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

PRE-MADE ANKI DECKS FOR JAPANESE

No I am not writing to write platitudes about the benefits of making your own deck. I
don’t understand how those Japanese language learning bloggers write platitudes and common sensical statements about the most banal topics. I don’t blog that frequently because I have to be smart with my time and only blog about stuff that’s worthy of my time.  I’m gonna talk about the pre-made Japanese decks that I found indispensable and time-saving. Especially in this day and age some pre-made decks may have the potential to be amazing with the advent of plugins like wordquery, sanseido.

The 2 types of decks that I found indispensable were the HEISIG deck WITH the top stories and the onomatopoeia decks

So if you get the deck HEISIG deck with top 2 stories and then combine it with the deck with japanese words in addition to the keywords for RTK you save a lot of time! Now I can test myself with writing kanji without wasting time thinking of what the keyword is referring to or manually typing hiragana or copy pasting stories. My heisig deck got messed up years back when all my cards duplicated and I didn’t know how to fix it. So I ended up creating a new kakitori deck where I added words I wanted to know how to write. Just in case you didn’t realize, if you do Remeber the kanji you still have to practice kakitori to write actual Japanese words. I think I have 500 cards in that deck and it’s a struggle because I don’t have stories in all of them and I ain’t copying/pasting from the koohii site so some cards are easy and some are hard etc. I always wanted to go DO THE RTK again with an amazing pre-made deck and now I can.

as for the top 2 stories as an uncreative person I appreciate them a lot. Also a lot of them are dirty or funny in a perverse way so that makes remembering the stories easier. I absolutely don’t mind. I live in America so I am used to filth!

ONOMATOPOEIA
There are 3 decks that are shared currently. One of them is from tofugu and it has over 900 cards. There’s a cornucopia of onomatopoeia out there and it’s never-ending lol. For some reason I thought once I’m 5 or 7 years into Japanese I’d see all the onomatopoeia and get used to them by then but it’s just never-ending and you can’t expect yourself to know/memorize 100% of them. Also I thought 10 years in I’d be able to just feel/infer the meaning of most unknown gion I come across based on how it sounds and the context but half of the time either I have no idea what the gion is alluding to or means or after I look it up I go I was not definitely feeling/guessing that (It is pure serendipity when I do guess correct or am close and of course I am filled with glee! :D). Also this tends to happen more often with novels than tv shows. I attribute this to the audio and additional available context. People on Japanese TV try to tell stories in an interesting/scary/funny/etc way and there’s usually emotions involved and people tend to emphasize certain words when they talk and gion is emphasized OFTEN especially with the HUGE Japanese text they plaster all over the screen. Now that I think about it watching talk/variety shows was the most effective way for learning gion in my japanese leisure time experience(I don’t like using the word immersion because people may think that means I’m watching shit that i don’t understand and may feel ambivalent about lol.  I only watch the cream of the crop when it comes to talk/variety shows. i encourage people to be picky af ). Also, I’ve also picked up gion effortlessly from songs since they’re so catchy and memorable like shanari shanari (the word sounds so pretty too). Clearly due to the nature of gion, audio is indispensable and emotional usages are especially memorable. Guess from now on I won’t bother looking up gion in novels unless it really intrigues me since there’s no audio which is the key to making gion easy/effortless to remember. So I’ve accepted that it’s A never-ending journey but I thought it’d be a good idea to have a deck purely dedicated to onomatopoeia with huge anki intervals. So I did just that by importing these decks, tagging them, and combining them. With onomatopoeia the Japanese dictionary is usually more helpful but English can be helpful/more memorable too so I ran sanseido, wordquery for daijirin, meikyo and the j-e-dict to supplement the meaning to the cards. Then what I did was set up SPECIAL DECK SETTINGS. I made huge intervals so I’m not seeing them every day as you would with the default settings (that’s what it LEGIT  feels like) and I made the STEPS a RIDICULOUSLY huge number like 190 years from now. I did this so I could get through the cards more quickly since not all the cards are worth learning whether it’s too easy/common or it’s low-quality for whatever reason which is possible since I didn’t make this. It’s easier for me to hit AGAIN than suspend on my nook ereader. Because I can’t hit AGAIN for the sake of again I only go through NEW CARDS for the day since I don’t actually have the option of pressing AGAIN for a card that I’ve already seen. Once I make it through all the cards I will look for the cards that are due in 190 years in that deck or search for stuff that’s in the learning phase and suspend and tag them, then I will change the anki settings so that I can mark AGAIN on future reviews and set the step to something reasonable like 2 days from now. RIGHT NOW I’m still in the phase of going through all the cards since I imported a bunch of crap from a Japanese site.

From doing this deck I can confidently say that going after gion like this is helpful. I wish I did this earlier! Sometimes I like reading the description/definition of the gion and it does aid in deepening  my understanding of the gion. I did the same thing for korean after I realized how helpful this was. But then when I made the deck from tables and whatnot from the japanese websites and the wordquery/hanseido plugin I was reminded that my onmatopoeia game in Korean is weak. It’s much harder to do the premade onomatopoeia korean deck than the premade onomatopoeia japanese deck… some of the onomatopoeia just doesn’t sound like what it means or I can’t remember it (the sound or the meaning or both). It’s just harder to remember or hear what I’m supposed to hear or feel what I’m supposed to feel. SO I realized that I should give myself more credit for my japanese onomatopoeia skills.

I’ve tried getting other pre-made decks for Japanese but they’re not helpful since I’m already advanced and I already have a huge backlog of crap I want to add to anki AND it’s so easy and effortless and efficient generating anki cards with RIKAISAMA on PALE MOON.

<– Soyu has been saying  some fierce, cut-throat stuff on Produce 48…. I loved how she said this. It reminds me of the lyrics 前髪の造形に神経を奪われて  from shiina ringo. I’m sure YOU KNOW someone like that. I sure do it’s damn irritating to be around people with bangs. They always put in a dramatic pause or sound effect before the trainers give feedback to the trainees. Of course as a viewer i try to predict whether they’ll say something positive or negative.

RECENTLY I found out about this site for japanese onomatopoeia!

http://thejadednetwork.com/sfx/

cheers!

I can’t recommend any pre-made decks for Korean but I generated some cool decks from Japanese sites with HUGE TABLES and quizlet.

Vocabulary lists

VOCABULARY LISTS
Vocab lists seem so tempting because it seems so efficient sorta like premade like anki decks. Of premade decks I’ve only used the heisig one successfully which I had to modify heavily to suit my needs. It’s tempting to go math crazy and do the 20 words a day x 356 days in a year = 7120 words or some other variation but I’ve learned the hard way the futility in doing that with my experience of misusing anki while learning Japanese.

I’m just posting about this topic because I just happened to come across these blogs that are an amazing fit for me to generate the anki cards in MCD format. These bloggers are sharing what they looked up on their blogs and they’re Japanese people learning Korean so this material is quite alluring to me.

http://uprive1.rssing.com/chan-2640801/all_p15.html
http://yokorea.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-62.html
http://erirang.blogspot.com/

****
6000 intermediate
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s167/sh/5d3a9f85-afd6-4466-82e5-9286d5e8d985/33a6ba3bb7d7c7ff42187680cb77f8c0

6000 advanced
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s167/sh/5b206c6c-9772-4199-9d2a-7f58d816549e/11a60d02ccedd27630da31b7d8a8dc9d

So I had saved this huge ass list of the top 6,000 Korean words from a some wiki website into my evernote. i had no intention of memorizing the list. I know how it may seem appealing for some hardworking rote-memorizing people but not to me. It just makes more sense to learn these words as you encounter them since they ARE SO GODDAMN COMMON AND USEFUL. also you may think top 6,000 words are mad useful!! but trust me they most likely aren’t. you need to figure out what YOUR TOP 6,000 KOREAN WORDS ARE as in the top 6000 words that come up in the korean media you enjoy. Anyways I kept it to sorta gauge my growth in korean vocabulary. for example a lot of the words were ha? the(japanese ha) or like wuh? from 2 years ago are now i know this shit. I’ll go “wow this shit is mad useful or i’ve seen it.” or i’ll be hardpresed to find words i have never seen or heard of. never mind it was from 4 years ago! 2012! If you still suck after 4 years you should reevaluate your methods and your goals.

Speak of the devil, here’s my worst nightmare realized

 

Has anyone reached proficiency through self-study outside of Korea?
byu/infringement153 inKorean

In my case by the time i reached 3000 cards in anki ( i didn’t anki for the first 3 or 6 months because i do not want to waste my time learning super common/useful words… that’s just stupid) I was understanding talk variety shows anywhere from 80 to 100% (depending on the show and how much I look up.. ). it’s not about the number of cards…

BTW memorizing all the words in this 6000 word list will not enable you to watch korean dramas without subtitles ( just looking through this list and thinking of all the words that i know on this list and all the words i know that i encounter that are not on this list… by encounter I mean strictly talk/variety shows). it’s literally the tip of the iceberg (all the awesome kickass words are obviously not in this list… not to mention korea is obsessed with trends so it feels like they invent 100 news words and that of that 90% die the next year, rinse and repeat. I’m just guessing here because I don’t keep up with that since I don’t watch korean dramas or korean shows on a consistent basis. in fact I’m chasing after random eps of shows that aired a few years ago or a fewdays ago or a few months ago… even with japanese I’ve read over 120 books and recently I looked up a few words from this new book I’m reading and I’m like woah these are some cool words why didn’t I hear about them sooner. this shit is never ending but at the same time I love how there’s so many awesome words out there that i do not know about. this applies to english as well OF COURSE). there’s so much vocab to know for korean dramas (even more for the saguk dramas) since as everyone knows the characters talk so much and they always drag out the dialogue and the scenes. literally every single character in korean dramas are chatterboxes. it’s a lot of vocab. well that level is fluency… in other words watching korean dramas without subtitles. I do know people who are Korean and fluent in Korean who watch it and understand/catch everything so that is what fluency is… for comprehension in my opinion anyway. I don’t like Korean dramas anyway so this doesn’t bother me but sometimes I like gauging my Korean by watching some clip of a korean drama to see my lack of vocabulary or my full comprehension if lightening strikes. sometimes it happens.

However as much as I find anking with mcd format to be effective for learning Korean at my Korean level (vocab, grammar, hours spent on Korean, etc) I can’t bring myself to use the material on these blogs to generate anki cards. It is intriguing to sorta gauge my level or rather see how much I don’t know from scrolling through these blogs.

I’ve been mostly getting words and whatnot for my anki deck from Korean that come out of people’s mouths on Korean TV and sometimes words on the screen that aren’t said ( I usually only do this if I feel really tempted because the word seems super easy to remember if it has no bacchim or I feel that I can associate something with the sound with the bacchim whether or not it is of sino-korean origin to remember the meaning). Partly that’s due to lack of motivation because I do not want to learn useless Korean. Maybe if you’re obsessed and driven to become fluent in Korean ASAP then maybe you have the urge to look up anything and everything but looking at it in the overall scheme of things that’s not an efficient way to go on about that.

The fact that I got something from a Korean show from a Korean person’s mouth imparts that word or grammar etc so much more value versus some word list with words that people think are useful based on their experiences with the English counterpart of those words or whatever variation of this. People just express things differently on a fundamental level depending on the language.

So anyways, some of the blogs that I linked did mine real Korean from a Korean article etc etc which imparts value on the list they share. However though it raises the value of the list in my eyes I personally didn’t read that article so I have no personal connection to any of those words and therefore no conviction that those words are useful. I won’t believe it unless I actually see it being used. But also I won’t force myself to read an article just so I can easily generate anki cards. I’ll only read the article if it interests me.

This site http://uprive1.rssing.com/chan-2640801/all_p15.html reminds me of textbooks. I am tempted for a second to learn from it but then the next second I realize there’s way too much awesome kickass tv show episodes of korean talk/variety shows to be watched. When it comes down to it, no matter what textbook it is, textbooks will never be more fun then native media. The whole point of textbooks is so you can stop using it and learn from Native material ASAP. If you think textbooks are fun you’ll probably faint from the shock of how much more interesting native material is. I see no problem using textbooks in the beginning stages but some people are like hey you got recs for intermediate/advanced? I’m thinking to myself do you want to learn korean for the sake of learning korean? how embarrassing.

If I had to choose between anking too much and anking too little I would choose anking too little. I think anking too much is worse because it’s proof that you are wasting your time that could be spent living your life doing things you enjoy whether it’s language learning related or not. To put a new perspective on it, I imagine what I would be doing if I were fluent in Korean and/or raised in Korea. The answer is not me reading from a textbook to improve my Korean. The answer would be I would be watching the exact same shows I’m watching now except I wouldn’t be looking up anything because I already know all those words and their nuances and their multiple meanings and the literal / figurative meanings of all the Korean because I’m fluent in Korean. I’d probably be multitasking like washing dishes while listening to it etc etc because it’s so effortless. I’m watching the show because I enjoy it. I don’t try to force myself to like a show or pretend that I like it or pretend that I like it or enjoy it more than I do just so I can find something to do in Korean…. I’m sure some people try AJATT and kinda think they’re doing it but they’re really not if they have to lie to themselves that they enjoy doing something or enjoy it more than they actually do.

When it comes down to it the number of anki cards I have or the percentage of mature cards is not an accurate measure of my Korean abilities. Ultimately it comes down to the amount of time I spent doing STUFF IN Korean while actively trying to figure out what I don’t understand or don’t know. Anki helps so much with making time I spent with Korean to be that much more fruitful and efficient with acquiring Korean vocab /grammar. I don’t have time to be watching Korean TV all day because I work full-time and I have other stuff I want to do that may not be in Korean. Why should I miss out on amazing stuff like Breaking Bad? Or God Tongue? Though I’m not able to spend a lot of time on Korean on a consistent basis (daily is ideal right?) due to time restraints and my volition that wants to do other things anki allows me to maximize whatever time I spent with the Korean show etc. I’ve never felt like I’ve moved backwards in Korean or even stagnant to be honest. The reason is that sometimes even if you don’t do something in Korean for let’s say 3 months, you still have Korean running through your brain that’s being digested. It’s some kind of delayed processing. I do still do anki on a daily basis or sometimes less frequently. It’s so strange how I feel like my Korean improved in certain ways despite cutting contact for x weeks or months. I’ve experienced this with Japanese as well in the past due to unfortunate circumstances. It was invigorating to hear other language learners talk about this EXPERIENCE on an episode on language mastery podcast. http://l2mastery.com/show/

you know I think the only possible way for my Korean to be stagnant or go backwards is if all I did was textbooks or cramming wordlists. I think to realize my efforts are for nil would be so devastating and disheartening AFTER x weeks or months despite torturing myself for x hours. One of the many reasons why I learned Korean after Japanese was that I did not want to waste my time with learning Korean. I equate stagnation and going backwards as wasting time. Learning in this order (with the foundation/scaffolding that is hanja and Japanese grammar) and using anki has ensured that I never feel like I’m going backwards with Korean. It’s just impossible. I never understood how people could motivate themselves to learn a language using methods that could possibly lead to stagnation or going backwards if they slacked or not get in contact with the language for x weeks or months.

holy crap.

I’m not the type of person to share stuff like sharing haul photos of Japanese books ( it’s only meaningful if you actually read the books you hauled) or my handwritten Japanese writing but I thought this was interesting to share since I’ve been going at Japanese for so long.

holy crap I still have this notebook where I use to work on remember the kanji. I’m not the type of person to keep everything like those frightening hoarders on TV. A good rule of thumb is to throw shit away if you haven’t used it or worn it etc in over a year. If anything I would love to be a danshari expert like SAKAI MASATO. He loves throwing crap away.

SO I’m surprised by the fact that i was able to fill up a whole page in such a neat manner. Writing so that the letters fit between the lines is a big deal to me because I’m lazy and I hate writing stuff by hand. It’s evidenced by the messier picture. Of course there are worse pages but 3 pics are enough for this blog post. Coincidentally I also found little entries I wrote in Japanese which is cool (entries where i just wrote something in japanese without looking up how to write x word on the computer because that’s pointless… might as well type it on the computer then) because I’m like oh I was able to do this then. I would think this notebook is from 2008 or 2009 maybe 2010. For remember the kanji reviews I usually wrote it anywhere and everywhere and then threw the paper away. nowadays I do kakitori reviews on anki because I eventually had to convert the cards over since I can read Japanese and it’s nonsensical for me to stick with the original format of key word + whatever.

So anyways if you just look at this notebook I look like I”m super hardcore and dedicated to Japanese learning right? at least to some random person who doesn’t know Japanese. It looks intimidating lol. If you look closely you’ll notice I’m not just copying the chinese character OVER AND OVER AND OVER OVER AND OVER AGAIN which is a strategy that is very much emphasized and used in Korea probably even now for learning hanja ( those poor kids). It’s great that the emphasize working hard but stupid learning methods are stupid and wasting people’s time and energy that could be put to better use. I was doing remember the kanji where you remember the story and write the kanji. Of course I didn’t fill up the whole page in one day though it would be easily done if all you did is copy the same character over and over again which is just stupid since it’s not effective.

I think I started remember the kanji in 2008 or 2007 and I used anki and it’s 2016 and I”m still using anki and i converted most of it to kakitori and i average 10 cards a day? But the thing is writing by hand isn’t that important nowadays for any language, not just japanese, so I try to not put excessive time into my heisig deck so I don’t go out of my way to add more cards unles I come across some word that i really want to know how to write by hand. Sometimes I want to learn to write a certain word just because I want to not necessarily because it’s useful or common. I still haven’t broken down and drilled the japanese surname/first name anki deck. I don’t care!!! I’ll literally read a japanese novel and for x character they’ll put the furigana on the name the first instance and then the next time i read the book and get to the next instance of that person’s name i don’t know what that person’s name is though I recognize the kanji or the meanig of the kanji and i keep reading and if they do not repeat furigana again i finish the book not knowing their name. if they repeat the furigana then i might remember it at that point or remember it for a little while and then forget it again. I don’t think it’s too bad because even if i don’t know the reading, I do recognize the kanji and or the meaning of it. I just don’t see the point of me putting effort into name readings. words are more important to me. most of the japanese names I can read are probably names I learned from talk/variety shows because they have so many people on the shows.

rather than writing, I think my time is put to better use reading or listening! I am just apersonthat hates writing stuff by hand whether it’s english or korean or japanese. I just hate writing… the physical movements with my hand are just so demanding for me. But I still want to know how to write Japanese so I’m glad I stuck with it! another upside is that i can do remember the kanji/kakitori reviews on anki while watching tv which is something i cannot do with regular sentence/cloze cards… probably has to do with the part of the brain i use.

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