#japanese reference

Did you guess?

It was 100. WOWWWWWW that's hilarious.

(1100 words when I mark it as known if I just recognize the word in reading)

I was trying to find an audio-only test, because I feel like I know a solid 2000+ common words in listening. Because I can listen to Japanese with Shun podcast, Nihongo Con Teppei, in the episodes I've listened to I hear very few brand new words, mostly just words I'm rusty with. I've been going through Nihongo Con Teppei Beginner and in an hour haven't heard any brand new words (so I think I know much more than 100 words lol). In video games like Judgement I recognize a ton of the daily-life related phrases, and in Man's Inhumanity To Man cdrama that I've been watching lately I also recognize a lot of the daily-conversation bits.

Alas, I could not find an audio-only test.

I did find a bunch of Japanese study resources though! Many of which I've linked before.

Japanese Vocab Test

Sabuki Grammar Guide (which I love)

Kana drilling site

Japanese Learning Loop (I just found this today, and appreciate it a lot. It's interesting to read through for me, and applicable to learning any language)

Japanese Primer (i found this today, Morg System's personal recommendations for learning Japanese)

Yoku.bi Grammar Guide (an update on Sabuki's guide)

Wasabi-jpn Self Learning Materials (I liked their Read Aloud lessons, and am exploring their other lessons, I like all the free lesson materials they have)

How do you deal with cultural stereotypes?

With a lot of teeth gnashing and furious rants to my friends and family, mostly.

I have absolutely struggled with Asian and Japanese stereotypes through my life! I think I struggle with it a lot less now since I am more secure in my intersecting identity as an Asian American and Japanese American, but it takes a lot of work to get here and America doesn't make it easy. And I don't think that struggle will necessarily ever fade. People can be ignorant and racist, even if they don't realize it.

It is so easy to think this is a personal problem. People think it's a compliment, or they think that you're overreacting when you get upset about it because it's not a big deal, so you either get shamed into feeling bad about speaking up, or you learn to internalize it and not say anything. That is really distressing.

So I'm here to say: It's not your fault. It's not you. It is never your fault that you feel terrible when someone says "wow you're different from other Asians", or "I thought Asians were supposed to be good at math". Those are called microaggressions, and those are racist acts. You are not crazy or wrong for feeling hurt or upset by microaggressions. You are right to feel that way; it's racist and unacceptable, even if other people refuse to believe it.

I think for me, one of the biggest things that have helped is reframing the issue and contextualizing it. I felt an enormous amount of relief when I learned that systemic oppression and institutionalized racism was a thing. For my entire life, I thought that I was too sensitive, or that I couldn't take a joke, or that there was something wrong with me for being so hurt and upset by microaggressions, but no. It's a societal problem that has deep, deep roots and impacts almost every single person livinig in Western society. Your feelings are valid. Your hurt, your anger, it is all valid and important. This is a societal problem, not a you problem. These things are real, and you are right to be upset.

Asian Stereotypes and Me

I fit into a lot of Asian/Japanese stereotypes. I was known for being super smart in school, I'm pretty quiet and introverted, I was really good at math. I'm a fantastic student who never needed help and always got excellent grades. My parents also had high expectations for me and were disappointed when I got a B, even though they don't otherwise fit into the stereotype of strict Asian parents and were actually quite leniant with me. I even fit into a Japanese stereotype visually: I look like your average Japanese character in the background of a school anime — the plain extras that don't have a name, they're just there to fill space.

I definitely got told "you're so Asian/Japanese" because of that. It really hurt that none of my accomplishments were really mine, you know? Like if I'm good at math it was automatically because I was Asian/Japanese, and not because I attended two schools and put in twice the amount of work into math because I had already learned it. Everything that I did, and all of my accomplishments and efforts were invalidated because it's something that I'm supposed to be automatically good at as an Asian/Japanese person.

Because I was the smart Asian in school, a lot of people compared their test scores to mine to gauge whether they did well or not. One moment that I remember from middle school very clearly is someone saying "Oh, I did better than Undine!!! That means that I did really well!" and boy howdy that put an unbelievable amount of pressure on me — on top of all of the pressure I was feeling that I had to be smart. I had to be capable, I had to be smart without asking for help.

I'm also a former gifted kid. I never had to study in elementary or middle school because everything came naturally to me and it was so easy. I experienced all of those gifted kid issues where I didn't know how to study because I never needed to, I panicked and froze when I wasn't doing well for the first time in life, couldn't handle failure because I'd never failed before, but all of that was also compounded by the experiencing Asian stereotypes. I wasn't just a gifted kid, I was also a Japanese gifted kid who had all of the Asian stereotype expectations to deal with on top of gifted kid syndrome.

And I internalized that so much! Not only did it ruin my self-esteem and sense of self-worth, it also impacted how the people around me treated me and it was awful.

I also think that one of the most painful things for me about being Asian was that I'm never an individual. When people look at me, they don't see me, they just see an Asian. I think that this is a part of white privilege that doesn't get discussed as often, but it's really important. When you're visibly a minority, you're never an individual. When you're white in America, you have the luxury of being seen as an individual. Everything I do reflects on my entire race and ethnicity, because people just see an Asian.

(And then you get white people who get super defensive when you talk about racism, and common responses are "not all white people are like that! You're just seeing me as a white person, you're not seeing me as an individual", and it's like... Cool? You just got a taste of how I feel all the time. It's institutional and systemic baybee~)

I remember a time when I was taking part in a program and I only knew two people there. So naturally I hung out with them, they were my friends! They also happened to both be Asian. We weren't hanging out because we were Asian, we just all happened to share some classes and got friendly because we didn't know anyone else in this program. Then, I heard someone refer to us as "the Asians", and I was so shook. I had a mental breakdown after I got home that day because it was so jarring and invalidating and shocking. Because I'm an individual! I have my own personality, my own identity, I have worth and so many things going on outside of my Asian American identity. I was hanging out with my friends because of a lot of other reasons, not because we were all Asian. But none of that mattered to those people. They didn't see me as an individual, they just saw me as an Asian. And that was the first time I really realized that and it was so painful.

This experience contributed to my own internalized racism, and the desire to be #not like other Asians. I had a huge fear of making Asian friends, and participating in Asian things with Asian people because it meant that people would only see me as an Asian, and not myself. And this is something that I'm still working through; I have a lot of unlearning to do still.

It's also hard because if people don't get to know you as a person, no matter what you do, you are only reinforcing stereotypes. If you do well on an exam, it's because you're Asian. If you don't do well on an exam, you're an exception, not the norm. When people look at you as nothing but an Asian, it doesn't matter who you are. All you are is a stereotype, or the rare exception and a weirdo because you don't fit the stereotype. And then people try to force you to fit into the stereotype anyway so again, it doesn't matter who you are.

And there are several other microaggression and stereotypes about being Japanese specifically that really bother me and happen quite often, but since this is already getting really long, I think that's a post for another time. Send me an ask if you're interested in hearing about those.

As a quick peek into the Japanese-specific stereotypes: the stereotype song was a thing back when I was in high school, and there's a line in it that says "I think that I love you more than a Japanese girl loves tentacle porn", so I got asked about tentacle porn a lot.

AAPI AMA 2022: Ask me anything about being Japanese!

This is a good example of how newspapers don't use non-Jōyō kanji*, found on the front page of today's (21.05.04) Mainichi. 牽制・けんせい means curbing in, containment, restraint (here the implied object is China), but 牽 isn't in the list so is rendered in kana.

払う「はらう」and 支払う「しはらう」both mean to pay but have slight differences in when they are used

払う  can be used to mean to pay but it doesn’t just mean money as it’s also when you pay/compensate for something in equal value. Also, as you’ll see in an example, it doesn’t just mean to pay but also to brush or to dust off

払わせてください

彼女はむ棲むのレッスン代を払うため、必需品をなしですませた

敷物のほこりを払って落とそう

注意を払う　To pay attention

敬意を払う    to pay respects

犠牲を払う    to pay dearly for; to sacrifice 

支払う on the other hand is used for paying with money, paying fees, paying bills, etc. You’ll see it with words like  代金、料金、授業料、家賃、給料、税金、罰金, and so on. 

彼にお金を支払わせよう

彼らは別々に支払った

彼は私たちに高い賃金を支払うことを約束した

I want to read every entry on this site! I just found it today, and it explained the BETSUNI i’ve been hearing so much in video games and couldn’t figure out!!!

Ilya Recently I found a collection of The Natural Approach study resources! It’s amazing! Its got links for learning through comprehensible input for several languages, and includes many resources I’ve mentioned before like Comprehensible Input French, Ayan Academy, Le Francais Par Le Methode Nature, Frank Method, along with stuff I hadn’t found before! 

Awesome Natural Approach - https://github.com/IvanovCosmin/awesome-natural-approach

This is a natural approach resource someone designed for japanese, which is really cool because its the first of it’s kind I’ve seen for an asian language (I would love more nature approach/comprehensible input resources for languages like japanese, chinese, korean etc). I’ve explored this site and truly it is comprehensible input if you can read kana. Its a wonderful resource and I’ve been going through it to see how much it teaches - I would be in heaven if a resource like this ultimately aims to cover as many words as Le Francais Par Le Methode Nature does. In my dream world many languages would have a resource that covers as much as that book ToT. I’m really excited by the project below, and I still would desperately love to figure out how to make a similar resource for chinese one day.

DrDru’s Lab https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html

Ilya Frank’s Reading Method (japanese - but it has several other language resources): http://english.franklang.ru/index.php/japanese/11-japanese-folk-tales

Wasabi-jpn (not a nature method resource, but it has phenomenal free lessons for japanese with audio and text and translations): https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/

DeFrancis Chinese Readers audio files (while the books are really good graded reading material, they’re old and out of print and hard to get copies of, and I highly recommend the audio files on their own - they’re clear enough to study from even without accompanying text, just like FSI’s language course audios are useful even without the accompanying text. The material is incredibly dry, but if you need tone drills, sound drills, drills of simple common words and graded listening material that gradually increases in difficulty, its a plentiful resource): http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=31539&TPN=3

Legend of Fei audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1iN411d7M6

Tian Ya Ke audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1t7sB?p=11&spm_id_from=pageDriver

Modu audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gb4y1e7z8?from=search&seid=16682226077510869656&spm_id_from=333.337.0.0

Guardian audiobook: https://music.163.com/#/djradio?id=791802378&order=2&_hash=programlist&limit=100&offset=0

Guardian audiobook (deep voice): https://fm.qq.com/show/rd002ED4aN0mYz2L__

Night by U (Bai Yu): https://www.ximalaya.com/renwenjp/42190598/

Webnovel site jjwxc (it has a LOT of webnovels, is the place a ton of danmei authors post on, also one of my favorite pingxie fanfiction writers posts their stories here. Good for keeping up to date on newer stuff, following authors, supporting authors, and finding what’s popular) https://www.jjwxc.net/

Daomubiji novel site (I don’t think it has some of the really new novels though): http://www.daomubiji.org/

Zhenhunxiaoshuo (this lovely site has a ton of danmei novels backed up, along with a ton of romance novels in general backed up, while https://www.jjwxc.net/ is the go to for keeping up with novels, buying new chapters and supporting authors, zhenhunxiaoshuo has back ups and is nice for if chapters have been censored/taken down/changed or full stories have been deleted, zhenhunxiaoshuo also has the print chapters of some novels if you’re trying to find a limited-run extra online. Also if you’re just trying to find a new danmei author or story, everything on there is solid, then you can use the title or author to go search for more. As its named for zhenhun, it seems to prioritize backing up everything by priest in particular. I’ve often gone there when looking for chapters or extras that were missing from either a print novel I owned or another site I’d been reading on. For the learners and translators - it works really well with a lot of text to audio, click dictionary, mtl tools, it has none of the weird text partly not registering/not showing up issues that some hosting sites have).

MTLnovel (I know people like to look down on mtl novels, although to be fair a lot of novels still are untranslated and mtls get used until better translations are made - and sometimes some wonderful person makes an Edited mtl to fix some glaring errors, until a better translation gets made. Well, if you have to read an MTL, I recommend this site. It hosts a LOT of webnovels, seems to use Google Translate as far as I can tell so its not awful considering I know apps like Readibu use Google Translate too - though far from ideal. Its biggest benefit though is you can make an account, then click ‘RAW’ at the top of chapters and read a parallel text chinese text with the english MTL. As a learner it means a TON of convieniently made parallel readers with the click of a button and is easier than copy/pasting each section you’re reading into some translator and looking back and forth to compare. It has each line of chinese followed by the english mtl, so its well suited for following along with an audiobook or just comparing the chinese text to the translation to figure something out. If you’re a translator and know some chinese already but use MTL as a first-pass on texts, I found this feature useful so I could quickly read the original chinese and notice glaring errors like wrong gender or the mtl totally misunderstanding a sentence/phrase. Then I could narrow in and just work more on translating those specific parts with issues, instead of either missing them by thinking the MTL was fine or wasting a lot more time on parts that read-okay when there were messier sections that needed to be worked on. I just think the ability to quickly compare the original to a line by line MTL makes it easier to comb through errors in an MTL, if you’re trying to make an edited MTL translation for people or relying on MTL to help. And again, as a learner, a lot of the less great click-dictionaries like LingQ and Readibu use Google Translate anyway, so its nice to have a site that uses it but also separates it into easier readable chunks to compare with the original. About 6 months into learning Chinese I used mtlnovel to translate 10 chapters of Silent Reading for myself, because the translation was unfinished at the time. It was a slog as a beginner but the site absolutely helped me not drown. If you’re a person who ends up interested in a lot of chinese-only novels, this site’s a nice collective resource until better person-done translations get made) https://www.mtlnovel.com/

Deepl.com (a translator. Its not perfect by any means, and I have found times when it gets things Worse than Google Translate or Baidu. But me and a few others have used this to just BULK mtl a novel that has no translation yet. Like The Wolf and The Rebel Princess’s novels. And overall, it doesn’t tend to get to many errors - it still makes the he/she mistake which is fixable, but otherwise it mostly only has issues of somewhat misunderstanding complex phrases/sentences. It rarely spits out a Really Wrong word definition, whereas Google Translate regularly spits out a Very Wrong translation for a lot of commonly used words. Also unlike Baidu Translate which seems to simplify down phrases unless you are just translating one small section at a time, DeepL tends to keep most details in its MTL instead of simplifying. It still simplifies a bit, but I think that's just a sad issue with chinese to english MTL. Basically, overall DeepL is likely to give you a very readable text with few glaring issues that would cause frustration - only the he/she and names might need fixing - and then will give few enough major errors in meaning that you’ll still retain the gist correct plot of the novel. I cannot necessarily say the same for Google Translate, so usually when I use Google Translate I also use Baidu or Yandex and compare. If you’re trying to whip up a parallel text for yourself real fast with a machine translation, I’d recommend DeepL. But if you know of a better mtl that still retains most details and doesn’t give a ton of glaring errors, please let me know.) https://www.deepl.com/translator

Baidu Translate (I highly recommend pasting in a URL and getting the whole webpage bulk translated, if you’re attempting to keep the text from being as simplified. I recommend pasting in individual sentences and paragraphs if you suspect simplifying is happening, and baidu will give you footnotes below your translation of expanded translations of various parts. I think baidu Usually is fairly good at getting the overall meaning of a translation. However baidu Really frustrates me, because it clearly has the CAPACITY to retain idioms and longer turns of phrase but instead will cut out idioms and oversimplify when it spits out a translation Bigger than only the idiom/phrase. So something like ‘stiff as a coffin’ baidu may translate to ‘scared’. You lose a lot of detail when it does that constantly. 

Translations come out like this. Baidu is more likely to retain specifically correct word translations than Google Translate - for one thing Google Translate tends to get some really common words brutally wrong and if you’re a learner you will notice - but the longer the translation, the more likely Baidu is to start cutting translations you see below in its footnotes and then turn them into simplified shorter phrases on the right hand side. If you are using Baidu to MTL before you translate further yourself, its worth comparing the actual chinese to the actual MTL it spits out and seeing what stuff it simplified. Like DeepL, Baidu occasionally struggles with longer phrases/sentences and mistranslates them, but if you break down the sentence into individual words it will handle each word fine.) https://fanyi.baidu.com/#zh/en/

Various alternate sites to find cnovels (when you can’t find a chapter somewhere else, need to translate and copy paste, etc): https://www.sto.cx/list-mbook-44-1-0.html (sto.cx seems to have a LOT including fanfictions backed up, however it has some features which sometimes break text-to-audio functions and click-dictionary functions), https://www.mengruan.com/ (mengruan has some cnovels along with translations of things like The Little Prince, Agatha Christie, etc). If you search a novel’s chinese name followed by “小说在线” in a search engine, you will find a lot of alternative sites that host said novel, if you need to search for alternatives which work correctly for whatever tools you’re using (if you’re using a click dictionary or text to speech or google translate etc).

Bilibili Comics (if you’re looking for manhua, bilibili generally hosts a TON especially the new release stuff, just change the language at the top to Chinese) https://www.bilibilicomics.com/ There are alternative manga hosting sites, but honestly webtoons and bilibili are the most reliable and are the official hosts of a lot. However if again for your needs you need an alternative, search the manhua title in chinese then “ 在线” zaixian and you will find some alternative hosts in the results that may work better for you. In general though I’ve found its easy to find the official chinese releases, and its only for finding unofficial manhua translations in english that I’ve had to dig and really look around. 

Various sites to find audio books, audio dramas (有声读物 youshengduwu and  有声读物在线 youshengduwu zaixian are your friends. Go to a search engine and search the chinese name plus one of those phrases, and you will find potential audio even if its not on one of the bigger sites - that’s how I found daomubiji audiobooks. Its worth searching youtube or bilibili first as they have a lot of audio that’s easier to find. https://music.163.com/ , https://fm.qq.com/ , https://www.ximalaya.com/ are the big 3 sites to find audiobooks specifically, and they work fine in computer and phone web browsers if you can’t download their apps in your region. Ximalaya often has official productions, and music.163 and qq have a lot of fans who make audios. https://www.missevan.com/ is a good site for finding audio dramas, as well as bilibili and youtube. Youtube is the most likely to have english subs on the audio dramas if you need them, and if you click the button below the videos on missevan - or the similar looking button on bilibili below videos -  sometimes videos have chinese captions at the bottom of the video.)

I’ve brought this book up before, and I feel like doing it again. If you are just starting to learn chinese (or japanese), you often hear people suggest remembering the characters with mnemonics. 

People will tell you 1. Read about how characters are made of ~200 radicals, those radicals may hint at meaning and/or pronunciation, those radicals make characters of which some of those characters may combine with other characters/radicals to make additional characters, and 2. Make up mnemonic stories to remember the meaning and/or pronunciation (example: “tree 木 + several 几 = machine 机”: It took several trees to provide enough wood to make the parts for the huge machine. When it was finished they had to get the giant to bring his jeep to deliver it. Here the mnemonic is using giant to indicate tone-which is what the particular book I used did, and the ‘jee’ part of jeep is to remind you roughly of the pronunciation).

You can learn characters a different way, in whatever way works best for you. Some people do best by writing characters repeatedly, some use SRS flashcard apps or paper flashcards, some need to read and look up characters over and over (me lol), some find mnemonics useful. 

I found mnemonics for sound/shape useful back when I learned hiragana and katakana, so I found the idea of using mnemonics for kanji and hanzi helpful. People often suggest Heisig’s Remember the Kanji book for japanese learners (and there’s a Remember the Hanzi version for chinese). That book does a good job of explaining radicals, and how to make up mnemonics... but you have to make the majority of the stories up yourself. Which to me, was the hardest part about using mnemonics, so I never found the Heisig books very useful.

These are the books I found tremendously useful:

Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters: (HSK Levels 1 -3) A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters - this book covers 800 common hanzi, includes a lot of common words, has HSK overlap if you happen to be studying using HSK guidelines early on (I was), explains radicals and how to make mnemonics, and includes mnemonic stories for meaning and pronunciation for every single hanzi in the book. There’s a lot of places to find free explanations of radicals, of how to make mnemonics, and of mnemonics people have made up (I highly recommend searching user made anki and memrise decks for “hanzi mnemonics” if like me you prefer premade-stories included). This book is the only thing I’ve seen so far though that includes mnemonics for the pronunciation aspect including the tone of the hanzi. As a beginner, it made it so much easier to just zoom through and read through the hanzi, get to a point I could recognize a few hundred within a month and several hundred within 3 months, and remember how to pronounce them. Including the tone, which was so important as a beginner not used to remembering tones and keeping track of tones in a language. The book also covers so much more than the Heisig books, in that it actually makes a story for all the hanzi it covers. Once I was through reading the book (just reading the next chapter and glancing-back at some old pages each week, I did not SRS study this), I was good at making up my own stories like the book, and was able to move on to learning 2000 common words, and reading with a click dictionary, and I didn’t have issues remembering hanzi or figuring out how to remember new ones I saw. If I really struggled to make a story up (and needed one), then after I was done with the book I looked up “hanzi mnemonics” online and found other people’s examples then just added a pronunciation bit if I needed to. I think this book is just so easy to use, does so much work for the learner and explains decently, matches up to HSK well so people don’t have to change their study materials greatly, matches up to a lot of common words (most of the 2000 words I learned later used mostly these hanzi I’d learned from the book), and explains how to break down looking at a character and making up a useful mnemonic story. Heisig’s books explain that too, but make you do a lot more of the work yourself which can be time consuming, and happened to demotivate me and I kept quitting back when I used Heisig’s books (though for people who prefer making their own study materials they may find the Tuttle book annoying and Heisig’s books more useful).

Tuttle Read Japanese Today - back when I started learning japanese, this book is how I learned my first 400 kanji. This book does NOT teach with mnemonics. It teaches some pronunciation but does not use mnemonics, just states what the pronunciations are. Where this book shines, is getting a beginner unfamiliar with characters used to them, used to seeing them as words/concepts/symbols, used to breaking them down into their components, and able to distinguish and remember them. If a beginner is struggling to see characters as parts, rather than random lines/shapes, or struggling to remember what characters mean, this is a good introductory book. 

Learn to Read in Japanese, Volumes 1-3 - these books are made by japaneseaudiolessons.com (a site which provides completely free audio lessons and accompanying pdf transcript and grammar book). These books succeed where Heisig’s failed me. These books provide mnemonic stories for the meaning of kanji, and for the pronunciations. If you learn well with mnemonics, then these books have stories pre-made for every kanji within them. The 3 volumes contain 1528 kanji, which is a solid number, and like the Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters book above, once you learn so many kanji this way it becomes easier to adapt to do it yourself if you run into more kanji while reading on your own. These books go even farther, and also give you practice sentences to read. If your options are Heisig’s books or these, I’d recommend these if you prefer mnemonics for meaning and sound already made for you. However, these are the only books on this list that may not be in a library/online for free. So if price is an issue, all of the other books listed are easy to find for free in regular libraries, college/university libraries, ebook libraries, and book download sites. These specific books are about 10-20 a piece, about 60 dollars for all 3. 

Chinese Characters: Learn & Remember 2,178 Characters and Their Meanings by Alan Hoenig - a great book that contains pre-made mnemonic stories for 2,178 hanzi meanings. There are no mnemonics for pronunciation, but the pronunciation is visible in pinyin next to each hanzi entry. Between this book and Heisig’s, I prefer this one because it has premade all the mnemonics for you. So if you need/prefer premade mnemonic stories to remember, this is a cheap easy reference. There’s also free mnemonic stories out there if you search “anki hanzi mnemonics” or “hanzi mnemonics” etc. I ended up buying this book because I liked having a book reference around, I study best with books. Like most of the books above, this is cheap to buy and floating around as a free pdf in a ton of places. This book is a bit harder to find in libraries though, and sometimes it’s not on bigger sites and you need to look for it used on Thriftbooks/Abebooks etc if you want a physical copy.