To add onto this, you may want to check Uniqlo’s website and look at sizing charts. Their clothes are usually more accessibly large than a lot of non-international clothing branches, and cooltech/heattech will be your best friend anyway. I am a male of smaller frame (I wear smalls in the US), but I’ve found that pants that fit my waist are too short, and pants that are long enough are too wide for my waist! I’m not even 6 feet tall, so beware!
As for the spoiler content, I have found Japanese brand condoms of larger sizes, but, in general, they are much poorer quality and more likely to rip. I haven’t been to Hiroshima, but I have found American brand condoms (like Trojan) in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, so you may be able to as well, should this be a concern or interest for you.
This is not a stupid question at all. Unfortunately, I have no easy answer. The answer is, I have like a dozen different grammar sources right now, and I try my best to find answers in any of them. Sometimes I will look at Tae Kims grammar, but I am not a huge fan of that usually. Sometimes, I will watch nihongonomori videos on youtube about relevant topics. Some times I will search something like “what does しなきゃならない mean in English” and then slog through a variety of sites until I find a good answer (for example, for that one, I found maggie sensei’s explanation as well as some other sources that helped to clarify that a bit). Basically, it depends on the exact thing you are trying to find. At the moment, I have recently bought the three books in the “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar” series. I have not used them extensively yet, but they seem to have a very thorough explanation of most grammar points so I am looking forward to getting a lot of usage out of them. They come highly recommended so maybe look into them and see if they look helpful to you.
Really my biggest advice is, rely on google, slog through a lot of material to find what will actually help you to understand this particular piece of grammar, and sometimes be willing to give up on finding your answer. I have found that a lot of the time just by reading a lot, I start to catch on to the meaning of some of the grammar that I don’t know even without looking it up. Brains are weird, they are pretty good at catching on to patterns and figuring out what those patterns do if you give them enough data to work with.
Two other suggestions if it is something that you can’t find on your own and really want to get an answer: Hinative is a site where you can ask native japanese people what something means and they are usually pretty helpful. Also, if you post it as a question in the japanese only section on wk community, I bet a lot of people would be more than happy to give some help as well.
Really though, my grammar is still fairly weak and my methods of searching could use help, so it might also be more useful to ask some other people what they do for that as well to get some more advice on resources.
@MissMisc@Vanilla any suggestions for Tyger (and for me too!!!) for looking up grammar points encountered when reading? I feel like both of you are better suited to answering this question.
Thank you very much for this!
I will put this advice to good use. A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, I‘ve seen it. I‘ll look into it. Just shying away from spending more money at the moment…
Sadly I don’t think there really exists a way to look up grammar on the fly. Sure, for some words like あくまでも you might be able to look up on the fly, mainly because they are essentially vocabulary words. However, I don’t know how you would instinctively know something like からすると was even really a grammar point separate from から and する without knowing beforehand. You might just skip it thinking you know it but in fact being confused at the nuances of the sentence. Not to mention some dictionaries won’t even list stuff like とは限らない as it is more of a phrase than anything. I can’t even imagine the various forms of だって.
The best resources I use are http://japanesetest4you.com , 完全マスター, and 日本語の森 for the nuances. Just study enough that you can recognize it, read, go back and improve you understanding of it after some time, rinse and repeat. Eventually you’ll be looking at stuff like ばかり and be like, man that is easy.
Edit 1:
For beginners specifically, I would avoid the above mentioned resources. Not that they can’t be used for N5 and N4, but I would use others. Specifically, Genki 1 and 2 as well as Tae Kim are some of the best resources you could use in my opinion.
Edit 2: Oh yeah, also use Bunpro if that works for you. I nearly forgot about that since it is so recent.
Congratulations. I’ll try to reach your level. Not far from Horishima you have Miyajima, Kurashiki and Onomichi where you can have a great time.
I remember eating one of my best ramen in a bar in Onomichi and some very good sushi in Hiroshima.
Honestly I’ve just gotten the hang of using google to my advantage to look up grammar points, I don’t really have a specific go to for clarifying grammar points/nuances (sorry I know that’s not really insightful) — I try to be as specific as possible in my searches when trying to figure out nuances, but if I don’t even know where to start with a grammar point, I start broad and that usually ends up taking me to more specific places to solidify the grammar points for me
Just so my response isn’t completely useless, I will say that I’ve noticed japanese stackexchange often has great, detailed explanations of differences between similar grammar points and explaining specific nuances so I like reading from there whenever I see it pop up from one of my searches
I love what you said about learning how to read quickly.
…Also, I this made me realize that when you do move here you may have to compulsively fight purchasing items from Amazon Japan after going through the really good reviews.
Check as many sources as possible (no matter what people tell you, there’s not a single textbook/blog that has it all.
Take notes of the essencial parts.
Write your own sentences based on the grammar you just learned.
Review your notes once in a while (this actually helps a lot, don’t skip it).
Use Bunpro for the SRS advantage and to quickly check grammar points that might be interesting to learn.
Take notes of what you don’t understand and don’t be afraid to ask about it on the internetz. We’ve all been there.
Better yet, get a iTalki teacher once every month (no excuses of being expensive this way) to explain all your questions that you left unsolved. Tell the teacher your questions in advance. This will have the advantage that now you’re actually paying someone to work for your own good. No one will really go out of their way to give you the best answer possible for free, tbh. This will also force you to leave your comfort zone.
Be consistent with your studies of course. The higher the efficiency of your studies, the more you’ll like it.
Hm, I actually disagree with xyz kinda. Assuming you are reading your computer, here’s what I would do:
Download translation aggregator and set it up with the edict dictionary. Tick the option that automatically loads in whatever text you have copied to your clipboard. This way, you can just highlight something as you come across it and a quick ctrl+c will put it in the TA. Use jparser and WWWJDIC together and it will break down the parts based off of educated guesses where you can then hover over each part for a definition. xyz mentioned からすると, so heres an example of a sentence that actually uses that.
So, the two sides may disagree on some parts, but as you can see, both make guesses about what should be what. In this case, you can see からすると being parsed as one word and on the left its parsed as two. This also will tell you every possible form that a word is in and how its definition can change based off of what precedes it. This is useful for when it doesn’t always have the grammar point in the dictionary. You can look up (verb form)+ whatever and it will tell you most of the time. xyz also mentioned とは限らない so here is a sentence with that that is also muchhh longer. Only thing it messes up is では and みてごらん, but みてごらん can honestly be deciphered by what it gives as the individual definitions and で は is just two particles everyone should know before reading.
So then about the times where it isn’t correct and you have to guess. Sometimes you need to look it up online, but sometimes it has the answer sort of hidden. For example, in the sentence 人々は都会の炎熱を避けようとする。it tells us two things about the end of that sentence.
So from this we can deduce that they were trying to avoid whatever. Rikaikun actually elaborates that the “try to” definition of とする comes after volitional, but this thing doesn’t. Luckily since we have a good idea of how its parsed, you can just look up verb volitional + tosuru and you will find the related grammar point. It also lists a bunch of commonly used auxiliary verbs and what not. Its not perfect, but its quick and will help you with most of your grammar issues.
Also @xyzbuster I kept having to copy stuff and go back and forth with stuff as well as setting it up again because I didn’t have the TA on this comp.
Ahh, your dictionary and text hooker might be better than mine. I’m just coping mine onto an old FireFox version and using Rikaisama with some dictionary I found online.
I suppose it does depend heavily on what your dictionary has as to how much grammar you can relax on. Also, nuances are something you do have to look up no matter what. Like the nuances of からすると and からみると seen here:
I also think that stuff that changes the words might be harder for dictionaries to pick up on. I would be surprised if even the dictionary you are using would be able to pick up something like this from Tae Kim.
Yeah what dictionary you use makes a pretty big difference. It gets the other two example sentences, but not the one you provided. Probably because of する being both an exception and more rarely used in that way. Like I said, there will be times where you are forced to just google something, but its not too bad.
笑. I’m just in love with this WK app.
