12 comments

1. a burglar was introduced as 忍び込み造 and I was wondering what the 造 on the end there was about? It had furigana of ぞう.

2. This is a question from the practice test for N3 in the Mazii app.

   エプロンを（　）、料理を作ってください。

   Why is the answer して? Isn’t する usually used for wearing accessories?

3. Can’t make a post because Karmas to low on this subreddit, but i’m starting language school in Japan next week! Any advice!?

4. Is this the most natural way to say “did you feed the animals?”

   動物に餌をあげましたか

   (eg cats, chickens)

5. Any difference for 弾く (はじく) vs (ひく) in regards to a guitar or piano?

6. I’ve recently started studying Japanese seriously and was wondering: what is the best way to get to where immersion becomes useful? I’m currently working through Genki 1, Remembering the Kanji and Anki flash cards (core 2.2k). I know that immersion is considered one of the best ways to learn but I’m not at a point where I even understand 10% of the conversation that I’m listening to.

7. >風が緩かろうと、自転車で来ている奴等は、 まさに一苦労と言えるだろう。

   There’s 2 things about this sentence I don’t understand:

   1. What is the と particle doing here?

   2. What does the volitional form 緩かろう do to modify this verb? I have some basic understanding of volitional form as expressing intention, but for something non-living like wind, I’m not sure how to wrap my head around this form.

8. I’ve hit 2,300 words on my core 2k/6k deck. Should I begin sentence mining? Or should I go all the way to 3,000 and begin then?

9. I’ve studied the Kanji using Remembering the Kanji (with Kanji Koohii), until reached maybe 80% success rate with 3000 kanji around two years ago. Dropped studying those then, since felt like overkill at the point, compared to being just a beginner with Duolingo back then otherwise.

   As for now, I’m at the early section 4 in Duolingo, with 1400 words. I do like the app for listening and good motivational effect. And I’m sure I have motivation to continue it untill end of time, as long as there is any benefit to it.

   Now, should I continue focusing on Duolingo, or should I start utilizing some other tool aside it?

10. 彼は日本にまだ１年しか住んでいないのに、日本語が( )だ.

    I thought the word in ( ) is ペラペラ but the answer is ばらばら. Isn’t the sentence trying to say that despite only living in Japan for one year, he’s already fluent in Japanese?

11. I had this question much earlier in my journey, and experience has borne my intuition that this might be the one most important thing for making more input comprehensible for me, so I’m still searching for this several months in. I make the most obvious acceleration in my ability to learn from immersion now when I happen to collect explanations for *this*, but I’m only able to do so by happenstance.

    Is there a grammar resource that specifically focuses on terms that are likely to appear in hiragana? If you don’t have a good translation on hand, this is the one place where you can’t always tease apart what’s going on without already knowing what the structure means. Kanji are actually easy to search for and learn about through for yourself, but when you find a long string of hiragana, it could be almost anything. And every parser I have tried gets a lot of examples wrong (or just doesn’t even try to parse the actually troublesome bit).

    Grammar points like “より。。。方が良い” I can understand very easily just by immersing. The one place where I can’t is long strings of hiragana. I feel like if I could find a resource that just focuses strictly on this, I would be fully prepared to immerse in and learn from the most advanced material out there. I feel very comfortable with kanji now by contrast.

    Just a random example of one I read very recently. 兼ねる is often attached to verb stems, to mean “be unable to do [verb],” but often written in hiragana when this happens, i.e. 理解しかねます = I’m unable to understand. If I’m reading alone, I might for example try to parse しか and then make sense of what ねます could mean here, you know? It’s not a perfect example because dictionaries do cover this one in most of its permutations, but I hope you get my point – a somewhat complete list of verbs added to verb stems and often written in hiragana is one thing I would find extremely useful here. Anything that addresses some piece of the puzzle of “why you might see a bunch of hiragana in a row.”

12. This is a pretty specific question but how “impressive” would N3 be on a college application? I was going to try for N2 in December but I fell off of studying for a couple of months so I don’t think that’s happening.

    I doubt that most admissions officers are familiar with the JLPT but they could certainly Google it and see what the different levels are pretty quickly. It’s not like putting it on a resume where I may actually be expected to use it – really I’d just like to quantify that I actually did something with my hobby. Fwiw I’d be using it for a transfer application.