Japanese Langblr

Hi! I’ll write down a few! I mostly watch wlw couple channels. The wlw representation in Japanese media (or any media let’s be honest) is scarce, but in the last couple of years Youtube has become a great asset in taking control of the narrative.

TabiEats: A middle-aged gay couple in Tokyo introduce Japanese foods to international audiences in English.

Taiki & Noah: A Japanese-Korean gay couple channel with English subs. They also happen to be beautiful male models with legs for days so perhaps not the most relatable lifestyle out of the bunch, but their channel is very charming haha. Plus I’m endlessly interested in other couples who don’t share the same first language as that’s my everyday reality too.

Kazue-chan: A Youtube pioneer who over the years has interviewed lgbtq people and their family members from all over the country, bringing hope to the community in the knowledge that we are everywhere and our lives are worth living.

Papi life: A charming lesbian couple channel that does frequent live streams. (I’m using gay and lesbian as umbrella terms for these couple channels but some of them may and do idenfity as bi.) They just moved into a new flat and omg i’m so excited for them!!! They have a great double act chemistry that’s fun to fun watch. I just love them!!

L BIAN TV: Another wlw couple channel! They were one of the first Japanese wlw channels as far as I know. Their content is pretty varied from sitdown videos to vlogs. I am all the comments screaming how cool U-chan is when she drives.

Wagashi channel: Another lesbian couple channel that started soon after Lbian TV. Unfortunately I tend to pass out from watching their videos because they ooze such cool model vibes.

Ukapeko channel: A young lesbian couple from Fukuoka! They’ve been together since middle school which is pretty wild. Peko-san is the cool sempai we all wish we had lol.

Yobu to Yobo channel: A Japanese-Korean lesbian couple channel that I discovered recently. I’m pretty new to them but omg they’re so charming and such pleasant talkers and really funny and quickly becoming my faves.

Obabian channel: A most wholesome channel by a group of thirty and fortysomething lesbian obasans. They should have a tv show, this is the content we need to see.

Shiba and Koji: Just two dudes being ridiculously beautiful in ridiculously beautiful environments.

Kanataimu: Personal channel of a trans man with a very nice, calm presence. The channel is fairly new, Kanata first started as a Youtuber with his roommate on another channel but they parted ways because the roommate was abusive. He grew up with a deaf parent, so he also makes videos about Japanese sign language. Please note that the Japanese trans community uses terms that non-Japanese people may not be comfortable using, so if you’re not trans, make sure you know the terms preferred by your local community!

Kareshi wa mousugu otokonoko: A ridiculously cute couple channel by a trans boyfriend and his cis girlfriend who met while working at a convenience store. They look so happy & in love and I love them. Again, please note that the preferred terminology may not be the same outside of Japan!

I’m saving the best ones for last! Both of these are actually Korean channels, but I’m putting them here anyway because I want the world to experience them. These are my two favourite channels, nothing else comes close.

Mango couple: This is a vlog channel by a gay couple who have been together for seven years. Kim is the ambitious president of a queer rights organisation in Seoul and works a demanding corporate job. Pack who edits the videos is more of a free spirit with depths of emotional intelligence. Not much happens in their videos, yet each is a story that leaves you with a thought. I just really relate to these people on such a profound level. I’m around their age, I have been with the same person for over nine years which is most of my adult life, I have watched someone I love work themselves to exhaustion in the East Asian working culture. This channel feels like such a real representation of life with another person, as well as the struggle of being in your early 30s.

Channel Gimcheolsoo: Gim Cheolsoo was the first gay Youtuber in Korea to reveal his face. There are so many Korean gay couple channels now, but before him there was nothing. This channel is one of a kind. He doesn’t upload that often unfortunately, but when he does, it’s usually a video of an ordinary moment that is now gone. Moments alone, moments with his cats, moments with his boyfriend. The real magic of this channel is how you’ll watch a ten minute video of his boyfriend eating noodles and you will feel content because you know you have seen a person who is truly loved.

Sadly I don’t really vibe with the Finnish Youtube scene, which is a shame really now that I’m unable to go back there because of the Japanese travel restrictions for who knows how long, with no other Finnish speakers around but myself. :( I do like watching Valtteri Sandberg’s vlogs from time to time when I’m doing chores. He’ll cook and clean and talk about anxiety and insomnia for forty minutes so it’s relatable content lol. The podcast he does with his boyfriend is also pretty funny and down to earth. Kaksi äitiä ja kaksoset a channel by lesbian moms raising twins. Henny Harjusola is a pretty big trans youtuber though I don’t personally watch her content (it’s a small country of five million people so 100k subscribers is a big channel.) Tuure Boelius is a gay youtuber that teens watch but I’m way too old for his content haha. He released a song called Lätkäjätkä-Ville (hockey dude Ville) a couple of years ago where he makes out with a hockey jock in the locker room and it caused this whole controversy because hockey is like a religion in Finland and the toxic masculinity surrounding it is crazy.

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If you are strapped for cash, but have enough to spare to buy these items- you WILL get your money back. Tested and approved.

Anyone who knows me knows I love tea (and am in fact drinking tea right now), so here are a few tea-related words for my tea-loving nakama (chakama?).

First, the kanji for tea, 茶, is read ちゃ with almost no exception, but on rare occasion is read さ (ex. 喫茶店・きっさてん・café and 茶道・さどう・tea ceremony)

Types of tea and tea foods

お茶　generally refers to green tea but isn’t super specific like 緑茶（りょくちゃ）green tea or, even more specific, one of the many types of green tea like 煎茶sencha, ほうじ茶 houjicha, 玉露 gyokuro, etc.

紅茶（こうちゃ）black tea. Surprisingly, there are a few types of 和紅茶（わこうちゃ）, Japanese black tea (I sometimes have a particular organic one from Nara).  

ハーブティー　herbal tea

茶菓子（ちゃがし）the version of 和菓子（わがし）, Japanese traditional sweets, which are tea-flavored or use tea in the ingredients.

ちゃがゆ (sometimes written in the kanji 茶粥)　the version of おかゆ, a rice porridge often made for someone who isn’t feeling well, made with green tea instead of water (houjicha, a low-caffeine tea, is traditional.)

Words used when talking about tea:

茶葉（ちゃば） tea leaves (unused)

茶殻（ちゃがら） used tea leaves

浸出（しんしゅつ）steeping (a bit specific/technical, used often as 浸出時間. お茶を入れる is also just fine to say “make tea”)

And DON’T come at me with the “but green tea is so bitter!” until you’ve had PROPERLY made green tea and that is the hill I will die on.  Don’t use boiling water!  Don’t leave the tea leaves/teabag in too long!  Stop squeezing out your teabag!  Don’t skimp on the tea leaves!

Some words that use 茶 but are actually unrelated to tea:        

無茶（むちゃ）reckless, illogical, unreasonable (more often talking about an action, not a person); and 無茶苦茶（むちゃくちゃ）jumbled, mixed up; unrestrained, excessive—it’s not ucommon to see these written in hiragana instead of kanji; and 茶番（ちゃばん）farce.冬にその山に登るなんて彼は無茶だ　He’d be crazy to climb the mountain in winter

デイジーの周りには無茶苦茶な噂が飛び交ってた　Wild rumors were circulating about Daisy.

赤茶ける（あかちゃける）to turn reddish brown (赤茶けた+”noun”=reddish-brown “noun”; 白茶ける（しらちゃける） to discolor

茶目な・茶目っ気（ちゃめ）mischievous

(from “Common Japanese Collocations” by Kakuko Shoji, with some additions)

Eg sentence:

彼は待っている間新聞を読んでひまをつぶした。

He killed time reading a newspaper while he waited.

手間を掛ける てまをかける to take up someone’s time

Eg sentence:

ずいぶんお手間をかけさせまして、すみませんでした。

I’m revising for my finals and I thought a quick recap on each particle would be welcome for anyone. Even when you’re around then N3, particles can still be tricky, even more so because you learn new things about them. It can be really frustrating then, cause you’re like “why didn’t you say so earlier ?” but, heh, what can you do.  Anyway, here goes the post nobody expected nor asked for ! 

1. The most obvious, aka question mark

 かis mostly seen and used as the western question mark. Placed at the end of a sentence, it turns it into a question. 

ex : どこですか。お元気ですか。(where is it ? how are you ?)

2. The consequence of the previous, aka indirect interrogative clause

And this is where trouble starts, people. 

No, really, nothing to catastrophic is going on here. The idea behind the barbaric “indirect interrogative clause” is simply a reported question. It also works for “I wonder if Tequila, my bunny, is doing fine.” 

In japanese, that would be : テキラは元気かいぶかる。

If I want to say : “I don’t know when to go to Japan.”, I would say : いつ日本に行くか知りません。

By now, you probably understood what to do with the particle. Basically, there are two rules to respect here : 

The question should be in neutral form

Put the particle at the end of the interrogative clause

3- The easy one, aka “or” 

Just use か instead of “or”. That’s it. That’s the post. 

朝ご飯はコーンフレークスかケ－キ、なにが食べたいか。

For breakfast, do you want to eat cornflakes or cake ?

4. The one that’s not really a particle, aka making words with か

何か something

だれか someone

どこか somewhere

This is an excellent question, and one that I get asked a lot irl by Japanese people in particular. Let’s talk about gaining fluency and the ways we can go about it!

How to Gain Fluency in Japanese (and Other Languages)

Speaking Fluency versus Accuracy

Language proficiency is divided into two separate categories:

Fluency: Although there are no widely agreed-upon definitions or measures of language fluency, someone is typically said to be fluent if their use of the language appears fluid, or natural, coherent, and easy as opposed to slow, halting use. In other words, fluency is often described as the ability to produce language on demand and be understood.

Accuracy: Correctness of language use, especially grammatical correctness and word choice.

By the above definitions, a “fluent” speaker may make grammatical mistakes, but they can speak without having to stop and think too much about conjugations, word choice, etc.

An “accurate” speaker can speak with nearly zero grammatical/word choice mistakes. However, the speed of their utterances isn’t generally taken into account, so it could take an “accurate” person twice as long to articulate the same idea as a “fluent” person. 

Ideally, you need to strike a good balance between these two qualities when speaking. I have a boss, God bless him, who is 100% fluency and 0% accuracy and…man is it hard to understand what he’s saying sometimes, but he can generally get his point across just barely. I have another coworker who is 100% accuracy and takes about 3 minutes to form a sentence because he wants it to be perfect. 

How to Increase Speaking/Writing Accuracy

First, let’s talk about the easiest thing to improve, which is accuracy. It’s also (in my opinion) the least fun thing to improve, because it means grammar books and vocabulary memorization. 

You can only use a language accurately if you know what is correct and what is incorrect, and you can only learn that by studying grammar and vocabulary (or if you’re a native speaker and picked it up innately, you lucky bastard).

So here’s some things you can do to increase your accuracy:

For example, if you’re having a hard time using the passive, you need to review that part of your textbook and find some exercises to drill it into your head. 

Say the correct thing aloud. Lots. Sometimes I just walk around my apartment and narrate everything I see/do like a crazy person, but that’s good practice. 

Write example sentences using the grammar you’re struggling with and say them aloud too. 

There’s a bunch of cool apps that connect you with native speakers that can help correct you too! I used to use HelloTalk, I think. 

If you’re a creative soul, when I was studying for the JLPT, I took 1 grammar point and 5 vocabulary words from my JLPT study books and used them to write a 2-page short story about the adventures of ネギ, a stray black cat that smelled like green onions because she napped in an onion field. Then I had a Japanese friend check it over for me and mark mistakes. I hand-wrote them to improve my abysmal handwriting at the same time. It was really fun! I sometimes think about doing it again just for funsies.

When someone corrects you, don’t feel like your entire life is over and you’re a failure and you’ll never get it right haha. I’ve seen people fall into that hopeless mindset, and that’s just nonsense. It’s a good opportunity for learning and nothing more! Say the correct thing you’ve just been taught out loud, then write it down if you can. And, if possible, find a chance to use it in conversation asap.

How to Increase Speaking/Writing Fluency

Now this is the hard one. Especially for those learners who do not have native speakers nearby. 

I’m going to be dead honest with you. I started formally studying Japanese at uni, and I had a Japanese roommate/best friend since year one. I had a 4.0 GPA in my Japanese classes (and only my Japanese classes lol) because I was and still am a MEGA NERD about it. 

…But it wasn’t until I studied abroad in Japan my 4th year of uni that I gained fluency. 

There are a lot of things that can hold us back from fluency. An interesting thing I’ve noted is that Foreign Language is perhaps the only subject in which a student’s personality can directly affect their progress. To gain fluency, you have to go forth and speak, but if you are naturally a shy person, that is going to hinder you. If you are the kind of person who takes mistakes/failures poorly, you will be less likely to take risks and try to say harder sentences. In contrast, you can get full marks in math regardless of the above personality traits. 

I’m not saying that you have to be an outgoing explosion of a human being in order to gain fluency. But what I am saying is that you have to be willing to seek out conversations, and you have to be willing to take chances. Get out of your comfort zone. Use that new word you picked up the other day. Try to explain something that is difficult for you. 

My problem was that, while I lived with a native speaker who would have happily taught me anything I asked, her English proficiency was much higher than my Japanese proficiency. And when I struggled to say something in Japanese, I’d fall back onto English. And when she told me something I didn’t understand in Japanese, she’d repeat it in English instead of Japanese, because that was easier for us both. The same thing happened when I was in Japanese class as well. I always had the assurance that I could fall back on English.

But when I elected to study abroad in Japan for 3 months, I knew that this was my big chance. So on the host family form in the “other requests” area, I wrote that I specifically wanted a host family that could not speak English. I was setting fire to my crutches, and I was scared but excited to see them burn. 

By the end of my three months in Japan, I had gone from “Chotto matte kudasai” and needing a minute to form my reply, to “Okay, yeah I see that movie too and I liked the action scenes, but I didn’t care for the story little.” (I’ve underlined mistakes that I would have made in Japanese, to show you that I sacrificed some accuracy to obtain higher fluency.)

So, in short, the easiest and quickest way to increase your spoken fluency is to throw away all the crutches you can and use the language as much as possible. Every single day. Even if you’re just having an imaginary conversation with yourself! And like I said, there are a bunch of cool apps that connect you with Japanese people who want to learn English and you can do language exchanges with them. I had a lot of fun with those in the past. 

As for increasing writing fluency…well. That’s a tough question with Japanese, because I can type Japanese at like 100 wpm, but my Japanese handwriting fluency is at a 10/100. I can read and type at the level of a native Japanese high school student, but I can only write the kanji that 7 year old can write. That’s no exaggeration.

The big reason for that dichotomy is that my work is paper-free. 100% of my work is done on screen, so about the only time I have to write out something is when I’m filling out a form, which includes my name (katakana), address, and maybe occupation. 

If you want to increase your Japanese handwriting speed, just keep on writing. Write those little short stories about ネギ like I did, or find some writing prompts (I just started a side-blog with writing prompts yesterday btw) or keep a little diary. Make opportunities to write. 

How to Have Nice Handwriting in Japanese

Okay, full disclaimer: I am the absolute LAST person qualified to talk about this, because I have awful handwriting in Japanese. 

Unless you have prior experience with a different language that uses kanji, or you lack the keen eye of an artist, you will likely struggle to develop neat handwriting. 

Personally, I really like using this app called Japanese Kanji Sensei. It’s on Android (not sure about iOS), and if you pay just a few bucks you can make your own kanji sets and stuff. Anyways, it will show you how to write the characters prettily. It gives you a good frame of reference for what nice, pencil/pen-written characters (versus calligraphy characters). It has hiragana and katakana on it too!

I get a stylus and write out the characters on this app for the muscle memory, so my hands remember the sensation of writing a certain character. (The muscle memory is different if you only use your fingertip.) This muscle memory and repetition is how Japanese people learn how to internalize kanji as well. I really enjoy and recommend this app. I’m sure that there are others out there like it too.

Summary

My Japanese “Library”

So recently I had a follower ask me about my Japanese book collection that I had on my desk. So I thought I’d make a post to list them all (left to right as in the first photo). Hope you guys enjoy!

Yotsuba& manga 1-3. These manga are supposed to be really easy to read for beginner learners. Personally I’ve only managed to read a few of chapters but it’s still considerably easier compared to other native mangas. It’s also really encouraging to read these and actually be to understand REAL manga meant for Japanese Natives.

Azumanga Daioh. This is a considerably harder manga which i believe is usually read by Japanese high schoolers and such but I still haven’t cracked open. I just keep it up there for inspiration and motivation.

The next is a children’s dictionary which, again, I still have to crack open. I’ve heard from others that they usually help when you get more into the intermediate level of Japanese but it’s just another book I keep for motivation

Shirokuma Cafe is another easy manga like Yotsuba& about a polar bear who owns an organic cafe and his friends.

Kuruneko is another kind of easy manga about a cat’s life

The next is a practice workbook with 500 Japanese sentences aimed at training you for the JLPT N5-4

MLA Handbook which I keep on my desk for when I’m writing essays for my english class (not japanese)

The next is my Japanese Notebook where I keep all my language notes

The official JLPT N5 practice workbook

Genki Answer Key, along with Both Genki textbooks and workbooks

花 「はな」 flower 葉 「は」 leaf 茎 「くき」 stem 根 「ね」 root 花びら 「はなびら」 flower petals 花粉 「かふん」 pollen 花芽 「かが」 flower bud 蕾 「つぼみ」 flower bud 青葉 「あおば」 fresh leaves 枝 「えだ」 branch 芽 「め」 sprout 実 「み」 seed, nut, fruit 種 「たね」 seed 苗木 「なえぎ」 sapling, young tree 雑草 「ざっそう」 weeds 草花 「くさばな」 or 「そうか」 flowering plant 紅葉 「もみじ」 or 「こうよう」 autumn leaves

咲く 「さく」 to bloom 植える 「うえる」 to plant 根付く 「ねづく」 to take root 生える 「はえる」 to grow, to sprout 茂る 「しげる」 to grow thickly, to prosper 実る 「みのる」 to bear fruit, to ripen 芽吹く 「めぶく」 to bud 蕾む 「つぼむ」 to bud 窄む 「つぼむ」 to close (about flowers) 萎む 「しぼむ」 to wither (about flowers, dreams) 枯れる 「かれる」 to wither (about plants) 採る 「とる」 to pick (flowers)

Me:

Today's theme is "really?".

今日のテーマは「マジ？」です。

(きょうの　てーまは　まじ　です)

A:Guess what? I bought a new car yesterday.

ねぇ聞いて？昨日新しい車を買ったんだ。

(ねぇきいて　きのう　あたらしい　くるまを　かったんだ)

B: Really? I want to see it.

マジ？見てみたい。

(まじ　みてみたい)

A: I heard It will snow tomorrow.

明日は雪が降るって聞いたよ。

(あしたは　ゆきがふるって　きいたよ)

B: Really? I can't wait tomorrow.

マジ？　明日が楽しみ。

(まじ　あしたが　たのしみ)

You should use it!

It’s sooo hot … I’m about to melt😣 今日は暑い…暑すぎて溶ける〜

The highest temperature today was 35 degrees! 最高気温35℃だって！

BTW, I’m growing bitter melons in front of the office. そうそう、今ね会社の前でゴーヤを育ててるの。

I’m enjoying watching bitter melons grow in a planter everyday. 毎日ゴーヤの成長を見て楽しんでます。

I’m looking forward to picking them ‘cause bitter melon is my favorite food. ゴーヤ大好きだから楽しみ。

I also like Goya chanpuru but I like to eat it raw the best! ゴーヤチャンプルーも良いけど、やっぱり生で食べるのが1番好きだな〜

★ ”Goya” is bitter melon and is one of the most popular Okinawan food. ”Goya Chanpuru” is bitter melon stir-fried with pork, tofu and other vegetables.

Let’s be careful of heat stroke. 熱中症に気をつけて。