It’s honestly been weighing on my chest for some time now, and even if it’s just a “let it out” cathartic moment I want to rant about this for a bit because it’s gotten really bad especially lately.
I’ve been in this sub for a few years now, I have my periods of daily answering questions and helping people, and then months of radio silence as I move on with my life. For the last few months I’ve been mostly away but recently I came back and… I’m honestly surprised at how bad it’s gotten.
Before you get upset about this, let me clarify a couple of things:
* There’s a lot of extremely skilled, friendly, and welcoming people in this subreddit who are always providing amazing high-quality answers and helping others completely for free. This thread is **definitely not** about them. You probably know who those people are. I’m not talking about them.
* I absolutely love the **discussions**. Even the opinionated posts and the occasional “flame war” that happen between different camps (immersion vs textbooks, pitch accent vs no pitch accent, etc). I’ve gotten my fair share of downvotes, and given some too. It’s just part of the discourse. **I am not talking about subjective posts here**. Everyone has different opinions, especially when it comes to language learning
* I absolutely love the daily question thread. The quality of answers there is always extremely high, I rarely see wrong answers (ignoring mine), and there’s a good amount of native speakers who help a lot. It’s really high quality.
This said, it’s a bit sad to see the difference in quality when it comes to the main sub page. A lot of “simple” questions that should be posted in the simple question thread often just float around with 1 or 2 answers on the front page and don’t get deleted until maybe a day later (I’ve seen posts up for like 16 hours before they get deleted). And more often than not those answers are very low quality or incorrect (talking objectively here, like wrong grammar, etc) and sometimes even get a few upvotes too. **The fact that both the thread and the wrong answers stay up for so long with positive upvotes is what is actually bad for other people lurking and learning.**
There’s usually even 2-3 longer threads (I can spot at least one right now on the front page, although I won’t link to it) with like hundreds of upvotes, 20-30+ replies, and a probably a good 70-80% are just flat out wrong (again, not talking about opinions, I’m talking about actual objectively wrong answers). Often these wrong answers will even be top of the thread (most upvoted) and you’ll sometimes see a native speaker answer later and still not make it anywhere close to being the top answer.
What’s the solution? I honestly don’t know, but as it is right now it’s **really** bad for beginners. Most people in JP learning communities are at beginner (more than half) or intermediate level [(Here is the data if you’re curious)](https://i.imgur.com/bVar0uj.png) [\*] and this can explain both the existence of wrong answers and why they might get upvoted so much.
One of the subreddit rules is:
> **Do not guess or attempt to answer questions beyond your own knowledge.** Remember that answers you receive are never guaranteed to be 100% correct.
On the one hand obviously there’s always some leeway for answers, there’s sometimes subjectivity at play (“I hear X all the time” vs “I never heard X being used” which is common) and people do make mistakes and it’s totally normal and acceptable for it to happen. However on the other hand, a lot of people are well aware that they should not be answering certain questions and yet they do it anyway, and there doesn’t seem to be enough moderation to recognize, call out, and delete these posts. Especially when they make it to the most upvoted post in that thread.
Is it just me? Am I an old bitter man? I probably expect to get a lot of flack from this post here but it’s just my complete honest opinion as someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time helping others with Japanese. It honestly hurts me to see people get wrong answers and be none the wiser because of it. Especially when it happens on a weekly if not daily basis.
[\*] Data is sourced from a past survey (700+ responders)
14 comments
>What’s the solution? I honestly don’t know, but as it is right now it’s **really** bad for beginners.
Maybe something like a special flair to people who give enough fucks to prove that they’re a native speaker or posses some teaching qualifications or have passed some kind of proficiency level? This is probably going to hurt people who are proficient in Japanese but don’t have any formal qualifications but I don’t think there’s an easy way out of this. If you don’t have any system of promoting answers by qualified people then it all boils down to “can OP somehow determine he’s being fed false information”.
> **Do not guess or attempt to answer questions beyond your own knowledge.** Remember that answers you receive are never guaranteed to be 100% correct.
This is the reason I usually do not attempt to answer any questions here. I can manage not to get myself killed using Japanese but that’s about it.
A large part of the problem is that a lot of the time correct answers get downvoted. That discourages people with the correct answers from… you know, answering questions. The fundamental problem is really Reddit’s structure. It’s kind of like a blend of a traditional forum and the Youtube comment section where popular/early answers get pushed up and unpopular/late ones get buried, and that comes along with a very gameified rewards/punishment system with Reddit karma that exploits peoples dopamine receptors to control their behavior like a gambling den.
A solution might be to force every user to have a flair displaying their level before they can comment/post (with no proof required, but maybe an option to have a verified flair). This wouldn’t stop beginners from pretending to be advanced, but it would mean people know that the advice they’re receiving is from someone who at least claims to be proficient.
I sometimes think that people who post simple “how does this sentence work” questions to the general public (most of which are beginners) have themselves to blame for not using the dedicated question thread. The rules clearly state
>8. The following types of questions should be posted to the pinned daily question thread:
>
>– Any question for beginner or JLPT N5 level material (e.g. Genki I, Tango N5, etc)
>
>– Quick/short questions that could be addressed by a single answer.
As you said, the daily thread has great answers. If you ask all 500K+ users here, mostly beginners, you are poised to get bad answers.
I’d say it’s fundamentally a Reddit problem. As long as something gets upvoted, it will be displayed more and often at the top… Even if it’s wrong.
My solution is very simple… Yes, the community can be VERY helpful at times, but don’t use Reddit as an actual source for learning any Japanese- always check your answers at sites that are reputable. Maggie-sensei and Tae Kim come to mind for grammar… Kanji has various dictionaries out there.
And that’s not including that as purely a language problem, there are ALWAYS exceptions to any rules you think you know.
How do you know what’s correct or not? You always seem to have a warning in your posts that states that your japanese sucks and that we should take everything you say with a pinch of salt. Like, you say it yourself, why would anyone listen to you instead of another random guy?
I ask questions myself… Rarely answered any (I did answer a question about stroke order afaik… Can’t remember anything else other than that).
I like it here because of how fast I can get my question answered… However, when someone has answered my question, there’s a possibility someone corrects them and it doesn’t give me enough confidence I’m getting “real” answers.
I also realized that people can claim to be a native speaker (or something near-fluent) in the language without ever confirming if they are or not. If this subreddit were to enforce that (confirming their qualifications to be considered native or something), **you’d have to de-anonymize them…**
If someone were to claim to be a native speaker, should we ask for their birth certificate…? 😱
If someone claims to be fluent and we give them an online test, who’s to say they’re not Googling the answers? 😢
If someone says they’re a teacher (specializing in Japanese), do we get their ID and see if the face on their ID matches their face irl? 😷
I think all online communities have these problems… **but the advantage** with Reddit is that people get to argue, to defend, to correct, to etc. if someone’s answer was incorrect.
With HelloTalk, HiNative, and Facebook … they’re kind of too “censored” or “politically correct.” The answers don’t always get elaborated and I think telling another user they’re wrong might disrupt the peace rather than actually coming to a conclusion as to which is which.
I don’t think there’s an efficient way for us to know who’s the beginner… teaching another beginner.
It’s pretty bad yeah.
Competitive, nitpicking nature of the Japanese learning community + lack of native speakers + slow or inactive mods = this hot mess.
I stopped commenting after I got mowed down by people who don’t even live here. Decided to let them at it if they think they know better.
Could you provide some examples? In my experience as someone who’s been actively studying for a year-ish, I can’t really think of a time where an explanation taken as correct has been so bad that it’s had long term effects on my ability to parse the language. Maybe I just don’t understand Japanese at all and everything I know is wrong, but it’s usually more like, “this explanation doesn’t seem to fit the usage, I’ll look into it more”, and then you do and learn and move on. There’s just too much Japanese for having to worry about finding a perfect response to every question every single time one arises, and there’s definitely much worse places to consistently get unhelpful answer than here.
I notice a lot of the proficient people with many contributions to this sub seem to always be perpetually on the edge of losing it over things like this, which to someone who isn’t checking this sub constantly, don’t seem to amount to much. Maybe there’s something we can do as a community to address this
Agreed, they should get more mods and aggressively remove posts that should be in the simple questions thread
one thing I’ve noticed about this subredit is that people dont pre determined research
ie : I need to understand x, ive done no preliminary checking
if I had to post a question i would do my basic googling,
write my sentence in english, write the jpn version of it,
use this for grammar [https://bunpo-check.com/](https://bunpo-check.com/)
this does not only happen here, but in learning in general. we are at a time where it is easy to get resources and do the search the number of times i have to tell people, have you typed it in google sensei first. and they’ll get annoyed.
another gripe I have is people confuse “immersion”, what they describe is intense studying. this isnt language immersion, that would be spend all day in tarket languange / only speek in it. if what you are doing is a “mini mersion” weekend sorry to pop their bubble but they are just stuying,
Well, there’s a reason why so many people say “don’t believe everything you read on the internet”; Reddit is obviously no exception, everyone with a device capable of connecting to the internet can post whatever the hell they want, either here or anywhere else online.
That’s why anyone posting here should be aware of the risks of being bamboozled by people who probably are even worse at Japanese than them. I mean it’s kind of ridiculous; if you read the comments in some YouTube channels of Japanese natives teaching Japanese, chances are you may find a few idiots trying to correct the Japanese of a NATIVE speaker, I’ve seen it myself more often than I’d like to admit.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe this subreddit has its uses, for instance I love when people find new resources to study (namely apps, new books, maybe a new YouTube channel, etc), or when native speakers allow us to ask a few questions, talk about study strategies or even set up discord servers to chat about learning this beautiful language. Other than that, I’d rather ask my questions to people who are actually qualified to teach Japanese, or at the very least have been living in Japan long enough to teach the language.
>I absolutely love the daily question thread. The quality of answers there is always extremely high, I rarely see wrong answers (ignoring mine), and there’s a good amount of native speakers who help a lot. It’s really high quality.
I’m less keen on it in terms of readability. It just seems to be mimicking normal threads but without the benefit of clear subject titles and post demarcations. Why do you think the quality of answers is better on that thread? there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why they should be – unless the clever people just limit their attention to the questions there.
Also, why was the daily thread instituted in the first place? Was the number of normal posts becoming too high to handle?
As you can tell (from the above), I don’t really understand why the daily thread exists.
Yes, let’s shame people for both trying to help and being engaged enough to want to learn.
Yes, you’re a bitter old man and unless you had some idea in mind on how to improve your perceived quality of response on here, you’re changing nothing by posting this other than perhaps to feel better surrounding yourself with other elitists.