File: read.webp (70 KB, 949x1080)
About 10 years ago I became interested in learning Japanese. Mostly because of anime, I just wanted to know what the basic konoyarou/tasukete/urusai stuff meant so I could focus better on the show's plot.
The tsukkomi/boke comedy in anime involving unecessary physical/emotional violence never fails to amuse me. I don't watch much anime these days but I have become interested in Japanese culture.
The Miko shrine maidens, Shinto shrines themselves, Geisha, tea ceremonies, Onsen, no tipping in restaurants, general lack of DEI, and so on and so on. All things that I wish the US would adopt.
Thus I've been on a journey, for a few years now, to pass the JLPT N5. I've bought many books on this but it's always turned into a 5 minute study session followed by 30 minutes of youtube.
Result: I can read common kanji compounds like 野菜、電話、入口, without furigana now and from memrise practice I know pretty much all hiragana/katakana. However I just can't power through the grammar parts.
SO I've signed up here: https://www.tokiniandy.com/
It's $10 a month and my hope is that this course dumbs it down enough for me to stick to it for longer than 5 mintues a day. I know some N5 stuff now so I hope it can boost me to N4 level this year alone.
I don't mean to shill this course and I have no idea if it will even be worth it. However my plan is to post updates here every week or so and let you all know how it's going.
I hope that this will help other anons here struggling with learning Japanese. It's an amusing/mysterious high-context language (see honne/tatemae) but it will break you especially with grammar.
Still, the challenge can be quite fun. Which is why I refuse to drop it. Gonna start tomorrow (today?) night so stay tuned.
Tags: Help
>>490
I've been discouraged from using AI to assist with Japanese because of how high context it is and I believe them. Basically people in Japan often don't mean what they say, it becomes a guessing game. Who said it? What's their status compared to you? Are you surrounded by peers/family? Are you friends/family/strangers? All of those things morph the intended conveyed meaning. Like for example: Taihen (大変), itcan morph from "That's rough buddy." to "Oh no!" to "No, I won't do that." to "What are you, stupid?". Guessing the wrong intended meaning will earn you negative social points and that seems to matter a lot in Japanese culture.
As far as I know, current LLMs struggle with vague languages like this as much as most people struggler learning it. It might be good enough now for things like Spanish/German, there's less ambiguity there.
File: 1778273054743454.webm (1.27 MB, 253x450)
ごめんなさい
I had completely forgotten about this, I only noticed when I panicked over $10 missing. I may have subconsciously suppressed this out of my enormous fear of Japanese grammar...
Tomorrow I'll be free all day and lately I have grown bored of watching cop videos on Youtube so I think the conditions are just right for me to not weasel out of this.
After tomorrow, I can't promise when I'll provide the next update but I'm angry that my cowardice of Japanese grammar cost me $10 for nothing.
File: jingu_off_the_rails.webp (67 KB, 1080x1080)
I managed to endure about an hour of these videos, about halfway done with lesson 1 in the Genki 1 section, tokiniandy has 12 sections for this.
I took the N5 practice test from here: https://www.jlpt.jp/e/samples/forlearners.html
I got 6/14 right so I'm still at rock bottom but watching the video seems considerably less stressful than reading every beginner Japanese book I've tried.
File: particles_are_hell.webp (6 KB, 723x123)
The question where you have to place the particles while also guessing where the verb/nouns go are killing me the most right now. しりませんですよ
>>740
Yes it's the N5 variant here: https://www.jlpt.jp/e/samples/forlearners.html
If you can ace this thing then you are 80% done with the basic N5 level of Japanese.
File: 157830778502.webp (128 KB, 560x596)
Honest update: 3 months later and I still can't pass all the N5 sample questions on https://www.jlpt.jp/e/samples/forlearners.html
I don't blame tokiniandy though, the videos seem concise and to the point but it's like I'm too dumb to actually grasp the grammar points.
Like I have such a horrible time distinguishing when to use へ and に for location even though the video series seems to try to explain it to me.
I've only been chipping at them in 5 to 15 minute sessions per day max so my laziness hasn't helped either.
I dunno what to do maaaang, it's like I need to grow new braincells or something but I don't know how...