Daily Thread: simple questions, comments that don’t need their own posts, and first time posters go here (July 21, 2023)

12 comments

1. I’m currently going through WaniKani and have been for a quite a while (extremely consistently at the start, but lately I’ve just been finishing my reviews on my way to work/home since it’s a 90 minute commute by bus). Currently I’m on Lesson 22 and it’s actually kind of crazy the number of Kanji I recognize in the wild because of it.

   I’m exposed to a lot of Japanese at my job since we have a lot of manuals for things that are only in Japanese. I can get by pretty well with just a patchwork of vocab and kinda getting the rest by context and just being used to reading manuals in English as well so I know what to generally expect. Everyone else just uses Google translate, so it’s pretty cool being able to just read them unassisted for the most part. However something that catches me constantly, even if I know *every single word* that I’m reading individually, is the grammar.

   I started out my Japanese journey with Genki, and I ended up going through all of 1 and 2 including the workbooks and an answer sheet I found online. However, I ended up taking quite a break afterwards and now I’ve forgotten pretty much every single thing from that.

   Part of me is thinking I should just go through it all again, but honestly I kind of want to try a different resource and see if getting a variety of different explanations might be better for recall, rather than just re-reading what I’ve already read.

   I bought [Japanese: The Spoken Language](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/4yIAAOSwFfph0Iq9/s-l1600.jpg) but honestly I kind of hate it. The whole thing is written like phonetically and it’s just not *fun* to read. Japanese is *fun* to read. I like reading it. I want to read *Japanese*. Even if it’s literally just kana it still would help with reading speed at the very least. On top of that the layout just seems really unintuitive to me. There will be something that looks like it’s supposed to go with the accompanying audio but then I’ll listen to the audio and it actually doesn’t, or the audio will do part of it and then move on without saying anything. I don’t know. I might be stupid or something, but regardless of that I just don’t think it’s a good fit for me and I can tell that reading through it will be way more of a chore than I want.

   I’m looking for something that’s good for a self-learner and also presents the examples in Japanese, so that I can get practice *actually reading Japanese* while also learning grammar with guidance from a book.

   I’m kinda looking at **みんなの日本語** because if I want to read Japanese while learning grammar… well there it is. However I read that the *entire book* is written in Japanese, and it seems really daunting to have *everything* in Japanese as I feel like it’d be harder for me to actually understand what the book is trying to teach me. I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts on that or if there’s maybe something that’s good as an in-between where I’m still getting Japanese reading practice while learning grammar in English.

2. Not a question, but I was watching this small [clip](https://youtu.be/_SCyvbQfTm8), and thought about how easily the kids tossed out those がs:
   0:04 地面が仰山あるなあ…
   1:41 ぼろでも,どこにしまっとくが?

3. How am I going to remember 線路 is railroad track and 路線 is route…I get them mixed up…

   I guess I might have to rely on context…

4. From the やさしい日本語 blog – a post about 入学式 in elementary schools:

   先日、息子の小学校の入学式がありました。1年生と、その親が、学校へ行きます。先生方やPTAの人、それと生徒を代表**して**6年生がいました。

   It looks like the sentence [生徒を代表**して**] is modifying 6年生 (six graders who represent students). However if this is a relative clause, I’d expect する, している, orした. Can a て form verb really modify a noun?

5. I bought this tea cup in Japan but i’m not so sure what it says. Can someone help me translate please? Would be much appreciated!

   ​

   https://imgur.com/D392HHU

6. Does anyone have a good resource for finding the origins of phrases/grammar? I like to look that up out of curiosity when it’s not inherently clear to me how a phrase/grammar point got its meaning, but it does not always seem easy to find. I came across ものの today and can’t seem to find where it came from.

7. Why many Japanese stores and commercials use the word:友だち but not 友達？

8. In this JLPT N5 question, i don’t get why the が and は are in the positions they’re in.

   correct answer: 野村さんがつけているのはロレックスの時計です。

   the answer i arranged: 野村さんはつけているのがロレックスの時計です。

9. The sentence 勉強を怠けてはいけないよ translates to “You must not be lazy about studying.”

   Here the “wa” particle is marking 怠けて (to be lazy) as the subject, which is confusing to me because wouldn’t the subject of this sentence be “you” not “lazy”?

   Could someone help me understand this?

10. [deleted]

11. How do I add Kanji to Anki with Kanji God where it’ll fill in the card data?

12. Hi I’m trying to understand the translation of Lamp’s album Stardust in Blue “秋の惑星、ハートはナイトブルー”:

    Is the 秋 in 秋の惑星 read as あき or とき？Also what does “秋の惑星” mean and how does it translate in the context of “ハートはナイトブルー” to Stardust in Blue? What I understand it as, is “autumn planet, a night blue heart” which dosen’t seem exactly right to me