# Japanese
**URL:** https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043
**Category:** Unbounded
**Created:** [April 24, 2025, 6:43pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043 "2025-04-24T18:43:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2026, 4:51am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/21 "2026-01-06T04:51:12Z")
One goal I have for this year is to pass the [JLPT](https://www.jlpt.jp/e/) (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) N3 exam (I think I can do higher if I really focus in on Japanese but I’d rather aim for a more reasonable goal for now). I’ve been coming back and forth to Japanese and the realization hit me that I could probably be pretty fluent by now if I was just consistent (I’ve been studying it for technically ~7 years now, though that’s with a lot of time spent not studying in those 7 years). I think one mistake that I keep making is having a pretty overbearing routine. Which was fine during time periods where Japanese was all I would study, but it became pretty unsustainable in the long run as I would end up dropping it when pursuing something else (though that’s something that happens with a lot of things I do).
Right now I haven’t really studied for around ~6 months. My plan right now is to quickly go through a course called Human Japanese and to restart my grammar studies on the SRS app BunPro. I have a few extra things I want to do in the mean time, but those two I want to focus on. I want to get Human Japanese out of the way and then move onto something else.
---
### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2026, 5:12am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/22 "2026-01-06T05:12:23Z")
Some cultural notes I took from the lesson I just did in Human Japanese (the chapter only focused on cultural notes, nothing else):
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## Chapter 11: Cultural Notes
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### Ofuro
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> It all starts with the ofuro, or Japanese bath. For Westerners, a bath is a place where dirty people get clean. But in Japan, the bath is a place that can only be entered by already-clean bodies. The idea of a dirty person getting into a bath is shocking.
- Huh that’s interesting. I did notice that. When I went to the Ryokan last trip there was a bunch of stuff to get myself clean before I entered the onsen. I assume its the same for a bath. I guess baths, to the Japanese, is a way to relax and not a different way to get clean. Which, I think, makes sense. Baths may have been more water efficient back in the day(?) because it was just one thing of water reused, but they seem kinda gross.
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> The bath-room, or ofuro-ba, in Japan is always its own affair, totally separate from the room with the toilet. The ofuro-ba is divided into two parts: a deep soaking tub where the aforementioned clean people may go, and a shower area with a drain in the floor, which not-yet-clean people use to change that fact. When you enter the room, you step into the shower area.
- Hmm. I think that tracks. The hotels I stayed at were western style hotels so the shower stuff was with the bath, but the airbnb I stayed at had the shower separate from the bathtub so that tracks.
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> The soaking tub is covered when not in use, and the door is water-tight, so in the shower area, you are free to splash up a storm. The traditional way to bathe is to sit on a small stool, fill up a pail of hot water either by scooping it out of the bath or by filling it from a spigot, and dump it all over oneself. The bather then scrubs up in the usual manner, dumping more water on himself as required until satisfactorily clean. Only after a final dousing to remove any lingering soap suds does the bather have clearance to enter the guarded waters of the ofuro.
- One thing I liked about the Japanese bathrooms(?)/shower rooms is that they can fully get wet and are designed for it.
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> Another important reason that only clean bodies are allowed into the bath is that the same water is shared among all the members in a family. The tub will be used in turn by each member of the family until they have all had their nightly bath.
- Huh. Well that avoids the grossness of a regular bath. Neat.
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### Public Bathing
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> In days prior to the advent of individual indoor plumbing, Japanese people living in cities stayed clean by visiting the public bathhouse. After World War 2, in an effort to put up cheap housing, many apartments had toilets but no bath facilities, so the public bathhouse continued to be an important part of life.
- I wonder if they had showers?
* * *
I kinda took notes on the other chapters a while ago, but I don’t know where I put them on my PC. I’m trying to avoid constantly restarting stuff (especially when this is basic stuff I’m familiar with) and trying to complete more stuff, so I’m just rolling with where I am.
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### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2026, 5:13am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/23 "2026-01-06T05:13:14Z")
> [@ActiveMind](#):
>
> I’m currently learning Spanish.
Are you still learning Spanish?
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### Author:  [@ActiveMind](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/ActiveMind)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2026, 11:54pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/24 "2026-01-06T23:54:05Z")
Yes, but mostly passively. I recently began reading Harry Potter in Spanish again and listening to audio books. I never stopped watching Spanish youtube.
I want to learn grammar and start speaking. I must have a pretty good vocabulary by now. If I get better at grammar it will be way easier to generate sentences.
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### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2026, 1:49am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/25 "2026-01-07T01:49:31Z")
Some notes I took today:
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## Chapter 12
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### More Set Phrases
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> Itte kimasu means literally, “I’ll go and come back.” The person who is leaving the house for school or work calls this out to the others who are remaining behind.
- Hmm. The i part is probably related to the word for go, and ki part is probably the word for to come. So all together it makes going and then coming back. That makes sense. Also, its saying you’re leaving and then coming back which is what you do when leaving home.
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> Shitsurei shimasu means literally “I will commit a rudeness,” and it’s used quite similiarly to “excuse me,” as a preface to doing something like blowing your nose, getting up to go to the bathroom, or some other “rude” thing.
- I wonder if it works literally as excuse me. Like is it polite/correct to say it when trying to get by someone for example?
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> Sayonara: Although this is one of the most well-known Japanese words, it is not used very often. Have you ever noticed how every time you hear it being used in the movies, someone is about to get blown away? That’s actually pretty appropriate, because the word has a heavy, dramatic feel to it. You don’t usually use it with someone you expect to see tomorrow afternoon.
- I always thought this was spanish or something. Idk. Never thought it was anything remotely asian in origin.
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> Dewa: This means “Well…” and is a handy word for implying that it’s time to go. For example, imagine that you’re sitting in a restaurant, talking with your friends. Everyone has finished their meal, and the conversation has come to a good stopping point. This is the moment when someone will look at her watch and say “Dewa…” Everyone understands the unspoken remainder of the sentence: “Well, (I better be going.)” Dewa can be abbreviated to ja.
- This confuses me. では じゃ How does this abbreviation work here?
- Hmm. I couldn’t find any clean rule for abbreviations and stuff, but the aim is the same. They’re just trying to shorten stuff.
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### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2026, 1:52am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/26 "2026-01-07T01:52:15Z")
> [@ActiveMind](#):
>
> I want to learn grammar and start speaking.
Have you done any grammar study at all?
> [@ActiveMind](#):
>
> I must have a pretty good vocabulary by now. If I get better at grammar it will be way easier to generate sentences.
Have you been studying vocabulary or just been passively listening? Have you done anything like sentence mining yet?
---
### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2026, 2:20am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/27 "2026-01-07T02:20:02Z")
Some grammar notes I took (source is BunPro):
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#### を - Object marking particle
- を marks the object of an action. So in ball wo kick. Ball is being marked by wo as the object that is being kicked.
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> In these sentences, を is marking the thing that is having an action performed ‘on’ it. This is how the Japanese language views the ‘object’. However, unlike English, an object can also be a place in which an action is performed ‘through’, if the goal of that action is based in that location itself.
- park wo walk, that can be translated too walk through a park. hmm. ok. I think that’s a bit different from English?
- I am walking through the park. Ok. To communicate through in english we use the preposition through.
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#### ます- Polite Verb Endings
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> ます is an auxiliary verb, which means it is a word that connects to other words in order to change the meaning
- Hmm. I guess I need to know what an auxiliary verb is for this. I wonder if the Japanese actually have concepts similar to auxiliary verbs or if this is just our way of understanding what’s going on.
- From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_verb):
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> An auxiliary verb (abbreviated aux) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause
- Hmm. Ok. So I guess in the case of ます here. Its adds the functional meaning of politeness to a verb.
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> To use ます, attach it to the conjunctive form of the verb.
- Ok. After googling I’m still not sure what conjunctive is. From what I can tell it has a pretty technical definition and doesn’t help here. I think what they mean is to use the verb without the part that changes tense at the end (-る,-う, etc.
- Ok that was wrong, because some of them do contain some parts of the verb that change at the end. From later in the section:
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> Because most students see ます so early in their learning, the ‘conjunctive form’ is often simply called the ‘ます form’, or the ‘ます stem’ in many resources, as it may be easier to remember what to do with the verb that way.
- What is the masu form? I wonder if I missed it.
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2026, 2:23am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/28 "2026-01-07T02:23:37Z")
An option for Spanish grammar: [https://www.learncraftspanish.com](https://www.learncraftspanish.com)
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2026, 2:31am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/29 "2026-01-07T02:31:10Z")
> [@Eternity](#):
>
> park wo walk, that can be translated too walk through a park. hmm. ok. I think that’s a bit different from English?
>
> - I am walking through the park. Ok. To communicate through in english we use the preposition through.
So basically in Japanese you can say “I walked the park” but in English you say “I walked in the park”.
> [@Eternity](#):
>
> What is the masu form? I wonder if I missed it.
They just mean the form that ends in masu. Like in Duolingo I learned ikimasu, kimasu, shimasu, tsukurimasu, etc. So since I know those forms already, I can delete the “masu” to get a base form of the verb (iki, ki, shi, tsukuri)
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### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2026, 5:47am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/30 "2026-01-07T05:47:29Z")
I’ll find some stuff that says this directly soon (as I’m going through material I went through before, and new material, on studying language/Japanese), but something I remembered thats kinda CF related I think:
Is language learning a skill? I think it is. I think your first language is a skill that you picked up as a baby and you keep learning it (until you get to a point where you stop caring) and fixing it for a while. You learn from school, your parents, people around you , etc. on how to talk correctly and stuff. You, as a baby, probably made a bunch of mistakes and then fixed those. I think theories like us having a voice box are probably wrong. Language is a skill/tool like anything else.
I bring the above up because there’s a sentiment I came across in the language learning resources I went through that people should avoid outputting their language too early. Afaik there’s roughly two schools of thoughts on this: early language outputting can lead to very bad habits sticking which is then hard to fix because they are now so ingraied (which I think is probably fair). The other school of thought, which is made me write this post, talks in a manner in which they think language mistakes can’t be fixed later. As soon as you start mispronouncing your Japanese R’s you’re cooked. Done for. Unless you address it very quickly, you will be stuck with a bad habit for life. Idk. I think their confusing some peoples difficulty in addressing something like this with impossibility.
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### Author:  [@ActiveMind](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/ActiveMind)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2026, 11:29am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/31 "2026-01-07T11:29:43Z")
> [@Eternity](#):
>
> Have you done any grammar study at all?
I had Spanish in middle and high school where we did grammar. After that I listened to half of the LanguageTransfer course, which is mostly grammar.
> [@Eternity](#):
>
> Have you been studying vocabulary or just been passively listening? Have you done anything like sentence mining yet?
After school I did just flashcards with Anki. After like 2 years of that I started watching Dreaming Spanish then I started reading. No sentence mining.
Is sentence mining more about understanding the structure of sentences or for vocabulary?
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### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [January 10, 2026, 9:04pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/32 "2026-01-10T21:04:33Z")
> [@ActiveMind](#):
>
> Is sentence mining more about understanding the structure of sentences or for vocabulary?
Just to clear up when we’re talking about sentence mining, we’re talking about finding (mining) sentences in the material you’re consuming to make flashcards out of?
as far as the resources i’ve read have explained to me, the goal is for vocabulary. when mining for sentence flashcards your goal is to find sentences with like one thing you don’t know in it. usually like a vocab word. you should already be kind of familiar with the grammar of the sentence/it should have been studied before hand. For example, using English:
- They learn a simple sentence structure of subject-verb-object. I kicked him.
- They learned those three words.
- They’re watching some simple English content and come across I kicked her.
- They don’t what her is. They take/mine that sentence and make a flashcard for her.
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### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [August 20, 2026, 10:37pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/33 "2026-08-20T22:37:15Z")
> [@Eternity](#):
>
> Oh yeah: this routine seems kind of much, and it kinda is, but I slowly built it up over time.
I’ve changed it a bunch since then. It was “sustainable” so long as I was only doing Japanese. However, when I started doing other things with my life/time (or at least tried to do other things), it was hard to keep up.
I have a simpler routine that I go through now. I’m just trying to build some consistency. I realized two things:
1.) Consistency is important. It’s important, in general, for learning/language learning. It’s important to put in time everyday. I wasn’t able to do that before. Also, making a bit of progress everyday, that is building on other stuff, seems better than doing lots of “big” progress all at once which you then proceed to forget about (I would come back at random intervals and try and do big chunks of Japanese at a time, get overwhelmed again, and quit).
2.) Idk if its from my perfectionism or from bad ideas in the language learning community, but I got caught up in the idea of needing to learn a lot of stuff at the same time. I think this issue comes up a lot with output. A lot of the language learning advice I got advised against outputting language (speaking and writing). It wanted you to focus on comprehension and immersion. The idea was that when you start outputting you will create habits. Those habits can become permanent or very very hard to change. So to avoid that, you pretty much become near fluent in comprehending your second language before outputting anything. I think stuff like that has made me want to spend a lot of time getting the basics right and all that.
> [@Elliot](#):
>
> Some of this sounds like doing stuff that other people said is good rather than using your own judgment. But it also partly doesn’t sound that way because it also sounds like you’ve been selective and cut out things you didn’t like enough.
Thinking on it again: I think it was 50/50 or whatever. A lot of the resources I liked and I judged as helpful. What I did a poor job of judging was what resources were necessary or not. The stuff I cut in the past were things I thought were unhelpful or weren’t fun to use (I remember a really unfun Japanese vocabulary app), but I never really judged them on their necessity.
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### Author:  [@Eternity](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Eternity)
#### Post date: [August 20, 2026, 10:46pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/34 "2026-08-20T22:46:14Z")
> [@ActiveMind](#):
>
> Yeah share.
Bit late, but here you go. I don’t know if you’re still interested it, but I’ve been working on my Japanese routine again and remembered this.
Some tools I’ve used before:
[https://migaku.com/](https://migaku.com/) - A browser add-on that lets you generate flashcards from Netflix, YouTube, and a few other places. It even captures audio from them. You can use the subtitles files off of the website or your own. It can connect to Anki, but nowadays they push for you to use their own flashcard program. I like it. They started off primarily for Japanese but now their language support for other things is quite good I’ve heard. It is paid, however.
[https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/asbplayer-language-learni/hkledmpjpaehamkiehglnbelcpdflcab](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/asbplayer-language-learni/hkledmpjpaehamkiehglnbelcpdflcab) - ASBplayer, a free tool that does what Migaku does. A little less intuitive, but still good.
Both those are the “main” tools for mining sentences from videos and stuff.
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### Author:  [@ActiveMind](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/ActiveMind)
#### Post date: [August 21, 2026, 5:21am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/35 "2026-08-21T05:21:12Z")
I’m using Migaku for spanish currently and I connect it with Anki.
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2026, 5:42am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/36 "2026-08-22T05:42:57Z")
> [@Eternity](#):
>
> 2.) Idk if its from my perfectionism or from bad ideas in the language learning community, but I got caught up in the idea of needing to learn a lot of stuff at the same time. I think this issue comes up a lot with output. A lot of the language learning advice I got advised against outputting language (speaking and writing). It wanted you to focus on comprehension and immersion. The idea was that when you start outputting you will create habits. Those habits can become permanent or very very hard to change. So to avoid that, you pretty much become near fluent in comprehending your second language before outputting anything. I think stuff like that has made me want to spend a lot of time getting the basics right and all that.
An example of delaying output would be trying to learn a video game or chess by watching a ton of videos without playing any games. That just sounds wrong and super inefficient to me. When you try to play, you quickly find out things you were missing when just observing. It works better to go back and forth between playing and observing.
Playing chess or piano or basketball as a beginner doesn’t cause you to be stuck with bad habits. Habits – and your ability to make changes or get stuck – are way more complicated than that.
Where did you get this from? Like which language learning sites/resources? Is it based on any research?
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### Author:  [@ActiveMind](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/ActiveMind)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2026, 11:36am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/37 "2026-08-22T11:36:43Z")
> [@Elliot](#):
>
> An example of delaying output would be trying to learn a video game or chess by watching a ton of videos without playing any games. That just sounds wrong and super inefficient to me. When you try to play, you quickly find out things you were missing when just observing. It works better to go back and forth between playing and observing.
I agree that going back and forth is best but there’s a difference that makes it better for language learning than for gaming. An actual plausible goal for learning a language is to only consume media in that language. So the so called “input” is actually output as well.
The equivalent to watching people play games from this point of view would be to watch people read books or watch series in the foreign language. This activity would be much worse than watching people play games, which also illustrates the differences between the topics. You would learn almost nothing doing this, but you could for example learn how people take notes, look up the dictionary, how they mine for words, etc.
Even if your only goal with the language was consuming media I still think writing and speaking would be beneficial in speeding up your comprehension and allowing you to understand deeper.
> [@Elliot](#):
>
> Playing chess or piano or basketball as a beginner doesn’t cause you to be stuck with bad habits. Habits – and your ability to make changes or get stuck – are way more complicated than that.
People seem to get uniquely stuck on accent though. Even people who’ve spent many years in a country will still have a thick accent, like Rand. I think getting the accent right from day one and being able to sound out words from reading out loud and in your head is uniquely valuable compared to getting grammar super precise, not mixing similar vocab, knowing edge-cases, avoiding pitfalls common to learners with your mother tongue, etc.
I don’t know how hard it actually is to unlearn the accent. It could be that people just don’t know and if they got a coach and put in real effort it wouldn’t be that uniquely hard to unlearn.
I think some language learning theorists/influencers have over generalized from accent to all of language learning.
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### Author:  [@ActiveMind](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/ActiveMind)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2026, 11:47am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/38 "2026-08-22T11:47:24Z")
Migaku is unreasonably slow software. Computers are mind-bogglingly fast. Yomitan is faster but doesn’t do videos. I didn’t know about Yomitan and ASBplayer until now, but that seems like the free alternative to most of Migaku.
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2026, 3:53pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/39 "2026-08-22T15:53:48Z")
> [@ActiveMind](#):
>
> Migaku is unreasonably slow software.
Flashcards from subtitles sounds vibe-codable. And ASB Player is available to contribute to or fork: [GitHub - asbplayer/asbplayer: Browser-based media player and Chrome extension for subtitle sentence mining · GitHub](https://github.com/asbplayer/asbplayer)
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2026, 5:04pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/japanese/2043/40 "2026-08-22T17:04:20Z")
> [@ActiveMind](#):
>
> People seem to get uniquely stuck on accent though.
Does delaying output when learning a language actually fix that? Is there research on this? I can imagine that potentially a lot of people would end up with an accent regardless of how they learned another language as an adult. I can imagine that maybe the accent is more caused by learning their first language and/or childhood, and what they did then and how they did it, rather than the learning methods used for adult language learning. I don’t know.
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