April 6th (Calendar Post)
Bookclub friday let’s go~
からかい上手の高木さん => 12 pages (12 min)
それでも歩は寄せてくる => 15 pages (12 min)
ゆるキャン△ => 9 pages (35 min)
Flying Witch => 24 pages
Some fun panels from today:
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Haha I wonder whether that’s because people are already starting to place orders as it seems to be the next pick for the Intermediate club 
Bookclubs moving the markets again, it seems 
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Woo! I voted! It was a hard choice, there are so many great options 
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Learning a new language is never linear. Unfortunately.
I can’t speak much for my Japanese, but when I was getting myself to fluency from a good base (the base I got from 1-2 English lessons a week over many years in obligatory schooling), there were times it all felt so bad.
I remember I was speaking to some English people and I had to say volcano for some reason or other. Turns out, that I’d internalized the w sound for English so well, that I basically said wolcano. And they pointed it out, so after that I practiced until I got the v sound down right. Swedish doesn’t have a w sound, just a v sound we use for both.
Not to mention even to this day, I don’t naturally do the English j sound correctly (meaning I do have some trouble with certain Japanese sounds too), because to me it sound like its like dj (kinda). Such emphasize on the sound that I just can’t figure out, and even when I try to practice a j-word in isolation (say juice) I’m not sure I get it right. (Maybe I need to get someone to explain to me what to do with my mouth to get the right sound, although by now I’ve mostly just gone *shrug* and figure it is part of my charm )
All this too say, that yes, language learning is up and down. Eventually you get to a place where most things are pretty smooth, and maybe you just have some idiosyncrasies. (WOOT, I spelled that word correctly on first try. Holy moly.) I still use singular verb tenses for plural pronoun quite a lot, because Swedish doesn’t have a difference between how many is doing something. (SEE! I wrote “is” for how many… I decided to leave it in even though I noticed this time. Is this irony? Or just funny? I can never remember what irony actually is…)
Anyways, there you got a story or two or three.
Side note: If I seem like I’m all relaxed about this, I haven’t always been. I had to make conscious decisions to let go of the need to be perfect. And every time I learn of a new little idiosyncrasy I have to make that decision again, because I’d like to say/write everything correctly, but then I wouldn’t enjoy my life so much. One thing I still struggle with is picking the right pronunciation of soup vs soap, I always have to sound it out in my head first to make sure I don’t pick the wrong one for the situation. It can lead to some hilarity, but still feels very embarrassing if I do. (Basically my brain seem to have mixed up those two words pronunciation so it doesn’t know on an instinctual level which one goes with which word.)
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Language and pronunciation
I never really realized this! When I read that, I immediately thought that I always use the pronunciation of the j to get more insights on whether a person might be Swedish - and then I read on 
I’ve become quite interested in trying to explain pronunciation (on a hobby level) as I have a few Japanese friends who are in need of those explanations for English and German. So let’s see: For me, when I pronounce the Swedish j, the tip of my tongue is down and the middle is up, while when I pronounce the English j, the tip of my tongue is up. It’s actually very similar to a snake-hiss sound - can you do that? and then just add voicing to that, but keep the tongue in the same position. For me that alters something in my throat (cannot explain though, sort of like it widens a bit?) but the tongue position remains the same.
I didn’t know that! I thought that European languages generally(*) have singular and plural, and Swedish feels to me that it is closely connected to German and English, which are two languages that both have singular and plural tenses.
(*) I know there are exceptional languages (like e.g. Basque or Welsh, I think?) that are not connected to Latin/Germanic and I cannot speak for them.
It’s amazing that you got to that!
(Incidentally, a former boss of mine used to say that you only learn through mistakes, which is a really tough premise, but for me it very much increased my acceptance of my own mistakes.)
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Hello everyone. I’m still alive.
But like I expected I couldn’t say the same about my streak. Homepost 36/61 (missing 1 like for the 25 
)
At least I could keep up with all my book clubs. This list roughly shows what I did for the last 2 weeks.
- Saga 4 chapters
- Yoru Cafe 2 chapters
- Slam Dunk 5 Chapters
- Lots and lots of Todai on the move
- Some browsing Booklive free section.
Sadly I didn’t find time to advance my textbooks this time around. I’m thinking of dropping the BBC for the next pick and use the roughly one day a week I get from dropping it to work on the textbooks. I already reduced my Wanikani forum time by quite a bit to make enough time for all my Japanese learning. It takes up roughly 1-2 hours each day for me which is quite a lot given all the other things I do.
It doesn’t seem like the next intermediate club will be one I’m interessted in so I can pick something from my own shelf again after this challenge.
I probably won’t adjust much for the remainder of the challenge but after I’m thinking about reducing my reading time slightly, trying to roughly half my Anki time and supplement it with more textbook study. I’m often stumbling over N2 grammar which I look up again and again, just because I haven’t gotten around to those grammar books yet -.-. If I find the reduced reading time doesn’t produce enough useful vocabulary that I want to learn, I might even break open my SKM 語彙 book.
Honestly I’m looking forward to the weather being so good that I can chill at some lake and take my manga there to read. Always feels the most effortless to me. Probably because I don’t like to surf much on my smartphone and therefore there is no Wanikani forum to take up my time.
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Days 26-36
Wow, hello, long time no see, how y’all doing?
It’s been an interesting and busy af Golden Week. I’ve doing a lot of irl stuff like visiting museums and restaurants. For about half of Golden Week, I did a great job of actually reading manga. The other half, not so much. I did do a lot of reading at the museums though along with some needed katakana practice with menus. I’d say that I did so much reading in those situations that I’d count it for this challenge. Yesterday I had to go back to work and accidently forgot to read before falling asleep at an actually decent hour. I also didn’t read the day before but that was from exhaustion 
- ジョジョの奇妙な冒険
30-106
Tarkus’s speech is so much easier to understand than Bluford.
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That’s certainly possible, although I don’t know if it’s specifically a Global listing or if it’s just that, since it’s one of Amazon’s listings it can also be shipped globally (which is why I called it such), so it could also be that people in Japan are buying them, too. It’s also the source material of a new, popular anime!
Well, I’m just glad I managed to get it cheaply elsewhere. I really wanted to read it along with the club
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Oh, I didn’t realize that the anime is new. Well, in that case, it’s probably rather due to that and not due to the book club I guess
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May 7th!
Just a little bit of reading today as I’m travelling. I read 6 pages of ふしぎねこのきゅーちゃん which is great for reading when you don’t have a lot of time since its a 4-koma where you can generally read each page as a standalone story.
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More language and pronunciation
Probably because we do get taught fairly well how to make the w sound since it is so very prevalent in English. Where, were, what, who, etc. So not realizing Swedish doesn’t have w sound maybe isn’t so strange. Also, try to find a word in Swedish with a w. 
(I can only come up with some last names that have w. And as mentioned, they’re all just pronounced as if they were v:s.)
This does help, thank you. I’d have to spend some time with a native English speaker to check, but the j-words are sounding more correct to my ear. Well, to my ear and the inside of my head, which is why I need someone else to confirm.
Swedish is a Germanic language. I wouldn’t call Swedish closely connected to English. There is a lot of overlapping grammar and such, but I’d say that comes more from both English and Swedish taking from the same sources, rather than them affecting each other directly. (Goes into history too, but anyway…)
Just an example, the verb “to be” in Swedish is “är”. And lets conjugate it (I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they):
Jag är
Du är
Han/Hon/Den är
Vi är
Ni är
De är
(I had to go searching online for what our plural you is called. Shows how much that is used nowadays. )
This is why my brain naturally don’t even consider whether something is plural or not when conjugating verbs. Unlike Japanese though, we do have plural form for nouns. Anka/ankor, bil/bilar, kräm/krämer, fönster/fönster, mus/möss, etc. (-ar, -or, and -er are the most common ones, the ones that go same/same or change vowels and such would probably be called exceptions.)
Of course, let us not mention the Swedish version of a/an (en/ett) which maybe have guidelines, but no rules; you learn by ear. That one is killer when trying to sound native.
Somewhere along the line, I had to decide how important it was to me to sound native. I always try to write correctly (singular/plural verb forms are probably my most common mistake), but I’ve never felt like I needed to sound native. However, if I get to fix my wonky j-sound, I’ll be happy, because it is probably the only one that bothers me. (Because it makes people do a double take the first time, they get used to the way I say it and can understand, but I’d rather skip that step.)
This is very true. I remember more high level math when I had a course on that. The parts I understood best, where those I’d made mistakes on while practicing, because it taught me how it really worked.
I find it sad that school teaches that mistakes are bad (tests being the main culprit here, and any assignment you can’t redo). Because mistakes and failures are not failings of us as people. It doesn’t ruin our future (except potentially in school, don’t get me started… 
).
Also perfection in language overall isn’t possible. Natives sometimes don’t sound native. They stumble on words, forget words and sometimes construct their sentences like they’ve never used the language before. We all do.
My Swedish ways that show up in my speech, sentence patterns, the way I speak (Swedish goes up and down a lot while we speak, there is a reason many call it quite melodic); this makes my expression my own, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are times it has to be curbed to facilitate communication, but I see my roots as an asset, not a liability.
And now I’m off on another tangent. #sorrynotsorry
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language, pronunciation, fluency
This is such an important thing to realize! I only figured it out after becoming fluent in Dutch, because I was wondering about the fact that I still forgot words sometimes (and things like: once I had a slip of the tongue and dropped a big fat American R randomly in the middle of a sentence, when normally my accent could easily pass for Dutch.) Now I notice every time I make a mistake in English and internally I go: HAH!
I appreciate your tangents!! 
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Singular/plural
There was talk about singular/plural in the Scandinavikanian thread some time ago. Basically just wanted to share this image although you’ve covered the topic already. cc @NicoleIsEnough
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Tanuki Den (aka Homepost): Date 20220507 
Tanuki Scroll XXXVII: 酔っ払いの化け物退治 
Read today’s hyakumonogatari, about a samurai who becomes banished as a ronin because he gets drunk one night and punches his superior. In need of a job (and more sake) he wanders round town until he stumbles upon that the emperor is looking for some monster exterminators to get rid of some pesky monsters in a temple. He says he’ll get rid of the monsters, provided he can be paid first so he can get some sake (and they actually agree to this).
So, now that he has the money he naturally goes out to hunt the monsters… drink lots and lots of sake. He passes out in the temple and is awoken by a big Onyudo, the ronin greets the Onyudo and tells him how famous he is for being a big scary monster. This flatters the Onyudo and he starts to show off by transforming into all sorts of things like a princess, tiger, kappa… the ronin is then like, “betcha can’t turn into something small like an umeboshi!”
To prove a point the Onyudo transforms into a tasty little umeboshi, and the ronin, knowing that nothing else goes better with sake than a umeboshi-snacc, munches him up.
Japanese found in the tall grass
New Things
ぶらぶら ー Swinging to and fro; wandering; roaming; idly; leisurely
Places
三十三間堂「さんじゅうさんげんどう」ー A Buddhist temple in Higashiyama, Kyoto
Reply
I had this problem too! But in reverse 
When I was learning Swedish I found it pretty confusing that J’s did not sound like the J’s I was used to. Like how Juice wasn’t JEW-ss but YUU-ss. Seemed to be easier if I heard the word before I knew how it was spelt, knowing that a J was hiding in the word seemed to throw me off, like djur… I would never guess it’d be spelt like that after hearing it, and sjukhuset, sjö… got easier after I got used to it, but it really threw me off at first.
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It’s probably a little bit of both. I’m sure it became a book club suggestion (and practical shoo-in) because the anime’s currently airing
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Finished reading that Shinymas event earlier today. My favorite part of the last chapter was when Kaho was giving speech, saying good points about everyone and when it came to Chiyoko this is what she had to say
With that event done, I started on the next Hokura event. In this one, they are doing a web drama about some delinquents that have taken over the school. The style of speech they use in the drama is a bit different than normal SoL stuff so its a little more lookup heavy but first chapter was funny seeing Kaho with a “delinquent” way of talking.
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May 7th
・薬屋のひとりごと (86% → 88%)
Read half of chapter 29.
@Naphthalene The case of the mysterious bamboozle sentence is now unmystified. Thank you~ 
SleepingSnout hehe, good one 
Random: I’m very curious how prepared I’m going to be for my exam next week. Might have spent a bit too much time preparing for the previous exam but it was worth it. Reading might have to take a break, we’ll see!
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Swedish is a mess too :joy:
Ah, yeah. Sjö, sjukhus, all the sj words. I bet you had trouble figuring out how to spell schysst, especially since Swedes can’t even agree on how to spell it (jysst? sjysst? or some other combination? My Swedish teacher back when I was in school didn’t seem entirely sure what would be the right way. Maybe it has been settled since then, but I spell it schysst). How about kyrka? (That k is German so depending on your other language knowledge maybe that was fine. (Assuming English is your first language.))
Oh, this made me think of the tongue twister:
Sju sjuka sjömän på skeppet Shanghai etc. Adds another fun one: sk as in skeppet. But then you have skopa. Like how even…
I like to complain about English, and it is a pronunciation and spelling mess due to historically following different rules (changing the spelling to fit the English pronunciation, keeping original spelling but pronounce it in a English way, not to mention how pronunciations have changed over time but maybe not the spelling); but I am also aware that Swedish have some of that too.
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I don’t think I ever saw this written or ever had to write it, thankfully The K (like in kyrka) sound I didn’t find too awkward, K’s weird in English anyway so it being similar to a SH didn’t seem too out of place.
The hardest ones for me are the HJ sound like in hjord or hjul, never felt like I could get the hang of it. And, kinda specific this one, but I knew someone called Mårta and I could not get that the “-rta” part at all, I thought it’d just be like Martha in English but with an å… but no, it’s some kinda chth noise that I can’t make. Thankfully that one name seemed to be the only time I had to try and make that noise.
Also, how a lot of words end in: er, ar, or - because of my accent, when these are in English this is the same noise (an UH sorta noise), so trying to making them sound distinguishable was a bit difficult. Also also, knowing when something is ETT or EN, that is just… no.
Honestly, most European-stemmed languages seem to have really out-there pronunciations (and grammar) for no real reason other than “Oh it’s always been like that cos some guy did it like that back in the 1600s, now no one can agree on it and we can’t be bothered to change it”.
I’m just glad that Japanese pronunciation is what it says it is.
(Oh yeah, English is my first language, forgot to mention that)
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Swedish discussion
If you still have trouble with hjul, hjord, etc. It probably wouldn’t be noticeable if you just went for the pronunciation with just a j sound. (Obviously those are problematic, but hj is basically j sound with maybe a little bit extra that is barely noticeable.) Although I don’t know if that is just my dialect. I’m from Stockholm and while we pride ourselves on being closest to rikssvenska (dialect-less Swedish); we really have quite a bit of dialect.
Funnily enough, when I went to write hjord, I wrote gjord istället which made me realize gj is also kinda the same sound. Although that is pronounced more like hjort (which is another word when spelled like that).
Side note: Stockholmska actually pronounces är (am/is/are) more like just the letter e. We be weird.
We’ve basically let our languages evolve without restriction (or temporary restrictions while not also applying them retro-actively). Should also be noted that at times nobles vs commoners have spoken different languages. There was this trend all over Europe for all nobles to speak French (at least at court). Not to mention trade had to be made somehow, and English wasn’t the international language back in history.
It is a language soup with far too many chefs, and many European languages feel the effects.
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