@“saddleblasters”#p149039 yeah i find this whole focus on “common” vocabulary to be really misguided. if you want to be good at speaking and reading japanese, you have to know all those words; after all, native speakers do. all minmaxing to focus exclusively on the most likely words to come up is going to help you do is make a tiktok called WHITE GUY STUNS JAPANESE STORE OWNER WITH PERFECT JAPANESE
@“cass”#p149061 It does make sense to focus on more common words as a beginner because they‘re the most likely that you will need to use, and they’re going to be the easiest to pick out when listening to other‘s speak. These common words also provide context for when more complicated words are used, and can even be used to define them in a pinch. If you don’t know what a specific thing is, you can use common words to describe it and be understood. Learning a bunch of overly specific words as a beginner speaker just isn‘t that helpful, because if you don’t use them, they‘ll just be forgotten. (Unless they’re related to a niche interest you want to talk to people about.)
When I started learning Arabic I was using a Saudi resource I found online, where some of the first words in their lessons were camel, horse, merchant, Islamic words like Kaaba, etc. These would be useful to someone who wants to study the Qur'an in Saudia, but they're not going to help me have a conversation with anyone or even start being able to pick out words when watching movies or videos or just listening to people talk. This is obviously an extreme example but my point is that there is a reason to prioritize common words that goes beyond wanting to impress people or make a TikTok...
Language learning happens in phases, not all at once. It's easier to add more obscure vocab later when you have a better grasp of other aspects of the language.
@“wickedcestus”#p149065 I say all this as someone who has spent a lot of time learning a ton of Japanese words that I then never used and now couldn't define if you put a gun to my head.
I will say that Japanese specifically feels like there is a large gap between the vocabulary required to understand dialogue which includes both dialogue in books/manga/games/movies and actual conversation and that required to understand general prose (descriptive etc.) which is mostly required for reading books, but the relevant words can of course pop up in other contexts as well.
In addition there is a large gap between being able to have comfortable conversations about most topics (potentially by just talking around words you don’t know) and knowing the specific vocabulary required for understanding every line of dialogue in a random fictional work or indeed any random sentence someone might throw at you.
This is of course true for most languages, but I feel like you can get away with knowing less Japanese vocabulary and still have a relatively high-level conversation compared to English, but maybe I just don’t remember what it was like to know less English and at the time I started learning English I was much less likely to speak with native speakers so I probably cannot compare fairly. I might also be misremembering how difficult topics I could actually discuss when I was worse at Japanese, mixing it up with later experiences.
In this sense I understand why some people want to focus on getting good at communicating quickly, especially when living in Japan (certainly my main focus at first was simply becoming able to communicate, although studying the written language is still very useful for this in my experience). But it can absolutely give a false sense of security, where you think you are much better at Japanese than you are and when you open a book or a newspaper you get a serious reality check.
I don’t think that it is ever a “waste” to learn more specific or uncommon vocabulary, however, as it can still come up in conversation and it will definitely pop up in other contexts if you end up trying to read stuff. Sometimes “strange” fantasy and sci-fi terminology can have slightly different meanings in other contexts, but familiarity with the words are still helpful when learning the latter. Weird phrases/talking patterns you might see in some manga can absolutely come up in casual conversation if simply in a joking manner. Overall, I’ve always thought the old internet advice of “never learn Japanese from manga/anime” was rather silly, it will teach you plenty of stuff and a bit of common sense and a few months interacting with natives will quickly allow you to see which parts are weird in daily conversation. And of course you need to know this stuff anyways if one of your reasons for studying Japanese is wanting to read manga.
Also the more Japanese vocabulary you yourself use, the more your conversation partner is liable to use. I definitely get the feeling that people have started using more complicated words with me over time, simply because I myself use a wider vocabulary and they trust I can understand more. In this sense part of the gap I was mentioning may also be related to Japanese people adjusting their level of conversation downwards when speaking with someone who they sense have a more shallow vocabulary. Not always of course! I have definitely talked with some people who were quite hard to understand due to using relatively obscure (at least to me at the time) vocabulary.
However, the gap between dialogue and general text is definitely real, it is so much easier to understand 90% of a random Japanese movie/anime set in modern day Japan (as long as they don’t go crazy with yakuza slang or whatever) than any moderately complex written text.
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This is the W section in my French-English dictionary, notably short. In French, words beginning in W often sound like they begin with V (unless you’re in Belgium—even the Walloon Region if you like—in which case the W sound is retained), excepting for example those borrowed directly from English[1], like Walkman, waterproof, watt, week-end, and whisky. Notably wagon and all its derivatives are pronounced, in France-French[2], with the V sound…
…
…
…
except…!
A synonym for wagon-réservoir, listed above, wagon-citerne, is pronounced with a V. What the heck
Curiously wallace is written in this dictionary pronounced as [valas], though other dictionaries do not list this pronunciation. The word comes from Richard Wallace, the English financier of a certain kind of public water fountain.[3] ↩︎
Maybe it’s safer to say Parisian French in this case. ↩︎
Where I come from they’re “water fountains.” ↩︎
Where does one find Japanese podcasts from Japan? To be clear, I‘m talking about podcasts made not specifically for non-native speakers to learn Japanese, but just regular ol’ podcasts that are about anything, such as news or sports. I‘m a huge pro wrestling fan and some of my favorite Japanese pro wrestlers host podcasts and I’m also a big Japanese baseball fan, so I thought it would be a fun way to do some immersion and focus more on listening skills. What is the primary podcast outlet, platform, and/or site to find and download podcasts from Japan?
@“HeavenlyHalberd”#p149606 Well here‘s what I do. I use an app called Pocket Casts, which lets you choose a global region to search for podcasts. Set it to Japan, and there you go. Set it to India, and you get India’s top podcasts. It's fun! And there are a lot of countries to choose from!
@“whatsarobot”#p149637 Ooo, Pocket Casts is already my podcast app of choice! Thanks for the info, I'll give it a go!
A bit of shameless spam:
https://www.anaitgames.com/articulos/bosque-prohibido-i-vividlope#comments
@ana check this out, I did it!
@“JoJoestar”#p152740 this is the new feature column you mentioned?
@“yeso”#p152742 Yes, this is it 
After years of trying to improve my Japanese reading comprehension where I feel like I‘m not really getting anywhere (I think not having folks to speak it with is limiting my momentum in general), I think I’ve finally decided to pick French back up. It just seems much more practical, since there are a non-zero number of actual humans local to me who speak it, even if they don‘t speak it regularly. Plus, I have actual childhood experience with French, as well as years of Latin from high school and college, which I think gives me a reasonable foundation. It feels achievable, which honestly Japanese never really did. I won’t give up on Japanese, I just think it's maybe not the best use of time to try and improve.
Oh, and turns out French resources are super available for me locally, for free, through the public library! That's pretty great!
@“JoJoestar”#p152740 VIVIDLOPE MENTIONED en español
Just wanted to celebrate that I‘ve kept my pace up and have still been studying Japanese everyday this year. I feel confident I’m gonna stick with it, and I‘m already having small, practical lightbulb moments; here’s to many more months of studying!
Thanks to everyone who gave me recommendations earlier; it's nice to have a lot of where I need to go and improve already laid out for me :)
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Maybe this is useful to someone here:
The remake of Paper Mario: TTYD is fantastic to practice Japanese. I only know a few Kanji thus far but the game only has a limited amount of Kanji that show up again and again which is excellent of memorizing them. It also has Furigana and süaces between individual words.
It also really helps that I played the GameCube version before so I know where to go kind of intuitively even if I don’t understand every word they say. :)
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Been learning Japanese in a class for approaching two years now, was wondering when other folks have started to move on from class materials to games etc?
For reference I think having left beginner level at my class I am at about n5? I’ve bought some manga because of the furigana but still have trouble.
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Just start and try your best and look up whatever words you don’t know but seem important. It’s just really good for practice to be surrounded by the language you’re learning.
I’ve been learning for like 4 months and I’m trying to get through some games in Japanese lol
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I’ve been doing games and manga for a bit now, I’m… 1.5 years into proper classes?
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no time too soon imo, just pick something within reason and understand it will be likely be slow and or frustrating at first. a big thing for me starting out was not knowing where one word ended and another began as well as the different slangy verb conjugations you’ll see in manga
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I tried reading the start of Los Lanzallamas using my Canadian high school Spanish and realized it would take me about 4 and a half years to get through it. I’ll probably keep poking at it because why not. It certainly can’t hurt.