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.
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.
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.
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 also read on my iPhone and iPad using Immersion Reader with Yomichan-formatted dictionaries installed (I use a ton of dictionaries for better word coverage, both J-E and J-J monolingual dictionaries).
The advantage of using Immersion Reader is that you just simply touch the word, instead of selecting and highlighting it, so look-ups are quicker. Also in addition to installing multiple dictionaries, you can install frequency lists, pitch accent info, grammar guides, etc. When you look up a word, it’ll search through everything you’ve installed, so if you have pitch accent info and frequency lists installed, you can see the pitch accent of the word you touched, including the frequency number to help determine if it’s a word you want to learn.
Then you can save the word to your word list (it’ll also automatically save the definition and the sentence containing the word) so you can later export to Anki.
There also also third party tools that let you export your words from Kindle devices to Anki as well.
Note: some words with furigana may still be difficult to look up correctly on the Kindle and also Immersion Reader, if the formatting of the furigana is weird (a combination of the HTML code and the CSS styling). Sometimes the furigana isn’t clearly separated from the word, but instead jumbled together, so the dictionary may not be able to find the word.
Usually kanji-compound words are fine, but some words with kunyomi reading with a single furigana over it may cause some issues, but it depends on the book, and also it may depend on the particular word you are trying to look up.
To get around this, Immersion Reader has a search function that let you paste in the word (provided you copied it first), so you can fix the spelling (usually it means removing the furigana from the word) and it’ll search through all the dictionaries so you can add it to your word list. You can also edit each entry in your word list in order to manually add the example sentence, or to remove any unwanted dictionary entries.
Basically: Japan has tried to get rid of Kanji for convenience several times since the mid-19th Century. However, the first attempts which were mainly supported by the idea that regular civilians had low kanji literacy, amounted to nothing as kanji literacy among regular Japanese civilians was higher than expected.
For a while in the 20th century the 常用漢字 was actually named 当用漢字 or "provisional kanji list" as there was yet another push for education reforms that would gradually diminish kanji use. This was especially poignant before the arrival of personal computers, as there were no convenient input methods for kanji with typewriters.
But this was halted, once again, as personal computers provided a convenient and easy way for typing Kanji. Which meant that there was no real need to stop using it.
Ultimately, Japan hasn't abandoned Kanji because it hasn't been necessary. Most people already know how to read it, and it provides easier access and understanding of their historical texts.
Personally, I also think Kanji provides several advantages, such as an immediate understanding of vocabulary based solely on its kanji, or the ability to transmit more information in fewer characters.
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.
I could go completely with Kanji Study but for the fact that it doesn't do deconjugation and minor error correction like Takoboto, which is a lifesaver when trying to look up words that I only heard. For example, if you type in けいしき, it will still show 景色, and if you type in こべ, it will still show 神戸, and if you type in れんこう, it will still show 連合.
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>
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