yasuijp

[yasuijp]

There’s a protest going on against AI art over on artstation, so I feel like now is the time for me to make a statement on this issue! 

I wholeheartedly support the ongoing protest against AI art. Why? Because my artwork is included in the datasets used to train these image generators without my consent. I get zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use, and are a commercial product. 

Musicians are not being treated the same way. Stability has a music generator that only uses royalty free music in their dataset. Their words: “Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues.” Why is the work of visual artists being treated differently?

Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration. Those two are not the same. My art is literally being fed into these generators through the datasets, and spat back out of a program that has no inherent sense of what is respectful to artists. As long as my art is literally integrated into the system used to create the images, it is commercial use of my art without my consent.

Until there is an ethically sourced database that compensates artists for the use of their images, I am against AI art. I also think platforms should do everything they can to prevent scraping of their content for these databases. 

Artists, speak out against this predatory practice! Our art should not be exploited without our consent, and we deserve to be compensated when our art is exploited for commercial use. 

[yasuijp]

Wouldn't it be really funny to buy a book that does a pretty good job of teaching japanese while agressively saying that you dont need grammar books to learn japanese?

[yasuijp]

Also eventually i might end up proof reading/ condensing and turning these into something else. wait for my bookdeal with Yasui Japan, Language made easy or something.

[yasuijp]

What is the point of all these posts

Look imma be honest im rambling into the void because i kind of want to write some of my less concrete observations about learning language. I think stuff like "Hey guys remember that の means possession! is not very useful comming from me. Like you can learn that literally anywhere. I think that this is a mentally taxing process and sometimes having your own thoughts be expressed by someone else can give u a deeper understanding of whats going on.

so im trying to dive more into the almost psychological observations i make about learning language. The path is so winding and the avenues for improvement are all over the place and i think its so interesting. I also think that looking at it from the lens of compulsory education gives you the wrong idea of how the process actually happens. I don't think that having a standard/formal education in language is bad. Frankly there are a lot of things you'll learn that you'd probably never know about if you just did self learning. But the core philosophy of how they teach language in these programs are just fundamentally flawed and i think they need to be rebuilt from the ground up in such a way that it prepares you to live with a language.

Learning enough Spanish to pass a test vs Acquiring enough Spanish to hold a competent conversation are 2 different things. These systems dont reward the process of acquiring language because its very slow and we got like 4 months to get this done in our classroom. Whether you passed or failed a spanish class it doesn't say anything about whether you have any aptitude for the language. Some people who need the structured environment to learn will find themselves not learning and wondering if they're the problem and i just think thats really sad and would like to offer the idea that most of your learning in a language physically cannot happen in the classroom.

[yasuijp]

Just because its taught first/early doesn't mean that it is beginner material

This is one of the most important things you should wrap your head around as a self learner. Sometimes, the thing you learn first is only the thing you learn first because its mandatory to understand other things. You don't learn it first because its easy.

In my opinion Learning the Kana is "easy" but really acquiring and internalizing it is a very long road. Here is a quick lesson for you.

は　topic marker. Marks the topic of the sentence and is used in many common patterns.

これはペンです。This is a pen 今日はいい天気です。 The weather is nice today 猫は好き。I like cats.

が　subject marker. Marks the subject of the sentence and is also used in many common patterns.

彼が走った。he ran 親父が元気。dad is healthy 猫が好き。I like cats.

Wait a minute, you must be saying. "How come both of those sentences mean I like cats? Wait a minute what is the difference between a subject and a topic anyway???"

Well so is everyone else. As english speakers the distinction is most of the time non existent. But thats besides the point. This is something u basically learn in week 1 of any japanese class. And you will be thinking about it until like year 2 or 3 of your studies without ever being 100% sure. Its extremely hard to wrap your head around but its kind of everywhere in the language so they cannot hold off on teaching it to you. You might think to yourself wow i learned this so long ago and yet i still can't figure it out and feel down on yourself, but realistically its a hard concept. Just because you understand it sometimes doesn't mean you will all the time. This is an advanced topic that just has to be taught to beginners because things like language learning aren't built on a consistent difficulty curve. Frankly advanced topics are easier because by the time you learn them you've really gone through all of the hard stuff.

More examples with an even easier/earlier thing you learn. 1=　一 2=　二 3=　三

here are the kanji for 1 2 and 3

if u want to read these kanji and understand the raw meaning of them in isolation, you can now look at these and immediately glean meaning from them. Now lets learn them in kana

1 =　いち 2=　に 3=　さん

For kanji it was 1 to 1. You learn 1 symbol, you get 1 number. For the kana, you had to learn 5 seperate symbols to learn these 3 numbers. You are objectively just learning more. And this isn't to mention katakana since each sound will have 1 hiragana character and 1 katakana symbol to represent it. between the 46 (i think its 46) distinct symbols for EACH system, you also need to learn the the different....d-dakuten? i genuinely dont know what its called. but はぱば the little symbol at the side there?? the difference in sounds when these are applied and to which symbols they can be applied to. And for the few unique sounds that are created when you have a combined sound. じゃぴゃしょ etc. And i can't stress this enough. You do this for 2 different writing systems.

And this is basically going to be the first thing you learn in japanese and will form the backbone of everything that you do. Its relatively pretty easy, but if u compare it alongside something like...the past tense. It took me WAY longer to learn the kana than it did to learn past tense.

Kana is the foundation of being able to read japanese at all. You will never ever ever ever be able to get away with reading native japanese content without being able to read all of the kana. However you CAN get away without knowing the kanji a lot of the time.

Now, all of this said you will be months past learning the kana, and u will read a sentence that used the Katakana for ヲ and sit there staring at it for a while wondering what the fuck is that. You learned this ages ago how are you fucking it up now? And its because despite being part of the foundational building blocks for learning the language, this character is insanely rare. And beyond that sometimes even after you learned this ages ago you still might miss read some times.

Wordy rants are my specialty but lets bring it in. Foundational learning typically needs to happen at the start, and common things aren't usually common because they're easy. Frankly things that are common tend to linguistically end up being used for things that are barely related so it ends up getting muddy. Nothing someone who natively speaks the language would struggle with but if someone whos native tongue strictly doesn't have a comparable thing....well it'll be hard lol.

[yasuijp]

N+1+1 vs N + 2

Disclaimer we are fully in made up un-peer reviewed anecdotal territory here. N+1 is real and studied, this is just me. Now N is your knowledge, and 1 is representative of a small gap in your knowledge. If you're thinking of this as real math then obviously N+1+1 and N+2 are identical, but this isn't real math. Its more vague and conceptual.

N+1+1+1+1 etc etc, is my way of representing the fact that its not just 1 small hole in your knowledge. each 1 is a distinct tiny gap in your knowledge.

N+2 or N+3 or N+4 etc etc is instead representing that instead of 1 small hole its 1 BIG hole.

its a matter of perspective now which one is harder to deal with. I personally think that people generally speaking will have an easier time learning 5 easy things, than learning 1 thing thats about as hard as the 5 easy things put together. Heres an example.

I cleaned my house. I put it on the table.

For our fictional English learner ESL Eddie, the first sentence is N + 1 + 1 The second example is an N+7

As native english speakers you probably think im full of shit but thats because this is your mother tongue. Lets look at them.

I cleaned my house. Eddie here knows only the words, I and my. He knows about past tense, he understands possessive pronouns. He's familiar with the basic Subject Verb Object orientation of sentences in the english language. And he's also just heard enough english to know that This sentence structure implies that the speaker did something to something or someone that has some kind of direct relation to them. And the verb is in the past tense so it happened a while ago. They look up house. Very self explanatory. Its a house, no other hidden meanings. THey look up clean. Mostly the same deal. There is a potential double meaning because cleaning house can be an expression, but its irrelevant here really.

NOW. I put it on. veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery easy sentence for someone who already speaks the language and in theory to a learner, they look at this and go oh man easy N + 1. There is literally 1 word i dont know. And that word is put. they look up put and

and they keep scrolling down something like 40+ lines of definitions. Even if they had the person who said this sentence to them point out the exact definition being used they still have TONS of common meanings that they will run into every day where they hear the word put and they know it exists but have no idea how its being used in this case, and theres not really any good way to learn all of them either.

In theory the first sentence should be harder because you have to learn more, but in practice, despite having to only learn 1 thing, the 1 thing was such a complicated subject that even tho you ended up understanding the sentence in this moment, you're overloaded for next time and still didn't full grasp the word you learned.

Leads to a lot of moments where, and this sentence should be easy and it isn't. Or, this sentence looks really hard and u breeze by it. I find over all theres no real rhyme or reason to what is more difficult than the other because its hard to quantify the difficulty of a singular word or concept. Having as few things to learn as possible is ideal, but also having the things you do need to learn be as simple as possible is also ideal.

As a self learner just being aware of this kind of thing can make it easier for you when you find that you're having a hard time with things you'd think are supposed to be easy.

[yasuijp]

N + 1

N + 1 is the ideal way to learn supposedly and honestly i kind of agree. N + 1 is the idea that its easier to learn in situations when you know most of something. More specifically. N is what you know. And the thing you are trying to learn is just 1 shy of what you know. Its easier to learn that way. If i teach you how to say "I went to the store" at some point. And tomorrow I teach you how to say "She went to the store" because you know this entire sentence structure already and all of the words in the sentence except for this 1 word. You will be way more receptive to learning what "she" means.

Take it even further.

You Know about the progressive tense (ing) and a general idea of how to use it. You know the meaning of the expression run away. You know about sentence structure I am (blank). Now you run into the sentence "I am running away." You have never seen the word running before, but, you know about the tense, you know the sentence structure, everything about this sentence is known to u. So when u finally hit the eureka moment of "OH RUN IS IN THE PROGRESSIVE TENSE HERE SO ITS THE SAME EXPRESSION BUT ITS HAPPENING STILL AH" despite no one telling you or explaining anything, you were eventually able to fully comprehend the meaning of something. That's also N+1 in a sense because even tho technically you knew that, the word running is one that you've never encountered.

Naturally (or as close to naturally as it can get) encountering and deciphering an N + 1 sentence is one of the most satisfying things in all of language learning, and more often than not its the kind of thing that will end in permanent knowledge retention. That Said its a really hard thing to naturally run into. More often than not these won't happen by accident until you're a bit more advanced. Notice i said a bit more, you can run into them fairly often in the early stages but itreally just depends.

One that happened to me that was funny. I was watching something idr what, and a character said to another character 今日は早いですよね。And at that time the only definition i had for 早い (はやいーhayai）was fast. So im reading this sentence like Today is fast. And im lost. In the show its like 7am or something. This character can't have been up that long its not like the day is going by fast what does this mean. I kind of just let it go. At some other point a character says something similar but instead of 今日 which means today, they said the characters name. and they were still saying 早い so im like hold on. "Does hayai also mean something else? what could it m- oh" Hayai means early also. The character from earlier wasn't saying that today is fast. They were talking about the other character and saying that unlike usual, TODAY, you're EARLY.

2 separate sentences + my own prior knowledge worked together to create an N+1 Experience. Where i had all of the knowledge i needed to know what this meant, but i was missing just the second meaning of a single word. I have never needed to look at the definition of hayai ever again the experience just ingrained it in me.

If i ever figure out a way to make this happen more often ill get back to u

[yasuijp]

Deliberate vs Passive (cont.)

So lets review

Deliberate Practice: Practice on a specific subject with a goal in mind. Great for solidifying ideas in your head.

Passive Practice: Practice where you gain experience just as a result of doing something mindlessly without any particular goal in mind. Great for gaining a variable amount of experience in a variable amount of subjects.

Now, heres the thing. One of them is better than the other but its very complicated. Passive practice is better than Deliberate practice with an asterisk.

For PURE beginners, some deliberate practice on key subjects is mandatory. Basically if you can pick a good starting point thats ideal. For people who are really far along somewhere to later intermediate/mid to late expert (depending on how you categorize it) deliberate practice is also going to be better. That's because at this point, there is so much less to learn that the likelyhood of you running into something new during your passive practice is near 0.

HOWEVER. For the vast majority of the time you spend doing anything, passive practice is the most important. Passive practice having very hands on and realistic/natural experience is the key reason why its good. And in the early stages it gives you raw exposure to so many new things basically every day, and when it slows down, in some ways thats even better because when u know every word in a sentence except for the one, you can more easily identify that this is something you might want to learn (If not just learn it out right through context).

Mixing them is ideal though. If the first time you see a word you do a bunch of deliberate practice and never see it again the likelyhood of forgetting it is high. The likelyhood of stumbling on it next time you encounter it is also probably high especially when you're juggling other things u need to learn. But if you did this deliberate practice for a word you've run into a few times but never properly learned, your brain will more naturally just be able to internalize it and with less work than it would have taken otherwise.

The sweet spot is hard to reach because its different for everyone and it can change depending on the subject etc, but you should strive to find a balance that works for you. It'll make all of your practice more efficient.

[yasuijp]

Deliberate vs Passive Practice

There are (probably more tbh) 2 main types of practice that you can do with pretty much anything. We a language blog tho so, we talkin about that today.

Deliberate Practice is practice on a specific topic with a specific goal/result in mind

Passive Practice is practice that just happens as a result of doing something.

These are misnomers probably because im literally making this up. But for examples. Say you want to practice writing.

Deliberate practice would be, you noticed that you tend to use a particular phrase a lot. You want to cut down on it so you're actively trying to self correct that. At the same time you tend to make your writings too long. So you've given yourself a 900 word limit this time.

Passive practice would be hopping in a Discord RP server.

Its basically the difference between learning by actively fishing for mistakes and correcting them vs learning by just doing the thing.

Obviously the deliberate practice just sounds better right? But honestly it depends.

Lets say u and your 2 friends buy award winning fighting game guilty gear strive available right now on PC and playstation. You decide that you're going right into training mode and you're gonna learn a bunch of optimal combo routes. You learn all of the basic mechanics of the game and study up on some advanced theory from some of your favorite content creators on youtube.

Finally after a month you play one of your friends. You can't seem to land any of the combos that you practiced. You learned advanced counters for techniques that your friend doesn't do at all. In short its baby fights out there and your friend is babying waaaaaaaay better than you are.

What did your friend do differently than you. Well your friend just hopped online and mashed buttons until some stuff started to make sense. Now this doesn't even mean that they're better than you, it just means that unlike you, who prepared for something that was never coming and never tried to practically apply most of what you learned, vs the guy who has just been sweating for his life in the ranked tower and has found a bunch of random cheap shit that works. And found a bunch of scuffed workarounds to situations that they saw a lot.

You did deliberate practice and your friend did passive practice. With this example you might be thinking that im saying passive practice is better than deliberate practice, but thats not reaaaally the case. If for example you did this same deliberate practice but applied it to the things that your mashing friend was doing, you'd probably win every single game. But lets take your third friend into account. What happens when you play her?

Your third friend played the basic tutorial mode. Then she hopped into training mode for like 10 minutes on the character she thought was the hottest (I-no, if u even care) and got the jist of what her buttons did, Then she hopped online and started playing ranked. With her general idea of how the game worked coupled with some practice, she got to notice some things that she wanted to do that she was bad at, and some moves that she didn't know how to deal with. So she went into training mode again and tried to practice those things a little bit before hopping back online. In the process she found a youtube guide on a thing that she was trying to learn and ended up learning more new ideas along the way. She was like oh yeah gotta try that out online too and then did. Didn't get it every time but she got it sometimes. Anyway I say all this to say, when you played her you got DECIMATED. It was not even close. She was infinitely more refined of a player than the 2 of you. Frankly speaking you probably knew more than she did, but she had a way more consistent and solid gameplan, and she applied everything that she learned to the games that you played together.

If you didn't get it by now with this long winded explanation, the ideal is that you use both of these in tandem. Deliberate practice is great for solidifying ideas, but passive practice is not only where you find out what you should be deliberately practicing, its also where the results of these deliberate practice sessions can be tested shown off and refined.

[yasuijp]

Funny Thing you have never thought about that explains why you shouldn't be too obsessed with direct translation

を(wo but pronounced o in spoken japanese) is used to indicate the direct object. If your eyes glazed over, this just means that when you see NounをVerb in japanese, this pattern says that the verb is being done to the noun

foodをeat ballをkick taxesをdo

etc.

That guy over there is plucking at the strings on his guitar to make it produce sounds. He's playing the Guitar. Play the [insert instrument] is the simplest and most fundamental way to express that thought in english.

The word for to play is 遊ぶ（asobu) the word for guitar is just guitar but in katakana (ギター)

So you learn this and your english brain cannot fucking help itself, you want to say play the guitar and you say　ギターを遊ぶ (gita o asobu) and the japanese person you said that to would kind of just look at you for a minute. They'll probably understand what you meant maybe, but thats just not how u express that fundamental thought in this language. You'd say ギターを弾く（gita o hiku) hiku here is a verb that means to pull, but with this specific kanji its used just for "playing" a stringed instrument. If a japanese person told u in english that she pulls the guitar you'd look at her in the exact same way she'd look at you if you said ギターを遊ぶ

Its not the worst thing in the world to make these kinds of mistakes but this is the key problem with trying to learn how to speak too early and learning phrases that you've never heard said outloud. And these kinds of things will happen way more the earlier you try to output because you haven't internalized this new language well enough yet and are trying too hard to force it. Translating "ギターを弾く" to "Play guitar" is not correct in the literal sense, but it is the correct interpretation of the thought.

[yasuijp]

Resources

3 Resources you will use every day during your language learning journey.

Yomichan: looks up any typed japanese text on a webpage by highlighting it.

Grammar Guide: Simple web grammar guide with tons of common patterns. The website also has a section for a database of grammar patterns which will be useful when you get more advanced.

Anki: Powerful Flashcard app. I reccomend this one because its compatible with pretty much every other language learning resource on the internet

honorable mention Jisho.org is japanese to english web dictionary that you should use instead of google translate.

[yasuijp]

Some Japanese Resources

Like I said in one of these stream of consciousness un-revised blog posts you only need 4 resources to learn a language so i thought i'd give a basic 4 for japanese. note: I personally use, WAY more than this. These are just like the core 4 parts i use. Everything else is a tool to integrate these resources together, or to allow me to use these resources in situations where I usually cannot.

Lookup: Yomichan: a browser based extension that lets you highlight text in browser to pull definitions. It can parse through japanese also so it will be able to tell where one word ends and one begins. It uses the same definitions that they use over on Jisho which a free web dictionary for japanese. Technically i gave you 2 resources.

Grammar Guide: Look ngl, just pick whatever. If you own like the genki books or minna no nihongo or whatever already just use those for learning your basic grammar. After that find a more comprehensive collection of grammar. For basic grammar I used this guide here. This is a mirror of a guide written by a guy named Tae Kim that i can't find the link to anymore. This site also has a link to a comprehensive list of grammar patterns and stuff if you poke around.

Storing Info: Originally i was going to use a plain notebook for this but i realized how little i had any desire to write. So instead i got this Flashcard app called Anki. Its based on Spaced Repetition which is a concept that some smart people have decided is a good way to make sure you remember things. Look it up if you want a real explanation of whats going on but honestly it doesn't matter cause anki does it for you. You can use CSS on the cards so they're very customizable, and there are a lot of plugins that can make the program even more powerful. My advice? Keep it simple. The amount of freedom you get can lead you to spending more time tweeking your settings and hunting for add ons than actually trying to review your flashcards

Primary Sources: Google.com Its really cool, go there and type in japanese news, or raw japanese manga or whatever. The cool part about the primary source thing? Its literally anything u want it to be. Find something simple that you kind of like and thats a perfect starting point. Own a switch? Change the language setting to japanese and now all the games you play will automatically be set to japanese language. Got a netflix account? if you want any netflix original anime you can turn the english subs off and put on japanese ones. Know how to pirate? Then you can watch literally anything u feel like.

enjoy, if you dont like the resources you dont have to use mine, you cna use whatever you feel like as long as they get the basic job done.

[yasuijp]

Language Learning Tool Overload

It is easier than ever to learn a foreign language in 2022 because jesus christ there are a bunch of resources. Its kind of its own problem now, theres too many resources. Well meaning people making stuff that they would have liked during their journey, conmen trying to sell u the fastest way to fluency, the middle ground of people who genuinely want to help but want to feed themselves also. There's literally no end to resources.

At a base level what you really need are 4 things. You need a way to look words up, A resource for grammar, something to keep track of what you find easily so that you can go back to it later, and a primary source of real language like a news broadcast, novel, podcast, youtube channel whatever. Obviously within that you will want to do everything in your power to make the process as seemless and easy as possible, and THATs where the problem comes in.

Theres so many different dictionaries that do different things and have different benefits. Ton's of Grammar Guides each promising to be the most straight forward or have the most important things to know. TONS of flashcard apps, notebooks, planners whatever the fuck to store this information. And probably literally infinite primary sources of language that you could learn from.

Then you have resources that try to combine these things. Apps that have news articles but also have instant word look up and let you save words at the same time. Simultaneously they can also play audio, pay your taxes and implant the language directly into your brain thru osmosis at night. Its very easy to end up with a bunch of stuff that basically does the same thing. Especially when you try to start being more efficient. You find something that does one part of your process quicker and you end up in a rabbit hole of trying to replace your entire pipeline.

When u go to someones language learning guide and its just a page of 90 resources you can end up feeling like if you don't have all of this you can't even get started which might turn you off from the process entirely. Just being aware that you don't actually need much to get started if you don't care about MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY or whatever can be enough to prevent you from doing this. Just remember that once you have your current method, if the new method is making things more stressful its probably not worth it. Your way is working for you and thats ok

[yasuijp]

Duolingo is a toy

Duolingo and MOST gamified language learning apps do next to nothing for actual language learning. They have a role to play for sure tho. Its REALLY good at is making you feel like you're being productive while doing it. It gives a lot of positive feedback every time you get an answer right. There's a very visual sense of progression as you go thru the lessons. They constructed nature of it also does force a incremental sense of progression too where you are building upon knowledge of past words learned. Its not bad. Its just not going to have the effect you think it will. You're not going to finish duolingo and be anything resembling fluent. You wouldn't be able to understand real spoken language. For every good and usable phrase you learn, you'll learn 5 unnatural ones that you need to unlearn.

The true benefit of duolingo is easing people who are curious about the language learning process into it. I like it a lot for that. You really do just get to dip your toes into a language at an entry level without having to do much research. But thats it. As long as you know this and keep duolingo as a supplementary thing you'll be fine.

[yasuijp]

Road Map

Here's a basic guide to learning a language specifically japanese here

Learn the Writing system * Learn how to pronounce the primary sounds Do a beginners grammar guide to completion Memorize the most common 200-2000 words gradually Start Listening/Watching/Reading Content in the Target Language Look up and try to gradually memorize words you dont know that come up Do the same with new things that seem like grammar patterns. Increase the difficulty of the content you consume gradually and continue on like this until you start to have a good grasp of things.

*with japanese this would be the Kana, not the kanji really. You would gradually learn kanji at the same time you learn words. Not every language has its own writing system either. And it might be different levels of learning this depending on the language probably

This probably works on every language and would probably be easier with some languages than others (depending on how close they are to a language you already know i'd assume) And it really is this easy. Learning a language is only hard for commitment reasons, and if you decide to timegate yourself to learning it within a timeframe.

The percieved difficulty of learning in my opinion is the idea that you need perfect understanding of everything at all times. Once you let go of that you're able to improve a lot faster. You really just need tons of exposure, and thankfully you no longer need to live in the country to get that exposure

[yasuijp]

は vs が

You want to know the difference between は and が in japanese? Well i’m here to tell you literally who cares.

ok fine you should care but not nearly as much as you think you should. in the early stages of your japanese journey literally like... it doesn’t matter. Most of the early grammar rules and example sentences you learn from a beginner guide wont have too much of a difference in nuance between the two. There are WAY more grammar patterns that are more important for you to wrap your head around that will come up way more often. Save this shit for later. You will be fine. から isn’t just used for "from”, a lot of the time its used to indicate the reason for something. の isn't just for possessiveness, sometimes it makes the entire phrase before it act as a noun. In my experience と has meant “with”, way more often than it has meant “and”. These are the kind of simple contextual observations and understandings that will improve your listening and reading experience way more than learning when は or が should be used.

In fact, it might be worth remembering that a lot of the time in spoken Japanese the fucking  は straight up gets omitted. And not in the sense of im not saying the topic of this sentence because we all know due to context, i mean in the sense that people will say the topic, and instead of sayingは they will just pause for a beat or 2 where the は is removed from the sentence.

Anyway its no big deal if you dont understand this fully, treat them as tho they’re basically the same and every once in a while try to read up on the difference again. If you don’t understand it, consume more real japanese from japanese people for a while and try again later down the line. You’ll get it eventually.

If you want links to explanations literally don’t know any but since i’ve stopped trying to figure it out i feel like i’ve started understanding it a little more implicitly

[yasuijp]

Language Skill Disconnect

Being able to Read, Listen, Speak, and Write are all 4 completely different skills. If someone said watashi outloud i could understand it every time. If someone wrote the kanji 私 i would know that this said watashi. If you asked me to say watashi out loud, my pitch might not be perfect but i’d pronounce clearly enough. Ask me to write the kanji? Perfect Stroke order every time. Now ask me if I know what Watashi means. I dont know. Cause on top of all of those skills knowing the meaning of the word you said is still a thing you need.

Do I know the word watashi? At what point can we consider that i know this word. What if I can read write and say this word. I know that it means “I” but for some reason when its said outloud my brain can’t process it properly so im not able to tell you what what you just said means. This isn’t even as rare as you would expect. A lot of shorter words have the tendancy to feel like they’re part of a different word when said outloud so while you know what it is by itself you can just completely miss it in sentences. Do you think i know the word in this case?

What if i have all of these abilities and to take it a step further for some given word i know every possible definition of it. But i cannot immediately tell which definition the word is using in any given sentence. Do i know the word still?

If you think about it too long it will give you a migraine dont think about it to much. Just be aware that all of these ARE different skills. Testing yourself on 5 different aspects of words every single time can be daunting so being at the very least aware that that is what you’re doing to yourself can help alleviate it a bit. There will be some words you’re perfect on, some words you can understand but can’t output back and vice versa. Your language skills will always be improving so long as you continue using the language and making note of what you do and do not know.

For now maybe if you’re doing flash cards or whatever make sure that you test yourself on the aspect of words that you deem most important to your needs right now. Try to get them all but as long as you’re satisfying your own personal needs that should be enough.