i’ve had very little practice with production, whether written or spoken, and feel like i really should work on that a bit. and i’ve been eyeing the Japanese Sentence a Day challenge. so here’s a post to keep me accountable.
as i feel quite a bit of anxiety about actually using all the japanese i’ve learned, my aim will be to just write something every day. even just a sentence or two will be enough, in an attempt to break through this “i can’t do this” barrier.
I’m currently revisiting N5 grammar after taking a break for a month or so. My goal is to either write or say a few sentences every day to really get comfortable with using the grammar points again. Let’s see how it goes.
九月
月
火
水
木
金
土
日
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Please feel free to correct errors and share your knowledge and advice with me.
I’ve forgotten where I came across this site, but I think it’ll be nice for those looking for prompts to help with writing and/or speaking.
It’s a random prompt generator styled after a gacha machine. There are multiple categories so you can select a particular topic, or leave it up to chance. Categories include: Random, Love, Funny, Troubles, Serious, and Work. You can view prompts in Japanese or English versions of the site.
What’s more, they have generators for spoken lines of dialogue. You can select from a male- or female-spoken pool. I do wish it gave citations from where the lines are from though. This subset is only visible in the Japanese version.
わあ〜、緊張しちゃった!It’s been so long since I’ve spoken for even that long in Japanese, and I didn’t even make it to 2 minutes. I am under a bit of a time crunch with my mother visiting, so that didn’t help. Then again, this was the reason I wanted to start this challenge in the first place. Looking forward to coming back to this recording to see how much I improved!
I don’t really feel comfortable sharing my writing quite yet, but I did do writing practice today. It was more or less rambling to myself, in Japanese, about what topics I should write about. Very inspiring I wasn’t really feeling like doing it at all, though, but felt I must because how could I miss the first day of the challenge? Hopefully in coming days I’m slightly more productive
I’m actually out of town for the first several days, so I won’t be able to upload recordings, but I’ll do my best to write and record every day to upload later!
I did write and record a 日記 for today. I like the idea of 自己紹介. I’ll try to do one for tomorrow!
What’s the difference between なぜ and どうして? I’ve read that なぜ explicitly asks for a reason while どうして can have the same meaning as なぜ but can also mean something like “how/which way”. Would your sentence have a slightly different meaning if you had used どうして instead?
Today was a LOT of starting and stopping. My mother then came into the room, so I had to pause my recording because I didn’t want her to know what I was doing and ask questions.
From what I can tell after doing a little searching, なぜ pretty much only ever means why and is used to ask for a reason, while どうして can also be asking about the method. There’s also the possibility that なぜ is a little more formal. There’s also the idea that どうして has more emotion behind it than なぜ (like Why would you say that? versus What makes you say that? ) I don’t really think there’s too much difference if I used どうして over なぜ, though, since I was just looking for the reason behind you studying in Germany over Austria. Can’t say there’s any deep emotion attached to it, though.
I simplified my family’s living situation a little before because it’s hard to explain due to my limited japanese skills. I hope this makes it clearer now.
両親と妹はオーストリアにいますが、おじさんやおばさんやおじいさんやおばあさんはドイツにいます。
車で6時間ぐらいかかります。ちょっと遠いと思いますが、毎年オーストリアの家族に会います。softlyrainingさんは6時間は遠いと思いますか。アメリカのほうがドイツより大きいだから、アメリカ人はよく 「遠くないです!」と言っていますね。
I didn’t know how to phrase this properly. I meant to say that the USA are so huge compared to european countries like Germany that I’ve heard some Americans say that they visit their relatives regularly because they “only” live a few hours away, while some Europeans tend to think that that’s pretty far and don’t visit that often for that reason.
Thank you for your detailed explanation!
オーストリアに私の好きな専攻がありませんでしたので、ドイツに行きました。
Only did a little bit of writing today. I usually write each days diary entry the following day, but yesterday I actually did write yesterdays entry.
So today I just added some stuff about what I did in the evening.
Day ended before i knew it. Shouldve written earlier when i was thinking about it.
Has anyone else run into issues with discourse not saving bookmarks? I’ve definitely bookmarked this thread, but for whatever reason it doesnt appear in my bookmarks menu. Is there a max?