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 ^^;
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.
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.
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”.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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