@Syphus may be very matter of fact, but this wasn’t particularly rude. Your response, however, was a completely over the top personal attack.
Yeah, I always thought that was awful, unnecessarily confusing terminology. What’s wrong with ichidan and godan? That’s what you see when you look up a word in most dictionaries anyway. I think it’s a case of trying to make things more “beginner friendly” but just making it harder.
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First of all, I don’t agree with the tone that the responses that @Syphus had in this thread (particularly the last comment especially since there are several users who have openly admitted to being on the spectrum but haven’t had “outbursts” on the forum). However, the aim perhaps was to point out that your initial comment about what works for you wasn’t really solid advice for the OP because it hinges entirely on your own personal studying experience. And although your technique may have served you well, there are outliers due the amount of homophones in Japanese. So if the OP is a beginner (I’m unsure of their level, for the record), your technique would only further confuse them. But I’m pretty sure you’ve gleaned that fact from the responses that have followed.
In the future let’s try to abide by the community guidelines, which include civil discourse and edifying discussion.
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Exactly! When I first learnt the types of verbs, I learnt them as Ichidan and Godan. Using る and う is an impractical mess that’s difficult to get an understanding of and just leads to inconvenience in the long term.
It’s #4474 on this list of common Japanese words.
In other words, pretty darn common. You might want to broaden the type of content you consume. Newspapers, novels, and serious discussions on current events are a large part of any language.
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Yomichan gave up after 4 られs and convinced itself it was in ます form.
A few months ago I tried to make a tongue twister about all the かえる words, but I’m not creative enough to come up with something good. Would make for a fun forum topic though…
申し訳ありません、Syphilis-殿. STDs deserve respect.
All you did was pick at every tiny thing I said. You didn’t actually provide a rational reason as to why anything I said couldn’t work. Ugh really dude, I’ve only done Genki 1 and 2, in addition to my other exposure to the language. I took N3 two weeks ago. So yeah I’m not going to know every fucking obscure word but the point is it IS NOT an average everyday word and you’re just trying to flaunt your knowledge and feel better than everyone else while you look down from up high. I never said no one uses it, I said it’s not common. Maybe you wanna work on your reading comprehension. And utilize is far more common and useful than some random humble verb, that is such a stupid comparison, not to mention I’ve been exposed to a wide range of anime and music and studied at university with textbooks. But yeah sure, it’s just the same as looney toons.
Autistic? Hahahaha realllllllllyyy mature joke. So classy and intelligent. Well hey, in another thread you made a joke about assisted suicide so that’s just the kinda person you are. Autism is a mental disorder, not an insult and suicide is not a joke. I have friends who attempted suicide. I have attempted suicide. Oh it was reallyyy funny when I overdosed on those pills, hahaha funniest moment of my entire life, what a joke it was! And drinking charcoal in the hospital afterwards and vomiting it up, oh that was even funnier. And spending time in a psychiatric hospital, well that was just the most hilarious experience of my whole life.
And hey, for the record, I do have autism. And depression, and generalised anxiety disorder, and social anxiety disorder and borderline personality disorder! So using these words against me is not an insult. I am different from most people and most people are shit so you know what I’m fine with being different. I’ve been through more shit in the past year than the majority of people will in a lifetime. And I’m sick of dealing with shitty people who will never understand true pain and are determined to piss off other people and make the world worse as if it weren’t already bad enough, just for their own entertainment. I’m utterly overjoyed that even scum such as me could temporarily entertain you with my mental illness. I hope it gave you some relief from your undoubtedly dull and pathetic life. youtu.be/T9-OWfS2Vy4?t=9m16s
I don’t even care. I can study without this site. Maybe I should just go back to hello talk and hinative- people on those apps knew less but they also were friendly and genuinely wanted to learn and help other people to learn, not talk down to people who know less and act like arrogant dicks.
For what its worth, I have some input on hearing words in the wild before you actually learn them. Not going to take a side on this, just wanted to mention some things.
No matter how much anime or music you listen to, you won’t be a very good judge of how common a word is if you have never learned it. Our brain tends to pay more attention to the words we do know and, causing for confirmation bias. I watched anime for years and never picked up on some words that I see a heck ton nowadays.
If OP came out of this knowing anything, it would be that Japanese grammar is a very touchy subject.
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The best part of this is that nothing in the original Syphus reply was rude. But he calls someone out for a half-baked hunch and this is the response.
I felt the “Also I think いる might break your brain.” was pretty rude. The other guy may have had an overreaction to it, but it’s not like it was completely out of nowhere.
Syphus in general comes off really aggressive, and the autism remark was seriously not cool.
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I don’t know enough to make my own judgement but catagorizing them as iru/eru and regular/irregular seems to make a little more sense. There aren’t that many exceptions either way. My native language has loads.
The best part of this is that nothing in the original Syphus reply was rude.
I don’t believe that you don’t see how Syphus’s terse, dry humor in that post could be misinterpreted as stand-offish. Obviously the other guy’s response was blown way out of proportion, but sometimes you have a bad day and a bit of playful sass like “Also I think いる might break your brain” can seem pretty aggressive and condescending.
But he calls someone out for a half-baked hunch and this is the response.
He definitely deserved to get called out because most of the justification for his theory is contradicted by tons of examples already pointed out like 居る 要る 掛ける 翔る or 帰る 変える but it’s concerning to me that no one seems to have even tried to consider whether he had any valid points. For instance, it seems that the majority of verbs ending in -りる are in fact ichidan. The Ichidan / Godan distinction definitely seems mostly arbitrary but there might be little patterns like that which some people could find helpful.
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Ur talking about the most MaLiCiOus person on the forums here
Also to actually reply to the actual topic at hand…
You’re not wrong about the memorization thing, but I just wanted to mention to OP that it won’t be as hard as it sounds. From reading/listening you’ll begin to know which one just “feels” right, which makes memorizing it easier.
Just from all the anime I watched before learning, I could tell you いない means “to not be” and 要りません means “to not need”. The two have just stuck in my brain for some reason, and now I could tell you which is 五段 and which is 一段 just by looking at the way they conjugate in this one example. The beauty of it is that if you see it conjugated once, thats all you need to be able to say if its 一段 or 五段.
This is part of what I was trying to get at originally, that hearing words a lot allows you to remember either which type it is, or a conjugated form of it, from which you can tell which type it is. And that even with a word you haven’t formally learnt yet, you may know it consciously or subconsciously and because of that you can guess what type it is because it will “feel right”.
To everyone in this thread, I apologise for the way I acted yesterday. Against my better judgement, I wrote a ridiculous over the top response in the morning after not sleeping at all (after getting home late from a tiring night too). I have trouble interpreting other people’s words and emotions, especially in a completely written context like this. On top of that I tend towards strong emotional reactions and what other people view as overreactions because of the illnesses I mentioned before. In this case it was an overreaction and was uncalled for so I’m sorry to Syphus and anyone else I bothered. But the original response and the second response came across as both rude and aggressive. In any case both responses were condescending and there’s better ways of talking to someone who knows less than you. Other people in this thread alone have proven that, by giving a polite and reasoned explanation of why my method shouldn’t be relied on.
Levels on this site aren’t necessarily a good indication of someone’s knowledge or length of study- it’s possible to reach level 60 in a year and at the same time, someone who started learning 20 years ago could have just discovered this site. I have only done 2 years of formal study- obviously my knowledge and length of study is less than most people here, and even in my class most people have been learning for 10 or more years. So yes there’s a lot I don’t know and I’ve only been learning for a short time but despite that I’ve always managed to get good results, even with severe illness. I’ve done better than the majority of people who have been studying that much longer than me and I do think in a different way so I either have natural ability and pick it up easily or some of my ways of approaching things have merit. That sounds arrogant but it’s true. My academic ability is basically the only thing I’ve got going for me- you’ve all witnessed my shitty personality (though I’m not usually this bad I swear).
This is a place to learn and we all have different strengths and knowledge that we can use to help each other. I’d rather share an idea I have on the chance it may help someone else, even if it may be stupid or wrong, than not say anything out of fear of it being evident that I don’t know everything. No one would learn anything in that case. Personally I thought that other people may not have thought of things the way I did and that it may be helpful, that’s why I shared it in the first place. In my experience so far my approach has worked- I haven’t gotten to the level yet where it doesn’t work- but I never claimed it would work in every single situation or that it was foolproof anyway. But there’s obviously cases where it’s the opposite of what I’d expect and because of that it can’t be relied on.
The autism comment though, that was uncalled for and undoubtedly offensive. Mental disorders are serious, real, and incredibly painful- they’re not insults. And on top of that, people who use autism as an insult don’t even understand what it is. Jokes about mental disorders or suicide are never appropriate, unless you’re making a joke about something you yourself have experienced. People with mental illnesses are in general treated poorly, viewed as other, as freaks, as abnormal, as incapable, as violent, as bad people, outcasts, misunderstood. People want to forget we exist because we’re an inconvenience to them; a burden. Even in this thread it’s evident- no one has responded to what I said there because they either didn’t care, didn’t know what to say or it made them uncomfortable to be confronted by the fact I am ill and have attempted suicide. At best people with mental disorders receive sub-standard (compared to physical illnesses) treatment and at worst we’re stripped of our belongings and rights and locked up. And then there’s the thousands of people who end up taking their lives after seeking help because they are not taken seriously and don’t receive proper treatment. These are things that happen daily even in first world countries. And most people don’t know these things- they get to ignore this reality, living in blissful ignorance, all the while making dismissive and disparaging comments towards us and using our illnesses and existences as mere jokes and insults. If that’s still funny to you then go right ahead and continue, but no, I’m never going to take such comments well.
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@ab6uqd60e, categorizing either as “irregular” isn’t right. There are 2 sets of regular verbs, and a few exceptions to those rules which are irregular.
baader-meinhof phenomenon.
You’re going to see it everywhere now. 
I don’t live in Japan so it’s rare for me to see any Japanese outside of Daiso/Japanese on t shirts because it’s ‘trendy’ 
even though it usually is nonsense- like ‘no photos’ translated as 写真がありません (I mean literally it makes sense but it doesn’t match the real meaning or tone of the English) and ‘do the impossible’ translated as 不可能にする. I’ll take your point though that it’s common and you were right earlier in the thread when you said I should use a wider variety of study materials. Part of the joy of studying with music/anime is that it doesn’t feel like studying but then real world things are harder to understand…
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Yea but that’s not a song or an anime, which is where we all know real Japanese comes from.
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It’s a little-known fact that the Japanese language actually ceases to be real Japanese the instant it’s used in music or anime. On the other hand, the language used in ero games is 100% authentic real Japanese. Not to mention highly tasteful and useful. Quoting an eroge in ordinary everyday situations is guaranteed to have a bad end good result.
But hey, maybe the best way to learn is by having everything spoonfed to you by a class/textbook/website/app and never engaging with any outside materials that you don’t already 100% understand. For an example of how useless and fake the Japanese in song lyrics is, here’s a selection of words from my favourite song, complete with JLPT level off Jisho. ‘Common’ words are bold.
taught in Genki
No level: 迷う N1: 叶う N3: 願い 胸 勇気 N4: 夢 壊す N5: 言葉
not taught in Genki
No level: 灯す 魔法 呪文 奇跡 不思議
N1: 滅びる 欲深い 憧れ 儚い 闇 怯える
N2: 瞳 砕く 捉える 囁く
N3: 愛 超える 望む 頼る 記憶 太陽 輝く 影 命
N4: 光
I learnt the majority of words in this song before I started learning Japanese at all. Just through listening to the song and reading through the translation and figuring out which word was which. Many of these words I wouldn’t have learnt until much later on, if at all, without listening to music. And this is just one song. The Japanese in songs and anime is just as legitimate and real as Japanese in any other context. Anyone who thinks you can’t learn Japanese through music or anime is frankly an idiot.There is no one way or right way to learn Japanese. The only wrong way to learn Japanese is to not learn at all.
Everyone has different end goals for learning Japanese- some want to understand video games, some want to be able to have casual conversations with friends, some want to pass N1, some want to be able to live and work in Japan, others want to be able to understand song lyrics or watch anime without subtitles. All of these goals are going to take different methods and different amounts and types of vocabulary and grammar.
Most people have some area they know a lot about. You can either help and encourage newer people in your field or you can disparage and discourage them. Maybe you get to enjoy feeling superior but in the end it doesn’t make you smarter or better or kinder than anyone else. I could say to some beginner guitarist- “You only know the major scale? Well then, you’re going to love bitonality. It’s a key feature of Bartok’s violin duets, one of the most performed chamber works there is.” Would it be fair, considering I’ve got a decade more experience than them and a music degree? No. Would it be helpful or encouraging to them? No, because I was rude and didn’t bother to explain what bitonality is, who Bartok is, or why on earth they should care. Would it even be relevant to them? Probably not since they’re a guitarist, it’s not at their level, chamber music itself accounts for a fraction of all music and bitonal music is so rare that they’ll probably never end up hearing or playing any. And maybe all they were ever interested in playing was pop songs. They’ll probably come out of this interaction angry with me and lacking confidence in their own knowledge and skills.
I’ve apologised for my comments and made an effort to have a reasonable discussion. You, on the other hand, haven’t apologised for anything you said, including your distasteful autism comment and you’re making more unhelpful comments that don’t contribute to the discussion at hand. Don’t you have better things to do? Move on.
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