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Hentaigana, and the Frustration of Learning Japanese

While I was doing research for another project I was doing, I went down a bit of a rabbithole.  I was trying to explain (and make sure I understood) the uses of voiced vs. unvoiced consonants.  I found a bunch of interesting things.  One was that there are some kana that are not well known and aren’t taught.  Another is that there are specific origins for hiragana, and some of them went down some rather odd roads before settling on their current form. Now, Japanese teaching and learning is a… Read More »Hentaigana, and the Frustration of Learning Japanese

Restarting Japanese – and More

I really liked the format of my last post. The use of separators gave it a flow that I haven’t yet been able to achieve in any other way, and I intend on continuing to do that. The other day, the smoke alarms in an apartment in my building started going off for no reason. I left my building and wandered around until I actually found the apartment in which they were going off. I found it, and the apartment was inhabited by a Mexican grandma-type – older lady, very… Read More »Restarting Japanese – and More

Systems Vs. Goals

As you might have gathered at this point, I listen to the Scott Adams podcast. He’s a pretty intelligent guy and generally I respect intelligence. Of course he has a few blind spots of his own, but he’s only human, I suppose. His opinions in theology and philosophy are generally useless, but he makes up for it with understanding the human mind and how to hack it. He said something the other day that has me thinking, and I think my approach to learning Japanese has failed. He tends to… Read More »Systems Vs. Goals

An Update on Japanese

So, I’ve gone all over the place on this blog, and I haven’t posted about Japanese for a long time. And I kinda don’t want to, really. But this blog is ostensibly about Japanese, so, I guess I’ll write about that. I’ve lost all interest. True, if I abandon Japanese for much longer, I’ll start to forget it, and it’s a useful enough skill that I don’t want that to happen, but I’ve lost interest in Japanese, I’ve lost interest in Japanese culture, I’ve lost interest in Japan. All of… Read More »An Update on Japanese

Why I’m learning Japanese

I have mentioned several times on this blog that Ihave no idea why I’m studying Japanese. Well, dear reader, I’ve figured it out. And I may quit. My mother tells me that from a very early age I loved learning. And Iguess that’s true. But there’s something else I’ve also loved, and that’s collecting. I don’t know why, but from a very early age, I’ve liked collecting things. I never had anything good to collect, so I just ended up collecting random, stupid things. Things that a child with little… Read More »Why I’m learning Japanese

The most difficult things about Japanese

I’ve been studying Japanese (to varying degrees of success) for close to three years now (I think).  It’s most certainly been a while.  Over this time I’ve grown to understand where Japanese is simple and straightforward – and where it’s not.  Here are what, in my opinion, are the most difficult things about Japanese. Understanding Spoken Japanese It is very difficult for me to understand spoken Japanese.  It may be because there are many different dialects than Tokyo standard that are just different enough to throw me for a loop. … Read More »The most difficult things about Japanese

Systems vs. Goals: Why I am Failing at Learning Japanese

A couple of years ago, I was watching a Morning Musume video and saw lots of strange characters flashing along the screen, along with a bunch of gibberish.  And then I thought to myself, “I would like to learn Japanese”.  And thus, a goal was set. Two years later, I am wholly unsatisfied with my progress towards this goal, and I’m not going to lie, I’ve been seriously thinking about quitting.  It’s still something I want to do so the odds are that I won’t, but it is currently a… Read More »Systems vs. Goals: Why I am Failing at Learning Japanese

The Intimidation Factor of Kanji

Let’s face it.  As a Japanese learner, Kanji are intimidating.  They are this set of pictographs that really seem to have nothing to do with anything, each of them have a whole bunch of readings, all of which apply only in specific contexts.  There is a sentence: 明日は日曜日です Where the same kanji appears three times, has two different readings, and two and a half different pronunciations (one of them is in a word that has a reading that only applies across the entire word – there is no specific reading… Read More »The Intimidation Factor of Kanji

Sudoku

I’ve been recently learning how to do sudoku puzzles, and it turns out that I’m really good at it with the right hints, and really bad at the harder ones otherwise.  But I can’t help but to find some similarities between sudoku and the Japanese language. Both of them – particularly the harder sudoku – are incredibly intimidating when you first look at them.  Sudoku has only a few numbers filled in, and you’re thinking “I’m supposed to deduce a solution from this?  But then, you start to learn, and as the… Read More »Sudoku

What I Hate About Most Online “Learn Japanese” Sites

I’ve been using Wanikani lately  I’ve gotten to level 5, and it’s actually a little frustrating.  You have to get the radicals/kanji/vocabulary right a specific number of times, spaced out over months, before they consider the item “burned”, and you don’t have to see it again.  And they dole out the lessons sparingly.  You can’t binge on them.  A cynic might make the argument that they’re just doing that to stretch out the amount of money you need to pay them to complete the program, but while that may be… Read More »What I Hate About Most Online “Learn Japanese” Sites