Yet another grammar+vocab advice-seeking thread - Genki and BunPro

Japanese Language
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@mitrac
First, thanks for the encouragement! :blush:

In regards to reading… I suppose I do a fair bit (for this stage) of it daily with 80 to 100 sentences at reviews on Bunpro :slight_smile: Yes they’re fairly simple (they’re not giving me N4 ones yet, just N5-graded) and some will repeat over time but not often enough (yet!) for me to memorize them. Some are a little odd being, I assume, mined from other sources and lack the context but most are fine and make sense “standalone”.
On some days I’ll try NHK or Watanoc but I’m still overreliant on Yomitan or Watanoc’s own translations.

The trouble is, two rounds of Bunpro reviews kinda suck out the will to read extra materials like Tadoku.
I got myself into it with wanting to SRS the Genki vocab, but the upshot is I’ve already started hiding furigana for words I’ve seen over and over. Bunpro already syncs with Wanikani for known kanji, and also they allow manual hiding of furigana for kanji not yet studied.
In any case after Genki 2 the situation should ease up and there’ll be more time, better mood and energy left for reading other things.

The next stop right after Genki 2 will definitely be Satori (and thanks @Lisaveeta too for mentioning it) and then… well, recently I got this idea that I might skip ABBC-level and just dive straight into light novels (Shinkai Makoto’s, to begin with) with help from Yomitan, if I can find a way to have the books treated as text in a browser so Yomitan can “read” it. It’d still be painful, I’m sure.
But then again I’d be buying those books eventually anyway, so if it’s too hard or annoying I just set them aside for later and reset expectations :slight_smile:

With listening (films, music) what bothers me the most is not how much I don’t know yet (annoying but whatever, we’ll get there in the end) but what I’m supposed to know and don’t pick up on.
Although yes, it goes back to what you were saying about iteration: I’ve barely just learned a grammar point or some words, need a lot more encounters with them to solidify them - both through reading and listening.
On the other hand, the other day I listened to the first four episodes from Nihongo con Teppei and understood… at least 95% I’d say. I’m sure that’s to be expected as it’s all very simple, but two months ago it would have all been gibberish, sooo… progress :blush:

I hadn’t thought of transcripts for podcasts - I wonder if Spotify series include anything like that… maybe through the “lyrics” support the platform has? :thinking:
(I hate YT and only use it when absolutely needed, not good at looking things up on it)

Thanks again for all the insights!

@rene_yg
Of course!
DM whenever, or if you think it might be of general interest please feel free to ask in this thread - entirely up to you :slight_smile:

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You totally can do this! There are a few additional steps you have to take, though. My own system is to purchase ebooks through Rakuten Kobo (it used to be a lot easier to download the file, but they recently took away that download button, so now you need a special tool to get the epub in a state where you can do the next step), and then I read the books in-browser using Book Manager | ッツ Ebook Reader, which allows me to use Yomitan on the text.

It can be a bit tricky getting the whole setup figured out (I had to get help from others in my own study log, haha), so if you’re not sure about it, I’d maybe test it on a free book so that you can see how it all works. The good news is once you get the initial setup done, using it becomes a breeze (…unless Rakuten updates and changes things :weary:). As long as you liberate your book files as soon as you buy them, though, they can’t take away the ones you’ve already downloaded, so you don’t have to worry about losing your existing purchases to a potential future update.

If you run into problems getting this set up, folks on the forum can try to help troubleshoot it!

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Oh wow, that’s great! Thanks much :blush:

From the description of that tool on GitHub it sounds like it would also work with Amazon books.That’d be best for me, on the idea that I may at some point stop relying on Yomitan on the tablet and just read on the Kindle :slight_smile:

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I’ve personally had much worse luck with Amazon, so I would recommend caution :sweat_smile:. I know some people who have gotten this system to work with books purchased from Amazon, but the last time I tried, I had massive trouble even getting the file to download, and it was such a pain, I got it refunded and went to Rakuten instead. I also know someone who recently had a bunch of Amazon ebooks mysteriously disappear from their library… Plus there’s the fact that if you have a Kindle connected to an existing Amazon account that is not a Japanese Amazon account, you will have to disconnect it from your existing account in order to download the Japanese books onto it.

I think it’s possible to convert epub files to a Kindle format and upload them onto your device that way, so honestly I would still recommend buying through Rakuten (and liberating them immediately) even if you have the hope of eventually reading them on a Kindle. I think Rakuten gives more and better control over the actual files than Amazon does, and is less touchy with their DRM.

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Yeah I had read about that and it’s really dumb. But as it happens I have two devices, the plan was to keep the older one for English and French (if I ever get back to reading books in French, that is) because I’d not need the dictionary tools too ofen and use the newer (snappier) Kindle for Japanese.

But…

… this does make sense and is indeed a more sensible approach! :blush:

From the sound of it, you don’t have to own a Kobo device, do you?
It’s just buy → download → convert (all on PC) → read via browser (wherever) → happy days ahead :slight_smile:

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Nope, you do not have to own one! They have a browser app that you can download just like Kindle, and you basically get the books out of that once they are sent there.

And yep, that’s the basic process exactly!

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The default Japanese dictionary on kindle is terrible. If it’s one of the standard e-ink kindles you can install your own dictionary by just dropping it in the right folder on the device. There are some instructions somewhere on the internet - you can either download a pre-made one or select your own components and package it yourself. If you do the latter I’d advise leaving out the peoples names content.

Kindle + Amazon.jp works really well for me - I vaguely remember having to jump through a few hoops to get it set up with payment, but it was so long ago… I read books on the kindle and manga on a tablet with the app. The books & manga all have free first chapter samples, which can help if you want to check something out first.

Almost all Japanese books come with machine reading audio enabled which is occasionally useful, and if you’re really keen you can get a Japanese Audible account from you Amazon account and get some audio books as well - definite hoops to jump through with that, you need a VPN to set up the account & download books, and possibly one of those Japanese PO box addresses.

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I didn’t even know you could load custom dictionaries to the Kindle :man_facepalming: Thanks for the tip!
One is the first gen Oasis the other an older Paperwhite… I’ll look up the info and see what can done, hopefully it’ll be possible on the Oasis.

Ugh… I have a local address that I could use (from one of our offices :slight_smile: ) but the VPN may be problematic, need to check if we have a gateway in Japan.

But it’s all good info, thanks again!

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To be clear, you only need the VPN for Audible because the rights management is more strict.

Oasis is great for Japanese, paperwhite is fine. Both can have user dictionaries.

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Right. So.

I’ve decided to man up/suck it up/whatever and from now on I’ll aim to go through (“read” isn’t appropriate when ~90% is looking up English translations :man_facepalming: ) at least two NHK Easy articles daily.
It’s still very much annoying how little I know/recognize and I’ve no idea if at this stage doing this even helps with learning in any way but… 1. it can’t hurt, surely? and 2. those articles still give interesting news from Japan that I’m unlikely to find in Western media.

If nothing else, it’s good for getting used to the pain I’ll feel when I’ll actually start reading one of those light novels :rofl:

I’ve found a way to force a certain font on specific websites in Firefox via uBlock Origin (the common settings in the browser’s options force it globally, which I don’t want) and that helps with Japanse because by default it uses some weird very thin font (it’s falling back to Chinese fonts, I suppose?).

Also, I’ve stumbled upon two useful (to me) extensions for Firefox:
Furigana Toggle - can be used to have furigana show up only on hover on sites like NHK Easy. I think it only works with sites that already include furigana, though. Still, having the furigana available on hover is more convenient that a site’s on/off global toggle.

Furiganize - This adds furigana to kanji on websites that do not have it, like the full-fledged NHK. It’s a global on/off switch but in combination with the other one it’ll activate only on hover :grin: It may not be perfect but it’s better than nothing I suppose. Not that I can go anywhere near the full NHK, but it’s still a very handy tool :slight_smile:

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Hurray!
They’ve added vocab cram to Bunpro, at last! :grin: :partying_face:

It’s highly customizable, like the self-study quiz userscript here.
This will (hopefully!) make initial vocab aquisition from the decks smoother…

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Okay… continuing with the “study log in disguise” approach here… :smiley:

Genki 2 started - things are getting more complex/weird/interesting/however you wanna put it :slight_smile: Not necessarily “more complicated” but there is a clear step up from Genki 1.

Since I’m doing Genki vocab at the same time with grammar in Bunpro: I still haven’t found an effective way of dropping furigana from new words. Some do stick in kanji-only form after a few SRS stages but the majority, even if I hide the furigana by default I still have to hover over the kanji to see it before I can remember the reading :frowning_face:

And as far as TokiniAndi goes, while I love the explanations he gives for Genki, I can’t say I like the dialogue in the videos. When he does the “slow” pass over it it sounds like how one would talk to an infant and I can’t follow along (or I do, but don’t hear the words, I hear the individual mora); when he does the “regular” pass it’s too fast and I can’t follow along (it’s okayish if I look at the text on-screen) :rofl:
Plus the language used seems to be heavily slanted toward casual use, maybe like you find in manga or anime? Definitely not what I am used to hearing in films (not that I understand much from those), where people don’t burst out with silly childish emotion every other sentence :man_shrugging:

Anyway, it’s also very much a “me” problem with listening comprehension as even listening to NHK Easy audio for their articles is difficult. :confused:
Never mind the corresponding source videos for the “easy” articles, those are gibberish…

Speaking of NHK:
I stuck with the objective, deciphering (still can’t call it “reading”) with Yomitan and Deepl 2 to 4 articles daily. I’ve gone through pretty much all of their published content over the last 9-10 days :grin:
Funny thing is, it seems most of the unknown vocab there is in the WK levels 9 to 12, followed by items in levels 35+ and relatively few in-between those intervals.
So I’m looking forward to how “easy” NHK might be in a couple of months when I expect to move past level 12, although I’m fairly certain by then it will seem that a lot of items are in the WK 14 to 18 levels or something like that :rofl:

The other day I watched Children Who Chase Lost Voices (can’t say I loved it, that 7 on IMDb is about right) and in the first few minutes of dialogue it seemed like “oooh I can actually understand this, hope it’ll be good practice for listening”. Then a few more minutes go by and it takes it up a good number of notches, becoming incomprehensible other than a few words here and there. Typical! Oh, well… :rofl:

Also watched a couple of other older Japanese films (from the 50s-60s) but with those I didn’t have much hope of really understanding dialogue anyway :man_shrugging:

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Well… five chapters left in Genki 2 :slight_smile:
The most :exploding_head: so far is the use of けど tied to the A sentence instead of B as you’d expect it in our speech patterns. It’s even worse when there isn’t any B sentence, it all just ends with this darn けど :rofl:

Anyway, it looks like I may not be able to wrap Genki up by the end of the month as I wanted (still a lot of vocab to go through), might have to go a few days into July.

Reviews are now averaging 100 daily in both WK and BP. That’s… quite a lot, for me, adding the daily lessons I’m going over 2h of SRS time :confused:
Once I’ll be done with the Genki deck in BP I think I won’t be taking any new lessons there for at least one month. But I’ll stick with WK and maybe even go from 12 to 15 lessons here.

NHK Easy is going well enough, my reading speed has improved a little.It used to be 15mins or so per article, now it’s 11-12 on average. Well, depending on the contents… a few very easy ones I’ve read in 7-8m, but also I gave up mid-way through a tough one this week :man_shrugging:

As for other media:
WIth films, it ocurred to me just the other day that I recognize vocab more often than I used to. From zero in February, to a few words in April, to at least one word every other sentence now (often more than that) :slight_smile: Grammar structures too, which is funny as I don’t know what X verb or adjective means but I know it’s a past or continuous or negative form :man_facepalming:
I have a feeling I’d be able to comprehend more if the speech was more clear, with a lot of content there’s grumbling and whispering and background noise that make it hard to actually hear the dialogue clearly. Gotta man up and transition to Japanese subs soon, I suppose…

But this does lead to a question:

  • Does anyone know a good online source of Japanese subtitles for Japanese films (not anime series)?

My discs are from European and US releases, not Japanese imports. And these don’t usually include JP subs, or if a few do have them, re-repping the discs to extract the sub and convert it to .srt (so I can load it alongside the EN sub) would be quite the hassle.
In another thread I saw a link to a site with JP subs for anime, but I’m looking for film subtitles…
Tried OpenSubtitles but couldn’t find any for those films I own. I think SubScene may have had some but they’ve gone down :frowning:
Buying discs a second time from Japan just to get the subs isn’t… ideal, obviously.

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