What do I even call this?

Radio Shack!

The legendary TRaSh-80!

Oh yeah… Definitely some edlin. Hacked my first game in debug.com, too (and no, that’s not a website…) :slight_smile:

BBSs and ANSI art and Lynx. Ahhhh, nostalgia!

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You are just going to have to memorize the vocab. For a vocab with two kanji characters, chances are, the reading will be on, on. But there are plenty of kun, kun words and some irregular on, kun or kun, on words. What really helps is learning to speak and listen so that you start to recognize the words independently from their written characters. Then you can try the readings until you get the one that is correct - until the reading becomes natural.

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Yes, the general rule is On’ for double-kanji words and Kun’ for singles and kana-enhanced, with exceptions for words that have body parts in them, and irregular words, and when someone somewhere randomly decided to throw in a weird pronunciation for kicks. Keep in mind that written language in Japan came WAAAAYYY after the spoken language and they borrowed it from China, so some really old words may have very strange readings.

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That’s definitely what gets me through. "Does X sound right? No.’

@ZengoTim I guess the ugly truth is that I don’t know which reading is which anyway. :joy: Oh rendaku, why not just mess up my life for the heck of it.

Yeah…and…also:

(So just say something and there are decent odds that it’s a correct reading for that kanji?)

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@borx @glias :hugs:
@dwarsen pls, I’m from Stockholm, it’s Kex with a hard K

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Ok, now is it “S-Q-L” or “sequel” discuss.

I’ve always gone with the former.

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Although SQL was actually originally “Structured English Query Language” (SEQUEL), it was renamed to SQL due to copyright issues. So, all you people who call it ‘sequel’ need to start paying royalties.

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Testing? No. Disproving? Sure. I pronounce it giff and always have. I owned my first computer when I was 7, in the early 80s (well, okay, technically my parents owned it, but it was bought largely for myself and my sister and I easily used it the most).

P.S. As pointed out above, “Sequel” is a brand name and not identical in meaning to SQL (Ess-Kyu-Ell).

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  1. This thread is awesome. I had wondered why WaniKani worked like this for a long time. It’s definitely shed some light on how I approach my reviews and learn the vocab.

  2. GIF is pronounced with a soft G, like jif because that’s how the creator wanted it to be pronounced. The argument about pronunciation never made sense to me. It’d be like if I had a baby, gave them a name, and then people calling them something other than what I wanted because it suited them better for some arbitrary reason.

Edit: typos

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That’s how British people feel every time we listen to Americans.

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No taxation without representation!

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British English has divurged in pronunciation just as much as American English since the pronunciation of the time we became a country!

Moreso, actually. US pronunciations and word choices are actually the older, in most cases. New England speakers come pretty close to historical accent and dialect of Shakespeare, especially the accent.

I can’t believe this thread is still going… this is all from Kumirei claiming you say “Jif” instead of “Gif”…

We are monsters.

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funnily this is a very english thing.
In German, there are only two ‘letters’ which have more than one allowed pronunciation.
‘ch’ - which always can be pronounced as sh, ch (sh but back in mouth), k at the beginning of a word and in the middle of a word in a way that I cannot explain and that English people just cannot do. Only some words actually require a certain pronunciation at the beginning. like Christian which is always pronounced with k
‘c’ always a k besides in Ceasium were it is z (i don’t know any other exceptions)

well and then we have the word handy which is pronounced in the english way but means mobile phone instead of handy?!?! I guess mobile phones are handy tho.