Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (July 16, 2025)

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11 comments
  1. I just started the Kaishi 1.5k Anki deck.
    There’s the sentence “It was a good book, wasn’t it?”, meant to teach me the word “book”.
    In the recording of the sentence, and the Furigana, it says “hon”. In the other recording of the stand-alone word it says “pon”.
    It’s my first day trying to learn vocab with Kanji within context with Anki.
    What’s with the “pon”? I know that Kanjis can have multiple readings but why would it give me a different one than the one used in the sentence?

  2. Hello, earlier someone made this post online, and I am completely lost as to what it means or why

    > 最初からずっと男の格好でwwどこが女 声優もハイキューの日向くん めちゃ男らしく

    * Why is ずっと being used here?

    * What is a 格好? I know that it is used in カッコいい, but my dictionary is saying it means: “shape; appearance; situation”, but I am also seeing example sentences that seem to refer to wardrobes? What am I looking at here?

    * Why is there a で here?

    * Why is there a も here?

    * Why is it 男らしく and not 男らしい? I believe that く turns it into a modifier (Adverbial?), but there is nothing for it to modify, the sentence just ends…

    * What does this *Sentence* even mean?

    I have been studying Japanese for some time ~~(although my output has always sucked)~~, but this sentence is making me feel like I am back on Day 1. I know that it is super embarrassing, but I cannot understand *anything* that they are saying. 一語でも分からなくて助けてください!

  3. got a question about せっかく grammar in this quartet 1 workbook example dialogue about a college student who is gonna graduate soon

    でも、周りの友達はみんな就職する。いい会社に就職できさえすれば、将来のことを心配せずに済むと考えているようだ。しかし、せっかく大学で学んだのに、学んだことに関係がない仕事はしたくない。

    1. Confused with せっかく~のに in last sentence. I learned せっかく~のに can mean something like “even though i went through the trouble of”, but if i read it like that in this sentence, then the sentence doesnt sound right to me. Is it being used here to say something like “it took me great effort to(せっかく?) study/learn in college, so…(のに?)”?

  4. I asked like last week, but didn’t really get an answer. So I am on the last chapter of quartet 1 and basically fucked up my Anki card deck in the sense that I added every chapter’s vocab together into one big deck that also had my genki cards. So anki shows me 20 new cards a day, but they aren’t the ones from the chapter I am on at the time, so I can’t really read the supplementary practice texts because I have not learned the words from that chapter. Idk what to do at this point, I don’t wanna finish quartet 1 and move onto quartet 2 if I don’t have a good grasp of the vocab.. no point rushing if you can’t read anything. Should I make another deck or are there settings in Anki that can let me focus on particurlar chapters? I feel like I have completely messed up my learning experience here

  5. Hello! I started my “learning Japanese” journey recently and was wondering how I should approach learning Kana. I found this app called RoboKana and honestly think that they have the best approach to learning it, but I was wondering if I should take my time or if I should speed learn it in just under a month or 2-3 weeks. I’m about to take Japanese classes in August and would really love to know Kana by then.

  6. Is this a valid way of learning grammar, and does a resource like this exist?

    Knowing my own brain pretty well and how it absorbs information, I think I want to learn grammar by taking only 2 verbs, 2 nouns, 2 adjectives, but all the different to manipulate them (conjugations, negations, questions whatever) and create a bunch of sentences and learn all the (well idk if all but like the normal ones) ways to manipulate words into sentences in Japanese, without introducing a vocab overload at the same time.
    That’s *not* to say the only vocab is 6 words as I might have implied, but I would also need all the pronouns, wh-question words, different words for negation, spatial relativity (there, here), time relativity (now, tomorrow), particles, pioliteness modifiers, etc but *not* learn more words like “doctor”, “teacher”, “student”, “sleep”, “talk”, “sing” “kill”, “red”, “white” “small”, “big”.
    I think doing this for a few weeks will help me later with learning vocab through sentences where I already know what a structure already means.

    Think:

    He ate the big sausage
    they ate some sausages
    eating big sausages
    Who ate all the sausages?
    The big sausages ate him
    Who was eaten by the big sausage?

    I’m sure this can turn to hundreds sentences and if I master those I think vocabulary through sentences would be much easier. Also I find it more fun when I’m confident in my ability to create new sentenes even with a very limited vocab.

    *My examples really only used 1 noun/verb/adjective and it can still work I think, but the reason I want 2 is because then the number of combinations will be truly endless and not too restrictive. It will be more fun for me to come up with zany sentences with 2 of each instead of just 1 of each

  7. u/optyp_

    In….

    [https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1lyew7z/comment/n2zrpxg/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1lyew7z/comment/n2zrpxg/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)

    I deliberately didn’t mention this, as it could have confused beginners.

    テーブル に きれいなバラが活け てある。

    This might just confuse beginners, but it’s actually not impossible to focus on the に case here. There’s an argument that the co-occurence of テアル with the locative case might be because the meaning of アル is inherited in テアル, and its original sense of existence isn’t completely lost.

    However, for beginners, it’s probably safer to consider such discussions merely as intellectually interesting trivia.

  8. I know I’ve posted it way back in time, but I’ve lost the url. Can someone help with that site with icons and illustrations of people, animals, food, etc, that are very common?

  9. the mc was watching an action movie on tv, and there was an “adult scene”

    中盤にさしかかり、お約束というのか……主人公とヒロインの大人な時間がはじまった。

    …………むちゅーってしてる。

    and then later this happened to him:

    枕にむちゅーをしていた。

    あんな映画を見たせいだ。

    ただ……

    一体誰の夢を見ていた……?

    むちゅーは枕にしていたけど、夢の中では誰かがいた。

    isn’t 夢中 to be absorbed in / immersed in?

    or does it mean something else in this case?

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