15 comments

1. >unnamed friend chatater:「ジェシい、人が来てるよー？聞こえてないのォ？！」
   話者：「えッ、あ、あ、ごめん！！だ、誰？」

   友達が身を寄せ合いながら、何とも形容し難い目でこっちを見てヒソヒソ！と小声になっていない小声で囁き合っている。

   **自分でも**何だか白々しい

   ごめん、誰か…だって？！誰が尋ねてくるかなんてわかってるくせに！

   unnamed friend chatater：「ウソあれジェシの彼氏ィ！？」

   context: the speaker’s friends are gossiping about her pretty much right in front of her face, and she’s commentating on that as the narrator. (the 誰 thing refers to the fact that that her (the speaker’s) boyfriend is coming to visit. It’s not made explicit that the friend characters know that he’s coming, but I guess that is implied? Or not?

   自分でも is the only part of this that is confusing me. If you cut that out, this would be perfectly understandable to me as something like “It was somewhat brazen (that they are gossiping right in front of me)” but where does 自分 come into play? I am supposed to image an unspoken verb here like “自分でも何だか白々しい（と思った）”

   Or am I misreading this, like she’s saying that she herself is brazen for feigning ignroance about who has just arrived (her very own boyfriend). But in that case くせに sounds kind of accusatory.

2. 食べる手が止まりません

   What is the function of 手 in this sentence?

3. Hi! I’ve finished N5 and recently started N4, and I want to improve my reading through real books instead of just textbooks.

   I use a Kindle, so I’d love beginner-friendly Japanese books that work well with the built-in dictionary. Graded readers, easy short stories, or simple novels are all welcome.

4. Is weblio jp a good source of example sentences for vocabs? Like, is it reasonable to assume that examples there are “natural”?

5. >廊下を歩くと、自動販売機のスペースを流用した仮設舞台があった。

   >多分、グループやサークル単位で時間貸ししているのだろう。

   >学生のグループが歌を歌っているが、それも大いに盛り上がっていた。

   >「何だよ、あれ。ばかみたいだ」

   context: Speaker is at a school festival. It’s sort of a fish out of water situation so he’s not accustomed to the festivities. Narrator is also the speaker

   My question is about が. I understand that this is not the が that means “but/however” (I think…), but it doesn’t really feel like the softening が (as in 行きたいんですが、暇がありますか？）because he’s just factually stating what’s happening.

   Different meaning of が or I am juts misreading the nuance?

6. I’m almost at the point of giving up. I’ve been learning hiragana as a first step, but every single resource has the symbols drawn differently. There’s just no consistency and it is driving me insane. How am I supposed to learn to draw the symbol correctly when it’s done in multiple ways?

   I’ll give you an example. Here’s き. But on its own *Wiki* t[he image is a totally different symbol](https://japanese-ken.fandom.com/wiki/%E3%81%8D). Do you join up the bit at the bottom, or not? This is already almost impossible to learn, and I am totally defeated.

7. hi everyone, i wanna start studying Japanese and hope to reach N2 in 3 years, please share your experiences if you reached such goal, it’ll help me a lot, thankssss (How do you text your level though, like except for taking real JLPT test, what else do you do?)

8. I’m so dumb.

   I switched to 12-key input at the end of last year after having used rōmaji input for 12 years. My biggest complaint was that I couldn’t find the 「」 keys (press and hold K and L on Gboard’s rōmaji input; not sure how I figured that out) and I’ve been typing “かつ小こ” every time I need to use it in 12-key. Turns out I just needed to swipe left and right on や and select the proper bracket type. Sheesh.

   Bright side, it didn’t take me long to get used to the swipe inputs even though I thought it would take me a bit longer.

9. In a song I like, there’s a phrase I can’t figure out: 重ね合った時間 (はきっとHoliness – that’s the rest of the verse, just for context). Is it some idiom of a sort? Or is it a lyrical way of saying ‘time we spent together’? I can’t make sense out of it, help would be greatly appreciated!

10. Hi! I reached out a while back about sharing [QuizLingua](https://quizlingua.com/), my free Japanese learning web app project, and it wasn’t approved, but I think I messed up by not being clear enough, mentioning “premium” and making it sound like a paid app.

    Just wanted to quickly note that the learning experience is totally free, and always will be. The only paid things are just cosmetic skins and chat colors for those who want to support the project

    I’ve been grinding on it lately and added some new modes (Grammar, Sentence Builder, Vocab) and also a better mobile experience (working on an actual phone app too but it takes time), but I still need feedback to improve it.

    Would you guys be open to me making a post about it now? If you guys still want to keep it off the sub, I totally get it!

11. why does い-adjectives past form even uses です instead of でした. Isn’t the whole purpose of でした is that.

    https://preview.redd.it/wed0oic0g8lg1.png?width=576&format=png&auto=webp&s=c55012abf9b78fdf0fb3767eeadbd32936cbaa4c

    or is it just another language quirk, “It is the way it is. Just deal with it.”

12. Is it generally a good idea to converse with natives if one is still relatively early into their Japanese studies? Since I have seemingly become *really* good at stringing together constructs within a limited context, some natives online seem to get the impression that my Japanese is better than it actually is, however when it actually comes to holding a conversation, I always end up feeling guilty because I end up spending exorbitant amounts of time meticulously forging my sentences against the razor’s edge–only to never truly know if the contents I am producing are actually natural or not.

    On one side of things: I know that I need to practice *somehow* if I am ever to git gud, however I also cannot shake the feeling that I will be letting people down by revealing “the real truth” about how much I suck.

    Should I actually try to engage with conversation opportunities as they present themselves–or devise a means to scurry away until I am sure I can get it right?

13. Any good decks if I don’t have the time to mine using novels/anime/… ? (I just finished Kaishi 1.5k and want to improve my vocab)

14. When it comes to reading manga in Japanese for immersion practice – do I make sure I know every word & grammar particle, or do I try to get the gist of each page?

    Also, I add words to my Anki deck that are common enough.

15. Is there a systematic and engaging way to improve listening skills? I can read pretty much just fine. Light novels, visual novels, and whatever books I pick up I can generally read with few problems. But when it comes to listening, especially fast native speech, it just turns into a jumble that I can’t parse.

    With reading, you can go at your own pace. Also, you always have the exact words that the person is trying to communicate to you. With listening, you have to go at the speaker’s pace, and if you can’t pick up the words they said, then you’re left unable to understand what they’re trying to communicate. It’s just harder than reading to me.

    Example: I was listening to a DDLC stream and the line was something like 「親交を深めることがいいことだと思うけど」and the moment I heard しんこう I got tripped up and didn’t even hear the rest of the sentence. I then look down and then looking at the kanji it’s obvious what the word is and what it means. But this is concerning considering I’ve read 進行、信仰、親交、侵攻、like nothing pops to mind at all? I can recognize but not recall and without kanji I’m dead in the water.

    I am aware lots of Japanese videos on youtube have subtitles, and there is fast speech with subtitles that I can use to check what I heard, but that sounds like a very laborious process, especially if I have no interest in the content. However, if it is the fastest way to improve listening, I might do it.

    Anyway I am just wondering what it’s like from people’s perspectives who learned to hear very fast Japanese. How did you do it?

Comments are closed.