Another blast from the past: Learning how to read Japanese

http://daigotorena.moo.jp/lesson/bushu-hen1.htm

I’ve pictured this scenario where a white person is walking around with a Japanese person and the white guy asks the Japanese guy what does that say and the thing they’re pointing to is scribble aka archaic writing.

Reading archaic writing is a skill that I never developed from just immersing in Japanese since I don’t read stuff written in the cursive writing etc. Sometimes I can figure it out and sometimes I’m like wtf? I remember pausing the screen while watching JIN when Nokaze or whoever would send letters to JIN and I’d be like how he does he read that scribble or I’d be able to read some of it. Luckily, he usually read the letter aloud in the narration etc so I didn’t have to read that to enjoy the show. Now that I think about it I’ve seen a lot of handwritten Japanese on Japanese tv shows since they always make people write letters and read them on the show. those are usually legible.  I always get excited whenever I spot a mistake in handwritten Japanese lol. Check out my previous post for an exmplae

I later learned it’s not just hand-writing scribble; it’s olden japanese hand scribble. This was back in 2009 when d-addicts was a thing and I was watching the show with Japanese subtitles. I was thinking how unhelpful korean subtitles are for watching time period dramas as a Korean learner in that even if you watch with the korean subtitles they don’t help you understand the show when it comes to encounters with new words. English subs would be more helpful honestly in terms of whatever learning you can accomplish while watching a drama like a normal person (no pausing, rewinding, etc) and looking up zero things in the dictionary since my ears aren’t broken and I want to know what the words mean not how to spell them. This is a statement I’d never say about Japanese because of the inherent nature of its writing system. But in the end it doesn’t matter because I don’t watch Korean dramas since they’re unwatchable.  This tangent is just a long-winded of saying that watching JIN with Japanese subtitles was an ABSOLUTE pleasure. J subs are a MUST for jidaigeki imo. I contemplated watching ryoma-den at one point because it was getting buzz and yoshida from black mayonnaise loved it but I never watched it but if I did I would watch j-subs.

<- only in Japan…  thank god for amazon.co.jp lolz

I’ve mentioned before on a post about the finale of JIN season 2 about the behind the scenes scoop on the letter reading scene. The actor who plays Jin decided to read the letter for the FIRST time on the FIRST take so that he can give a genuine reaction while in character. All I thought while watching that scene is how does he read that shit lol. I was genuinely curious how well modern-day Japanese people can read the scribbles.

I was digging into this topic again because I read this on dokushometer

ひさびさに手書きすると漢字を書けなくなっているので、その意味では日本語ワープロの発達と普及が「漢字廃止の思想」を実現されているのではないか、みたいなことがあとがきにあった。草書や行書は最初から書けないしなぁ。読めはする

https://bookmeter.com/books/10377254

Then I googled gyousho and sousho and found an informative answer on chiebukuro!
https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1463748384

The person posted links to website that will teach you all that you need to know so you can learn to read Japanese that’s written in those specific styles and of course if you want to read old Japanese (edo era etc) you have to learn the traditional forms of kanji. This elicited the thought that learning Japanese is never-ending if you are obsessed with being super skillful or perfect in Japanese with even reading; I don’t feel like learning how to read that stuff because I don’t read that kinda stuff and I don’t have interest in shodou. I contemplated looking through it since i am into writing messy, quickly, taking shortcuts etc and i love getting tips. but i never took a deep dive look into it. though from the cursory look, I already do some of the truncating they do when I handwrite Japanese… it’s human nature to want to be lazy lol. Why write all the individual strokes when you can draw a wavy/squiggly line.

If you are dead set on perfection in every aspect of Japanese and go down all these rabbit holes like pitch accent or even reading all types of Japanese writing it’s never-ending…. at the end of the day you have to follow your heart do whatever interests you the most. for me that does not involve learning how to read cursive/archaic japanese. Time is precious and I have a lot of other more practical activities to use my time towards. Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future. w’knows

The post was aptly titled blast from the past like the YG post because it took me a very long time to post it and I never went back to click on the links from the chiebukuro answer. I have many interests  and it’s just not one of them.

閑話休題
HERE IS AN interesting article:
https://www.nikkei.com/news/image-article/?R_FLG=0&ad=DSXMZO8840586023062015000001&dc=1&ng=DGXLASJB17H11_X10C15A6AA1P00&z=20150627
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXLASJB17H11_X10C15A6AA1P00/

AND on a japanese 101 note I found out this year that PANSA means panther! I never looked it up and I think I even saw a bit of the commercial for black panther when i was watching hanseikai. I never gave a thought to the word PANSA until the london heart’s hliarious dokkiri on ogata when ogata said ko-yo-te. I’ve probably heard this word a couple hundred times if not thousands of times by now. Better late than NEver I guess.

On the topic of handwriting Japanese: I’m not into journaling but I do sporadically freewrite in Japanese. I scoff and roll my eyes at the silly blogs that tell people to read the news in their target language everyday or start a diary in the target language because everyone knows no one will keep that habit going for long unless they truly enjoy those activities.  FOr me I don’t give a shit about the news in English and I also unsurprisingly don’t give a shit about the news in Korean and in Japanese especially the boring political articles. Occasionally I’ll read news articles that interesting ie scandals or if it’s about a topic I find interesting but I don’t go out of my way to buy a newspaper or visit the news websites daily etc. My freewriting activity is organic because I only do it if I feel like doing it. I don’t follow any schedule so the interval between entries could be days, months, or weeks. Every time I go to write, I’m amazed by the kanji I remember as well as the ones I don’t remember (sometimes I just blank out) since I’ve had problems with my heisig deck in the past which led to be stop doing it. Nowadays I only do kakitori cards since I combined some amazing pre-made decks.

So maybe a year or two ago I tried turning my spiral notebook sideways to write vertically in Japanese. I’ve written words or a sentence vertically before but I’ve never tried it for my freewriting. I noticed that writing Japanese vertically is easier and more practical. I never knew because I never tried it! I hate handwriting in general so I appreciate anything that lessens the burden. I’m not into buying expensive notebooks, stationary, pens, etc so I’m glad that I tried it and loved it. I write extremely messy and I plan to throw the notebok away after filling it so I have no interest spending money on nice notebooks. Writing Japanese has definitely help me hone in my skills in writing in my own sougyou-esque handwriting style.

ハングル文字で生活していらっしゃるのか、漢字が書けない帰化朝鮮人？と思われる議員たち

PITCH ACCENT OBSERVATIONS!

resource:

This post is about the following words that I will write here in romaji on PURPOSE.

NETABAKO

BAKAGIRI

METTAGIRI

TETSUKAZU

I was prompted to write this entry when I figured out why I wrote this lang-8 entry in 2011!

I wrote on lang-8 that bakagiri reminded me of METTAGIRI due to the similar pronunciation. I think the number of moras is different between these words because of the double ttsu but I’m too lazy to check the definition of mora. Dogen did an excellent job explaining it in video but I don’t remember the details since I saw his pitch accent videos a year ago and I have re-watched none of them. They definitely have the same number of syllables according to Japanese wiki which says

但し、長音、促音、撥音（ん）だけは、音節区切りでは、前の音といっしょに数える。

Of course no one in the comments pointed out that I heard it like that because of the pitch accent! I wrote that I watched an m-station episode clip where they’re interviewing shiina ringo and they weren’t subbing ANY OF IT. I solely relied on my ears and I made out BAKAGIRI. I had to find out what that means so I googled and luckily I was able to find a transcription on a Japanese blog by searching key words with quotes.

I noticed that Shiina Ringo pronounced bakagiri as if there is a “break” after “ka” like baka / giri. This word in the turn of phrase reminded me of めった切り which is a wonderful word I learned from the drama JIN at the time. So based off that バカ切り ran through my head just because it sounds likes mettagiri. Of course I don’t know if such a word exists and once I saw the transcript I realized it’s definitely not バカ切り. I end up finding out it’s the set phrase SONO BAKAGIRI rather than just bakagiri and more importantly I’m pretty sure if I had ran into that word at that time in written text rather than in video/audio, I would’ve read it with a “break” after ba like ba/kagiri because I didn’t know any better and would’ve assumed that that’s how it is pronounced based on the kanji that comprise the word. Or perhaps I was expecting kagiri in bakagiri to be pronounced the way kagiri is pronounced when it’s by itself and that is a word that is used a lot more frequently than sono bakagiri. I keep putting the word break in quotes because that’s how I described it then but I now realize it’s the pitch accent I was hearing.

I was reminded of my old lang-8 entry when I saw a comedy sketch titled HERO by the comedy duo saraba seishun after watching a God Tongue episode that featured this comedy duo. They made saraba seishun perform “HERO” but completely cut it out of the God Tongue episode.

So the “Hero” keeps saying netabako with what I hear as a break after “ta” as in neta/bako. The video is not subbed so I’m thinking ネタ箱 ? wtf is that? sushi box? box full of comedy material/jokes? As the video went on, he says it over and over again so eventually I figure out what he means since it’s really obvious from the context. Like BAKAGIRI I was expecting the “split” to be after ne like ne/tabako when I found out what the word meant.

I had yet another similar experience when I was listening/watching DARAKE when yomeda (yoneda?? I am too lazy to look up the woman’s name) said TETSUKAZU. I heard what I perceived to be a split after TSU as in tetsu/kazu . So I thought of 鉄 ___ テツトモ just from hearing it. This time the text was on the screen so once I saw the text I realized I had been bamboozled again! For some reason I got distracted by what I perceived as the “break” to the point that I don’t derive the meaning from the sound of the word since I know this word! Among BAKAGIRI, TETSUKAZU, NETABAKO, the only word that I didn’t know was bakagiri. For tetsukazu and netabako, I knew these words but I either have not heard them being said many times or it was my first time hearing the pronunciation; the dissonance between reality and my expectation hindered my comprehension.

<— (love this girl! I also miss NEZZUCHI !)

I think the only pitch accent patterns that would give me that perceived “break” after the first syllable would be ATAMADAKA or HEIBAN. On atamadaka words, the pitch accent starts HIGH then goes low after the first mora (In dictionaries they use 1 to denote atamadaka). For heiban words, the pitch accent starts low on the first mora then goes up high and stays high until the end of the word (They use 0 to denote heiban words in dictionaries). As I’ve said, that is not the case for these words. They’re all NAKADAKA which means the pitch accent goes up somewhere in the middle word and goes down right afterwards. I think I hadn’t heard about pitch accent in 2011. I can only assume that in 2011 that I was expecting the word to be pronounced heiban purely based on how the word is written since I didn’t know about the existence of pitch accent. It’s not unreasonable since heiban is the most popular pitch accent pattern in Japanese. I’m proud that I was able discern that what I was hearing was not what I was expecting even if I could only explain it using the word “break.” But then again, I also seem pitch-accent deaf since I thought the bachigai was pronounced differently from bakagiri. They actually have the same pitch accent!

Here is a copy paste of the dictionary entries for the words with the pitch accents. The syllable with the the line over it is the one that gets pronounced with a higher pitch accent.

Also, you can listen to the pronunciation OF THE WORDS on NAVER DICTIONARY. Just paste the word into the search bar and click on the speaker next to the word! The audio for speakers with the text TTS next to it are inaccurate.

てつかず | てつかず **

【手付かず】[3][2] This word can be pronounced with the higher pitch accent on tsu or ka. According to this dictionary, the accent on ka is more common than tsu since the order is 3, 2. Both are correct nonetheless!
まだ△手をつけていない（使っていない）こと。
「―で残される／―の△状態（まま）」

そのばかぎり [4]

その場限りの約束 a promise made on the spot (and broken later)

そのばしのぎ

4 [その場凌ぎ·其の場凌ぎ = 일시 모면; 임시방편[변통].

そのばのがれ

4 [その場逃れ·其の場逃れ

ばちがい

【場違い】【場違】[2] (一)その場所△に居る（でする）にはふさわしくないこと。

「―の服装／―の議論」

めったぎり [0]

【滅多斬り】所かまわず斬りつけること。めちゃめちゃに切ること。

み かぎり

[0] 【見限り】 I looked up words that end in kagiri just to see if they just all happen to follow the same pitch accent and of course they don’t.
（１）見限ること。
（２）（多く「お見限り」の形で）客などが顔を見せないこと。「すっかりお―ね」

かぎり | かぎり

[限り] 1음절 강조 또는 3음절 강조

한, 끝;한계, 한도;…껏

げたばこ

[げた箱·下駄箱

たばこ

煙草

ねたばこ

【寝たばこ】[2] 〔△起き（寝）がけに〕

寝床の中でたばこを吸うこと。また、そのたばこ。

ふでばこ

筆箱

I also remember being bewildered by the pronunciation of kakushigoto when I first heard it since I knew the words kakusu/kamikakushi/koto/etc. I was expecting hear the split after shi like kakushi/goto just based on the words that make up the word but that’s not how they pronounce it. The way it was pronunced reminded me of shigoto/yattsuk shigoto etc.

こと

0 こと

かくしごと

かくしごと

[隠し事]
0 or 5

かくし

[隠し]
3

しごと

[仕事
0

かみかくし

神隠し
3

やっつけしごと

5 [やっつけ仕事·遣っ付け仕事]

I highly recommend using a site like lang-8 (they don’t allow new sign-ups ) because it ends up being a record of your skills. Also, like me, you may end up answering your own questions many years down the line.

UPDATE 4-2022

had the same thing happen with 日めくりカレンダー on a recent god tongue episode! so ogiri/quiz shows etc repeat the same sentence OVER AND OVER AND OVER again.

here’s the pitch accent receipts on naver since jisho sucks like that. ひめくり

so this was one of the prompts

~ 錦鯉・渡辺からのお題「まさのり日めくりカレンダーに書いてある一言とは？

so from the first go I was like woah they’re pronouncing himekuri like himawari when i was expecting them to pronounce it heiban ie gakusei even though i haven’t heard it that many times. then they kept saying that sentence over and over again and it made himekuri seem like such a fun word to pronounce and i remembered how to pronounce it properly.

btw karenda- calendar is the same pitch accent so it’s on the RE. can’t hear it as clearly for himekuri to be honest. hopefully it’ll pop out to me one of these days.

True Phonetic Dictionary with Pitch Accent?
by inLearnJapanese

HANJARO – 漢字路 Resource Recommendation

HANJARO | 漢字路  |  한자로 ♪～（･ε･ )

I recommend this useful resource for Korean learners who know and can read Japanese or Chinese. For the love of god don’t learn Korean and japanese/chinese at the same time unless you want to suck forever. Get very literate/good at Japanese/Chinese then learn Korean for max efficiency. This is a site that inserts Chinese characters into the Korean text you paste. For longer texts like ebooks you have to download their program and use it on hancom or microsoft office.  (mediafire link to the plugins)The hancom/microsoft word plugin has more options to customize rendering ie only show hanja for the first instance of the word, ignore single syllable words, ability to add more words to the list, etc.  I recommend pairing hanjaro with lingoes off-line dictionary for reading on the computer!

lingoes dictionaries i Use : MEDIAFIRE

===

<_-__–_first selection is language as in what kinda chinese characters do you want: they are korean, taiwanese, mandarin, japanese… hanja, hanzi, hanzi, kanji

second selection is asking you whether you want to put the hanja next to the word or replace the hangeul with the hanja. i have it selected as NEXT To the word which is the second option.

the last option let’s you exclude/include hanja in different levels… if you’re literate in Japanese then you pretty much know all the hanja or kanji equivalents in the 8 levels since 2000 is the bare minimum i’m sure we all know more from reading and watching japanese tv lol.

====

 

It gives the user various options to customize the rendering to his or her needs:

• • paste the text or paste the URL. I usually paste the text because I usually hate the formatting of the website.
  • replace the hangeul with hanja or place hanja next to the hanguel word
  • the option of choosing from Chinese characters used in Taiwan, China, Japan, or Korea.
  • when it places the hanja next to the hangeul it place parentheses around the hanja word so what I like doing is doing control + h  (to bring up the FIND AND REPLACE WINDOW) and replace ( with space (
    so I can use lingoes off-line dictionary since lingoes only processes exact matches for Korean (I double click for it to look up the word). For example, instead of 논의(論議) I get 논의 (論議).  Parentheses inserted in by Hanjaro and the space inserted via control +h facilitate the use of lingoes pop-up dictionary (Before I’d manually insert spaces between sino-words and particles so I can double-click and look up the word on lingoes). Lingoes is great at compensating the weakness of hanjaro which is that it only inserts one hanja that matches even if there are multiple homonyms. Hanjaro makes lingoes even more useful by making it easier to look up sino-words. Lingoes offers k-j, k-e, and more ! ( I use K-J and K-e) Also, Hancom word processor has a k-k dictionary which works as a pop-up dictionary too! (however like lingoes the stuff has to be unconjugated and the kango words need to have a space from the verb etc) I do like how the dictionary searches as you type like Lingoes.   Unfortunately lingoes pop-up dictionary does NOT work on hancom word so I read the articles on notepad (the formatting on these Korean websites are terrible for reading) and I use lingoes pop-up dictionary (I also send text lingoes to look up words to save time for words that need to be unconjugated etc) then either look up the word using one of the authotkey shortcuts for opening a dictionary website with the word already inputted. However, lingoes comes to the front when I press control + L and also minimizes when I press control + L so looking stuff up isn’t cumbersome. I also have a script that sends text to lingoes
• 
  • <-FOR THIS particular word the corresponding meaning was not listed under the k-e english dictionary lol. It was however listed in the K-J naver dic for lingoes which I reached after scrollling.
  • 
  • I  have it set it on lingoes that if I hover over a word in the definition and press SHIFT, lingoes looks up that word! Also I only have the computer’s language set to Japanese because I can only set the computer language to Korean or Japanese because those are the only keyboards I have installed since it’s a pain to switch between keyboards if I have English, Korean and Japanese. also the korean keyboard includes English so it is redundant.  I prefer reading Japanese over Korean (I prefer English the most though! I’d rather read English than katakana which is the case with the computer) so I switched it to Japanese but now I’m considering changing it back to Korean because now hancom is full of gibberish since it can’t render Korean.

• I use it when I generate Korean anki cards from readlang.com. I use the cloze deletion format so I put the text rendered by hanjaro on the back of the card instead of the original sentence to lower the barrier of reading. Also the sentences that I encounter via reading  tend to be dense with information. UPDATE: I now use authotkey to collect sentences and it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It’s just more convenient for me than readlang.com. Also I LOVE EXCEL!

Here’s an example of text that went through hanjaro. I chose hanja for the rendering BUT as I’ve mentioned you choose kanji, simplified hanzi, etc.

7일(日) 한 매체(媒體)는 ‘프로듀스 101’의 네 번째(番째) 시즌이 내년(來年) 4월(月) 방송(放送)을 목표(目標)로 제작(製作)을 준비(準備) 중(中)이라고 보도(報道)했다. 이에 대(對)해 Mnet 측(側)은 “새로운 시즌을 논의(論議) 중(中)이다. 하지만 편성(編成) 등(等) 자세(仔細)한 사항(事項)은 아직 확정(確定)된 부분(部分)이 없다”며 말을 아꼈다.

‘프로듀스 101’ 시리즈는 그동안 아이오아이, 워너원 등(等)을 탄생시켜 대중(大衆)들의 뜨거운 반응(反應)을 이끌어 냈다. 또한, 가장 최근(最近) 시즌인 ‘프로듀스 48’에서는 아이즈원까지 출범(出帆)시켰다.

I actually know and am already familiar with all the words in the article excerpt so I don’t need the hanja inserted but I definitely read faster and with LESS effort with hanja than without. The name of the program, Hanjaro, reminds me of 活路 sure enough for a myriad of reasons. The word exists in Korean too so that’s a freebie! Hey there’s also 血路 혈로

Here’s the before:

7일 한 매체는 ‘프로듀스 101’의 네 번째 시즌이 내년 4월 방송을 목표로 제작을 준비 중이라고 보도했다. 이에 대해 Mnet 측은 “새로운 시즌을 논의 중이다. 하지만 편성 등 자세한 사항은 아직 확정된 부분이 없다”며 말을 아꼈다.

‘프로듀스 101’ 시리즈는 그동안 아이오아이, 워너원 등을 탄생시켜 대중들의 뜨거운 반응을 이끌어 냈다. 또한, 가장 최근 시즌인 ‘프로듀스 48’에서는 아이즈원까지 출범시켰다.

 

<- goldendict woes and joy

 

It has its limitations which primarily stem from the existence of homonyms that exist in Korean. However, that’s almost nonissue to me since I am very literate in Japanese and I’ve gotten fairly proficient in Korean from the time put I put into the language from the summer of 2011. It’s obvious to me when the hanja is wrong based on the context. I use the hanja as a visual aid to exert less effort and lower the burden while reading and to read faster. The beauty of kanji and hanja is that I read its meaning automatically, without my volition, and instantaneously. Hangeul is cool and effortless to read out loud (phonetics phonetics) and it’s easy to read and you max out on your speed rather quickly if you read a lot BUT compared to reading Japanese it’s more labor-intensive and it’s not something will change from reading a shit ton of Korean. If I had to quantify the amount of energy it takes to read hangeul for meaning for the sake of comparison it’d be 1 and for Japanese it would 0.1 or 0.01. The only analogy I can think of to explain it to someone who can’t read Japanese/Chinese is numbers and even then it’s not a perfect analogy since hanja/kanji aren’t numbers and numbers aren’t hanja/kanji…. but at least you get an idea

Here goes:

Would you prefer to read 123,865,987,123 or one hundred twenty-three billion eight hundred sixty-five million nine hundred eighty-seven thousand one hundred twenty-three?

Or how about 천이백삼십팔억 육천오백구십팔만 칠천백이십삼?

I definitely prefer the former. And on a related note, I hate reading numbers in kanji which would be 一千二百三十八億六千五百九十八萬七千一百二十三 here according to aChinese number converter. All the characters here are the same as the characters in Japanese with the exception of MAN. Not as labor-intensive to read as roman numerals but still way too demanding for me. I never got good at understanding/using man/oku etc  (issenman etc) because usually they’re talking about money so I’m always converting to USD to see if the people on TV are over-reacting or exaggerating.

Here’s another one:

would you prefer to read Breaking Bad or 브레이킹 배드,

orgasm or 오르가슴?

lol j/k but seriously I take English’s spelling inconsistencies over reading English words in hangeul any day!  The first time I encountered 오르가슴 in a Korean novel, I thought it was a Korean word that had something to with chest lol… BTW 얼룩말 has nothing to do with words or talking… I didn’t know the word before I watched so I was just as confused as they were…

I am acutely aware of how labor-intensive reading Korean is compared to Japanese when it comes to reading for meaning. It’s especially noticeable when I see a Korean sentence with a Japanese translation when the sentence is full of sino-words such as this huge deck I made from dumping in stuff I found on cool, helpful Japanese sites… That’s just one reason why going “monolingual” for Korean is so different from going “monolingual” for Japanese which I don’t support anyway. It takes SO MUCH MORE effort to read uninteresting Korean stuff vs uninteresting Japanese stuff simply because hangeul is labor-intensive to read compared to Japanese… I especially noticed this disparity between the writing system when I do my huge pre-made Korean deck that I made from Japanese sites. I read the Japanese automatically with 0 effort and even if I try to focus my energy on reading the hangeul first etc during my anki reviews because kanji/JAPANESE-WRITING gets read automatically without my volition…. I am saying this as a person who is MAXED THE F OUT on my hangeul reading speed. It doesn’t take long to max out on that. On a side note, I like learning Korean using Japanese because it also helps my Japanese since it helps my notice how exactly stuff is said/worded in Japanese since it’s not always a word-to-word translation from Korean.

ie this

Front:

A: 회사를 그만두고 독립하기로 결정했다.
会社を辞めて独立することにした。

Back is the same as the front.

Some sentences are longer or more boring or more complex or have words that I am less familiar with and those factors contribute even more to me rejoicing that I don’t need to read Korean translations of Japanese books/manga/etc. I personally think it makes sense to take advantage of ALL THE LANGUAGES you know to learn a language rather than LIMITING yourself one language (even if it’s that’s the target language or especially because it’s the target language) to learn the language. It’s common sense. Sometimes the English/Japanese/Korean is more memorable or explains it better etc and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Hanja is a fantastic companion to hangeul for reading for lazy people like me who happen to know how to read Japanese. I use hanjaro for internet articles and korean ebooks. It makes reading Korean more pleasant for me even despite its limitations.

Now, I can finally put my foot down when it comes to adding hanja based words to anki. Sometimes I’d be almost mad at myself for not recognizing a hanja word that I already know since I know the Japanese equivalent and they sound sorta similar and/or I’ve already looked it up in the past. I get into this conundrum of should I put this into anki to make sure I don’t waste time looking it up if I don’t recognize the word in a future encounter even though it’s kind of a freebie since I know Japanese or should I not add it and hope I will be able to conjure up the word’s meaning next time I encounter it from having looked it up and just based on the hangeul and context. Now because of this site I will only add hanja-words to anki that are truly difficult or tricky to remember. After all, the korean korean words (ex 코딱지 and no that word is not in my anki deck) are hard to remember as it is and I want to focus my energy on those words as opposed to hanja-words I already know that I don’t recognize that hide behind the hangeul-mask.

I found the the site by googling in Japanese when I reached a chiebukuro question. and I’m just kicking myself for not having done it sooner. The thought popped in my head because I was reading about the pros and cons of writing in Korean in hangeul only vs writing korean in a mixed script of hangeul and hanja on this wiki website that was outlining all the points of contention between the 2 fierce groups. I was surprised to learn from that site that there are so many ways to propose mixing the hanja and hangeul in writing ie only write x type of words in Hanja. I never realized that there were so many ways to go about it. At first I was interested in finding a news site or blog of some sort that writes in mixed hangeul-hanja writing but there’s not much out there and I have no interest reading newspapers from the 70s, 60s etc. With hanjaro I can read any site with hanja inserted and most importantly it allows me to customize the rendering. I never choose the option to replace the hangeul with hanja since the hanja may not be correct due to homonyms or hanjaro mis-identifying non-sino words as sino-words since they happen to share the same sounds such as when it thinks someone’s name or a verb conjugated a certain way or a noun with a particle attached ie ㄴ is a sino-word (this is something they can’t fix since the only way to determine the correct, intended meaning is to look at the CONTEXT precisely because it’s written with only hangeul). Also, if it replaces the text hanja, and I don’t know the reading of the hanja then I’m completely shit out of luck, not to mention it may have replaced the hangeul with the wrong hanja, and most importantly I can’t look up hanja on lingoes pop-up dictionary. Anyway, I love this site because it enables me to take full advantage of Japanese proficiency and my latent korean instincts, knowledge, etc. I have experience a lot of experience reading without hanjaro unfortunately lol and reading with hanjaro and I can unequivocally say that  if I discovered the site in 2016 and NOT 2019/2018 (of course it didn’t exist in 2012/2011! when I started Korean), my Korean would have improved much faster and I definitely would have read MORE. COMPREHENSIVE INPUT ALWAYS TRUMPS INCOMPREHENSIBLE INPUT! But for reals if I read korean with hanjaro from the get go in 2011/2012 i would’ve improved like f’in crazy at an alarming rate lol especially for the news where it’s literally like 90-95% the same words as the japanese news with the korean readings.  I’ll finally get through the north korean spy diaries on lingq !!  thank god for lingq.. the original korean urls are DEAD AF. Reading korean is so much more pleasurable and fun and effortless (not labor-intensive!!!) now!  It’s a pleasant surprise how hanjaro even works on north korean words where they keep the first syllable as R instead of changing it to a Y like they do in south korea. I ain’t saying bring back the mixed script.. don’t put words in my mouth. I’m just saying hanja-filled text (hanja next to the words.. the thing they’re trying to do with korean textbooks… hope it passed!! i don’t like words being replcaed by hanja lol.) provided by hanjaro is better than the original text for my reading pleasure.

I believe I will improve at reading HANGEUL ONLY texts better and faster through reading hangeul text that has hanja haphazardly inserted in than reading the original hangeul only text. ( It’s unforuntate that I can’t test my hypothesis out since I hav ebeen learnig Korean hanjaro-free from 2011 to now which is sheer BS…) It means I constantly reinforce the hanja-based words with the hanja next to them (or by double clicking with lingoes pop-up dictionary to get the correct hanja if it’s the wrong hanja. This is a inconvenience that I don’t consider an inconvenience since it makes me more aware of homonyms and Korean people are pretty much doing this while they read since they possess a huge vocabulary since they’re fluent in Korean and have plenty of experience reading hangeul) instead of seeing them veiled under hangeul and look them up manually over and over EVEN with authotkey scripts + gaming mouse. Before I knew about this site, I would waste my time looking up hanja words I already know but didn’t recognize because they were written in hangeul. I am free of delusions and illusions that somehow reading hangeul-only texts will help me improve at Korean as much as hangeul texts with hanja haphazardly inserted in. Reading hangeul as a native Korean is a completely different experience from reading Korean as a Korean learner simply for that fact that I’m not fluent in Korean. You can boast about your ability to phonetically read hangeul as much as you want but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re not comprehending the information like a native due to lack of vocab, shoddy parsing skills, lack of knowledge, lack of grammar, etc… There’s no reason to subject myself to what natives read which is hangeul-only text for silly, vapid, ascetic (? lol) reasons. I am not a native Korean speaker and somehow pretending that I am one and acting like one, does not serve my goals and aspirations. For one thing, I know English and Japanese and I am very literate in both so I can never look at hangeul the way Koreans (who can’t read hanja/KANJI/ETC) look at hangeul. Hangeul’s weaknesses and strengths are obvious to me and I can’t pretend to be illiterate in Japanese/English. I’ve recently developed a new-found appreciation for hangeul when I found out how misleading pinyin is! The most damning anecdotal evidence that I have to back reading text with hanja haphazardly inserted over hangeul-only texts is my experience of learning/reading Korean pre-hanjaro and post-hanjaro. It’s better to read comprehensible text than incomprehensible text and hanjaro increases comprehensibility despite its defects so it makes reading Korean more fruitful and I am at a level in Korean where I’m not being overwhelmed with the inclination to read the hanja next to the words with the Japanese readings and disregarding the Hangeul that corresponds with the hanja (Though I have a feeling I would’ve benefited from hanjaro from the get-go in my Korean learning since it would’ve cut-down on dictionary look-ups).

here’s an example of a hanja word that I couldn’t figure out from the hangeul and the context. It happened like years ago ?? It’s the only example I can come up with right now because I’ve been loving the hanjaro site and I’ve gotten more literate in Korean these past years. Variations of this has happened to me so many times!

So, I read an article and it used the word 화재 a bunch of times and I said to myself it’s definitely not 화제 (hot topic) and nothing is coming to mind as to what kanji/hanja word it is (I just know that it is a noun and it’s definitely a kanji/hanja word). of course at the end I either looked it up or figured out its the korean version of kasai (Fire disaster). Without fail, I realize that I already looked up 화재 sometime before the second I learned what the meaning was (just seeing the hangeul is completely arbitrary to me). So at that point I had read the whole article not understanding what hajae was other than it was a noun and it’s based on hanja so obviously I missed out. At that point I decided to not re-read the article because it annoyed me immensely and I did not care about the article that much. If you asked me THEN what’s the the hanja reading for 火 and 災 I would say hwa and se/je. I know hwa of course because of TUESDAY and other words but just seeing it in hangeul doesn’t guarantee that I will instantly think of 火. The only thing that evokes  火 without fail is 火 not 화 nor ひ nor か. With the hangeul, depending on the weather, my mood, color of MY underwear etc, I may or may not make that connection ( there is just no guarantee especially since there are multiple hanja that have that reading. Though sometimes nothing comes to mind .  here are some hanja with HWA as the reading.

1 畵
2 話
3 化
4 和
5 嬅
6 樺
7 火
8 禍
9 禾
10 花
11 華
12 譁
13 貨
14 靴

AND are some hanja with jae as the reading

1 再
2 哉
3 在
4 宰
5 才
6 材
7 栽
8 梓
9 渽
10 滓
11 災
12 縡
13 裁
14 財
15 載
16 齋
17 齎

I would answer se/je from guessing since I know that sound conversion rule well since it’s so simple and logical. I think half the time when I read hangeul-only text when I come across unknown hanja compound words NOTHING comes to mind (even if I know a ton of words that contain that hanja) or I think of a few hanja/kanji that would fulfill the pronunciation requirement but clearly does not fit the context so is most likely wrong so I feel pissed that I’m robbed of my energy. I can’t blame myself for not magically figuring out the word on the spot all the time… that’s just the way it is. The other half of the time, I FIGURE IT OUT correctly or think I did but I did not lol or more like FML. It bothers me tremendously because this shit never happens in Japanese because they use Kanji. The thing is your language-learning is a never-ending endeavor… it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at it, there’s always going to be something you don’t know ie vocabulary EVEN with your native language. When I use hanjaro (I think of it as KATSURO sometimes), reading takes less effort, I read faster, and I don’t waste my time looking up words I pretty much know but have a low familiarity with (I’d rather learn sino-based words from encountering it 20-30 times with the correct/incorrect hanja next to it than to look it up multiple times manually and making anki cards. There’s no urgency for me to grow my korean vocabulary in a brute-force, unnecessarily painful, and laborious manner). time spent Reading > time spent in Anki-related activties like making cards. no brainer! It’s a win win win situation.  Just the other day I came across 중단발 in youtube comments and I was like did so-and-so do something with her leg? then I realized it’s hair and not foot and it’s jong + danbar NOT jongdan + bar. I would never waste this much time for comprehending written text for Japanese.

Also sometime last year, I tried learning from Korean news through this Japanese site that provides korean news in Japanese with links to the original articles in KOrean. For a second I thought that having a Japanese translation would lower my apprehension and burden dramatically. It was a big fail because I don’t like reading about news about government/economics/etc especially when I don’t live in Korea… that stuff bores me. It’s like watching the weather segment of the Korean news except it’s 100 times harder to understand and I live in America. Also darting my eyes between hangeul and Japanese searching for the translation of the unknown word is a pain. Also, sometimes the Japanese version of the article would omit the sentence that I specifically wanted clarification on! More than anything the site made go why the hell would I read this in Korean when there is a Japanese translation with all that kanji since it’s so dense with sino-words written in hangeul.  I think this year I may try to learn from this site since now I have hanjaro added to my arsenal.  I will blog about it if I go through with it~ I’m thinking of setting low goals like 1 article a month etc. EDIT: I did not do this because I have a million other things I’d read in Korean than korean news articles about politics and whatever other boring topics on that site… I’m not into reading news regardless of the language at least the hard-hitting news. I will read news about stuff I’m interested in. Life’s too short to read stuff you’re not interested in. EDIT: this youtube channel is pretty cool. They put japanese subs on short korean news clips and i find it helpful for training listening comprehension haha. i find it better than watching it with english subs, korean subs, no subs in the situation where I watch the video only ONCE with rewinding because my korean level is high and japanese subs serve as fantastic hints  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkSHg01LkqghdfbE_Ru5amg tHIS REMINDS me of the time I saw BoA in a Japanese documentary-type show where she was watching a korean drama with japanese subtitles to practice reading Kanji. I thought it was brilliant due to all the sino-vocab overlap!

I tried using the site for Korean subs to see if it would help me comprehend/reading the subs faster but I found it incredibly distracting since hanja is traditional characters (there’s a lot of stuff going with one character lol). I tried with kanji just in case but it was still distracting since it’s not 100% correct. Not only that, it was subs to YG treasure box on V-LIVE (it is subbed in MANY languages) which is very easy to understand anyway. I love hearing the incorrect Korean from the Japanese people lol. They direct-translate like crazy and they always correct their Korean in the subs. I usually make anywhere from 2-5 anki cards per episode. It’s not as challenging as SMTM or talk shows for obvious reasons. I am better off with hangeul-only subs for this situation. BTW Viki has a lot of dramas with korean and english subs and you can download the subs!

On a related note, whenever I go through korean song lyrics if I think the artist or song is remotely popular I google the song title, artist and wayaku because it’s so much faster for me to go through the lyrics with that compared to me going at it with a dictionary and the korean lyrics. Also I generate anki cards so it would speed up the process.

Part of the reason I do that is because Korean requires interpretation skills that I don’t possess yet. I’ll read the lyrics and be confused or unsure as to what it means because they often leave out subjects. I’ll figure out all the ways something can be interpreted and then I’ll come to a decision and then later find out (through an english or japanese translation) that I was wrong in that none of my interpretations were right or the one that I thought was the least likely was correct. I believe I gain more by using wayaku and just getting the answer to the correct interpretation than wasting my time trying to figure out the interpretation every time I look up song lyrics to a song I like. It’s time I don’t have and I don’t believe the labor-intensive activity of looking up all the words and interpreting the lyrics myself instead of reading the wayaku will help me grow my interpretation skills. I think I’ll eventually hone in on this skill once I spend enough time inputting comprehensible input.

Hanja compliments Hangeul because hanja makes the text easier to read by rendering the act more effortless. There’s an effortless quality that I attribute to reading Chinese characters compared to phonetic alphabet like English or Hangeul. Hangeul represent sound while hanja represents MEANING and SOUND (if you know the reading. It’s a quality that’s highly desired by lazy people like me (Of course I’ve experienced first-hand that learning to read and write 2000+ kanji takes more time and effort than learning how to read and write hangeul. I did like how it broke up the monotony of studying grammar. I enjoyed having variety in that I had the option of doing an acitivity to learn Japanese that involved a different part of my brain or a lower level of energy or so it seemed.). Of course, if you don’t know Japanese or Mandarin you may assume that phonetic alphabets are superior to logographic writing systems in every way. It seems that a lot of Korean netizens always say that hangeul is acknowledged by scientists as the MOST brilliant, logical writing system and that Korea was able to abandon hanja ( The scientists statement is complete bullshit and I feel terrible that it keeps being stated over and over again since it makes Koreans and Korea look bad. I think it’s great that they celebrate Sejong the Great but he didn’t invent hangeul with the intention of changing the writing system to hangeul-only and they kinda make it seem like he would support that even though there’s no evidence to support that. I hate it when people put words in other people’s mouth. ) while Japan has a crazy writing system where you have ask people how to read their name which is a sign that they have a primitive writing system ( Of course that’s what precisely what some Japanese netizens say about hangeul) and China is spending too much time and energy learning all those characters. Statements like that only demonstrate their ignorance and close-mindedness. There are disadvantages and advantages to the 3 writing systems.

When I went into Korean knowing English and Japanese, I knew that no matter how much I read hangeul it’ll never feel as comfortable as reading Japanese as far as reading for meaning or speed (as in not reading it out loud) in terms of obtaining the meaning or exerting least amount of effort possible. The inherent nature of the PHONETIC hangeul writing system and its limitations are obvious to me. I think if it came down to which language I can read out loud fastest without taking comprehension into account it would come down to English and Korean of course but that defeats the point of reading which is to understand what you’re reading. Of course the downside to Japanese is that I have the dilemma of being unsure of the readings at times but I prefer knowing meaning over reading any day. I find not understanding the most “frustrating” part of sucking at language rather than not being able to read it out-loud. Reading hangeul is tiring. Reading Japanese is less tiring and takes less effort once you’re literate. ACTUALLY there was a point in time where I kinda looked down on katakana/hirgana because I was comparing it to the “brilliant” hangeul. At the time I thought DAMN instead of making people memorize so many kana (hiragana/katakana – I’m not referring to kanji here) why don’t they use hangeul or something like hangeul where it functions as an alphabet and you combine crap instead of memorizing a symbol for each sound. I thought the katakana/hiragana thing was very basic in a bad way…. however NOW (it didn’t take me long ) I’m really grateful that they have hirgana/katakana and not some alphabet thing (they have ta / da/ ba / ha /pa but it’s nothing compared to hangeul’s combining properties) because it takes LESS effort to read that stuff though it takes more initial effort to learn them compared to hangeul due to the sheer number of symbols you gotta memorize… 26 vs  92 or something no?? Obviously korean has way too many sounds to use a writing system like hiragana/katakana to represent the sounds…. that would be cray cray.    As a lazy person, I’m glad I learned Japanese because of how effortless it can be to read stuff in Japanese at times. Every time I see a big block of text in hangeul when I open online articles I feel a tinge of anxiety and ominous dread because I have a point of comparison. It’s the analogy of why would you go back to black and white when you can have all the colors  or why go back windows 95 when you have windows 10 (I can’t think of a good one). The point is I’ve experienced the wonders of reading Japanese. It’s obvious to me that the Japanese writing system plays an integral role in the popularity of reading in Japan. Actually when I started reading Japanese novels I thought korean novels are probably more fun to read (if i had the vocab) since korean has so much more grammar/variation with the 600+ possible grammar endings etc (korean grammar is japanese times 10)  but i don’t think that way anymore and am rather embarrassed i ever thought that lol. nowadays i enjoy korean novels and japanese novels and call it a day. 

Also it seems like everyone on Japanese TV has written a book because I constantly add stuff to my amazon.co.jp wishlist or dokushometer when I watch Japanese TV shows (there are so many interesting books to be read). I’ve always cared about being able to understand a piece of writing more than being able to read it loud. Also, I’ve never had to waste time looking up words like MARTHA or 오르가슴 or VOLDEMORT (no i was not reading harry potter) since they write foreign words in Katakana meanwhile I’ve had that bitter experience many times with Korean since they only write in hangeul (in printed books they write foreign names and foreign words in a different font or was it that they italicize it… ). That was one of the most demotivating characteristics of Korean with respect to learning it for me personally. I am very happy and blessed to have found HANJARO.  I just wish I found it in 2016!

Ultimately for kango words like KASAI/HWAJAE I prefer to sort it out by encountering it multiple times with the hanja next to it when I read rather than seeing it in anki or looking it up over and over and over and over when I read to my dismay and disgust (that’s what I feel when I look up a Korean word that I already know on some level but don’t recognize it when it’s just hangeul and the context is not strong enough to conjure the meaning). I believe in being as lazy as possible at times by not going against the current. I don’t aspire to reach a point in Korean where I read hangeul-only texts “fluently” with such ease that going through the rolodex of words to find the corresponding meaning only based on the context is imperceptible to my consciousness. I have no desire to strive to reach or reach the level where I read hangeul like a Korean native. It’s a pipe dream that I never had for Korean. The alphabet only represents sounds since it’s an alphabet which means to read as fluently as a native you’d have to as fluent as a native to parse the words, and go through your gargantuan mental rolodex of words etc etc. I have no desire to dump the Naver Korean-JApanese dictionary on lingoes which has at least 90,000 entries into anki and memorize it (ha even if I did that I’d still run into unknown words since I go to the internet when the dictionaries lingoes fail me. PLUS korean people love making up new words, shortened versions of words, variation of the word which you’ll only recognize if you already know the original word so it’s a big fuck you when the dictionary/google fails you. some of these new words are only transparent to certain age groups.)… You will always have to convert this PHONETIC INFORMATION into meaning when you read hangeul. This means there’s a minimum prerequisite of possessing a huge passive vocabulary that rivals a native speaker to read fluently like a native  AND know korean grammar INSIDE AND OUT AND the ability to parse written Korean like a native which is herculean feat lol. I am aware of deficiencies in my Korean such as onomatopoeia and obscure vocabulary which I know that korean kids know really well but I don’t (for example they love using onomatopoeia and use it well. I notice the same thing for Japanese… onomatopoeia is one of those tricky, never-ending things that natives use frequently but I can’t seem to use/remember them easily as natives and that includes the KIDS. I accept it and move on). I’ve come to the conclusion that I read much faster when hanja is haphazardly (it’s just not 100% correct) inserted into the hangeul text via hanjaro and I completely accept it and embrace it.   This fact will never reverse unless somehow I become illiterate in Japanese which seems impossible to me. My conviction is rooted in my literacy in Japanese,  my literacy in Korean, time I spent reading Korean + dic/google/etc while being completely OBLIVIOUS to the existence of hanjaro, time I spent reading Korean with hanjaro, my understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of the Korean and Japanese writing systems that I gained first-hand, and also from reading about the topic in 3 languages. I can’t imagine a day when I don’t run text through HANJARO before reading when I can (maybe if I’m reading a short paragraph or two??). To me, not running a text through hanjaro is equivalent to asking myself if I want to subject myself to the experience of reading a Japanese article or book that’s only written in hiragana/KATAKANA. Sure you can do that but it is torture! 😦  But in all seriouness Japanese people describe hangeul as something between hiragana and Kanji and that’s the reason they give as to why homonyms/homophones are not a problem in Korean since Japanese people always ask isn’t reading hangeul like reading hiragana?

Anyway, even if I know all the words really well in the article, book, etc, it’s still easier to read with hanja than without as I expressed with the example in the beginning of this post. I think for me, I would’ve NEVER EVER EVER EVER learned Korean to this level if I didn’t now Japanese. It’s just way too frustrating, inefficient, and stupid otherwise. Plus the Korean-Japanese Naver dictionary is a god-send. It just feels like a waste of my time reading hiragana/hangeul that has no meaning to me. Reading a text or a book full of unknown words in Japanese is a completely different experience from reading a text of book full of unknown words in Korean because it’s just that much more fruitless and painful in Korean. The same can be said about using a korean-korean dictionary and japanese-japanese dictionary. It is NIGHT AND DAY!  and yes I have seen them use the word to define the word in the korean-korean dictionary. It’s a real nightmare that I don’t have to deal with for Japanese since they have better dictionaries and write stuff in hiragana/katakana and kanji. Of course my go-to authotkey script is for google searching the word with IMI WA appended to it). For Japanese even if you don’t know the word, if it’s written in kanji you get something out of it and you have some obscure, vague idea of it (and you can even use pop-up dictionaries like rikai-sama, yomi-chan, etc. pop-up dictionaries exist for Korean but they suck compared to japanese ones) while in Korean you can waste a lot of energy trying to figure out the meaning solely based off the “sound” of the word (the fact there are homonyms and countless hanja that share the same pronunciation doesn’t help. this was exemplified by the KASAI/HWAJE example I mentioned.). Also, I think I was more acutely aware of my deficiencies in listening comprehension in Japanese when I was at an intermediate level years back precisely because reading Japanese is easier than reading Korean. That is because the written form of Japanese represents sounds and meaning while for Korean it only represents sounds. Written Japanese is easier to understand than written Korean for language learners because it’s more transparent due to the writing system representing both sound and meaning.  There is a greater disparity between reading comprehension and listening comprehension for Japanese compared to Korean when you’re intermediate/etc ie for Japanese you may read and understanding something just fine but end up not understanding it when it’s just audio while for Korean that would never happen! For Japanese you have visual cues that represent meaning and sound (or just meaning if you don’t know the reading) while for Korean you’re SOL if you don’t know the word. Actually I can think of a couple exceptions, Korean words that aren’t pronounced phonetically due to pronunciation rule ie 격려, 심리, 설 수 있다, 굳이, 폭력, 짓이기다 etc (answers are 경녀, 심니, 슬 수 있다 , 구지, 퐁녁, 진니기다 and no I never bothered to memorize the rules so don’t ask me why). A recent example I can think of is the word 視姦　(しかん) which I encountered when I was watching hanseikai. I’ve never heard of this word in my life but I know the kanji that make up the word and I don’t need to look it up since it’s obvious from the context and kanji what it means. This kinda stuff happens from time to time and it will never cease to stop occurring since obviously you can’t memorize every single word in the Japanese language or any language. Conversely, in Korean all you get is the sound of the word so when I come across new words that are sino-based I may or may not figure it out on the spot or I may think I figured it out but I figured wrong ( SINCE THERE are plenty of hanja that have the same reading depending on the hanja). Initially the kanji mountain seems like a huge deterrent for learning Japanese compared to Korean but once you’re over the mountain you realize the mountain for Korean is never ending because they write everything in hangeul lol. it’s another case of the tortoise vs the hare. we all know the tortoise wins.

I’ve always felt super entitled as a person who knows Japanese that whenever I looked up hanja-based words that I already know that sound similar to Japanese or exist in Japanese I would feel irritated and mercilessly robbed of my my time and energy. Also I know about the history of the Japanese language and the Korean language ( I inadvertently learned about the influx of foreign words into Japanese during the Meiji Era when I was reading a book about Korean/Korea in Japanese. ) which makes me even more flummoxed to being subjected to reading hangeul-only text. Now I have no reason to feel that resentment when I read Korean on the internet or ebooks! I have a lot of articles and topics I’m interested in reading on the Korean internet and now I can finally hop to it. I would’ve never fathomed in 2012 that I would read Korean novels/books one day but I am (by read I mean reading and understanding 85-95%! NOT just having the ability to read it out phonetically while not understanding shit or coming across an unknown word in every other sentence etc. I could do that in 2012! Ain’t nothing productive or admirable OR NOBLE or fun about being able to read something outloud 100% phonetically while missing all the important details. Maybe for Koreaboos it’s cool enough??). Vocab is king. Reading is king. Hanjaro makes reading so much better so hanjaro is king! I wish I read less  Korean between 2012-2018 lol.  I hope to read more in 2019! 

hanjaro + likebook 7.8 in android erearder moonreader + goldendict = heaven

—>

HERE are some articles I read so far: I like reading about people or topics that are of interest to me.

http://www.hankookilbo.com/News/Read/201605122062423406
http://www.pressian.com/news/article.html?no=69280#09T0

https://www.sisain.co.kr/?mod=news&act=articleView&idxno=26576 <-this was hard to follow at times. It was pretty bad. I didn’t understand the main points of the article. It was unclear to me and I had no motivation to re-read stuff to figure out the meaning of the sentence or phrases. I kinda gave up on this one. It’s too hard for me at my current level or I’m just too lazy to apply myself (no that’s a good thing because I gotta read what I’m really interested in) I think I’ll read an article about it in Japanese sometime in the future. I feel content with my expectations and my goals. I don’t need to kill myself AND read anything and everything in Korean. I have a choice to read about topics in English or Japanese instead just so I can satisfy my curiosity without having to spend ungodly amounts of time and effort. It’s just more fruitful and beneficial to focus on reading stuff in Korean that I really want to read in Korean. Enjoyment is VERY important and can never be tossed aside.

http://news.donga.com/Culture/more29/3/all/20141010/67068211/1

https://namu.wiki/w/%EC%9B%90%EC%A0%95%EB%85%80

https://www.sisain.co.kr/?mod=news&act=articleView&idxno=24942 <- about hanja

http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/03/02/2014030202553.html

http://monthly.chosun.com/client/mdaily/daily_view.asp?idx=1998&Newsnumb=2017111998

https://theqoo.net/square/1043395792   < – seungri’s interview

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu3JOlUBbVK/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1glj78ewve7pw

tiffany’s apology
http://tenasia.hankyung.com/archives/995846

tiffany’s main apology
http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2016/08/26/2016082602778.html

jimin’s apology

https://www.instagram.com/p/CCNxXQjF1jv/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=09038146-ef9c-4415-a714-c36820f014f7

https://www.hangeul.or.kr/modules/bbs/index.php?code=bbs23&mode=view&id=12281&page=14&___M_ID=47&f_head=&sfield=&sword=

http://blog.daum.net/_blog/BlogTypeView.do?blogid=0CgXV&articleno=5862561&categoryId=510472&regdt=20060925005221

i WOULD love to link this article/blog entry/comment/whatever it was that I read a couple years ago. It might’ve been written in English. The gist of the text was that someone had to translate this science-jargon heavy article or study (maybe it’s an academic paper) from Korean to English and it was an insurmountable task. So you know it’s 90% hanja-based words lol. There’s literally no way for the person to make heads or tails of certain words because there’s all this ambiguity.  Context wasn’t doing shit in this case… So the translator person had to contact the author to figure what the fuck the article is saying then he was able to translate it. It’s not even like he understood the article and was just struggling to express it in English. HE literally could not even comprehend it because of the limitations of hangeul. sO what should the author have done so that it’s not incomprehensible to most people (it could be everyone for all i know. who knows who ambiguous and frustrating it was to read it. I haven’t read this article question my self)? Insert a shit ton of hanja? insert a shit ton of english in parentheses? write the whole thing in English? Not sure but any of these options is better than reading hangeul-only text for this particular case.

LASTLY my favorite hanja is 畓 1. 논 2. 수전(水田)  and it’s because I like the way it looks and I don’t think it exists in Japanese 🙂 I’m all about being shallow like picking books by the cover . i get excited when i see hanja that don’t exist in japanese

articles about hanja:

https://m.cafe.daum.net/nature-hanja/YpJG/3?q=D_jDGwPlH16FY0&amp;
https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/03/02/2014030202553.html
https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/03/02/2014030202535.html
https://m.blog.daum.net/kimkyoc/1221


http://pub.chosun.com/client/news/viw.asp?cate=C03&mcate=M1003&nNewsNumb=20161021618&nidx=21619
https://m.blog.daum.net/kimkyoc/1221
https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/01/19/2014011902491.html
http://topa.co.kr/archives/198
http://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/View/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0002478244

english: https://web.archive.org/web/20160811071843/https://kuiwon.wordpress.com/articles/ -hmm i don’t believe this: “In fact, this blogger knows a few Koreans that do not know the word jangrae, and surmises that vast majority of the ones that do know the two words do not know the difference in nuance.” that’s bs.. he must be referring to gyopos that speak korean well??

other articles:

https://www.chosun.com/opinion/readers_opinion/2021/05/05/KYRDDSN3MNGPLK7BP5XDBAK7RM/

https://www.chosun.com/opinion/readers_opinion/2021/05/05/KYRDDSN3MNGPLK7BP5XDBAK7RM/

https://www.chosun.com/national/education/2021/04/27/NWS4LCICMBBAZM3QE3ZQICIKBA/

http://star.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/OhmyStar/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0002727773

http://news.kmib.co.kr/article/view.asp?arcid=0015606353&code=61171511

https://news.nate.com/view/20210317n50309?mid=n1101

https://m.blog.naver.com/jjlove0526/221369843354

https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/schooling/711527.html

http://star.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/OhmyStar/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0002731796

Pitch Accent

I forgot to mention that I donated to dogen’s patreon page for 1 month in May to learn about pitch accent! It’s definitely worth more than $10 but I am frugal. For a person who has never bought a textbook for Japanese (tae kim is more than enough to get people started),  this is the only thing I spent money on to learn Japanese (I’ve spend a fair amount over the years on Japanese media like books, dvds, cds but they’re for entertainment first and foremost and their secondary function was learning! ). It made realize why I never noticed the pitch accent of certain words. I think he gave an example of an atamadaka word that changed to heiban because it was used in the middle of the sentence after a word that ended in some pitch accent ( I am on fuzzy on the details). I also realized that I did pick up on the pitch accent of some words from all my listening/watching Japanese media just because they say it the same way many many times ie 師匠　ししょう、　韓国　KANKOKU – korea is atamadaka without a doubt! It always left an impression on me how they always seemed to say kankoku forcefully lol. After watching dogen’s video series, I know that I definitely do not speak or read Japanese with perfect pitch accent but I still think my intonation is good.

For those who know Korean I can tell you that Korean is flatter than Japanese even though Korean people say Japanese is flat (yes flatter than english but not korean)…  for god’s sakes on korean tv they always point out how japanese people say EH in such a dramatic way.  Both languages have intonation but Japanese has pitch accent and Korean doesn’t.  I think pitch accent is the reason why Japanese women’s voices are higher-pitched than Korean women’s voices lol (that and how your voice can get nasally very easily).  When korean people who don’t know Japanese say japanese people’s names or words that are heiban they just say it low low low (a pattern that doesn’t exist in Japanese) since Korean doesn’t have pitch accent outside of dialects and that’s how words and names are usually said in Korean. I was wondering during Produce 48 why the Japanese people’s names are so much harder to understand and remember when the Korean people say their names minus the times when the sound doesn’t exist in Korean (RIP matsui. you are now machh-i. Thank god none of the 3 girls who made the group have a tsu or z sound in their name). Eventually I figured out that it was the lack of pitch accent that was throwing me off.

I took notes in a notebook while watching dogen’s vids and also downloaded the anki deck on the patreon page. I have not touched the anki deck lol and I have not touched the notebook since June. However, I definitely noticed pitch accent from then to now when I watched my Japanese shows ( I studied some of the patterns with the notebook by trying to say stuff aloud with the correct pitch accent). I think I’ll go back through some of his videos or some of the anki cards to get more stuff to notice. When I watched his videos in May, there were many instances where I couldn’t hear the pitch accent ie there was no way I could pass his tests.  When Dogen was saying “University is” with varying pitch accents, sometimes I could hear it, sometimes I thought I heard it, sometimes I knew I couldn’t tell the difference lol. Maybe I will try the tests again sometimes this year!  What I found really helpful for me was to try to say 2-syllable Japanese words in the 2 possible pitch accents: high to low and low to high. For words that are longer than 2 syllables, I practice saying the 2 syllables in the word that have the pitch accent difference in the 2 pitch accent patterns (high to low, low to high) a few times before saying the whole word. Breaking it down is a must for me… If I try to say the whole word in the correct pitch accent from the get go then I get caught up in the cadence of the saying the word etc and get nothing from the activity in terms of pitch accent. I also find comparing homophones really helpful

ie 若い 2 and 和解 0

機嫌 0 and 期限 1

also I’ve been meaning to look at these sites so I have more words/patterns to notice…

http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/

http://accent.u-biq.org/a.html

https://www.sanseido-publ.co.jp/publ/dicts/daijirin_ac.html

https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/summary/kotoba/term/049.html –  months

https://www.edx.org/course/japanese-pronunciation-for-communication-0  <- this is free

<<- there are dl links in the video info.

Japanese pitch accent
byu/weab00 inLearnJapanese

Also I’ve been meaning to check out youtube vids in KOrean talking about Japanese pitch accent since knowing Korean doesn’t help with Japanese pitch accent or long-short vowels.

Unlike Dogen, I have no aspirations of sounding “perfect” as in get mistaken for a native-speaker which requires perfect pitch-accent and sounding like a Japanese woman. Also, I have no desire to buy a pitch accent dictionary. I do want to improve my pitch accent to sound more natural and hear Japanese even better (I have no problem understanding Japanese TV). Because I watched dogen’s vids and familiarized myself with pitch accent, I use the pitch accent plugin for anki (I put it there so I can reference it but I do not test myself on pitch accent).  Dogen even has videos on how to make the sounds of the Japanese language with the mouth/tongue positioning. I signed up for his patreon solely for his pitch accent videos but I still checked out some of the other vids on making the sounds of the Japanese language out of curiosity in case I’m not making the sounds correctly since I share the same native language as him. There were moments where Dogen would make himself sounds more Japanese by changing a quality of his voice ever so slightly he’s really obsessed with sounding more japanese .

On a related note I checked out the episode of ANOTHER SKY that featured JIYEON from KARA (now disbanded kpop group). She mentioned how tough it is to speak Japanese when she acts since pitch accent doesn’t exist in Korean (minus a certain dialect) and people would correct her over and over again. I remember a few years back she was on jigoku sensei nube playing a very japanese role and I saw a clip just to see the atrocity. It was the typical Korean person speaking unpleasant-sounding Japanese due to lackluster intonation and pitch accent… She has definitely improved leaps and bounds since then. I also got interested in watching one of her movies for fun. It’s a movie with a tired plot that we’ve seen many times ie secret garden (korean drama), freaky friday. I was intrigued by the cast since I recognized people from talk/variety shows. That was the only reason I watched sanbun no ichi which featured Kosugi, danmitsu, and the guy from kat-tun. Also it was directed by shinagawa!

I also read an article on japanese buzzfeed ( I usually avoid this site like the plague because it’s click-bait whether it’s Japanese or English) a while back about this guy who moved from oosaka to tokyo as a kid and how he had the toughest time trying to speak like the other kids. I got curious so I searched chiebukuro and this guy who spoke standard Japanese moved to somewhere in the Kansai-area and he was saying it took him years to perfect his pitch accent. He was saying how everyone kept telling him to stop speaking fake kansai-ben in the beginning since his pitch accent was off.

Also I recall seeing some Arashi show where they had arashi members say NANI YANEN and everyone sounded off. At the time I thought it was the intonation since I didn’t know better. They were really trying to say it like the kansai people but didn’t succeed. I thought someone might pull it off since I’m sure they’ve heard nani yanen hundreds if not thousands of times. I know they have no problem hearing/understanding kansai-ben since I don’t but speaking and understanding are 2 completely different skills.

OMG speaking of Kansai-ben I was so dumbfounded when I heard Seungri from BIG BANG talk on hanseikai a couple months back because he was speaking in kansai-ben. I found it especially ear-grating because I’m not used to hearing foreigners speak kansai-ben minus jero (the enka singer) who sounds amazing which is not surprising since he is an enka singer. I recall him talking about the pitch accent or intonation for disney sea on shindoumoto kyoudai. I’m used to foreign accents in standard japanese but not with kansai-ben so Seungri’s japanese sounded jarring. At first I thought he was joking around or something and waiting for ariyoshi to call him out on it. I read around and realized he decided to adapt the kansai-ben dialect over the standard japanese because he’s supposedly sanma-san’s apprentice and wants to become or is a geinin (comedian).  Maybe he is hanging around with a lot of kansai people in Japan? To me his kansai-ben sounds just like his standard Japanese except he said yanen or yakara instead of whatever people say in standard Japanese. In other words, his japanaese sounds worse when he speaks kansai-ben due to the incorrect intonation, and pitch accent.  When he does that with standard Japanese, it doesn’t bother me because I’m so used to hearing that kind of japanese from foreigners or kpop stars. I was wondering if kansai-ben people were irritated by his kansai-ben and googled but everyone seemed supportive of him. Maybe after he does his 2 years in the military and spends more time speaking Japanese, he may develop  better intonation?? I’m doubtful though because his standard Japanese speaking is the typical way Korean people speak Japanese when they ignore intonation/pitch accent or apply Korean intonation.  He would be so much better if he just worked on intonation and he just seems to have ingrained, bad habits that stem from him applying his way of speaking of Korean on top of Japanese. At the end of the day, Seungri has the right to learn Japanese however he wants and he doesn’t have to improve his intonation, pitch accent since people have no problem him understanding him when he talks. However, he would sound better if he did improve in those areas.

here’s manzai about funny Japanese.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYdePeVu0ow

I’ve been a fan of JARUJARU since like 2009 during the red carpet/theater show days~~ Here’s some random info: the guy on the right is named fukutoku and he actually lived in AMERICA until he was 7 or 9 or something then he went back to Japan. He forgot all his English but his oosaka-ben sounds flawless!  I know this because he told this story on some show about how as a kid he pronounced Z as Z while everyone  else was pronouncing it as ZETTO.

transcript:
http://geininn-netatyou.com/wp/manzai/jyarujyaru/jyaru/

damn I wish these sites were prevalent in 2009!

gotta watch this later

kansaiben stuff

アニメの関西弁は、違和感満載？ 関西人が選ぶ自然な関西弁キャラランキング

INCORRECT Japanese

I just wanted to share some incorrect Japanese I came across while watching Japanese stuff. Of course I’ve heard these exact incorrect usages in other tv shows etc a long time ago… these are just the most recent instances I recall.

First one is from The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (it really is not a movie. I mean that in a bad way. super long, boring and the “movie music” was so forced and out of place)

It was said by koizumi who is a high schooler and while I was watching I thought damn do any high schoolers talk like him? but anyways I do like listening to polite japanese and I love anime for the variety of Japanese speaking skills. It’s very fun.

he says
おやりになる
So the first thing I thought was since やる can mean to f*** it probably doesn’t work with keigo ever. I’ve come across a MC on a VERY popular japanese talk show use o yari ni naru. Also it reminded me of the first time BOA went on HEY HEY HEY and matsumoto hitoshi asks her why do you want to be a singer in Japan? and she answers yaritari kara and of course he responds with a I don’t think you should say that on tv. of course boa did not understand why he said that to her or she didn’t understand him because of the kansai-ben.

here’s the japanese explanation for why it’s wrong.
http://www.kamigaki.jp/blog/2015/02/27/52154733/

ですとか
I hear this from various talk variety shows. In short you’re supposed to use や instead…. it reeks of contradiction… desu is for polite situations while toka is for informal talking.

if you come across any suspicious Japanese that you suspect is incorrect I recommend googling with the words 正しい and you’ll probably get an answer.

Something that made me LOL hard

It’s from the same show that I had featured in this previous post

So what I found really funny was when misaki called takashi at 19:40.  I loved takahashi’s wtf reaction and how misaki never told him before the show or maybe they told her she can’t. i was disappointed that none of the other contestants used the phone lifeline since I’m sure if anyone else did it would’ve gotten down  in a similar fashion as misaki and takashi’s phone call did….. which ensued in HILARITY

I recently realized in the episode when they copied hoko-tate the  background music was from evangelion since I never saw that anime until recently (besides the availability of japanese subs and countless explanations online, there’s also the sara ni wakaru video which was super helpful.)

 

HOW TO USE LANG-8

Here’s my advice on how to use lang-8. You could say my views are pessimistic but I think they’re realistic and recognizing and accepting reality is necessary.

If you notice on my lang-8 my writing has improved a lot and on one of my entries this Japanese person had said you know I can’t say that your writing is wrong or right because you have your own writing style. Of course within that entry there were legitimate mistakes or parts where there was a more natural way to express something but there definitely were parts that supported what this person had said. ONE OBSERVATION that you can make is that lang-8 did not improve my writing. I did not religiously force myself to write entries into lang-8 every week or every month. there are some long stretches of blanks on lang-8 and i can tell you that i never EVER EVER EVER ANKIED anything i wrote on lang-8 whether it’s my writing or someone else’s correction of my writing.

i hate people who shit on input-based methods especially when they arrogantly criticize it based on their TINY AMOUNT OF INPUT. i phrase it this way because people don’t seem to understand A LOT OF INPUT. I AM Speaking from experience feeling frustrated being stuck at the intermediate or advanced plateau where i did spend a lot of time in japanese but I still had not passed this elusive “threshold”. also i had my personal circumstances that prevented me from spending time doing things i wanted to do including things in japanese.  it took me longer to reach this elusive threshold point. or maybe it was the mcd format that really made an impact. That was something that organically transpired from me finally coming to terms with my wasting time on anki whether it’s making cards or doing them because the shit was not working.

Of course ultimately you have to write a lot if you want to improve at writing so you can’t just rely on input but input is still a part of outputting.

<- midorikawa-san on anime giga. he voiced xingke on code geass and zelgadiss in slayers

so my advice for using lang-8 to improve your Japanese is to use lang-8 for it is. You can write something and gauge how correct or natural your Japanese is. Don’t try to memorize the corrections or add the corrections to anki. Why does anyone think that sounds like a good plan? It is a site where people correct your Japanese… depending on the individual’s level it could be anywhere from fixing minor mistakes to making something unintelligible into something intelligible. PLEASE do not waste YOUR TIME and other people’s time writing unintelligible giberish or bs shit like watashi ha honyara desu. nihongo wobenkyou siteimasu. anime ga suki desu. If you write about something boring and generic no one will want to read it. IF no one ends up correcting your entry you really can’t blame them. IF you can’t understand anything don’t bother outputting. You’re just better off inputting if you’re those people writing unintelligible entries. Once you can output decently, find something you want to write about passionately and write about it. I submit entries to lang-8 sporadically but when I do it’s usually about a topic that I want to write about. It’s nice to see my old lang-8 entries and to see how good or bad my Japanese is. Sometimes I’m surprised I used a certain word or some obscure grammar thing I was into at the time due to the influence of JIN or something else.
What I attribute to my improved writing at lang-8 is a lot of input and output (talking to myself, writing) NOT trying to memorize lang-8 corrections by heart or word for word. input a lot, output a lot

ANOTHER tip is DO NOT USE THE DICTINOARY TO LOOK UP WORDS while you write. one reason is lang-8 is kind of a record of how much you grew so if you go out of your way to look up all these fancy words that you didn’t know then and you don’t know now to make your entry seem better than what your actual skills are it kinda defeats the purpose. plus it’s really obvious when people do that or use the thesaurus for thier native language. don’t have the motivation to show0off or whatever because you’re wasting time that could be put towards input. it’s a just poor use of your time.

I can understand looking up a word or two to write in your lang-8 (if a word is really necessary or if it’s on the tip of your tongue) but do not waste your time looking up countless words because you wont’ remember them. also i consider  5 years olds to be fluent in whatever language they speak natively because they’ve spent 5 unadulterated years with their language so even if their vocab isn’t huge they know how to use what they know really well like grammar or gion and manipulate the language with ease. you should be practicing what you know and try to maximize the possibilities. it’s not just about the number of words you know.

I loved what steve kaufman wrote in his latest blog entry. It’s kinda related to what I wrote about the futility in trying to consciously memorize corrections.
http://blog.thelinguist.com/learning-languages-is-a-subconscious-process

Also here is shokotan talking about someone that she likes a lot!

The first time I saw this I loled at Jackie’s delayed reaction. now that i think about it, shokotan should’ve paused more for the translator~ as you can see she has no trouble going on and on when it comes to complimenting someone she likes a lot.

Japanese Counters

So I recently “learned” /relearned 2 counters for Japanese which are Ittsui  and fusa.

ittsui is for stuff that comes in pairs like shoes and ear plugs.I’ve already encountered it before years ago and it’s buried in my anki deck but i didn’t actually know it until now.  just because it’s in my anki deck and i marked easy a bunch of times don’t mean i actually know it. I’m sure I knew it for like maybe 10 minutes a couple years ago then it got wiped from my memory.

So I was talking to myself in Japanese and thought hey is earplugs also counted as ittsui?  i googled it and it is 🙂 I like “producing” then checking anything that could be wrong since most of the time it is correct! 🙂 Another thing is the verb soguu. I was like hey does soguwanai work for this case and it did 😀 sometimes a verb will have the same meaning as another verb like awanai in this case but that doesn’t mean they are interchangeable. when you produce that’s when you inadvertently use a word and you wonder hey is that correct? and then i can look it up and solidify my understanding of that word or grammar. It’s also exciting and confidence-building if you keep getting it right despite your creative ways to use the word though it may not actually be creative and it’s the case that i just don’t recall the exact instance where i heard it being used in that exact same way by a japanese person.

fusa is for counting bananas and possibly some other stuff but so far I’ve only come across the usage for bananas and that must be why it took me this long to come across this counter.

ex:  banana  WO Hitofusa

i only came across this because i read a book and no the banana did not play a central role in the story.  imagine if i read another book instead perhaps i would’v not come across this counter until next year. but if i had gone to japanese grocery store like if i lived in japan i would’ve known about it sooner…

I am adamantly opposed to rote memorization especially when it comes to counters. I recommend reading through it ON TAE KIM without trying to remember anything and be aware that japanese uses counters and then learn them as you encounter them. i see no point of drilling/ rote memorizing something you will forget. if you’re obsessed with production then just use ko for everything that requires encounters lol. when it comes down to it people will still understand you.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE: i used the word ochiiru as opposed to ochiru when i was talking to myself and i knew in that instance ochiru would not work and when i looked it up, lo and be hold it is correct.

another example: i ‘ll do some grammar construction which may seem incorrect or at least i’m not 100% it is and it ends up being correct 😀

Worries about learning Japanese in the beginning stages

I was going to write about some worries I had about Japanese during my initial learning just in case this gets wiped from my memory.

most of my issues I was worried about with Japanese was stuff that’s not also present in Korean such as long-short vowels and intonation.  Well yes Korean has intonation too but it’s not as big a deal in Korean because Japanese is more reliant on it with the lack of consonant sounds etc.

I honestly pondered in the beginning how do the Japanese people not trip up when they talk fast and uninhibited with all damn long-short vowels　そう　じゅう　しゅう だいいち　おねがいいたします

徒労　灯籠　とろう　とうろう

粗相　そそう= this means to crap your pants　etc

 which do not exist in Korean. The stressed syllables was one thing but having to hold a vowel for 2x longer etc was MIND-BOGGLING.  I remember when I was reading Japanese or trying to output Japanese when I was talking with myself I was very deliberate in my pronunciation of the long/short vowels and also with particles with wo which was unnatural but couldn’t be helped. I’m like I spent 0.3 seconds saying this so if the long vowel means you hold it out longer then I should hold this for 0.6 seconds lol… so there would be all this unnecessary stressing in the talking/reading because this was a challenge.  of course I would be SUPER LIVID when I watched a Japanese talk/variety show and somebody said something I didn’t understand and I wanted to look it up and there was a possibility that it was a long or short vowel or there was a possibly there’s a stress with the small tsu and sometimes i’d have to type out various possibilities and figured out what was said ( of course there’s homophones so typing out the variations is half the battle).  ALSO there’s words like DAIICHI or KEII where it’s the LONG-VOWEL for i which at the time i would’ve never been able to catch and loook up. oF COURSE if i could go back in time i would say bug the crap out of lang-8 japaese poeple.

The reason why the long vowels aren’t a big deal is because Japanese has intonation so like a 2 syllable word of long – short will always have the same intonation and the opposite of 2 syllable word of short-long always has a  certain intonation. and 2 syllable word of long long will have a specific intonation etc etc. I’m sure there’s exceptions but for the most part the intonation is a dead giveaway. I went from not even knowing there is intonation to noticing it then being able to copy it from hearing Japanese so much. 　my advice to japanese beginners is to listen to alot of japanese because what will happen is you will remember the word pronunciation with the intonation which becomes effortless after a certain point and i don’t go oh shit is it short vowel or long vowel. it’ s really obvious from the intonation whether that word is short and long or short short etc etc. In fact I think it’s incredibly DIFFICULT to speak Japanese and pronounce the short/long vowels with the opposite intonation while dragging the sound for the correct duration because it just goes against all the japanese input.  Kpop stars usually suck at japanese so their intonation is always wrong so it’s grating and sometimes they speak japanese with the polite korean intonation which sounds REALLY ARROGANT and unpleasant in Japanese. Also they suck at the long/short vowels so shoujojidai usually call themselves shojo jidai which means virgin generation…. probably everyone except sooyoung!

from all my previous entries about learning japaese and getting used to it this is also something you will get used to and not worth worrying about. nowadays when i read or speak japanese with myself I don’t think twice about whether it’s a long or short vowel… it just comes out correct with the correct intonation. it’s effortless and automatic.

as far as intonation is concerned i wasn’t aware of its existence and ignored it. when somebody brought up the diff in intonation between hashi and hashi i honestly can’t hear nor mimic the difference lol. I still cannot do it now actually lol. I probably pronoumce hashi with the wrong intonation. I”m fine with pronouncing japanese with correct intonation for the most part but isolated words like hashi is just like… goes over my head. But obviously context will fill in the gap and HONESTLY not everyone in japanese uses the same intonation for hashi since there’s kansai-ben etc

Knowing korean provides advantages for learning Japanese but they are still different languages. Think of SPanish and english yes they’re similar and whatnot but they’re STILL different languages and you gotta put the time in and get used to the spanish or the english.

BUYING JAPANESE BOOKS FOR STUDYING JAPANESE

SO far I am at around 110 books? I know it’s more because i don’t register every book on dokusho meter because i don’t want to be associated with shitty books. and i’m excited to reach 200 and i certainly have a long list of shit i want to read so there’s no problem in that department. it’s just a matter of time. if 2015 and half of 2015 wasn’t so shitty i might’ve already reached 200 books and i am not exaggerating. it’s incredible what a difference changing jobs can make. BUT 2017 should be better for that reason alone.

I do not mean textbooks. and btw I don’t think Korean books can be bought on the cheap unless you go to book off in Korea, right? I have no interest in reading books in Korean anyway so it works out great for me but curious if you’re shit of luck if your target language is Korean.

I think tae Kim and RIKAI-CHAN and google is PLENTY. I never bought a Japanese grammar book and I KNOW my Japanese grammar. it is not necessary and I’m glad I never bothered! FREE FOR THE WIN. I mean books to enjoy reading whether it’s books with furigana ( I only have one book with furigana over all the kanji and that was because that was the only way that particular book was printed because the publisher wanted everyone to be able to read the story), light novel ( love slayers… not interested in loli moe gag shit that are plaguing and ruining anime nowadays), hard covers, bunko, manga, etc….

ANYWAYS 2 ways to buy books are in person and online. the option for in person is book off if you’re in south Korea or japan or NY or California… go to the site to find out more locations. There’s kurokuniya but it’s so expensive and you can find books people sold from kurokuniya (whatev it is called) kinokuni? to book-off. I went to kinikuniya and gasped and left lol. It’s only good for window shopping. for online there’s cdjapan and honto.jp?? and buying services but… I don’t want to pay for EMS shipping

here’s the list

CDJAPAN.NET

mercari – if you reside in the US. / EBAY

PHYSICAL BOOK STORES LIKE BOOK-OFF, KUROKUNIYA

HONTO.JP (EMS ONLY – EXPENSIVE)

AMAZON.CO.JP (only if the seller sends internationally. you find out by putting the stuff in your cart and checking it out but delivery is relatively fast… like a few days! )

TENSO (FORWARDING SERVICE which opens you up to all Japanese websites ie amazon)

cdjapan.net and my rationalization!

so I love book off in NYC because of the prices like the 1 dollar section. there have been books where they’ll be in both the 1 dollar section and the regular price section which ranges from 3-5 dollars or even more if it’s hard cover or immaculate condition (but honestly everything in the stores seems to be good condition for the most part) and so in that case I go for the 1 dollar one because there is no discernible difference between the 2 in quality. sometimes the 1 dollars are books are a little more busted or yellowed but usually they’re in good quality. BUT it’s far for me now like 2 hours so if take in the time it takes to travel there and the cost it costs to go there and the selection (it’s limited in that whatever’s there is there.) and blahblah cdjapan.net price isn’t that bad. CDjapan sells new books so they’re going to range from 4-6 dollars unless it’s new or hardcover etc. (then it can go up higher) and gives you options for the shipping so I go for the cheapest because there’s no rush!!! I don’t understand people’s obsession with expedited EMS shipping and all that. Like with any overseas transactions you gotta experiment and see what weight will give you the most bang for your buck with the shipping. What I love about CDJAPAN is that I can buy books that I can’t buy at bookoff there and they’re all new…. so I try my best to not buy anything I can buy at book off…. like popular stuff. Like I said in the beginning considering the circumstances the price that I pay at cdjapan isn’t that bad but you know in case I ever go to nyc I don’t want to buy something for 7 dollars if I can get it for 1 dollar or 3 dollars etc… like I said I’m not impatient. I can wait a year or years. Unfortunately cdjapn can only sell books that are print ( but even if it’s in print sometimes they don’t carry it… there’s one book I WANTD TO READ AND IT WAS SO WORTH IT but it was not on cdjapan and it is definitely not out of print because it’s not that old.. they can’t possibly carry every fikin’ book. btw that books is ZOO 2 by otsuchi … IHIGHLLY RECOMMEND zoo 1 btw. btw I found it book off 😃 curiosity satisfied but I think I liked zoo 1 more) … so I can’t buy any ZEPPAN books 😦 it’s not like I’m obsessed with obscure books. it so happens some books that I want to read are not in print anymore. I am keeping a list of those books in evernote and dokusoh meter and whatnot and hopefully once that list is long enough and I carefully assess if they’re worth reading or not based off amazing reviews etc. I may look into a buying service in japan so I can buy used versions of them. book-off is a hit or miss because you can find some treasures and other times I know what I want to buy and they don’t have it which can’t be helped because it’s a used book store. what I want is a Japanese library because I don’t like buying shit. for English I try to borrow everything from the library.

here’s the other rationalization. I don’t spend money on stuff I don’t need to. I realize a lot of the times there’s an option to not buy something. you don’t need to buy coffee from Starbucks or decorations or candles or febreeze ( candles and febreeze are bad for your health) or soda or perfume (why do people pay money to SMELL LIKE SHIT) or cigarettes. one of the things I thought of as a little girl was that I never want to become that 40/50 year old woman who douses herself in perfume everyday and upset everyone with her presence or in other words emit effluvium. I think overapplying perfume is one of the most embarrassing things ever. I am anti-perfume so I wish people do not use it or make it etc. It is toxic.) or fast food or snacks (I actually prefer to starve or fast depending on how you want to construe it since it takes many days to starve to death – thank you books about north Korea- if it’s not necessary for me to buy and eat crap. according to a very INTERESTING book about notrh Korea they knew from experience how many days if takes women and men to die from starvation and it takes longer for women. it’s so scary and CREEPY that they have this knowledge from the wealth of anecdotal experience… why do that to your OWN PEOPLE over the dumbest shit). there are some shit they sell in cvs’s etc. that I do not understand why they bother producing it and why people bother buying it… stuff like frivolous Christmas decorations and whatnot especially plastic crap that’s bad for your health. and it’s always the people who make minimum wage + too many children who spend on that stuff… WHY??? (well they’re not very smart so it’s not surprising. but seriously if you’re a teen mom what do you want your daughter to become a teen mom? of course not. I think if my mom was a teen mom I would think she’s a dumb shit and hope I’m smarter than her and I only say harsh things like this because i’ve met impudent teen parents) but anyways I think a lot of the stuff that are sold and bought are so unnecessary and impart negative consequences on the environment and people around you etc. anyways it is one of my rationalization as to why I think it’s not so bad that I’m spending on money on Japanese books… I can’t borrow japanes books because I live in the usa and my only option it to buy and I go the cheapest route by choosing the slowest shipping and i’ve used my cdjapan points to save money and… reading is GOOD for your mind. It makes sense spending money on this vs other shit.

In case this puts someone’s mind at ease I am happy to report that my “haul” from cdjapan went swimmingly and all my crap was in mint condition as it should since they’re all new 😀 I think it averaged out to 6 or 7 dollars per book including the cost of shipping. I cant make myself spend 11 dollars on a book. it’s too much!! i’ll wait the few years lol (usually works for popular books… when I go to book-off). I am happy to report that cdjapan is worth it and I don’t feel like I’m spending a fortune on books. they’re new and it’s convenient because they’re sent to my door and I get to choose the shipping method and I get points for my birthday blahblahlh.

AMAZON.CO.JP

OMG I cannot believe I never looked into this. the shipping is only 10 dollars!!! well for whatever I ordered it was 10 dollars so it was totally worth it. I always assumed that the shipping cost would be obscene so I never looked into amazon.co.jp since I live in the USA. This is a route that is absolutely worth taking if you are buying a large set of books like the whole set of a manga series or a book series, etc. Otherwise you’re spending 10 dollars shipping per book. BTW not all sellers sell internationally. for the books I wanted to order only one seller would ship it to the USA so I am lucky :D. The downside to amazon.co.jp is that it’s only worth buying bulk so it’s not a good idea to order bulk of something you have NEVER read with the assumption that you’ll like it regardless of all the 5 star reviews on some site. sometimes the reason reading isn’t enjoyable in Japanese is because the book sucks rather than your shitty Japanese abilities. saying. There are some amazing books I’m compatible with that makes reading the Japanese language so PLEASANT AND FUN AND EFORTLESS AND THERE ARE SOME awful authors that are so frivolous and awful and it doesn’t take THAT many pages to figure that out. Now I haven’t read the full series so I cannot completely say my purchase was worth the money but I had read a few volumes so based on that it’s likely I’ll like the rest. EDIT: I ‘m almost done reading it was worth it.

ANOTHER option is TENSO which is a forwarding service. what you’d do is order books from online and have it sent to an address in japan then have them send them to you. I think I want to try it one day once I have a long enough list because I believe only EMS is available and that is HELLA expensive. there are some books I am dying to read that aren’t available through the other channels.

Lastly I need to include some deodorizing tips for old books whether they’re from Book-off or amazon or whatever other reason. I’ve researched my fairshare oN THE INTERNET. here’s the info without the BS

MERCARI/ EBAY

2 options if you live in america. on mercari search any of the following to find the listings: 小説　 japanese book 日本語　にほんご  本 文庫  単行本 漫画 マンガ

you could also search the author or book title in japanese but it’s like a shot in the dark…. unless it’s popular. if the shipping is too expensive ask the seller to use usps media mail for the shipping option. you can also use the site to sell books you finished reading! very easy to do if you read konmari’s book. mercari stuff usually comes people’s houses so i recommend asking the seller if it’s a smoke pet free home. even if the house is smoke/pet free the books will probably smell so if you’re like me it’ll be months until you read them but it’s quite all right since i have huge piles of physical books and ebooks that are waiting to be read.

i recommend bundling and sending an offer on the app provided the shipping option is set correctly on the listing. you send the offer by putting in all the books you want from the one seller in your cart then sending them the offer. you can send them any offer ! i recommend lowballing as much as possible like 5 books for 10 dollars or 5 dollars. at the end of the day people just want to get rid of their shit and japanese books in japanese are not in high demand on an american app.

if the bundle option does not work or the shipping price increases really high message the seller directly to negotiate.

EBAY – to price check the mercari listing. you could also price check with amazon.co.jp. useful for stuff that comes in a series like manga.

DE-ODORIZING TIPS

BAKING SODA – get a big plastic tub, pour baking soda in it, put in some kind of mesh or grid like thing in the plastic tub so you can put the books in the tub without them touching the baking soda but still get exposed to the baking soda via the air. I’d say give it a few days or a weeeek or a month or two. REPEAT as needed.. do not throw away the baking soda. save it to clean stuff like your bathtub or to stain treat your white shirts with the nasty, unsightly yellow stains. mix HYDROGEN peroxide and dish soap to get a super useful paste to clean ANYTHING.

also there’s kitty litter and activated carbon. be careful with activated carbon. i put them on coffee filters and sometimes i tie it up and sometimes i don’t. i use all 3 lol.

NEWSPAPER- put newspapers between the pages. It’s not necessary to do every page (maybe if the book is THAT bad). I’d say every 10-20 pages. give it a few days, a week. REPEAT as needed.

FREEZER + NEWSPAPER – place book in a ziplock bag then put it in the freezer. I say employ the newspaper method on top of it for good measure in case there’s moisture so that the book is not subjected to the full brunt of the it.. Leave in for 3 days. the freezer has to do with mold I think…

NEWSPAPER – by it self.

AIR IT OUT – I’d say you’d have to it leave it for many hours to notice a difference. Of course the book has to be open with the pages exposed to the air/wind to make a difference. It’s tricky because you want air/wind but you don’t want the sun on the book. don’t forget about uva rays. they are omnipresent. so I don’t recommend leaving them out for more than a few hours in shade.

SUN – sun is good and bad… you gotta think of the pros vs cons with the sun depending on the condition of your book. Sun kills germs and helps rid any excess moisture in the book which may make a difference. if you leave your book in direct sunlight for too long you’ll damage the book. the pages will turn darker and if you leave it in the sun long enough it will smell like the sun (which smells awful in my opinion). I think it’s unnecessary unless your book has serious smells/issues. I read somewhere it takes 6 minutes for the sun to kill whatever germs it is capable of killing.

VACCUM – sometimes the smell is dust rather than the book being old. i vacuum the books carefully with the appropriate attachment. sometimes the book is old so it will smell even if you vacuum it. vacuum has 2 u’s

TIME – I’ve been shocked how i’ve gotten stinky books to smell like nothing from using the above methods which ultimately take time.

there are way too many fun books to read. do not waste time hauling textbooks. the fact that you’re hauling textbooks is very telling that you seem to be wasting money and you’ll NEVER BECOME FLUENT