Tofugu

I think you may be spot on about the culture clash. Language learning takes a long time, and there are really no short-cuts nor magic solutions that will get you from zero to competent within any reasonable amount of time. This is in stark contrast with programming. If you already know a programming language, you can get reasonably acquainted with your second one by following a really good tutorial in a single afternoon (depending on the languages though). This make a lot of language learners (including my self) extremely vary and reactive of tutorials and explainers such as these. In the language learning space, tutorials belong as chapters in a good textbook, and explainers belong in dedicated sites written by teachers who have proven their worth with dozens of other explainers (e.g. https://www.tofugu.com/). The difference is that these are meant as part of a much much much longer journey. [Aside]: Japanese is actually my 5th language and the first that is self taught and outside the language environment. I am also a self taught programmer. I have observed that learning Japanese is in a totally different league then any programming language. I am now two years into learning Japanese, and I can barely read a kids book, and no way can I hold a conversation. At this point in my programming journey I was already writing three programming languages fluently (JavaScript, Python, and R) and was learning the 4th and 5th at the same time (Rust and Julia). [Re: “this is what got…

It's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I've had good success with WaniKani[0]. As an aside, the company behind it, Tofugu[1], also have a lot of good free resources. The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji. 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to put in a lot of work. 0: https://www.wanikani.com/ 1: https://www.tofugu.com/

As the other responder said, don't use Anki for memorization, only for reviewing what you already remember. I recommend using mnemonics for memorizing words. For katakana hiragana, refer to https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

And after that, visit the Tokyo Parasite Museum (https://www.tofugu.com/travel/parasite-museum-tokyo/ -- probably best not to visit this link while eating breakfast). In all seriousness I have been to this museum and it's fantastic.

I can totally recommend the Genki books combined with the Graded Readers! (besides any other materials you use, of course ;-) ) https://www.tofugu.com/reviews/genki-textbook/ http://www.japanesetease.net/japanese-graded-readers/

All the kana are easy to learn if you use mnemonics, though I admit handwriting recognition might be harder. It took me a moment to recall some of the mnemonics themselves, eventually you just see them as they are... For tsu, I can think of Two sewing needles, for shi, I can think of "she has a funny face", for so it's one "so-ing" needle, for n it's a cyclops who can only say "nnnnnn". (https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/ and https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ have some great mnemonics to start out, I remember only altering a few.)

In Japan, copyright law can't be enforced without the complaint of the rights holder.[1] If you have some spare time, I'd recommend reading the Copyright Law [2] for the powers that are legally provided to the rights holders and specifically, "Measures Against Infringement" [3]. They're quite fascinating. Disclaimer: IANAL, much less a Japanese legal scholar. [1] https://www.tofugu.com/japan/doujinshi-definition/ [2] http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/law/detail/?id=2506&vm=&am… [3] http://www.cric.or.jp/english/csj/csj5.html

I generally go to tofugu.com for really interesting articles about Japanese culture/language. The writing there is awesome, and the site is better designed. http://www.tofugu.com/

Not sure if Google Translate is the best research tool for an archaic idiom... Duckduckgo threw up this: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/itadakimasu-meaning/ Thanks for the interesting read :)

I hope some move back. From what I've seen/heard, the countryside is suffering radical population shifts. The following article has some great graphs to illustrate the point. There is a giant dip in the 20s (school) and a terrifying peak in the 55-60 range. But the greatest disparity is that there are many many more old (70s) than teenagers in the countryside. Across the nation those two groups are roughly equal. http://www.tofugu.com/2015/03/06/japanese-countryside-emptying/

I had a book of chindogu from at least 10 years ago. They had an invention that looked shockingly like the jump camera. Here is an image which shows a scan of a few of the images including the relivent one: http://www.tofugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chindogu-unuseless.jp… I find it kind of funny that Google is now using a system that was invented so long ago as a joke. Why not use any of the other system to capture 360 3d images? Why did Google decide 16 cameras was the right way to go? The only reason I can think is you might get higher res images out of 16 cameras than with only a few and a hemispherical reflector or a motor, but is it really worth the extra cost and points of failure?

I'll give a couple of these a shot, but I also really have to recommend the spaced repetition Anki provides for drills. There are a lot of community created decks [0] for different aspects of Japanese. And for some reason, creating your own deck for topics or vocabulary really seems to help with memorization. I can say that after just over three weeks I'm sounding out words. I think hours practiced are a better measure than weeks, but I don't know how many hours I've spent. (Even then sleep seems vital to processing the material, so you can't probably can't just count straight hours you've spent cramming.) My study has involved using this deck [1]; writing out the hiragana and katakana charts several times; and using Tofugu [2][3] or YouTube for mnemonics, extra explanation, or stroke order. [0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese [1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/827975112 [2] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ [3] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/

I love anime despite all of it's warts and blemishes and worse (as mentioned by others here). And I've been in and out of it heavily since I learned what it was my sophomore/junior year of HS (around 1996/7). I've learned that for me it comes down to the different way of storytelling and emphasized. A great breakdown of some of the differences are can be read here. https://www.tofugu.com/japan/japanese-horror-structure/ especially the diagrams from https://www.jstor.org/stable/20198301?seq=2 tldr: "In a Western story the plot is moved forward by the character’s goals." while in Japanese story telling they might go like this "In a simple-reaction story, the character’s own actions and the universe’s reactions to them drive the story to a conclusion that may or may not have anything to do with character goals." and the ending. "This leads us to the second significant difference between Japanese and Western story grammar: the conclusion. The Japanese story grammar ends with “events and/or emphasis,” whereas the more western model ends with a “resolution.”"

For anyone interested in learning the logical rules that dictate the more confusing parts of Japanese grammar (which were, as others have pointed out, dramatically over-simplified in this article), this is a decent starting point: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kobun-reading-introduction/ I've personally been happy with the following books as well: Bungo Manual: Selected Reference Materials for Students of Classical Japanese Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary Classical Japanese: A Grammar Many of the confusing rules we have today (i-adjectives vs na-adjectives, different verb conjugation classes, etc.) are subsets of much larger rule-sets from early in the language's written history. Bound particles are probably the most confusing of these rules, which were too convoluted to survive over time, but still inform common usage patterns today. The Japanese language (particularly its written form) is very young, so it's actually feasible to gain an in-depth understanding of the language's entire history without spending a decade on a doctorate.

I'm ready to take all the downvotes. You have lived a very privileged life in Japan, my friend. I have travelled to Japan and have a fiancee who is Zainichi North Korean. I urge you to stop interpreting Japanese culture with such extreme rose-coloured glasses and tone down your extreme positivity because it is blinding you from having the "balanced view" you say you have of Japan. Furthermore, it is insulting to minorities in Japan, which has a racist, insular, homogenous culture that so rigidly controls what is "true" and what is "false". The difference is that racism in Japan manifests itself in less violent and direct ways, as the culture of honne and tatemae is so prevalent. So it's difficult for foreigners to distinguish these things at face value. If you compare types of crimes and the types of "bad things" in the US to Japan, you will see Japan has very little of the "bad" things the US has. That is not the point, however. For example, I read an article that car accidents are up there as the leading causes of most deaths in the US. The Japanophile will remark how great Japan is because cars are not the leading deaths in Japan. But what the Japanophile will not tell you is that Japan has a high suicide rate, Hokkaido residents have the highest rate of heart disease in the world due to their consumption of sodium, and other issues that are probably specific to Japan. There are very few robberies in Japan, but sexual harassment and sexual assaults are so common…

> In an editorial published on 4 September 2013, the Los Angeles Times hailed a step forward. “States and schools shouldn’t cling to cursive based on the romantic idea that it’s a tradition, an art form or a basic skill whose disappearance would be a cultural tragedy. Of course, everyone needs to be able to write without computers, but longhand printing generally works fine […] Print is clearer and easier to read than script. For many, it’s easier to write and just about as fast.” Not all hand writing is meant to just express a point. Some hand writing is also—by itself—an art form. I can easily draw a parallel between penmanship skills and something such as creative writing. An easy to write, and fast way of writing is akin to "Jon kills Joe. Jon marries Susan. The end." Easily written, fast, to the point. And entirely worthless unless you only want to convey the absolute minimum. A fluid style in writing can display nuances, such as which side the gradient leans, what letters have a flourish, or how round the letters are (and which ones aren't). As a programmer, I need to physically draw and write out how an application and its input/output will all come together. Even something stupid such as a simple box with multiple arrows coming in and out of it can have a big meaning. On paper, it looks like a few lines. But it represents what I actually am thinking about; and putting the pen to paper helps create an extension of my own thoughts, and allows me to move on in my head…

This gets quite close to chindogu, the Japanese art of designing objects that kind of serve a very niche purpose, but then without being useful. https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-inventions/

I don't actually know what the bus factor for Tarsnap's infrastructure is. 2 is just the absolute lower bound from what I know of the company itself. It is in all likelihood much higher. I can't read the founder's mind, but if I were them I would probably have some Kongō Gumi style designs on making it a 1000-year company just because that's a fun intellectual exercise. [1] [1]: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/oldest-businesses-in-japan/

You could also try the particle for belonging の which is a bit like " 's " in English. Should appear in hiragana (as a standalone syllable) frequently since it is a particle much like the first one they suggested (ha for the theme of a sentence). The second one (su) tends to be at the end of maybe half the verbs, might be why it's less likely. Another one which might match is Japanese punctuation, such as the comma 、 and the period 。 https://www.tofugu.com/japanese-grammar/particle-no-noun-modifier/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_punctuation

only a small set of symbols I grind hundreds of flashcards every night to learn Japanese and I can assure you that one thing we are not short of is symbols. Chinese characters use ~218 basic symbols which can be stacked and combined to form tens of thousands of characters. There are 350 symbols just for counting different kinds of things. https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-counters-list/

Bigger picture of it: https://www.tofugu.com/travel/parasite-museum-tokyo/ The display has a piece of rope, so that you can get a not-too-intimate sense of its length.

A couple alternatives to WaniKani are: * https://kanji.garden/ * https://www.readthekanji.com (includes hiragana and katakana as well) You can also use the following for just memorizing hiragana and katakana: * https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/ * https://www.kana.pro/ And then there are online resources like the following that provide a guided, DIY approach to learning Japanese as a whole: * https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/ * https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/ * https://docs.google.com/document/d/10bRzVblKVOsQJjTc2PIi1Gbj_LrsJCkMkh…

Along the similar approach in defamiliarization, there's also Chindogu: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-inventions/

In Japan, they have a different species of cicada, and cicadas reliably emerge every single summer. As a result, the sound of cicadas is a popular shorthand for summertime in Japanese media: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/cicadas-in-japan/

https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chopsticks-in-japan > In 1878, Japan produced the world's first disposable chopsticks, and today China and Japan use the majority of them. China is responsible for using 45 billion disposable chopsticks a year. Japan is about half of that at 24 billion. I've used plastic, lacquered wood, and stainless steel multi-use chopsticks. Each of them has problems. At home I use titanium chopsticks and they are phenomenal, but bamboo are just as good if not better.

A similar phenomenon happens with various Western speakers in Japan: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/aizuchi-japanese-listening/ It's a bit different as "aizuchi" is merely signaling that you're being listened to, rather than an actual switching of speakers. "Enthusiastic listening" is how I've heard it described, and it can be a distraction if you're not used to it.

I didn’t know what kansai/kanto were, so here’s an article I liked explaining one view of the differences: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/kansai-vs-kanto/

Look at the recent reporting around Shinzo Abe's death in Japan for a really good example of different libel laws. In Japan the burden of proof lies with the entity publishing the information. A lot of the initial headlines were things like "Abe collapses at rally, shots heard" even though the article itself had a video of him getting shot and then falling down. Others just had a headline that equated to "Abe collapses during rally, currently in critical condition" without even mentioning a shooter. Here's an interesting article about it: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/sued-in-japan/

That book is controversial and has to be taken with a large dose of salt. It was written by a "Westernized" Japanese and targeted at Westerners. Some articles; 1) https://www.tofugu.com/japan/bushido/ 2) https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201020-bushido-the-book-that-cha… 3) https://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol18/iss3/etzrodt.html A better book is Legends of the Samurai by Hiroaki Sato. Review at https://www.tofugu.com/reviews/hiroaki-sato-legends-of-the-samurai/

This is a good explanation of Japanese onomatopoeia https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-onomatopoeia/