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Just do the best you can and keep moving. Those words are no more important than the thousands of other words you are going to need to learn.
Do you like mopey teenage boys? The answer to that is obviously “yes,” but do you also like eating English-style breakfasts in an old manor every morning? And after drinking tomato juice, do you think “Bloody!”
Well I found the TV series for you. It’s called RH Plus, and it’s about vampires, and being a sensitive man, and the importance of a proper breakfast. Seriously though, it’s the most important meal of the day. You should eat a good breakfast, because you only get to drink fresh blood once a month, and sometimes you don’t even get that, because you have to help solve cases the police won’t handle, or something.
I finished all the Giant Killing episodes they had on crunchyroll.com, and then 13 episodes of another series called Taburakashi. It’s about a “stand-in actress” who gets hired to impersonate people. For example in the first episode she gets hired to play someone’s corpse at a funeral, and then later that person’s ghost. Almost every single episode has someone threatening someone else with a knife, sexual harassment, infidelity, or all 3. And there is always this “get ready for the big moment” montage where the main character takes a shower and puts on makeup, set to uptempo music. The Japanese word for “over the top” is オーバー, isn’t it?
Now I’m watching another 13-episode series called Deka Kurokawa Suzuki, also on crunchyroll. It’s a sort of comedy detective story. There are all these running gags, like how the detective falls over onto his back while trying to tie his shoe, and his wife always shows up and gives him a hard time about how low his salary is. Sometimes the show gets a good laugh from being serious, like when this bus driver is trying to explain how some headlights looked, and he is doing this eye-beam gesture and ends up poking poking the detective in the chest. The detective says with a straight face, “どうも。 よく分かりました。”
I finished watching Anohana, tried a few other series, and now I’m watching Giant Killing. It’s about an young, unconventional Japanese football coach who trains his low-ranked team how to beat higher-ranked teams. I don’t know if his methods are based on examples of real coaching, but for whatever reason when watching I feel like I’m learning something. Maybe that’s just the magic of fiction. I played when I was in high school, and I was never really any good. Watching this series makes me realize how I never really took it seriously, and I never tried to understand the game better or improve my skills. Oh well.
Today I learned another usage of the pattern …をください. If you say “香耶さんをください,” it means “May I have Kaya’s hand in marriage?”
Are you watching all those shows on youtube?
Have you guys reached a level where you can understand most of what is being said without any help, or are you doing a Khatzumoto-style “listen even though you can’t understand” thing, or do you watch the shows over and over, looking up words as necessary until you understand what is being said, or are you doing something entirely different?
As for me, I watch TV shows with subtitles. I read the text as quickly as I can to get an idea of what people are saying, and then I listen to the audio to try to hear how they said it. It’s sort of like doing very quick English -> Japanese sentence reps.
> Would you say stroke order rules are worth learning?
No. When learning to write kanji, you should refer to stroke diagrams, and those will tell you the order and direction for each stroke. So you don’t need to learn any rules separately.
Now whether you should learn how to write kanji, that is a separate question. I think the answer is yes. But not for any reason you might expect. For me it comes down to this: I’m at my limit of how much time I can spend doing other things.
I do 50 sentence reps in Anki, watch one half-hour TV show, read one chapter of Bakuman, and then read a few pages of another comic at bed time. I do that every day, and I go to a conversation group once a week. I can’t do any more of those things than I am already doing. Everyone has a limit, and that is my limit, at least for now.
I’m sure there are people who do more, others who do less, and still others who get burned out because they try to do too much, especially when it comes to flash cards. But that is another topic for another thread.
The point is that even while doing those things, I can still find 5-10 minutes to do some kanji writing practice every day. That is because writing practice is different enough from the other things that it feels like a totally unrelated activity, and when I’m sick of doing sentence reps in Anki, I can still find some motivation to practice writing kanji.
So if you say there are more productive study methods out there, you are right. You are right up until you hit your limit. Then once you hit your limit, you have to make a choice between doing nothing and doing some kanji writing practice. If you don’t do the writing practice, you are missing a good opportunity to spend a little extra time with Japanese every day.
> 水 を いっぱい 入れました
Based on the fact that お茶を入れる means “make tea,” my guess is that your sentence means something like “…poured a glass of water.”
> Which reading would I use?
One way to find out how words are read is to look them up in a dictionary. For example,
http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/je2/4577/m0u/%E5%85%A5%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B/
Note also definition 16 on that page.
I finished Learning Language Through Literature I. Some of the words used aren’t in the notes or the dictionary in the back, and it doesn’t have full furigana coverage. So it’s not ideal for bedtime reading.
Next up is a comic about Tokugawa Ieyasu. It’s part of a series on Japanese history featuring Doraemon. It doesn’t have any English notes or anything like that, but based on some quick browsing through it, it looks like it is intended for grade-school students, and there is full furigana coverage.
At least since 1987, when Michael Jackson’s Bad album came out, and possibly before that, one of the meanings of “bad” in English has been “good,” or something like it. I suppose it sounds a little dated now to say something is “bad” in praise, as now people generally say “badass” instead. Is anyone else around here old enough to remember “Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?” or “I love the Power Glove, it’s so bad?” Anyway, recently I have been noticing that in Japanese, one of the meanings of “good” is “bad.”
For example, on 毎日かあさん, she frequently says もういいよ！. She means something like, “Enough already!” Then in Bakuman I just read one of the artists say, “もう細かい話はいいッスよ！”, which means something like “I don’t want to hear any more details!” The literal meanings of these, of course, are nearly opposite.
I suppose in English (American English at least) we have something similar. When someone asks you if you want something, you can say, “I’m good,” which means that you are content and you don’t want what is being offered. However, if you say “It’s all good” after someone apologizes, you really do mean that everything is fine, and it doesn’t imply the apology isn’t necessary.
Good is bad and bad is good, except when it isn’t.
The Graded Japanese Reader volume turned out to be a very quick read, and I don’t think it was worth the money. You get 5 stories and a CD for around $50 US. Maybe at the higher levels it is worth it, because the stories are longer.
I decided to look around for something else, and I found a manga version of Soseki’s 坊ちゃん. It’s apparently part of a series called Learning Language Through Literature, but I haven’t found any other volumes in the series. There is no CD, but there are some vocabulary notes on each page in English, so you can read it without a dictionary.
I finished reading the parallel text short stories book, and next up is something that doesn’t come with a translation. It’s Level 1 Volume 1 from a series called レベル別日本語多読ライブラリ. Or maybe it is called にほんごよむよむ文庫. I can’t really tell.
The idea of the series is to limit the vocabulary used for each level. It says that level 1 uses a vocabulary of 350 words. There is also an audio CD.
> How did you go about converting your desk?
I have a desk from Ikea with legs that have a long screw running through the middle, and you can sort of unscrew the two pieces to make the legs longer.
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/84609085/
That gets the table top to a fairly good height for working, but my monitor was still too low so I put it up on some books. The setup has a slight wobble to it, but it doesn’t bother me too much.
This article has some more information about what you can do with stuff from Ikea, and the first paragraph has a link to another article about the subject.
http://lifehacker.com/5739296/build-a-diy-wide-adjustable-height-ikea-standing-desk-on-the-cheap
> Or do you alternate between standing and sitting?
I can’t really go more than an hour or two without taking a break at the moment. Here is some more information about the topic if anyone is interested. The idea is that exercise is good, but sitting all day is bad, and exercise doesn’t make up for it.
I just converted my desk to a “stand up” desk, so now I stand while working. I also stand while doing flashcard reps and sometimes stand while watching videos. It’s only been a few days, but so far I like it.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it exercise, but I think it has some health benefits, and it makes me feel more mentally alert. It’s sort of a tradeoff between being more mentally alert but more physically tired. I think that tradeoff is worth making, because for me it’s mental alertness that counts.
