛ/ [*—————] é
    “`

    Of course I hear 周辺 mostly from my Garmin GPS, but the voice doesn’t sound synthetic and the device can’t state dynamic place names in any language. It’s surely a real NS.

    助けてｗｗｗ。Any general rules to follow?

  4. Reading stuff on the internet is easy with Yomitan, but what about pdf files? How do you all get the furigana from pdf for unknown kanji?

  5. “お会いしとうございました”

    I can’t find any sources that mention しとう in grammar. What does it mean?

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