#sometimes i miss things when i have english subtitles on and i'm not focusing as much on the chinese | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

chicoriii · 3 years ago

Text

Season 4, Episode 14 - Sentibulleur (Sentibubbler)

I just seen the episode today, because I wasn't looking forward for another Alya-centric one, I'm already sick of it. I did it only now when have more free time. It's the first time, since I'm a Miraculous fan, when I'm starting watching a completely new episode without feeling even a bit of excitation. I'm not gonna lie that I enjoyed it, I don't, because it's not my cup of tea. This is why this post is more about why I dislike Alya favouritism than Sentibubbler itself. But I need to clarify that I didn't enjoy the episode mostly because of personal taste, I'm not trying to say it's "objectively" bad (though opinions are never objective, only facts could be). If you love Alya's arc, it's completely understandable that you probably love this episode as well.

I thought it would be a DjWfi episode (to be clear, I haven't seen any trailers of it, only one screenshot, which was said to be from this episode, but I don't remember seeing that moment in it at all, and the ending card), but poor Nino was just a background character. This is literally an "Alya is amazing" episode in which she is saving the world with a very little help of Ladybug and even less of Chat Noir, who is treated more like an offending trash. After watching it, I see fan edits like that are even more accurate to describe season 4 (not made by me, I just stole it from Cartoon Apocalypse's video).

Adrien was supposed to be a deuteragonist and a second main character, but Alya is much more like ones than Adrien has ever been. He has never gotten as many episodes focusing on him as much like those with Alya in a season (and we can be sure, it's not the last one) and he has never be as much the main hero in a fight against villains in any of them. Instead of giving him more screentime, he's putted even more in the background than before, because Alya needs to shine. Why they can't do it without treating Adrien that much unfair? I'm not gonna hide that I hate it and it makes me feel that maybe I should stop watching the show, since it looks like it's not something I really enjoy anymore. Adrien is my favourite character, so I'm really pissed of that Alya is stealing his role. We will see, but once I will be sure that Alya favouritism is gonna last forever, I would consider stopping watching the show seriously. Especially that doesn't go hand in hand with good writing. In this episode nothing as much absurd like in Optigami happened, but I still have one big issue.

It's not a problem with Alya herself. I'm used to like her, even if she's been annoying me sometimes before S4. But I don't know what to think about her this season, since I have some issues with her writing. I just don't like the idea of as much favouritism any of the characters who are not the original main ones, especially if Adrien is treated that bad by the writing at the same time. I would say the same if it was Kagami, who is my third favourite character in the show, after Adrien and Plagg. As you see, I like the Japanese girl even more than Marinette, but I still don't think that making her more important than the protagonist would be okay (it would make no sense, but you know what I mean).

Besides, I've seen people speculating that Alya is going to fuse the fox with ladybug Miraculous in an episode in which Marinette is akumatised (if one will ever happen). Don't you see how much unfair to Adrien/Chat Noir it is? Alya is already getting much of special treatment, more than a character who was supposed to be the next most important one after the current Guardian of the Mother Box. An episode with Marinette as an akuma should be the one in which Chat Noir is saving her without help of any other heroes, just like she has saved him alone in Chat Blanc. If there was a fusion of the fox and ladybug, it would mean that's not a story mostly about Marinette and Adrien anymore. It would make it clear that the writers are not even try to hide the fact that's now it's Alya the second most important character. Adrien could be the third one at best, Chat is only a sidekick of the Ladies, not really a hero equal to Ladybug anymore. Besides, episode like that is most probably the only chance to see Tikki using her power without a wielder. Wouldn't it really interesting to see what bad happens when Tikki is using Lucky Charm all by herself?

And to be fair, this season has really way too much Alya generally, I'd like to see more other heroes, not just Rena Rouge and Rena Rouge over and over again. I want more new Miraculous wielders and since Ladybug is calling the old ones (though she definitely should not do it), I want to see them in action too. We need to get a full transformation sequence of Ryuuko at least once. But the more episodes they are released, the less I believe it would ever happen. Good thing that they found few seconds to show Chat's sequence (only a second time in 10 episodes!), but still no Cataclysm. I wonder if they are even going to show it after season 3.

I have no idea what writers are planning to do. If they're want Alya to be a permanent Miraculous holder who is treated like co-guardian by Marinette forever, why they write her that way? Why isn't she really noble and careful? Why all those red flags she's giving Marinette (those she always ignore anyway): like letting Mr. Ramier know that Ladybug's the Guardian now, though she asked her to keep it as a secret, or stealing a Miraculous that almost made Ladybug's identity exposed. Are any of those events be relevant later? Are they there to show that saying Alya everything about the Guardian things and giving her the fox Miraculous permanently are bad decisions? If yes, what's the purpose of Sentibubbler? This episode doesn't seem to be really significant, it's more like another one fan service for Alya stans. The previous ones were actually important, this one could be missed without much a loss for the plot. The only reason it could be seen as significant is to make Marinette letting her guard down even more. But isn't she extremely careless already? After revealing her identity, she immediately started to tell Alya all the Guardian secrets, gave her a code for the Miracle Box, as well as the Miraculous permanently, despite her identity being exposed and all the wrong things she has done. Marinette is already dealing completely reckless with Alya, there's no reason to make her even more. Besides, that dream can't be a prophetic one, right? I remember that adult Bunnix really believed that exposing Ladybug's identity is something what Alya is able to do (from her time at least), but I think it's impossible to happen in real. That's why I see this episode as the most "fillerish" from all of this's season those have been released till now. Other ones introduced new characters or Miraculous wielders at least, nothing really new and crucial happened in this one. There's nothing bad in fillers, but why another Alya-centric one? Why not focusing on a character who hasn't been favoured this season instead?

The most stupid thing in this episode is that Rena Rouge made an illusion in which Ladybug says that she won't give the Miraculous to her anymore, for two reasons. One is that Gabriel bought that very weak lie without questioning it at all. It's clearly a plot armor. I know that they tend to make Gabriel very dumb when they need it from the beginning, but it's extremely stupid even to him. Hey, Gabriel, you know Rena Rouge's identity for some time now and Ladybug has been already giving Rena the fox few times before after her identity being exposed. Why that sudden decision? Isn't it suspect? Second is that it's been portrayed as a clever thing, while it makes Alya unable to be Rena Rouge anymore, if they don't want to show to Shadow Moth that was a lie. I'm not talking only about the battles, Rena can't be seen in public, since Ladyblog is not the only place which is showing content about the heroes. So then there's no reason for Alya to keep the fox anymore. Unless I interpret it wrong, and Marinette doesn't think it would make Gabriel stop going after Alya. But to me it looked like that and that's also make Marinette dumb anyway, because she is still unable of seeing how dangerous it is for her best friend. Alya's plan worked once, but it doesn't mean it would work again, once he discovers the lie, it would make him even more suspicious of a bond between Rena Rouge and Ladybug. Marinette is risking not only safety of Paris and the whole world, but also safety of her best friend. Why everyone is able to see that obvious thing, not only the girls but also all of the Kwamis? I'm not going to change my opinion that they are dumbing down all the characters who are involved in it and that's just bad and lazy writing.

And where's Su-Han when he's needed. I've been working on the English subtitles for the French dubbing of Furious Fu recently and now I remember that he said that he's going to observe Marinette and take the box from her is she makes a slight mistake. She's keeping making bad decisions, but he still isn't showing. That was a lie? Because if he doesn't see anything wrong in how's Marinette is dealing with her guardian duty, I'm gonna to lose the rest of my faith in the writers.

--------

I'm so sorry. I wanted to be active on Tumblr at least a bit after seeing this episode, but I still don't feel motivated. It's painful to say that season 4 is mostly a disappointment to me, especially that I hate the biggest story arc of it.

#miraculous ladybug #ml sentibubbler #ml season 4 #ml spoilers #ml spoiler #ml season 4 spoilers #chicoriii about S4 episodes #chicoriii #original post

30 notes · View notes

cheydoesfandom · 3 years ago

Text

Fifteen to twenty years ago, I felt strongly that subs are superior, for a number of reasons, ranging from accuracy to quality to snobbery (tho I generally allowed people to enjoy as they liked, I didn't hide that I disagreed).

However, the poor quality dubs of yesteryear aren't really the problem they were anymore, now that there's, y'know, money in the industry. The voiceacting is better, translations are more accurate, and the quality is just overall improved.

But some of those old dubs were extraordinarily bad. Storylines cut or rearranged, character relationships altered, genders switched, complete reediting to change aspects of the animation.

Sailor Moon's DIC anime changed a lesbian couple into cousins, cut and pasted episodes together early on, shortening the series by at least 2., and a character was swapped from male to female (I'm p sure, but maybe it was the other way) to reframe a relationship.

4Kids would alter out ANY blood, because they were marketing anime for teenss to children. They turned Sanji's cigarette into a sucker, anyone else remember that?? Even as a 14yo who only had the dub to go on, I could tell it was weird. HIS HAND POSITION, guys! No one holds a sucker like that!!

And of course, Brock's famous "jelly donuts" and other mistranslations for the sake of "dumbing things down" bc an American audience can't possibly comprehend a rice ball or other cultural reference.

Of course, there were few to no official subs back then, either, so if you didn't want to "suffer" the dubs, you had to watch fanlations, which were done amaturely but with love, and often under translated, leaving native words in the subtitles with notes translating them on screen as well. Which was mostly fine, if distracting (this was also common in manga scanlations and idk which came first), and maybe taught you a little of the language if you managed to read everything fast enough, but would never pass in a professional sub.

A culture was formed in those years, and its hard to unlearn, and of course people have personal preferences, and I generally still choose subs over dubs, but I recognize that things have changed and that there are people with different needs when it comes to media.

I'm a multitasking ND and when I watch things in English, I'm often on my phone, too. But I can't do that when I have to read subs. So I end up getting distracted and zoning out, or picking up my phone anyway. I know a lot of platforms use poorly designed subs, in colors that sometimes blend into the animation bc the lettering doesn't have outlines, and that's annoying even without a visual problem. Or sometimes you just can't read fast enough. Or you're so focused on reading you miss the action and animation itself.

And some people just can't see, or colorblindness makes reading harder, or they might be illiterate, or not fluent in the languages available.

Anyway, this has become a ramble and I don't know where I was going with this anymore, or what the point is, except to remind people that dubs aren't the dumpster fire they were in the 90s, so that excuse is starting to sound a bit hollow, and maybe the millennials clinging to the "dubs r trash" mentality should take a sec to consider other people's needs and also the state of the industry rn.

Goodnight

so sick of hearing “subs are better than dubs” “dubs are worse than subtitles” that is not how accessibility works

#my rant is specifically about japanese anime #and my personal experience with it in high school/college in the 00s #but the accessability arguements still stand for all media #but also like some of that anime was so altered it was barely the same show #there's one where they werent even given a translated scriot #just the animation #and went off the walls with it #*middle/high school in the 00s

12K notes · View notes

natsunoomoi · 3 years ago

Text

Most days I watch a lot of Youtube in English mostly because of streamed tabletop games and educational channels to just keep my brain fresh. But also cuz when I'm working and focusing on something else, I don't feel so bad about missing parts of it if I have to switch rooms or need to focus more on something that prevents me from getting all the content.

On my time off though, that's when I usually try to watch anime and stuff because I can give more focus to it. Or even if I look away and play a game on my app, I'm still mostly focused on what's happening on screen and can read subtitles or something because my app is on auto-fight and I just have to set up the next battle. But times when I need to look away a bit more like when I'm playing FFXIV and actually have to focus on some mechanics, it's useful for the thing in the background to be one of the two languages I understand and when I watch in Japanese, it makes me really happy sometimes to realize how much my fluency has increased since I was a kid.

Like since last night I was playing FFXIV and I binged all of Tokyo Revengers because some of my students are interested in it and I wanted to check it out, and just in general I was pretty pleased by how much I was able to follow because of my fluency level. I've come a long way, and that makes me really happy.

Right now though I'm watching the Cowboy Bebop live action. It's alright so far. The anime is still definitely superior, and like some of the flash back scenes seem weird, but I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would based on some of the reviews I saw. So far I don't have a huge problem with the action sequences, but the flashbacks do look really weird and cheap for some reason. Like flashback Julia so far looks like she's wearing a cheap ass wig and it's kind of annoying.

The anime though is one that was good in Japanese and English and I could flip back and forth between both versions and basically feel like I didn't experience a difference. That isn't true for a lot of anime though, so I think it's a testament to the quality of work that went into it.

EDIT: No, wait. That weird cut they did at the end of ep 1 where Vicious slices the guy's neck. That was just stupid or at least poorly executed. Vicious' look seems weird/off to me too.

Further along in and seriously the casting choice that I detest the most is Vicious. Like anime Vicious is very intimidating and cool, and live action Vicious seems like a pathetic sad sack. Like in the original anime, you really got the feeling that Spike and Vicious were not only rivals, but like parallel and like equal yet opposite, and that helped make the story compelling. This Vicious is just really bad and I don't like feel like he can even compare to Spike and he has a chip on his shoulder over him as well.

Like others, the lack of Ed really leaves me wanting, and it's annoying that Ed isn't here in order to get to the story arc with Vicious faster, but Vicious is a very weak rendition so it's not even worth it. It would definitely have been better if they cast Ed, took their time getting to Vicious, and did a better job with that character including casting because I don't think the actor that they cast for him really fits Vicious at all. Like he's supposed to have a look similar to Goemon Ishikawa, but the actor they picked is a bit more like a thug.

Julia also gets too much actual screen time. She was better with more mystery instead of them inventing a personality and stuff for her, and why the fuck is she actually married? She was like associated with the Syndicate too, so why does she need "protection"? One of the compelling things about her in the anime was that she was literally neutral and didn't actually pick anyone until right before she died. Apparently they give her more agency in an upcoming episode I haven't seen yet and say that they want to allow her to give her more agency even though they start the series off with her under Vicious' thumb.

But like....that's stupid because in the original she was never under Vicious' thumb. They weakened her only to build her back up in the way they wanted. WHAT THE FUCK. Like in the anime, even though she isn't explored a lot, her agency in the story is the fact that she chose to help Spike which kicked off the affair, and then when she was given an ultimatum to kill Spike herself or both of them die, she chose neither and just up and left Spike to die. She's in hiding for most of the anime and Vicious is chasing her because of her choice. I feel like this plot and POV for this live action was written by men who don't know how women make choices. She has has agency and made her choice of moral ambiguity and chose herself rather than either man vying for her. Julia was a very strong, competent, and independent woman and viewed as a femme fatale in her own right. What the fuck is up with this wife shit? That they wrote her to have made a choice is what actually robs her of her agency.

0 notes

shysweetthing · 8 years ago

Note

Hi I really loved your YOI fic "Call Everything on the Ice"! I was also just wondering, though, how long have you been studying Japanese? Could you give some advice or resources how you're learning? I'm planning on going to Japan for my Asian Studies degree and hope to learn Japanese (or at least get a head start) before taking that leap. Hope this isn't a bother!!! Thank you if you have the time to answer!!!

Okay, so perhaps people have noticed that I tend to overanswer things? Yes, yes, that happens.

Me: Maybe only explain this a little bit.Me to me: Who are we kidding? Have five, count ‘em, five separate numbered lists.

Answer to question #1: I’m at about *glances at watch* four and a half months of studying Japanese, and while I’ve been spending about 3-4 hours a day on this, I’m still really new. This means that I am inevitably doing something inefficiently and so you should take everything I say with a grain of salt. I haven’t been doing this very long and other people are much better resources!

That being said, my tendency to overexplain, my general pedantry (own it if you are it, whatever), and my deeply weird overanalytical brain means that maybe something I’ve done in breaking down my experience thus far will be helpful to you.

All five numbered lists below the cut.

Further disclaimers: I know how I learn and what I’m good at, and this means that I am really really good at telling when a course of study is Not Working For Me. This is because I am Relatively Tumblr Old and have learned a variety of relatively complicated things with a high degree of success in my lifetime.

It is very unlikely that your brain works like mine, and so to further qualify this, I’m going to tell you how my brain works.

1. For me, the death of learning is boredom. I cannot, repeat, cannot, do boring things for much longer than about five minutes. You could offer me a half-million dollars a year to do a job that has twenty hours of boring work a week and I would quit in desperation after two weeks. Or, more likely, I’d take the job and stay up nights for months on end automating it and then you’d fire me when you realized that I was now doing nothing at work except reading AO3 articles. This means that time-efficient but boring study methods are completely inaccessible to me. I don’t care how effective it is. If it bores me, it is not getting done.

2. I have an incredibly good recall for sounds, and a basic amount of musical training. One of the ways I used to commit things like relative electronegativity to memory was to make a song, because I could remember the most ridiculously long strings of information that way. Ditto for memorizing monologues in school. (This is relevant).

3. I have an absolutely excellent memory for other things, too, when I’m paying attention. If I’m not paying attention, I will remember nothing. (Yes, I’m on the ADHD spectrum–I hyperfocus like nobody’s business, and if I’m not hyperfocused you might as well fuck off because I’m not paying a lick of attention.) I am much more likely to trigger my hyperfocus with physical activity–either walking or writing things down.

4. I am very goal focused. Give me just about any concrete goal and I will make a spreadsheet detailing how to get from point A to point B with every intermediate step in the way, which I will adjust on a biweekly basis to correspond to my progress and what I learn. My goal in this case was to be able to understand spoken Japanese well enough to get the gist of the raw Yuri on Ice feeds so that I didn’t have to wait 3+ hours for the Crunchyroll translations by the time Season 2 came around.

5. I am the person who will spend 40 hours fixing a persistent problem that takes me one minute of boring work every month. I am so damned impatient that I’ll spend three hours a day every day for two years so that I don’t have to wait three hours. Let’s hear it for the few, the proud, the delightedly inefficient.

6. Along the lines of hating boredom: I absolutely love figuring out how things work, and so I tend to jump onto solutions that prioritize understanding how a system works first and then moving from there to increasing fluency. I will happily spend 10 hours figuring out how something works even if it only saves me an hour of time. You’ll see what I mean a little later.

7. Also along the lines of having ADHD: I need to feel that I am accomplishing things along the way, which means that if I’m taking on a two-year project, I need to be able to point to things that I am accomplishing along the way, or I will get frustrated and give up. In this regard, I am like a small child. If I can’t pinpoint an immediate benefit to something, I get frustrated and give up. From experience, I have gotten very good at pinpointing accomplishments so that I am constantly affixing little medals to my own chest, but it also means that I “waste” (in some senses of the word) time doing things that probably are more about keeping my mental state chugging along.

8. This bears mentioning, but one thing about my being old and being good at fixing persistent problems? I have disposable income, and only about half of it goes toward purchasing Victor nendoroids. Some of the resources I list here cost money. I am naturally cheap–I don’t like spending money if I don’t have to–but I have learned to be cheap with my time, and to value people who provide useful or lovely things.

9. I am deeply introspective. If something is worth analyzing in my mind, it’s worth overanalyzing to death.

Okay, enough about me! Here are my thoughts on what I have done so far to learn Japanese, which I’m going to divide into sections.

Listening to Japanese (with some speaking)

I’m not going to have the temerity to explain spoken Japanese at this point, so google elsewhere. Here are useful resources:

1. JapanesePod101.com: https://www.japanesepod101.com I started a one-week free subscription to this site at the beginning of the year when I knew basically nothing, and then they had a huge membership sale at the beginning of the new year which I glommed onto immediately. I listen to about 4-6 podcasts a day–when I’m driving, when I’m out for a walk, when I’m shopping. I shadow the Japanese parts (this is what shadowing is: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowing). I listen. There are criticisms you could make of this podcast, but it’s rarely boring, the people on it are likable, and the lessons once Naomi-sensei gets on board are fantastic.

2. Crunchyroll. This is one of those “need accomplishment” things that I use regularly. Some people advocate putting anime on as background and letting your brain cogitate; my brain is EXTREMELY good at not paying attention to things and so I don’t think this would be effective for me. I watch anime. I’ve gone from maybe sometimes hearing a name, to understanding set phrases like Victor saying “Ohayou!” or Yuuri saying “Tadaima” to (at this point) being able to understand the simple sentences, and pick words out of the complex ones. I pause a lot, for instance, when I understand all the words in a sentence but one. I try to sound the word I think I heard out in a Japanese-to-English dictionary (tangorin.com is free, I think?), and if that doesn’t work, in google translate (sometimes it’s two words, and that makes it hard to look up).

3. I try to watch ice skating videos in Japanese. There are some that have subtitles in Japanese and English, too, which is cool.

Independent skills that I have had to actively force myself to learn in order to listen to Japanese properly (still working through this list):

1. Timing things. English (or any of the other languages I’ve studied) isn’t overly concerned with syllable length or breaks between syllables. That makes it hard to distinguish between a two-mora vowel and a one-mora vowel, or to make your mind pay attention to the small-tsu break. You have to really work to pay attention to train your mind that this is important and it needs to stop filtering those things out. It took me probably two months to retrain my mental filters, which I mostly did by banging my head against trying to figure out what words I heard, trying different combinations, and then going back to the word I heard and relistening to it once i figured out what it was, until I was hearing the thing I wasn’t hearing.

2. Vowels. In English, we can mess around with vowels a LOT and it works just fine as long as the consonants are vaguely in the right place. That’s why people can write sentences with misplaced/swapped out vowels and your mind will basically make sense of it anyway–because we use consonants a lot to tag words. This means that a brain fed a diet of mostly English squishes a lot of vowels together into one mushy sounding sound. It’s why some people hear “Hai” as “Hi” and not as a two-mora, two vowel sound. There’s a point at the end of episode 4 where Yuuri says something like “Victor and my season is finally beginning,” and I understood all the words except 'finally,’ so I tried to sound out the word I heard that was probably 'finally’ as an exercise. I tried EVERY FREAKING COMBINATION of “よよ” and “ようよ” and “ようよう” and finally realized that I just wasn’t hearing the two-vowel combination properly: “いよいよ.” Again, the way I dealt with this except to repeatedly force myself to do exercises like this again and again while listening, sounding out what I heard and then listening to it again and again when I was wrong until I could hear the thing I missed.

3. Pitch accent. In English, pitch plays a role in intonation, and there are accepted pitches, but there’s a lot more pitch variation, and we mostly use stress to indicate meaning. In Japanese, pitch is far more important, with relative pitch between words being important, and increasing differences in pitch indicating increasing importance. It took me about a month into trying to learn Japanese to hear the words “pitch accent” and then another month to start really paying attention to words to try and determine the pitch accent, and then only very recently, discovering resources that break down what pitch accent is and what the rules are to it (OMG I didn’t know there were rules, I love rules!) in a way that made me say, yes, this is amazing. You want to visit Dogen’s site for this: https://www.patreon.com/dogen/posts – I found his videos accidentally, but they’re amazing. The first handful are free; the next handful, you need to pledge to his Patreon. Some of the things he says are difficult for English speakers to learn are not difficult for me–I suspect because I have basic musical training, and it turns out that those lessons where I learned to identify intervals taught me to hear pitch changes.

4. Language parsing. The thing I’m working on now is a straight-up language parsing issue. English functions much like a stack: Words go on the stack in the right order, and your brain assigns function and meaning on the basis of where in the stack they land, and improper stacking leads to breakdown. Stack issues in English are why it’s completely fine to say “friendly little brown fluffy Japanese dog” but “Japanese friendly fluffy brown little dog” is just wrong. English is, to use a metaphor that will be almost completely inaccessible to the current generation, rather like the BASIC I used on the Commodore 64–executed in mostly linear fashion with a handful of awkward and inelegant GOTOs that I only learned to cringe at when I took a computer science course many years later. Japanese also has a little bit of a stack issue, but a stack-parsing order is inappropriate. In a sense, it feels closer to a language in which particles function as meta-tags. It feels…more appropriate, I guess? to parse from particle to particle and from conjugation to conjugation. Japanese is closer to Java in many, many ways. I figured out that I needed to parse differently about a month ago, and have been slowly working on upgrading my internal interpreter.

5. Next stages: A lot of Japanese is indirect, and so absorbing indirect equivalents (or where there is none, getting the gist) is probably going to be a lifelong process.

Speaking

1. Some people like talking to other people. I hate it with a burning passion. I prefer people who use pixels. I did try a Japanese Skype conversation partner through italki.com. It was very, very useful. I learned a lot. I hated it so much that I have myself permission to not do it for another few months. (I do use italki to practice the other language I know–where I’m fluent enough that I can have an actual conversation about, like, the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order on immigration, for instance, instead of the name of someone’s rabbit. I don’t particularly hate that.)

2. I talk to myself, out loud, a lot in Japanese, even if I only say very stupid things. I try to express things I don’t know how to say.

3. I give my cat orders in Japanese. He listens to me in Japanese as often as he does in English, so this is a huge success.

4. I am not great at speaking, partially because my goal is not to be able to speak to people.

Reading and Writing

1. You’re gonna have to memorize the Kana. Just do it. I did it, and I hate boring things.

2. I spent some time looking at various speed-Kanji-learning methods, like Remembering the Kana, WaniKani, and Kanji Damage. The most useful thing I got was this description of Kanji from KanjiDamage http://www.kanjidamage.com/introduction and the description of Kanji as an orthography: http://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts. This made me think of Kanji as words composed of radicals laid out on a two-dimensional canvas, as compared to English, where words are are composed of the letters of the alphabet on a one-dimensional canvas. Once I saw that, then you see that some connections and combinations are meaningful in the same way that evocative, advocacy, and vocal are related. Some connections are totally illusory and trying to find meaning or explanation for it is a fool’s game. Having understood that, I tried the basic method behind these and found that it did not work at all for me because it was boring as all get out, and I didn’t feel like I was learning anything (even though I was).

3. My current method is absolutely not the most efficient but I am making headway with it. It goes like this: find really easy reading materials, and learn the words that are in it. It took me about a month before I could read even the most basic of texts. (I started with the graded Japanese readers, level 0). Is this method of learning words scattershot as fuck? YES. ABSOLUTELY. But I feel like I’m accomplishing things because I am reading books, and I am willing to accept substantial amounts of inefficiency if it results in continued motivation.

4. At some point–my guess is somewhere around the one year mark–I’m going to have to transition to something a little more systematic. My hope is that once I reach that point I will have encountered those kanji enough that I will feel like I’m forming connections, not just learning disparate disconnected material, and I will not be bored.

5. Along those lines, Anki is my everything. I do about 20 cards a day, which means I’m learning around 70 words a week. Some of these words are great, like 難しい or 簡単. Some of those words are skating related, like 4回転トエループ. Some of those words are just really random things that showed up in the graded reader and I learned it because I’m stubborn, like 苦汁 (“bittern,” or a concentrated solution of magnesium chloride) or 納豆菌 (bacillus subtilis natto, the bacteria used to ferment soybeans into natto).

6. My Anki vocabulary cards have the English word on the front. On the back, I have the word in either hiragana or katakana, color-coded according to pitch accent, a recording of the word in Japanese, the kanji for the word, and sometimes the stroke order for the kanji. Yes, I write down the kanji–my memory is triggered by using muscles, including a pencil, and so this works for me.

7. This is what one of my Anki cards looks like, minus the spoken recording + stroke order. Blue is low pitch, red is high pitch, and the color of the heart at the end indicates the pitch of the particle at the end. It would be way more efficient to import other people’s Anki decks but I am (in addition to all the stuff mentioned above) deeply demand resistant and I only want to learn things that I have decided I should learn, with the precise information I want, no more, no less. I end up resenting other people’s flashcards so much that I’m stuck wasting time doing my own.

8. I’m also using a textbook (みんなの日本語). My textbook work lags substantially behind my comprehension, as driven by JapanesePod101, mostly because it’s boring until I understand it well enough to not have to stop and check every damned thing all the time. It is good to do exercises, though, and then to use the exercises as templates for saying and writing my own sentences which are of far greater interest.

Um, I think that’s everything I have for now?

Welcome to my brain.

#replies #how i'm learning japanese #my brain is not normal #that's okay it's okay to not have a normal brain

34 notes · View notes