Honestly, its not too valuable. Japanese phonemes are mostly straightforward for english speakers, with the exception of “n”, the “d” and “r” syllabes, and the small “y” syllables (kya, ryo, etc). Those deserve some practice.
The stuff that gets complicated is things like devoicing, pitch accent, and redaku, which are all contextual. Listen for these in your anki so you get familiar with them, then practice them either in person or by shadowing in your immersion.
SRS helps you remember the shape of the word so you can qet to know it when you meet it in the wild, but it won’t teach you the job that word plays in laguange.
ゆっくりしていってね！Japanese uses both して and していって (can sound like してって). Adding いって to something gives it a sense of being “ongoing” and other forms of て+いる also exist
Imbortant to note, the accent in japanese is not stressed like english or french, but pitched. So when you are listening for it in your duoligo, don’t listen for the syllable with attack, listen for places where the pitch goes up or down.
there are 4 patterns of pitch accent. A good explainer is Here, or on youtube from Dogen
みず is あたまだか, where the first mora is high, then the second one (and all the others would be) is low. You can hear the fall on the ず, where it geos from the starting pitch to a lower one
Yes. The term you’re looking for is い抜き. It’s one of those things that’s technically, grammatically wrong and improper, but has been getting more and more common in casual speech, along with dropping “ra” or needlessly adding “re”.
That’s really great! Almost 25 years ago I passed level 2, after what I thought was quite a lot of work. The reading comprehension was definitely the hardest part for me, because of kanji, of course. Having left Japan more than 20 years ago, of course I have lost most of what I knew. But I’ve learned lots of other things, so it’s all good.
The most difficult part for me was the listening, but reading comprehension was also tough, mostly due to the time constraints. I’m not fabulous at skimming text, especially in a foreign language.
Nice write-up about yourei.jp. Yeah, I tended to use it more than weblio.jp as well.
For ficton-based sentences, I also like using massif.la since its pulling sentences from web novels on syosetsu.com. The only con since many of the stories are written by aspiring writers (ie. amateurs), there’s no guarantee everything is proofread and correct, but most of the time, it’s been fine.
I also find it helpful that these writers may overly rely on cliches and phrasing, as it’s better from a learner standpoint to see how a word is most commonly used. I’ll often see a word, especially a less common words, almost written verbatim in the same exact phrase by multiple authors. This can also help with learning collocations (common pairing of words) too.
Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary/新和英大辞典 is also really useful since it has so many example sentences per word, and it’s useful for getting a more nuanced feel for how a particular word is used.
For instance, ぼかす. Lots of sentences, but they’re all basically useless. Most seem to be excerpts from technical manuals.)
Funny that you mentioned ぼかす・暈す. While I have seen ぼかすused in fiction, the first few times I saw the word was actually in technical contexts, so that particular does appear in those situations quite often, like when I switched my phone to Japanese and used various camera apps. The very first time I saw the word was when playing a horror visual novel (沙耶の唄 / Saya no Uta). As soon as you start it up, it presents you with settings options screen, asking you the amount of blur you want to apply to the all violent imagery used in the game.
I used to use a website called Lang-8. It’s not really for direct chats, but you write an entry and then natives can come and correct it for grammar and/or natural feel. I was never brave enough to do full on chats with natives, so that’s the best I have ^^;
There’s a website/app called italki that has the specific purpose of allowing you to practice talking with native speakers. It’s paid per session, and offers a variety of levels of complexity.
Japanese Language
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