Japanese Learning Thread - Exchanging things they have learned with the tranime weeb language.

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Echoing the love for WaniKani (For Kanji) I've tried a few SRS systems but WaniKani is the only one where it sorta sticks. Also Kanji Study is fantastic and has been my sensei since the start.
 
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Kari Kamiya said:
My grasp on the language is barely even preschool level let's be fair here, so I just want some confirmation/advice on if the name-reading here is correct (because the name-meaning is crucial) and the kanji is not actually supposed to be read as a Chinese character. I have a fictional Japanese character with a given name "Naomi" (a normal Japanese name), and she has an affinity to water. I happened to come across "nao" during one of my searches on Jisho.org and saw one of its readings means "healing" and went "Oh, that's neat", so I figured her name could stand for "healing water". So that's why I want to make sure this is actually okay and not a weird butchery of just putting kanji together.

治水
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First of all, if you're serious about kanji names, you should look into names, pronunciations in names (nanori), and kanji origins and meanings. For the latter, I only know Kanji Study -- expensive but can be pirated; unfortunately there's no search by nanori). When I tried to translate my own name to make a fake account for yahoo, the result was a really cool name I had to give to a character in a story instead. Jisho has a good selection of names (better than Kanji Study) but fails the kanji origins part.

You can do any language fuckery you want, especially for a Japanese-American character:
  • Apparently, Japanese-Americans get discriminated against; when they come to Japan, their names in Japanese are fucky and distinctly foreign and they have to jump through an inordinate amount of hoops to get a proper kanji name. A Japanese-American IRL person can have a nonstandard name.
  • There's a trend of using wacky pronunciations for names (speshul snowflake pronunciations), it's called kirakira names. Some examples from the article:
    • 光宙 – ぴかちゅう – Pikachu [based off pronunciation but the kanji are sort of nice -S]
    • 愛猫 – きてぃ – Kitty [literally "love cat", arbitrary pronunciation -S]
    • 今鹿 – なうしか – Naushika [Nausicaa is a Greek name and a Miyazaki character; 鹿 means deer (connotation: beautiful, graceful) and is pronounced shika, 今 means "now", the English word; absolutely insane if real -S].
治水 however is already a word, it's pronounced "chisui" and means "river management".

But, 治 already has water in it, it was originally the name of a river. So you can use (sort of) whichever mi you want -- 明, 美, etc.
(I have two characters whose names start with mi, one is a deposed trophy waifu empress and uses a nonstandard reading of the imperial suffix "honorable", 御, the other is her evil heir and uses 魅 (fascination, bewitch, evil spirits; the other heir is the cool-name protagonist.)

There's a complication with 治: it's never pronounced nao in real Japanese names (usually either ji or haru). But for a Japanese-American, you can go ahead and use it if you want and ascribe it to emigrant weirdness.

An additional possible constraint is (not) mixing different types of pronunciation (on/kun) within a single word or between name and surname. I used to think there might be a rule but I've seen plenty of counterexamples (e.g. Miyamoto Musashi, kun surname, on name; cool-name protagonist has the same pattern). Still, mixing pronunciations within a single word is not often done.
 
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Safir said:
Apparently, Japanese-Americans get discriminated against; when they come to Japan, their names in Japanese are fucky and distinctly foreign and they have to jump through an inordinate amount of hoops to get a proper kanji name. A Japanese-American IRL person can have a nonstandard name.
Click to expand...
So I take it that should Naomi ever go to Japan and have to "change" her name, it wouldn't even be the same name phonetically? Interesting. I kinda stuck with the name because most Americans/English-speakers would read "Naomi" as "nay-uh-me" due to Naomi of the Old Testament, so characters in-series would commonly mispronounce it as such which she doesn't personally mind though she politely gives the proper pronunciation up-front which doesn't always stick. So I would assume that a "new" name in Japanese would reflect that?
 
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Kari Kamiya said:
So I take it that should Naomi ever go to Japan and have to "change" her name, it wouldn't even be the same name phonetically?
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disclaimer: I have no idea, I've never been to Japan, I don't have Japanese friends, etc, I'm just a waifuist with a dictionary
reddit_vs_russia.jpg
but here's what I think.

Script​

As an American, she would just have an American name spelled in Latin letters, Naomi. She may also have an informal Kanji spelling that's not in any document.
When she goes to Japan as an American citizen, her name would be spelled in kana (hiragana to katakana is what cursive is to block letters) or Latin ("romaji"), maybe even with an interpoint "·" separating name, surname, and middle name initial: NAOMI·S·FUDEBAYASHI.

If she then did what it takes to get a Japanese name (naturalization? no idea what else), she gets to choose a Japanese name, and that name can be "anything" within reason. She can choose a completely different name. She can choose ナオミ (or なおみ, I don't know if there's a difference w.r.t. names or it's just a matter of styling) and a kana family name (although a kana family name would "forever" stand out and has consequences for marriage etc). She can choose ナオミ and her original kanji family name, presumably the family knows what it was; or a different kanji family name. Or a kana family name and a kanji personal name.

Kanji spelling​

A kanji name can contain any currently allowed character.

Japan cut down on the number of Chinese characters in common use. All government documents must only use kanji from a set (but sometimes updated[1]) list called "joyo", "regular use" BUT for names, there's a special addon called "jinmeiyo", "human name use" that is updated more frequently to add to it at parents' requests. (The Japanese regularly use some unlisted kanji, too, most notably 嘘 "uso"[2] - "lie"). Joyo itself contains some otherwise rare kanji that are used in geographical names but not much anywhere else.

Some names can be declined for aesthetic / public order reasons. The character 無 (among many others, such as rape, diarrea, etc) is commonly thought to be inappropriate / unlucky for names, but I just found a native Japanese guy with 無 in the name, without even looking.

Pronunciation​

She will also get to choose the pronunciation of the names. I don't know if the pronunciation of the personal name goes into an official document, probably not. It might go into a government database, for ease of identification. But just like Miyamoto Musashi renamed himself Musashi from Takezo without changing the spelling (going from kun to on in his case), it's likely possible to change the spoken personal name.

‼️Since 2024, Japan requires the pronunciation of the family name to be registered ‼️

As you're searching for characters matching the pronunciation, keep in mind some consonants become voiced depending on where they are in the word. This applies to names, too. Depending on the dictionary you're using, sometimes a kanji might have a listed "pronunciation variant" but it's voicing, not a standalone variant. For example, when searching jisho.org for "zan", you get 山, mountain, under "other forms" of 山, but it's the voiced variant. 火山 = kazan = "fire mountain" = volcano; but 山 will never be "zan" at the beginning of a word.

Choice​

Names vs surnames​

Some names are "clearly" family names.
One of the Chinese teapot makers I'm fangirling is named Ma Lin. Can you tell which is the personal name and which is the family name? Can you tell if the person is male or female?
She's female, family name Ma, personal name Lin, "horse forest", she signs 馬琳 but is 马琳 on the forms: "horse" got simplified, the Chinese conduct reforms, too. It's not too hard to guess which is the family name if you're heard of Jack Ma the tax dodger.

In a traditional Japanese name, it's typically very obvious to the native which is the family name and which is the personal name. I mean, the family name goes first in Japanese, but if you mix them up, they will know, and if you only say one name they will know which one.

In English, you can also often tell which is the first name and which is the surname:
  • Lindsey Graham
lindsey_graham.jpeg
(lol troll example, and troll ccccombo for a female-sounding name)

A Japanese family name is often some geographical feature:
  • Matsumoto (Akira[3]) -- base of pine
  • Ishii[4] (Ayumi) -- stone well
  • Tezuka (Osamu[5]) -- hand hill
  • Takeda (Shingen)-- bamboo field
And in English:
🎼🎶🎹...was a bad motherfucker, he was seventeen feet tall, he had a hundred and fifty wives...🎵🎶
(lol another troll example)

Here, have one more:
  • Peaches Geldof
(No wonder she overdosed.)

Trolling aside, you know something's off when someone has a surnamey first name in English. Don't do this in Japanese, it'll come off really wacky.

Pronunciation​

Another consideration is pronunciation, how uncommon/wacky it is? Dictionaries are helpful but not too helpful. In Kanji Study, "nanori" is a pronunciation of a character that's used in names and almost nowhere else. It doesn't mean only nanori pronunciations of a character are used in names (although it's true for some characters). It also doesn't mean the character is used in personal names -- check name examples, it could be railway stations all the way down. Always sanity check the name corpus. I don't know of a site or service where you can type a kana syllable and get all characters appropriate for names. They might exist on the Japanese interwebs. I don't even know a search engine that gives good results for the Japanese interwebs. Whenever I try to google or bing Japanese names, I get results from w*stoid baby names sited which recommend weebing up the kid before he's even born.

Trends​

Yet another consideration is trends. Names and naming patterns go in and out of fashion. The protagonist of The Great Ace Attorney is named "Naruhodo Ryunosuke": "Ryunosuke" is a real name but rather old-fashioned (but appropriate for the time period), it practically screams "this is a period piece" (and it is). I haven't actually read that anywhere until now, it was just a fefeeling I developed from reading about Japan. (But I bing'ed to confirm.)

For ultra-accuracy, when naming a modern-ish Japanese character, you have to check which characters were legal when he or she was born. This is what a real person (or character) might do when picking his/her own name within the story, so as to not stand out. (As a side-example, troons who want to skinwalk a specific girl from their childhood pick an otherwise appopriate name -- hers -- but coomer/consoomer troons pick names that are currently trendy, and can thus be clocked without a photo.)

Other​

There are of course male and female names, social class names, professions and geographical trends in names, etc.
MAH BOOK is set at a colony in an alternate timeline, created when the cool-name protagonist made a deal with a genderspecial cannibal Cathar exile and then read a cursed astronomy treatise that contained a mathematical error. The inhabitants of the colony aren't on good terms with the actual Japan of the setting, and I can justify a lot of deliberate or ignorant discrepancies with "cultural divergence".

Pronunciation in practice​

Pronunciation of someone's name in Japanese is sometimes hard/impossible to guess from spelling, and vice versa. Surnames tend to have a set pronunciation -- we even discussed on here on the Farms how surnames are vanishing -- [article] [discussion] (note, the marriage clause is wrong, it will only postpone extinction by 1 generation; surnames will always keep disappearing if strictly passed down to children) -- but personal names are all over the place. Thus it's common to ask a person how his/her personal name is spelled or pronounced (depending if you first hear or read it).

django_unchained.jpeg

Creative writing considerations​

Your characters will not necessarily know the pronunciation or spelling of someone's name!
In terrible writer's Dan Abnett terrible 40k novels, collectively known as "the Inquisitor trilogy"
-- the good Inquisitor Trilogy is written by Ian Watson, everyone should read it --
there's a scene in which a daemon of Chaos appears and says
"MY NAME IS PROPHANITI"
Click to expand...
See why this is retarded? It's not the misspelling itself (ok, that too), it's -- how would the incel[6] protagonist, upon hearing "pruh-FAAH-nitti", know it MUST be misspelled that way?

The spelling vs pronunciation thing can be a plot point! A character might need to look up a name in the database or write a name into a magic curse. Two characters might be >subtly hinted to be related because they have the same kanji symbol in the name (but pronounced differently).

It can be a tool of artistic expression! Some mango authors (notably Mori Koji, famous among normies for inheriting Berserk but infamous among scanlators for his cringey originals, including a gay romance he snuck into a boys' magazine) name characters with katakana (yes, katakana: I repeat, it's strictly false that katakana is "for" foreign words, anyone who says otherwise is as wrong about Japanese as "the gulags" is wrong about the USSR) but these characters can actually have meaningful kanji names with auspicious (or suspicious) kanji in them. In Suicide Island (by Mori Koji of course), the protagonist, his dog, and his girlfriend are all named the same kanji character but pronounced differently (to be fair the protagonist named them both after himself). Or, you can choose to not reveal a character's kanji name (now or at all) and make the reader guess from several meaningful but very different kanji.

Here's a good article I just found which I think is correct (I did have an independent opinion going in, I didn't just crib from it for stickers). But yes, I put it in the end to force everyone interested to read my sperging.
:shit-eating:

[1] I just found out 脹 "dilate" got taken off the Joyo list in 2010! What a loss for Japanese terves!

[2] This reminds me: there's a villain in a mango I'm reading with "uso" in the name, obviously meant to be "lie". The mango is set in modern Japan and the character is supposed to have his documents in order (this is important for the plot). But 嘘 isn't legal in names. I'm reading a scanlation, I wonder what his name is in the original.

[3] As an inversion of the matter at hand, Matsumoto Akira picked the anglicization of his pseudonym, 零士 "zeroth warrior": Leiji, with an L, for "lion". The Japanese often ignore it and write "Reiji" anyway.

[4] Ishii Ayumi, the author of Nobunaga Concerto, has a hiragana personal name: あゆみ. The manga title is spelled 信長協奏曲 but pronounced "Nobunaga concerto", everyone who writes it "Nobunaga kyosokyoku" is being a tard. Matsumoto Leiji was also a fan of "Kanji term, English pronunciation". Galaxy brain realization: English letters are just as fluid! "sake" -- is it "seik" as in "for the sake of" or "sahkeh" as in booze? To say nothing of non-English languages using the Latin-English alphabet, such as "cat walked on my keyboard" Welsh.

[5] Tezuka Osamu's personal name used to be written 治 "osamu" for whatever reason, but then he added 虫 to be read "mu" because he liked insects, leaving 治 to be read "osa" (the regular kun reading). The 虫 character means "insect" and is pronounced "mushi" in words and in all example names in my dictionary BUT it has a nanori entry "mu" that's all due to Tezuka.

[6] The protagonist of Abnett's Inquisitor is a literal loser incel simping for a literal ho, but the protagonist of Watson's Inquisitor gets laid by Meh'Lindi, the hottest woman in the universe! Make an informed choice and read the superior book.

Holy effortpost! Hope to read your story eventually!
 
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I've more or less abandoned my studies after losing interest in Japanese media in the last few years. I studied for a year in college and that was enough for me to get by for a while on a brief job stint in Japan, but it's been a long time since then and unlike back when I was in college, there's a lot of localized Japanese media available these days if I cared to read it. Part of me doesn't want to let it go the way of high school Spanish, just because it's something I worked really hard at and cared about for a time.

I guess if I've got anything useful to say to anybody else who has an interest in learning Japanese - don't lapse in your studies for any extended length of time if you don't want to find yourself fighting a perpetually losing battle against inertia. The language is easy to begin learning but very, very hard to pick up again later on.
 
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Kanji Learner's Course Graded Reading Sets: a review/recommendation​

(This is not an ad. I will now type the word "nigger" as proof.)

One-time payment android app. NO REFUNDS. Free to try forever for the first 100 characters.
This is the last sentence in the free set; after you finish the free bit, you should be able to read it unaided.
> 子どものころ、父から自分自身の行いを正すことを学んだ。

So after I poasted in the thread to whine, I decided to try again, in honor of a family event, using Kanji Study (what else) again but this time harder.
Before starting, I could match about 1200 kanji with their meaning and vice versa, and knew a couple of touristy phrases. I forgot pretty much everything I'd learned decrypting the sacred scriptures (the fluffy-hat space-train lady books).

The Kanji Learning Course's Graded Reading Sets is a collection of Japanese sentences for practice reading, with a pronunciation guide and English translations. It has no coherent stories and is rather unsatisfying to read.

It typically has 10-15 (but, depending on character, can be anywhere from 1 to over 30) example sentences per character. Sentences are taken from various public domain works; some of those are other learning sets (Princeton's, Tatoeba.org), but others are turn-of-the-century literature, presidential speeches, and the Bible. The latter are hard, often completely unfair, and occasionally borderline useless (even given the original, it's impossible to parse the Japanese translation). For these real-world examples, they provide the Japanese sentence and the English sentence directly from the source without regard for the possible adaptation changes, so the translation is often not literal. At least the Bible version they picked uses simple modern English HAHA FAT CHANCE IT'S THE KJV. For now -- I don't know if it improves or not -- the non-learning examples are from non-Japanese sources, translated to Japanese. I'd like to see more Japanese originals. Maybe it's a copyright issue.

To give you an example of how unfair the examples get, this is the first reading example for the character 成 (pronounced "sei", "jou", and the "na" in "naru", "nasu" = to become):

> 金日成。

The characters are "gold" - "sun/day" - "become/establish".

Try to guess what the word means, the answer's in the spoiler.
Kim Il Sung.
Because FUCK YOU.

There are occasionally Chinese names, too. (I've only seen one but there's a note about Chinese names. They've been inserted deliberately; the authors of the KLC changed some names in examples to Japanese ones to assist with kanji learning, and they seem to have likewise inserted Chinese names to stab the reader in the back. ¡Ponte trucha!)

The KLC kanji sequence itself is weird. It is supposedly geared toward people who have trouble remembering character shapes. They could've arranged characters by difficulty of shape (very distinct shapes first – just like in Japanese primary school) or difficulty of meaning. They've chosen to sacrifice both; instead, characters are primarily grouped by visual similarity. After 100 characters, you'd know "eye", "ear", "leg" and "hand" but not any other body part, "up" and "down" but not "left" or "right", "day" and "month" but not "year", "east" but not any other compass direction, "white" but no other color, "write" but not "read", "rest" but not "work". It's not enough to read even beginner texts (such as Tadoku Stories's graded stories -- the KLC, at 5 characters per day, gets to Tadoku's "the car is blue" on day 125).

But you can't use an alternate (Joyo, school grades, your own) sequence, because, despite the unfairness, it is a well-structured course and the sets are (sadistically) graded:
  • w.r.t. kanji, each example can only contain kanji up to that point in the sequence: examples from further on can contain anything listed before (unlike e.g. Satori Reader (subscription), it does not convert kanji you personally happen to not have seen to kana).
  • w.r.t. vocabulary, examples for characters earlier in the sequence are on average simpler, later examples are murderously hardcore.
  • grammar is also introduced gradually but sadistically. Each construct is supposed to have explanations and references to several common Japanese-for-English-speakers textbooks the first few times it appears. But these references are also all over the place, an early example sentence can use a construct explained in volume 3 of a textbook.
This is a representative example for character 97:

> 日々学んで、成長したいです。

This is a representative example for character 2215:

> 脊髄は脳の底部から椎骨管を通って上腰部へ伸びる管状の構造物で、感覚および運動神経インパルスを脳とやり取りする、中枢神経系の主要な部分である。

You might notice only one character in the latter sentence, 「髄」, is uncommon. In this way, the course "open ups" later on. But the first 10 levels or so, you're locked into a torturous unrewarding grind. (I suppose, after 10 levels, it will be possible to read mango and improve that way.)

I would have liked to have a properly graded reader+course with a list of words to learn beforehand, smooth, gradually rising sentence difficulty, and moderately amusing stories. KLC via Kanji Study does not deliver any of this, but it's "good enough", in that it's not gay estonian owl busywork, it seems to have a positive effect.

I "learn" 5 kanji per day in the proprietary KLC sequence and read through every sentence in the respective sets, over and over, dropping the ones I get right, until I run out of sentences. This takes about 2.5 hours per day. I'm now 22 days and 120 characters in. After reading through character entries, I can read (correctly pronounce and understand) half of the never-before-seen example sentences, and this share does not go down from day to day as I progress through the entries and the examples get harder. (I was going to reduce character intake per day if/when I started doing worse on the readings, but this hasn't happened.) I think this is proof the course is working.
 
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sailorpuu said:
I'm curious if anyone here has taken the JPLT? What was your experience like?
Click to expand...

Got N2 a few years ago - probably should grab N1 but studying is for nerds who don't already have a job. (My job requires me to do a lot of language interpretation anyways so I'm always learning and I'm too stingy to pay for the test lol.)

For experience, I studied Japanese for four years in university, including a year of study abroad in a Japanese university, then read through a couple of JLPT study books I bought in Japan right before the test. I didn't bother to study for the listening comprehension section but there are plenty of free programs on YouTube that help with that (search for them in Japanese, though).

The test itself is a straightforward standardized test format. Kanji reading (choose the correct reading for a set of kanji; choose the correct kanji for this reading), vocabulary, reading comprehension, and listening comprehension sections.

Between sections, we had a short break for water/snacks etc. My proctors were incredibly strict. Five people got kicked out for touching their phones/forgetting to remove their smartwatch. The room I was in had no clocks, so if you're the kind of person who needs to know the time, bring an analog watch.

I should mention, there is basically no value in getting N5, N4, or N3 unless you're a student and your professor is mandating it somehow. No Japanese company will give you a job for less than N2. Translation jobs that go from Japanese to a target language (like JP to EN) will consider you at N2. Anything that needs you to translate into Japanese won't even look at you without N1 (or connections). If you want an actual job (so, not translating or hospitality), you'll need a lot more than JLPT results to even get a foot in the door. Sales, desk work, finance, entertainment are all brutal for foreigners and you need impeccable Japanese to get in (business keigo - something that is barely tested in the JLPT and that even Japanese college students take entire classes in before graduating).

If you're a weirdo who likes testing, I also recommend the KanKen (Japan Kanji Aptitude Test). Levels 10 to 1. This is also open to native Japanese people. Level 3 is for high school students to use as leverage for getting into uni. College students might go up to level 2 to put on their resumes. Level 1 is for crazy people.
 
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sailorpuu said:
I'm curious if anyone here has taken the JPLT? What was your experience like?
Click to expand...
I failed the N2 by one point when I took it.

I used some website called Kanji Damage a long time ago to learn the kanji. It would take a long time to recall the mnemonic so reading was excruciatingly slow, but it did seem to work - after a while I forgot the mnemonic and in its place developed an instant recognition of most of the kanji.

My ultimate goal is to read the classic literature that a lot of the films I like are adapted from, I have small collection of shōsestu from Yasunari Kawabata, Fumiko Hayashi etc. but reading them is still too slow to be enjoyable for me.
 
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