16 comments

1. I finished Octopath Traveler and moved onto Harvestella. I think I wouldn’t have considered this game normally but it is turning out to be a favourite. Very well told side quests that draw you in, you get to know the different characters as they reoccur. Lovely music and natural scenery that is quite peaceful.

2. Not sure if I am allowed to post it here but just wanted to share this! I recently started learning Japanese at a language school and I’ve been struggling with memorising particles and vocab consistently. I feel that crafting questions from what I learn and testing myself helps the most. There are already quiz apps like that but they don’t really let me choose which topics/combination of topics I would like to focus on (particles/vocab/a specific lesson, etc). So, I made a small app where users can input their own questions/answers from class and organise them with tags. Then when generating quizzes, you can choose exactly which topics you want to test yourself with. It’s currently in closed testing on Android, so I need to manually add testers for now. It’s completely free — if anyone’s interested in trying it out, feel free to PM me. This is my first application so would love to hear some feedback on it!

   https://preview.redd.it/vrywpuoeh00h1.jpeg?width=1078&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0258bccd81fcb957339c1c473ab4884f85bb4d3f

3. I already saw a post similar to this, but my question is a little more specific, so it didn’t have an answer that felt relevant to what I’m writing.

   Context: I have a character that compares herself to a doll because she doesn’t feel like a person, but instead plastic; and I know that in America trans women are sometimes referred to as “Dolls,” this character is a strong figure in media, and she’s briefly mentioned a few times that for her photoshoots, she finds it easier to control her expressions and mannerisms if she imagines herself as a doll and the manager of the shoot as a creative child who plays with and poses her.

   A lot of her fanbase are LGBTQ+ and she adores it, and while she is not trans, she doesn’t see interviewers asking her if she is to be an insult. She also does have a decent following in America; even so, they keep asking because of this American fanbase interacting with her online; they assume that she is and want to catch her in a controversy. It works for that demographic, but I wanted to know if this would something that would be interchangeable between the languages.

   Also, I know that in one place (I don’t remember which) that transgender women are referred to as “Angels,” which is also where my confusion lies. I could brush it off as her fanbase being knowledgeable about her American fanbase, but that’s also suspending the disbelief that people know American LGBTQ slag; I also just recently learned the term(a couple years, but I still fell like it’s recent) so I don’t want to assume and press that assumption onto characters I create

4. I watched two movies in Japanese while I was on a plane back-to-back. Lego Batman movie and Storks.

   One really weird thing I noticed is they add reference to a drink bar or ドリンクバー in places where there was nothing remotely similar in the original English versions.

   In the Lego Batman movie, Robin exclaims how big and spacious the Bat Cave is and he exclaims his excitement about how there’s also Drink Bar when he says nothing of the sort in the english version.

   In Storks, one of the character asks another what he envisions will be in his office if he ever becomes boss and he also mentions a drink bar. This change is so odd to me but it happened enough times for me to question the cultural significance of soda fountains being particularly associated with something extravagant.

   Is this just a really, REALLY weird coincidence that I happened to catch these interesting changes from a back-to-back movie watch or is this actually a popular Japanese joke that I was not aware about?

5. I’ve been working on Shirimono, a Japanese learning app, and I’d really like to hear what you think, especially from people who are actually studying. I am a JLPT N2 and I now consider myself fluent and the idea was to try to create the application I would have wanted to study with.

   There is a website: [https://shirimono.fun/](https://shirimono.fun/)
   But also an application on the iOS app store: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shirimono/id6759329826](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shirimono/id6759329826)

   For now, we got JLPT course materials from N5 to N3 right now. More content is on the way. It won’t be only JLPT though because we’re also building specialty courses (things like onomatopoeia, theme-based courses such as Tokyo train stations, Japanese food, that kind of stuff) so you will be able to drill stuff that’s fun or super practical, not just test prep.

   For those who want to try it out for free, I created a promotion code `REDDIT2026` for full free access (you will need to paste it in the Stripe checkout page so that no payment information is asked). I genuinely want feedback: what’s confusing, what’s missing, what you’d want in a “only X” course, whatever 🥹

   Please reply here or DM if you prefer.

   Thank you in advance!

6. Hi does anyone understand how minna no nihongo renshu works?

   A B C exercises

   Thank you🫡🫡

7. How do you handle synonyms in your SRS systems? Bunpro tends to translate words like datte and shikashi as “however” or demo and kedo as “but”, and I keep getting them wrong because I have no idea which it’s expecting. Is that just a skill issue where I need to be paying more attention to the context?

8. Watching old filthyfrank videos after learning Japanese is life changing.

9. https://preview.redd.it/lixh24uyw10h1.png?width=652&format=png&auto=webp&s=e48ab83bf64faea81de83f51da0478122a78330c

   What does もんな mean in “弱点タイプのポケモンで攻撃すれば、与えるダメージは２倍になるもんな。”?

10. I randomly came across a website with reading lessons and decided to check one close to my level.

    > 大学を卒業したばかりの私は、今、ある教室に通っている。実は、私は卒業後、第一希望の会社に入れず、それ以来すっかり自信をなくしてしまっていた。無気力になり、積極的に行動できなかった。いくつか就職活動は続けていたが、面接にはあまり**行きたがらなかった**。

    The whole text is written from the speaker’s perspective (私は). Why would they not write 行きたなかった in the last sentence and use がる？

    Isn’t that aux verb exclusively used to describe what others, i.e., third parties, are showing sings of? Maybe it’s admissible if you were describing yourself in a weird 3rd person way, but without any “perspective” noun attached like 傍目 or 視点 (honestly, I don’t know if this would work), it’s even clearer they are speaking about their own experiences.

    Am I missing something? >!The website has an AI vibe to it, so maybe that would explain this.!<

11. I realize this is a bit in the weeds, but it’s something I’m curious about gramatically.

    In this manga, a girl is staring at her phone and she says “既読にならないですよね”

    Logically, I know that in a hand-wavey way, she’s saying “it’s not read yet” with 既読 obviously being the operative word for an unread message.

    What I’m curious about is how にならない works tense-wise. When somebody knows something, and we know that they are in a current state of knowing it, we use 知っている。分かってる。 etc etc.

    But with 既読にならない, to me, it reads as ambiguous between “this will not become read” (it’s not read and I know that it will stay in a not-read state in the future) and “this is not (currently) read” … similar to how we use 知らない instead of something like 知っていない, even though it’s expressing a current state of not-knowing.

    I know I’m being pendantic to an extent, but can somebody help me with this grammar?

12. Is tofugu dead?

13. 部屋に入り近くに寄って気が付いたが、白羽さんからは、浮浪者のような臭いがした。

    Does 入り function as a conjunction here? I am a bit unsure because usually I only see Verb-ますstem (that used as conjuctions) put before a comma only, and not just put like this (except in lyrics)

14. Do you recomend kana.pro for learning kana? I like how it try to give you simple words too so you make connections

15. A handful of times, in written texts, I’ve seen 許し(ゆるし) used as a synonym for 許可(きょか). Like 「許しなしで〇〇してはいけません」 etc etc. Do people use 許し like this in modern spoken speech? In my personal experience, when modern people are speaking, 99% of the time it’s 許可. If I said 許し like this, would it be weird?

16. Hello, could someone explain っていうんだよ. It was in a video of some people gaming and a boy asked an other boy if he liked something in english, the girl in the group didn’t understood it and wanted them to repeat it.

    Boy: 男と男の会話

    Girl: もう一回英語で言ってみて

    Boy: いや no no no

    Girl: じゃあ私いらないやん。なんでコミュニケーションから仲間はずれっていうんだよ。いじめだよ、いじめ

    My guess would be it means something along the lines of “I am saying ‘Why are you leaving a comrade out of the conversation'”, but from what I could research っていうんだ is used for something an other person said and not oneself. But “Why are you saying to leave a comrade out of the conversation” doesn’t seem right.

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