What are some words that you didn’t rote memorize and learned just by listening to them in media

20 comments

1. まじで

2. Like, 50% of everything I know (media, but mostly life)

3. 分岐

   道なり

   I know there’s more than that, but the ones I picked up from my GPS are freshest in my mind.

   EDIT: Oh I remembered some more

   グー

   チョキ

   パー

   ブタ (as in a junk hand)

   Kakegurui is surprisingly good at showing AND telling so I’ve picked up quite a bit from just context. 🙂 Which is really what the ideal process is about. Sometimes I get lucky and can infer something from just knowing all the words around it. From Pokemon I was able to pick up 隣 because I had understood everything else in the dialogue about going to the neighboring town EXCEPT the word neighbor.

4. Lots, but one of the more impressive examples was when I picked up the 〜のように / 〜のような grammar from a subtitled anime episode a couple weeks before it came up in Japanese class, and worked out that it behaved like a na-adjective. I was SO proud of myself, lol.

5. Some high frequency words like 別に

6. weirdly I can usually just input them and not output them

7. Off the top of my head, from one particular source:

   – 交通
   – 算数
   – 悩み
   – 解決
   – 体重
   – 果てしない

8. Recently I’ve felt that with words like 宿敵 and 駄弁る. I must have first seen them maybe a few months ago, then I saw them again one of those days and I instantly knew what they meant.

9. Renkinjyutsu

10. 自己紹介 and 拍手 are the first two that come to mind. I watched a lot of idol concert livestreams over the pandemic.

11. 「行く～」

12. 地球温暖化

    Learned from Yotsuba lol

13. all of them

14. Mostly anime stuff. Some ones that come to mind

    やれやれ

    人間

    辞めて

    ちょっと待ってよ

    早く

    先輩

    お兄さん (and all the family words basically)

15. 大丈夫

16. Way too many to list. I would say at least 90% of my Japanese vocab I’ve learned solely through listening. Sometimes I even surprise myself by knowing words I didn’t even know I knew.

    I’ve also picked up some grammar solely through listening and not studying, but mostly verb suffixes. Like adding ば at the end of the verb to make it conditional, たい/たくない for want/don’t want, or はず for should.

17. 随分!

18. I donno man, most of them I suppose.

19. This will probably depend on how much Japanese you encounter without needing to sit down and study. I’ve done much of my learning in the country, so a lot, I’d say.

    I do remember when I first moved here and heard the word 気持ち without knowing what it meant. I thought, “wow, people here really love kimchi”.

20. There was a few but one in particular that I have no idea about the meaning is ですけど not sure how to really spell it but hope you and everyone who reads it gets the point that I’m trying to make