2 comments

1. Here’s something I’ve been wondering about lately. As a native Japanese speaker, I naturally struggle with learning English. But conversely, I wonder if a speaker of, say, an Indo-European language would face even greater difficulties trying to learn Japanese.

   Suppose a beginner sees a string of characters that appears to modify a predicate verb and, thinking it might be an adverb, asks a seemingly super simple question on Reddit.

   In that case, an advanced learner might respond with something like this, right?

   Oh, that is…..

   * adverbs (e.g., 呆然と, 颯爽と, 黙々と, 深々と…), or
   * the continuative form of i-adjectives (e.g., 軽く, 激しく, 強く, 厳しく, おとなしく…), or
   * the continuative form of na-adjectives (e.g., 活発に, 自由に, 真剣に, 静かに, 熱心に…), or
   * the -te form of verbs (e.g., 急いで, 慌てて, 喜んで, 笑って…), or
   * nouns with the -de particle (e.g., 大声で, 裸足で, 真顔で…), or
   * or reduplicated verbs (e.g., 恐る恐る, 泣く泣く…).

   Of course, while the kind of answer provided above is perfectly correct, if I were a beginner just starting to learn Japanese as a foreign language, **I can imagine that receiving such a response would make me want to throw my Japanese textbook against the wall.**

   (Not just because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I might even misunderstand it as an irrelevant response, not an answer to my question at all. There’s even a risk my misunderstanding could get worse, leading me to believe that advanced learners are simply showing off their knowledge.)

   Of course, it’s a different story if you’ve patiently studied Japanese in a classroom setting in places like Vietnam, Nepal, or Australia, using textbooks and under the guidance of decent teachers, that is, if you’ve survived a situation where, for instance, a 101 class started with 50 students but was down to 20 before the semester ended, and by 201, only 10 remained.

   Unless you survived the school curriculum of Genki 1/2 -> Quartet 1/2 -> Tobira: Gateway to Advanced Japanese (Tobira: Intermediate Japanese) -> advanced Japanese, that is, if you studied Japanese on your own, how did you overcome the kind of difficulties I mentioned?

   Did you, as an adult, understood from the beginning that no language in the world can truly be inherently more difficult to acquire than any other? That is, instead, for native speakers, it’s simply a matter of having been exposed to their mother tongue for 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 20 years or something, and that the fundamental, universal situation isn’t specifically about Japanese? And that cases like a Portuguese speaker learning Spanish are actually the special exception? So, did you simply understand that struggling is natural, and that there are no shortcuts, cheat skills, or game guides, and therefore, you just patiently learned?

   You’ve never found learning Japanese to be a painful experience? That you’ve never felt the need to conserve effort for something that’s merely a means to an end, and instead, you’ve always, consistently, enjoyed the learning process itself?

2. just updated from yomichan to yomitan

   used to make cards with a definition like: mountain top

   now makes cards with dictionary name in front of definition: *(n, JMdict (English))* mountain top

   how can I remove dictionary name?