Yeah, it’s uncommon, but I’ve seen that そら reading used in other places too, but it’s mainly been in manga, anime, videogames, like in your example.
I wonder if it was a relatively recent fad to read it that way (like in the past 20 years or so?)
In the visual novel 9-episode, there’s a kind of a meta comment about that unusual reading.
One of the characters in the visual novel is a teenage girl who was born with the 天 name and そら reading. She intensely hates this name because because everyone usually just calls her てん instead of そら. She describes her name as a 厨二ネーム and she blames her parents for trying to be too edgy, like a 厨二病 teenager edge-lord who has read too much manga and comes up with cringe-worthy names thinking they are cool-sounding but they are not.
Because of that 厨二ネーム, she thinks that’s the reason why she’s grown up with an eccentric personality, and does strange goofy things, all because of the edge-lord-sounding name. She vows that when she becomes an adult, she’ll change her name to something more conventional.
The 9-episode visual novel came out a few years ago, so the girl’s parents might have grown up reading manga like Bleach. so I wondered if this was a kind of meta-joke on chuuni-souding names with weird readings.
I laughed when I read the teenage girl’s rant about her name because 厨二病 is something you usually attach to teenagers, but here, the teenager is criticizing her adult parents for being like that, so it’s a kind of role-reversal.
A bit related to that, I heard that you are restricted on what kanjis to use for names but not on how they would be read. So a person could be named 空 and have the reading be スカイ(sky)
I didn’t know about the kanji restriction but that makes sense.
As far as readings, yeah, you’ll definitely see some wacky ones. There’s also a lot names that use ateji and spell things phonetically with kanji like 真理亜 (Maria).
I did italki for around 2 years between the stints when I lived in Japan, and I found that it improved my comfort level with speaking dramatically. My tutor did not provide me with highly structured lessons; each weekly conversation was simply free dialogue, so it really was just to exercise my speaking muscle, rather than rigorously learn vocabulary or grammar structures.
If you are in a spot where you feel like your passive vocabulary is significantly larger than your active vocabulary, it might be worth giving it a try. I would describe my experience with italki as mostly positive, and I have recommended it to my friends.
Ah, no, this is some Internet slang, and oddly enough it comes from the first meaning. AFAIK, the second one doesn’t exist in Japanese.
Basically, “hahaha” in Katakana is written as ハハハ. If you line up enough ハハ’s, it will look like a series of ｗ’s. In chats, they use ｗ (from 笑い、warai) to denote laughter. If you line up enough ｗｗｗｗ’s, it looks like grass. That’s how 草 ended up meaning LOL.
I thought maybe it was supposed to say Americano, but it’s not the same. There’s an explanation here. It’s made from light roasted beans, and they say it most likely got it’s name from Americans in post-war Japan brewing coffee with lots of water or diluting it further before drinking.
I’m not American, but the name sounds a little judgemental to me.
This was semi-debunked by James Hoffman semi-recently.
Technically yes lighter roast has more caffeine in the beans because less is burned off.
However, you use more darker roast because lighter roast is heavier (because darker is effectively more dry). Also because the darker roast is more roasted, the caffeine in the beans may be more easily accessible/dissolvable.
Yeah I’m a huge fan of James but no one measures by weight really unless you’re a nerd like us. So hence why I said if measured by volume specifically.
There seem to be multiple Japanese names for things that are tied to some other nationality with unclear logic.
I’ll never forget being at the train station in Kawaguchiko and seeing a フランスドッグ (France Dog) on the menu. It was a hot dog on a stick inside of batter (like a corndog), but with cheese also inside the batter layer.
As I mentioned in my other comment, I assumed they were the same, but several sites said they were different things. “American coffee” is a weak brewed coffee, and Caffe Americano (アメリカノ) is a diluted espresso, which is actually stronger than most brewed coffees, at least in terms of caffeine content. Japan has アメリカノ too, and in my experience it’s much more common.
Just a guess, but was there an extra space after the comma? Unlike in English, the full-width comma takes up an entire square worth of space like all other characters and shouldn’t have an extra space after it. I don’t know if Duolingo even considers spaces when marking answers though so that may not be it.
Although I can’t prove it with just the image, my input method editor (fcitx5) seems to only use full-width characters, even for commas, when I use it to input Japanese text. I had completed several dozen other exercises, many containing commas, which seemed to work fine with Duolingo. Even copy-pasting their “Correct solution” did not work and I believe it contained a full-width comma.
If you’re familar with Python, can you try this script? (please replace the string a and b with your input and the answer)
<span style="color:#323232;">$ python
</span><span style="color:#323232;">>>> import unicodedata
</span><span style="color:#323232;">>>> a = 'はい、 コンビニです。'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">>>> print('n'.join(f'{hex(ord(c))}, {unicodedata.name(c)}' for c in a))
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x306f, HIRAGANA LETTER HA
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3044, HIRAGANA LETTER I
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3001, IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3000, IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x30b3, KATAKANA LETTER KO
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x30f3, KATAKANA LETTER N
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x30d3, KATAKANA LETTER BI
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x30cb, KATAKANA LETTER NI
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3067, HIRAGANA LETTER DE
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3059, HIRAGANA LETTER SU
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3002, IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP
</span><span style="color:#323232;">>>> b = 'はい、コンビニです。'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">>>> print('n'.join(f'{hex(ord(c))}, {unicodedata.name(c)}' for c in b))
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x306f, HIRAGANA LETTER HA
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3044, HIRAGANA LETTER I
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3001, IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x30b3, KATAKANA LETTER KO
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x30f3, KATAKANA LETTER N
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x30d3, KATAKANA LETTER BI
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x30cb, KATAKANA LETTER NI
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3067, HIRAGANA LETTER DE
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3059, HIRAGANA LETTER SU
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0x3002, IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP
</span>
The R pops up for the same reason "no smorking" is a thing. That O sound can get a bit confusing depending upon what's near it and usual patterns. It tends to crop up when the O is a long vowel in the furigana. The L/R thing is everpresent.
I think that’s a British influence. Rs in English words tend to get transcribed into katakana as long vowels to resemble British pronunciation, like parking → パーキング or art → アート. For a Japanese person who hasn’t formally learned a romanization system but knows a decent amount of these English → Japanese word pairs, it seems pretty reasonable to try to reverse the process by turning long vowels into Rs when writing Japanese in Romaji.
Pronunciation is a majorly difficult thing for most native English speakers. I know people look at Japanese vowels and consonants and think “wow, only 5 vowels and a limited set of consonants and combinations, this is super easy!” And I guess it is easier than… Russian, Hungarian or French. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
But that’s mostly because they’re thinking of the “a” sound in English and the “o” sound, and so on. In reality, Japanese vowels are so radically different from English vowels, the vast majority of learners are going to completely butcher their pronunciation. You have to learn how to simplify all of them to their real sounds, because English vowels are usually rather complex, while Japanese are more similar to Spanish vowels. You also have to get rid of the plosives, which are also a dead giveaway when someone is a native English speaker.
As for what makes Japanese easier than others… hmm… well, not a lot, actually. I guess tenses and verb conjugations are considerably simpler than most Romance languages, for example. There are no gendered nouns but you have Kanji which is far more time consuming to memorise, and grammar structure and logic is usually completely different from English, and you’ll have to learn how to think differently to get your head around many concepts. This happens with most languages but even more so with Japanese.
So uh… the only thing that I think makes Japanese easier is that it’s arguably one of the most studied, documented and resource-rich languages to learn. There are millions of resources focusing on efficient and thorough study methodologies, as well as a lot of very popular media, books, TV shows, you name it. Cultural relevance is, in my opinion, Japanese’s biggest advantage, which is only rivalled by Spanish in the United States, or perhaps (I honestly have no clue but I’m guessing) French in the UK.
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