Oh how I loathe you 年中

部屋 is a much more common word, so every time I see 部室 I do a double take and have to look again to make sure I read it right. :laughing:

Grammar helps with those. 大きい is an い-adjective, so it’s used to modify nouns. To change an い-adjective to a noun, you replace い with さ. Hence 大きさ is a noun. You can think of it as going from “big” to “bigness”, but nobody says “bigness” so it’s translated as “size” instead.

大した is a pre-noun adjectival. That basically means it can modify nouns like an い-adjective, but can’t be conjugated or put at the end of a sentence. You’ll still have to memorize the exact meaning, but hopefully knowing that it’s used to modify nouns helps you narrow it down.

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yeah i still mess this up tbh

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人 is a quantum mechanical kanji that exists as a superposition of several eigenstates - じん and にん - not collapsing to either pronunciation until you hit enter. and get it wrong. every single time.

oh you think it’s にん this time? it’s not when you hit enter. the word comes up again the next day? try to be clever, type じん. nope, the universe wants you to suffer, it’s back to にん again…

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I like these ones. I know ookii and ookisa no problem

But then I always think ‘oo sh!t a’ with the other. That’s how I remember it though. It’s great to have a big poop!

<don’t know if we can swear on here. but it is taishita!>

I actually teach kids, and a few months ago I was typing (we’re all online distance learning) in math about how the ‘…numbers shift along the place value line…’ but I guess I was too fast and missed the f in shift. Just heard these little gasps from my 10 year olds…

What is… oh. OOOOOOOPPS!

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That aside, you can notice that した is the past/completed form of する, and often enough, kanji that come before する (without any other accompanying kana) are usually read with their on’yomi. However, if you don’t know which is the on’yomi, then this might be confusing, so I don’t know if it helps.

Would it help if I said that 室 generally appears in compounds, and almost always indicates a room with a specific purpose (e.g. 寝室, しんしつ=bedroom, literally ‘sleeping room’)? That’s the reason it can never just be ‘room’. 室 on its own is ‘room’, yes, but it’s more typically ‘room with a specific purpose’.

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For nin and jin, I try to associate it either with a ninja or genie. Ryourinin is a ninja with mad cooling skills. Henjin is a goofy genie… And such.
For tai and Dai, chuu and juu, chi and ji… I usually try to come up with some mnemonic on the spot. Brain usually makes it stick. Eventually :joy:

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Can’t remember that 通 is read つう. Keep answering つ.

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Funny you should ask because it is one I struggled with too. I finally have in my brain. Now, it’s 作る (to make) the reading is つく pronounced skudu. I want to always use jukugo on this one. :crazy_face:

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It’s not pronounced skudu, actually (except by Scooby-Doo). The “ru” sound in Japanese is not the same as the “ru” sound in English, but the closest transliteration is “tsukuru”.

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For 通 it helps to look at the compound words. It helped in my case :slight_smile:

Out of curiosity, where does the “skudu” come from?

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Slightly sideways topic- songs or video clips like that really help me. But I don’t know any Jpop. How did you find that? I would love songs or tvshow clips or anime for all the wanikani vocab. Suggestions?

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I’ve been into Japanese music for a while. I saw that video when it first came out, and that part of the song stuck in my head. I guess if you just search around YouTube for j-videos with subtitles, you should be able to find some good stuff. I’ve heard j-dramas are especially helpful, but I don’t know any of those.

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I dont know why but I keep mixing these two up in my reviews:

使用
作用

I think 使用 is use and 作用 is action but I probably even got them wrong here because I didn’t check :woman_shrugging:

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I love you for this. I’m pretty sure I will never again have trouble with 年中.

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There’s a grammar point I’ve recently picked up that explains this.

You can use “(time period)中” generally to say that something happens within that time period. This doesn’t have to be a formal period like a minute or year, it can also be “while I was in class” or whatever. But there are two ways to pronounce the kanji and they have different meanings.

“chuu” means that the thing happens sometime within the time period.
“juu” means that the thing happens throughout the entire time period.

The definition WK uses is the juu version, so they teach that reading. But they don’t teach the grammar point - or if they do, I missed it way back when - so it seems like a weird definition and weird rendaku, when it’s really just a standard instance of 中 that you don’t understand yet because you’re only thinking “within/inside”.

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Pretty much all kanji.

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I just got 一日 for the first time in a while and tried 「ひつか」。I think I’ve cleared all the other “number-day” combinations, but I never seem to remember 「いちにち」despite how simple it is

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If you don’t know it already:

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OMG! How did I live without this?? I’m at level 58! Why oh why didn’t I look at that list before…

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