The golden rule in Japanese: All Rules Have Exceptions, Including This One.
4 Likes
I think that’s your catch phrase at this point. 
3 Likes
I believe it also lines up better with traditional Japanese classifications:
No, I think you’re right, because 一段 is actually split into 下一段活用 (ending in える) and 上一段活用 (ending in いる). That’s literally how they’re classified. You can look it up in monolingual dictionaries. (PS, the readings for 下 and 上 are a little weird here: you say しも and かみ.)
I remember reading some book that said that at some point, you’re likely to be able to ‘feel’ that it would be wrong for a いる・える verb to be godan. So far, I’ve found that’s true. You just need enough exposure, because like you said, most of these things are very common words.
4 Likes
That tends to be the case regardless of the rule or even the language, actually!
Not very related to the conversation, but just an interesting little tidbit. As I understand, these things usually happen precisely because these words are so frequently used, and therefore both more likely to change naturally (because mistakes sneak in and stick around for words you might use use multiple times a day) and more resistant to change along with modifications in overarching language rules (because people are used to the “old” way and have difficulty changing).
3 Likes
Yeah, somehow I imagine the Japanese government declaring that all these exceptions are now ichidan wouldn’t go well. 
1 Like
Come to think of it, does WaniKani ever teach those readings? They’re kinda useful to know, especially when it comes to place names.
I don’t think so. Which is crazy because people are always saying how wanikani is “aLl AbOuT lEaRnInG tHe KaNjI”.
1 Like
I’m not really sure how that would inherently mean learning all readings.
WaniKani is all about learning the kanji. That is the only thing the platform is for. Vocab is a nice bonus, but the vocab taught by WK is also about learning kanji and their readings.
There are always going to be readings you won’t learn. I can promise you, you don’t learn all the readings for 生 either. But that’s okay - because you can pick up the rest of them naturally.
1 Like
It might mean learning all the useful readings rather than learning a buncha vocab to “reinforce” the same readings over and over. Because that’s the only reason vocab is on this site right? haHAA
What readings are useful is highly dependent on what you aim to do though. Learning all the readings that are going to be useful for everyone means learning all the readings.
At some point you’re going to have to make a choice, is it feasible for people to just glean these readings from actually consuming Japanese? You can agree or disagree with that assessment, but I personally think for しも and かみ that’s not too far-fetched, honestly.
I do get the point you’re trying to make, but you’re honestly making a bit of an ass out of yourself in the way you’re making it.
Here are two answers you might want to look at:
I know 思い切り, but not so much 思い切って (it seems they’re related but different, anyhow), and I’m pretty clueless about 敢えて. However, what I can tell you is that yes, わざわざ and 無理に appear in the definition for that word in my dictionary as well, and using わざわざ, at the very least, would definitely feel wrong to me in both sentences. わざわざ requires going to great pains to do something, or doing something on purpose. I think the key difference here is that 思い切って (rather like 思い切り) often implies determination and resolution, and is somewhat more forceful than 敢えて. Another nuance is that with 敢えて, what is done is often something that is not particularly necessary (hence its similarity to わざわざ, which is often used when discussing a favour someone else did in a grateful and apologetic fashion, and saying that they did not have to make such an effort).
A possible reason for which 敢えて seems to make sense is that the kanji 敢 expresses daring, so it does seem to fit in context. That aside, I guess that the 無理に nuance might also fit here because we also do say,「無理しないで」when telling someone not to try too hard or to force themselves. (I don’t think the DoJG is right though: 無理に typically means ‘to do forcibly/in spite of difficulty’, and doesn’t necessarily draw on the first sense of 無理, which involves common sense and principles.) However, even then… I feel as though using 無理に might evoke a different impression: in both cases, one might be attempting to force the other person to listen. That’s clearly not what’s meant here. That raises another possible difference: I think that 敢えて implies the need for much more effort.
I mean, the two words are likely close enough that even some natives see little difference, especially given the kanji for あえて, but based on what we’ve just seen (and monolingual definitions), one thing is clear: 思い切って is definitely the more suitable word in both cases because it expresses the determination of the speaker, which is the key factor driving both actions: the speaker made up his or her mind. Nuances of effort, toil or trouble are mostly irrelevant here, especially because in the case of わざわざ and 無理に, I think they relate to the actual process necessarily involving those elements, whereas with 思い切って, that’s just the nature of the task or one’s impression of it, and it doesn’t actually matter whether the thing done ultimately is difficult.
1 Like
ehh that just seems like a cop out answer
You can literally learn every reading through consuming japanese doe…
Overall you really didn’t even address the point I made in my last post
Hoots with potential to be mustered: 0
So how would you define “useful readings” then?
Useful for what?
Yes, and that is the point exactly. WaniKani is all about learning kanji, but it was never about learning everything about all kanji. It’s not intended to be your only source of kanji. You use it as one of many materials to learn Japanese.
Then clearly I missed what your point was. What point were you trying to make?
Reading stuff that is commonly found in written japanese…
Im almost done eating my chicken tendies so i gotta wrap this up and get back to reading, but real quick to give an example:
上 is taught as じょう and there are twelve words that use 上 with the じょう reading. You’re going to sit here and tell me all twelve of those words are really reinforcing the じょう reading? Hell naw 99% of people would probably have it down pat by like the 10th word lmao. So really what are all those words doing, because you sure as hell don’t need all of them to remember the じょう reading. Same can be applied to some of the other kanji in the compounds.
So if you really cared so much about learning the kanji, then why wouldn’t you rather replace one of those words with like, 風上, per se? By losing one of those words you clearly are only going to lose vocab (which gets cancelled out by the fact that you learned a different vocab) and your ability to read 上 as じょう wouldn’t drop.
The reason WK doesn’t do that is clear. It prioritizes vocab it wants you to learn that it thinks is useful and its not all about the kanji after all.
Okay, but… what kind of written Japanese? If you’re planning to read manga, that’s a whole different set of “commonly found” from textbooks, or regular novels, or planning to live in Japan and reading signage.
1: not what I said
2: they’re not all just about reinforcing じょう for 上, they’re gonna reinforce a reading for whatever other kanji are in the word as well
And though it might be excessive in your eyes, reinforcing a certain reading is indeed the point.
Good idea. Why not suggest it?
That is… a bit of a strange leap in logic. The vocab you learn in WK is often hardly useful at all - and definitely less useful than other vocab you could be learning, no matter what your goal is in learning Japanese, how does that fit your conclusion?
neh not really, theres a lot more overlap than you think
Ah yeah like in 上地 where the other kanji that we need to reinforce appears with the ち reading in 26 different words on wanikani…
Boi what lol.
Ight I gotta peace out after that one. Take care
Why living person can be translated as 生きた人? I assumed that 生きている人 would be the only correct way… The past tense is confusing me…
The source of my question is this Bunpro sentence:
幽霊船というのは生きた乗組員のいない船舶 のことなの である。
A ghost ship is ( means ) a vessel with no living crew.
My guess would be that it’s more of the perfect aspect rather than the past tense, emphasizing that you must have an absence of living people before you can call it a ghost ship. I think it’s related to expressions like 大したこと or ちゃんとした, where there’s no past tense meaning.
3 Likes
I think it’s a case of 生きる just happening to be one of the verbs that tends to be used like this. When I looked up 生きた in my dictionary, I found other expressions like 生きた化石 (‘living fossil’) and 生きた心地もしない that both referred to current states as opposed to past states. The definition of 生きた心地もしない even starts with「生きているような…」.
I guess you could say it’s similar to these expressions, yes. The way I see it is that these expressions indicate that such a state has already been reached, and that such a characteristic still defines the person or thing now (it’s implied as opposed to being expressed explicitly). For what it’s worth, 大辞林 supports this interpretation under the definition of た:
⑤ （連体形を用いて）動作・作用がすんで，その結果が状態として存在していることを表す。てある。ている。「壁にかけた絵」「弟の写した写真」「とがった鉛筆」「整った身なり」
(using the adnominal/noun-joining form) expresses that a movement or action is finished, and that its result exists as a state. てある。ている。[examples untranslated]
2 Likes
Thank you!
1 Like