Language learning is a long, long process, and it’s important to make sure your habits are sustainable. It doesn’t really matter what’s optimal if you get demotivated and stop learning, so above all, you should do whatever keeps up your learning process. Don’t force yourself to speak the flashcards aloud if that will discourage you from the whole thing.
That, and don’t worry about optimal. There are no bad habits that can’t be unlearned (and the value you’d get out of speaking would far outweigh any effort you need to invest in the future if you want to improve your accent). Speaking would be great, but as long as you’re learning grammar and vocabulary, you’re on track.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Have been on italki for two years. My teacher uses tprs and I’ve found it very valuable. It gives me a great opportunity to catch new things and explore nuances.
As an example, the other day we came across そっくり and used it as an opportunity to explore when to use that or -よう or -見たい.
Its also nice to be able to try out constgucts that seem correct from immersion, but end up sounding weird
Yes, it’s correct. It’s not uncommon to have shortcuts in Japanese, especially if the connecting sounds are phonetically similar-ish. Casual masculine Japanese is particularly guilty of shortening up words and phrases, but it’s common for both sexes.
Japanese Language
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