Nipponese Learning Thread: Handholding Edition

I can understand most of what I'm able to hear, but since I'm not that great at understanding spoken japanese it's very hard to understand some of it over the background noise and echo that comes naturally with speaking through a microphone.

Everyone goes through this at some point. I think a big part of it is hearing about the rare people that really took to the language and were able to start reading and understanding stuff within a few months. The grind is slow, and you have to learn to enjoy it.

Take pride in small accomplishments, and use that as fuel for the grind. Maybe you were able to read the OP images and understand them without any help, maybe you understood some parts of a song, maybe you just finally remembered a word in anki that was giving you trouble. These types of things help keep me motivated, rather than just focusing on all the shit I still don't know.

Learning a language is a serious devotion that takes a significant amount of time, regardless of one's ability to absorb information. How long did it take you to learn English to level where you were able to proficiently read nearly everything you came across without the aid of a dictionary? It took me several years, and it took other people even longer. Hell, one guy I work with can't even spell "jalapeno" correctly, even though it's written everywhere, and he's at least in his forties. I'd argue that a language can be one of the hardest things someone can fully understand, taking hundreds, if not thousands of hours of sometimes boring drills.

Just out of curiosity, how long have you been studying Japanese? Look to when you didn't even know the difference between hiragana and katakana, how little you understood, and how much better you are now. Remember the first kanji you can write/see and know just about everything there is to know about it? For me, it's been 何, and the best part is, I don't really know why, it's just a word that stuck like instant glue. Progress can be incredibly slow, sometimes it feels like you are no better than you were a month ago, but you just need to continue. Maybe change what you're doing, introduce something fun to your studying, something that makes you smile? Learn the words of a song/ poem, and understand its meaning, dick around on jisho or something and learn something fun, watch some television, read something you can kinda understand. When you understand something, recognize that you understand it, and realize just how amazing that was that some sounds/writings got into your mind, and that you understood it, and it wasn't in a language you are familiar with.

One thing that makes Japanese so much fun for me is because it's so foreign to English, while also having a plethora of media to consume. There is almost a never-ending stream of all sorts of media to practice with, ranging from forums/image boards to a copious amount of manga/anime, to live action tv, having nearly anything pertaining to your interests

I should also mention, I admire your trips.

I also feel this way. Barring loan words, the complete lack of cognates/similar grammar structures make it really fun and challenging. Also, learning English doesn't seem to be as pervasive among Japanese as it is among a lot of Europe, so there's a lot of exclusive content. I do have to admit though, sometimes I think it would have been nice to have learned something like Dutch or Italian, where with the number of hours I've put into Japanese I'd be reading and speaking at a high level by now.

へー！　へんたい！ バカへんたい！

I see. To start with, is it possible to hold hands from that level? (is he referring to height? Not sure.)

you're pretty much right, I think the level may be referring to a game mechanic but I can't say for certain, I'm not OP. The one thing you got wrong was the 繋いじゃった, which basically means that her hand was grabbed and she didn't expect it and didn't have anything to do with it, IE, he grabbed her hand unexpectedly.
The relevant tae kim page is
guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/unintended#Using_the_casual_version_of
it's very common but at the same time a lot of beginner material leaves it out because it's technically slang.

You're doing good!

レベル=程度

oh yeah, なんて isn't a form of ない or ないで or any sort of negative command, it's just another word that basically means "and stuff", for lack of a better translation. Jisho lists it as "things like". So 男の人手をつなぐなんて just means "Holding a man's hand!" but her mind is scrambling so she's not thinking completely clearly and articulately. Same with 2 sentences later, it's still just "Holding hands…" Still, other than 2 minor errors you got it right.

I know this is pretty basic stuff, but the feeling of progression is great.

Is there any way to learn to decipher pitch intonation? Unless a jap goes out of their way to accentuate stuff like a kabuki, it all sounds the same to me coming from a speaker. I aint good enough to figure shit out contextually while I listen so I end up gettting confused as fuck.

I can't really respond to the pitch question, but you will become better at understanding context. I can't really understand from listening unless there's a video element, so I can understand TV shows, but not really podcasts or radio so well.

Anyone here have an actual job as a japanese to english translator or know a lot about it? I've been looking into it and want to know if its a goal worth aiming for or is at all feasible if I haven't been learning the language from a young age.

I hope you don’t translate anything professionally because that was horrible.

I did and it’s not a great job. If you translate things that you really enjoy sure it can be rewarding but overall it’s a pretty boring and tedious job and it doesn’t pay well. You really have to LOVE translating stuff as well as be very proficient and well read in both the source and target language.The real money to be made of you consider using Japanese as a profession is interpretation. I’ve been a court/medical interpreter for 4 years and I’ve made an average 50-60k a year. Just don’t live in a rural area with no Japs and you’ll be fine.

Can understand most, but some parts I can't hear clearly.

That's a shitty description. It's not really "unexpected". It just adds a negative feeling to the verb if it isn't deliberate. Otherwise, it indicates total completion. Like, if you say 財布なくしちゃったぞ　it's not that you "unexpectedly" lost your wallet, it's just that it fucking sucks that you lost your wallet. Basically, you append しまう to things that are negative from your perspective unless you're using it with the meaning of completion. If you got dumped by your girlfriend and you were bummed about it, you might say 彼女に振られちゃった but if you got dumped by your girlfriend and you give zero fucks, maybe you wanted to break up with her anyway, you would probably say 彼女に振られた instead. 首になっちゃった vs 首になった same thing. If しまう is used, that means you actually gave a fuck about losing your job, if not, then you didn't really give a fuck and maybe were thinking about quitting anyway.

Wrong. なんて adds an exclamatory tone, expressing admiration, outrage, shock or disbelief. It can be used before adjectives or after verbs. I'll give you the following examples.
例一：なんて綺麗な女の子だ。 "What a cute girl."
先生に暴力を振るうなんて、言語道断だよ！
"How dare you use violence against a teacher! It's outrageous!"
勇者様がスライム如きに負けるなんて
"How could a hero lose to a mere slime!"
白人が黒ん坊より頭が悪いなんて
"How can a White person be dumber than a nigger!"

Nice explanations user.

I knew しまう didn't really mean "unexpected", it was a poor explanation and I really just meant for him to read the tae kim section on it. The specifics of なんて had always confused me a little though, thanks.

No problem. Also, there's an additional case of usage. When used after a noun, it shows derision, sort of like "the likes of" in English.
In this case, it can also be replaced with other words, like など、なんか、なんぞ、なんざ。
あんたなんて信用してない
"I don't trust the likes of you!"
生魚なんて食べたくない
"I don't wanna eat crap like raw fish."

I wanna own a farm in Nipland some day.
So today is the day my lingual crusade begins.

...

Is that even legal there? I heard they even have a law that makes it's illegal for non-japanese citizens to own businesses in Japan.

None besides A) knowing what to listen for and B) practicing. Quizlet has a listening practice tool you could try to use for the second one.

As much as the altright would have you believe otherwise, Japan is not, in fact, an ethnostate, and foreigners can become citizens. he'll just have to renounce his other citizenship in order to do it

...

second class citizen

Before you start translating from other languages I suggest you brush up your English.

Nah, it's more like there are huge number of brazilian and chinese immigrants
Not sure about this, but you can probably get work there besides being a teacher if you have the right skills and you meet the right people
new generation of Japanese people are "westernized" so concepts like "ethno-centrism" and conforming to a commnual groupthink are probably not as potent as they were 150 - 200 years ago.
1. have bachelor's degree
2. get work visa
3. live there for 5 years
4. be eligible for citizenship (i.e. you must have work, you must know the language, and you must renounce your citizenship of the other country you came from)

If this crazy bitch can live there, then it can't be all that hard.

I'm a native English speaker, so you can blow it out your ass.

I shouldn't have watched that video. I shouldn't have looked at what her other videos are.
I SHOULDN'T HAVE OPENED THIS FUCKING THREAD BEFORE GOING TO BED
I am upset.

t.massive weebshit

Reality is a bitch isn't?

If Japanese people are so smart, why is a (((college degree))) so highly valued?

:^)
Most likely, but again, as I said, being a foreigner you will inevitably be shunned or otherwise handicapped when it comes to promotions or whatever else.
It's still very strong. There was even that one controversy where a Nip highschool forced a happa girl with naturally brown hair to dye them black because "muh dresscode". Then there's also the senpai-kouhai system where the kouhai are expected to basically lick the senpai's ass clean.

Doesn't really matter, because if you make retarded translation mistakes like that you're practically NISA tier.

FUUUUUUCK

The first question to ask is whether college degrees have been as devalued there as they have been in America.

Total Brazilian population as of 2015: 173,038
Total Chinese population as of 2010: 687,156
Total population as of 2017: 126,672,000

Even allowing for the 7-year gap, they're not even 1% of the population.

Doesn't look nearly that easy. archive.is/I1nUX

There's a big difference between living there a few years "teaching" English or doing some other dead-end job, which a lot of young westerners do, and actually becoming a permanent resident or citizen. Unless that bitch finds a Japanese man desperate enough to marry her, she'll be sent packing before long.

What in the fuck am I watching? Did this Canadian whore randomly went back to her, I guess, Muslim ex, put on a scarf on her head, went to Japan together and stayed there?
What the fuck is wrong with women?

It depends if she married the "ex" she mentioned or not. If she did then she's probably a full citizen and won't be deported. AFAIK you get to keep your nip citizenship even if you divorce the nip you married.

Her "ex" is most likely a nip she met in Canada and then moved to nipland with him. She became muslim later to virtue signal.

Sure, I'm not implying that immigration is so high that said immigrants are overtaking the natural population, just that there are immigrants there and in large numbers. 1% of 120 million is still around a million people, and that's a pretty huge number.
tokyoimmigration.jp/?p=178
According to this, it's only a minimum of five years. Still a long chunk of time, though.
I don't know about her situation, I don't know her personally, I just know she's a crazy bitch who attention whores on the jewtubes. She has another video in which she says that she only got rejected for citizenship status because she wasn't working at the time. Who knows how true or not that actually is. Point being, she's not just a young westerner who is staying there for shits and giggles (although I admit it looks that way), if you take what she says at face value, she meets most of the criteria for naturalization.

She's an attention whore. She likes to stir shit when she thinks she can get away with it and when she thinks it's going to benefit her somehow (vid related)

fuck that

apparently the US doesn't recognize renunciations made to foreign officials, so the US will still consider you a citizen, so it's more of a formality

Is there a way to study all the cards you've ever seen from a deck in Anki? Been doing anki reps for about three weeks and I want to test myself on all the cards I've seen.

This goes for all subhumans. Niggers will just stir up shit for something to do.

If you aren't willing to give it 100% to your new nation, you shouldn't be bothering in the first place and they don't want or need you if that's the case.
I'm a hypocrite saying that while holding dual citizenship myself, but I totally understand where the Nips are coming from. They're based as fuck for having that requirement.

ワイトピッグゴホム！

Country isn't even millitaristic.
Hell, they don't even have an army.

回到你的國家

>>>/gamergoy/

What is the JSDF? If Nips didn't get cucked during WW2 they would probably have one of the strongest militaries on the planet.

I mp4'd some more clips you guys can use to practice.

...

Is it just me or are the subtitles on this one all fucked up?

It's not just you, they're out of sync and some of them just plain don't match what the voice lines are saying.

I'm pretty sure all muslims who live in Japan are monitored by the government.

Do you think it's the bar autist?

I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, he'll probably show up in this thread within 6 hours now that you've mentioned him

It checks out.

Also
>"uniform" and "conquest" are a homonym homophone unless you write in kana

Here's a question - I understand this panel fine, but how would you all phrase the left bubble if you had to actually translate it to English? I'd say "I thought I could, so I did"

Yeah, something like that. Maybe add "do it" after "could"

Nioh did it just fine though.

That's voice acted though. I'm talking about a mostly text only game.

wow, what a twist.

Does some user have the apk file for Aedict3 for Android?

Then why not have the text translated really small below the text box when the character speaks?

...

So I just learned what the kanji for To Sing is through 2k and it said it was 歌う

However I knew how to say it for a long time thanks to a song title, except that song uses 謳う instead. What's the difference? Even dumping 謳う morphs it back into 歌う if you swap it back and forth a couple times.

Lots of words can be written using several different kanji.

What, with identical meanings and readings?

Yeah. I came across 翠 in a game the other day and was wondering what the fuck it was, but it was just another way of writing 緑

I'm pretty good at wand studies, I'd be happy to tutor any qt girls.

That song name is a pun. It sounds like it means just "song" when you hear the name but the kanji used can mean "praise, order, declaration" etc.

謳う means "to extol" among other things.

I think 翠 is usually associated with jade or kingfisher, rather than just "green".

No it was a chapter called 翠に眠る大森林

バンプ～

Imagine reading this every day. And then writing it. And rewriting it many many times.

what else would the sages who wrote this do besides meditate and pray and shit?

So after grinding the Kana fro two weeks I started using Anki and reading bits of Tae Kim.

Using Anki is a bit weird, using the core 2k/6k It started with simple stuff and the numbers and then it wanted me to memorize things like "two things" and "two days/second day of the month" before I had a grasp on the numbers, I was a bit troubled by the fact that 九 was きゅう but if we were talking about amounts it was ここの combinations for the days or amounts

now I reached the days of the week, it started showing me the days before 曜日, maybe Im using this thing wrong or Im just retarded

also apparently you should read your chosen grammar guide quickly, how good is Japanese the manga way? somebody told me its the best If I want to start reading right away, but he might be bullshitting, also the new guide kinda shits on Tae Kim

the core decks really throw words at you out of order, but 2k/6k seems to have most of the words you need. Don't worry about it and just keep plugging along, you'll eventually get a good vocab base between anki and grammar guides. As for the numbers, they change form depending on exactly what it is you're counting/describing. The relevant tae kim page is here: guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/numbers
It's not too important to remember the specific definition of all the different counters, not when you're still a beginner at least.
I'm not really sure what you mean when you say "read the grammar guide quickly". I like tae kim because I started reading early and it's a compartmentalized and searchable reference, so it's simple to read through and easy to look back to if you come across something you don't understand.

Tae Kim is good for basics and gets you started really fast. But the problem is that it doesn´t really get into detail with its explanations so you should maybe check another grammar guide if you have problem understanding something.

whenever I come across something I don't understand I usually just google whatever it is followed by "japanese". Usually, it brings up Maggie Sensei's site which provides a lot of examples and a pretty decent explanation.

I was a bit confused with the new guide, I didnt entire catch the deal with ha/wa and ga as particles and the alternative explanation dindnt help that much

neodjt.neocities.org/newguide.html

I put the password for copyright takedowns.

Because the decks use frequency in newspapers, they might throw you words like economy or employment before common stuff like girl or drinking water. But when you finish them you can mostly read newspapers.

Japanese the Manga Way is a nice guide. I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than Tae Kim, but the way it covers material is good and gives you a lot of real world examples. I have yet to find one complete source that teaches everything perfectly, you'll probably want to use a lot of different resources to get exposure to as many things as possible. Grammar guides, video tutorials, anki decks, etc. Sometimes something just has to be explained a certain way or repeated enough to make sense.

The numbers really pissed me off in the 2k/6k deck, because they really don't contribute anything to your vocabulary. However you don't really have to endure it
In the Anki settings you can set the flashcards to be presented to you either in the order they are in the deck, or in random order. That's what I did and it made the 2k/6k deck immeasurably more bearable.

Harv, you've got to stop

Mfw I'll never be able to play Idolm@ster.

In One For All you can pause the game and still read the text.

I've read genki 2's, tae kim's and the ADOBJG's version of てある and I still don't understand why you would use it. I just can't wrap my head around this pos

What's the difference? If I just used: ホテルの予約もした

Retarded idea. I'm half way through the deck and as far as I can tell, there seems to be a semi logical grouping to the words.

It indicates a presently continuing state as the result of an action. Daijirin also says it can express that preparations have been taken, but you can think of that too as a continuing state just as well. Let's say your hotel burned down the other day. You made the reservation, but the state of having reservations, or of being prepared, is no longer, so you wouldn't use てある. It's less about the action having been done, more that the effect of that action taken is still effective.

So, it can be interpreted as した"ている"?

Help me out guys, I can't for the life of me figure out what the first character is in this pic. Jisho's drawing tool didn't understand when I tried to mimic the stroke order, so I must be fucking it up somehow. Everything else I read as 初のティーターン, which as far as I can tell reads as "First Titan", but I have no idea what the first kanji is. Help a brother out.

最初

To me it looks like a combo of 年 and 骨

Ohhhh shit yeah, I see it. It's just drawn really loosely, so it wasn't obvious which strokes were supposed to connect and which were just brush trails.

Yeah, I recognize it as 最 now, but without someone else saying it there's no way I would have made the connection. Does anyone know if there's a searchable list where you can input a kanji and see various brush/cursive forms of it?

So let me see if I understand this correctly, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the way kanji works. The 初, when written on its own, is pronounced "hatsu" and means roughly 'the first time'. 最, when written on its own is pronounced "sai" and means "the most", but when written together as 最初 the meaning compounds to roughly "the very first" and is read collectively as "saisho." Is that about right?

No, it's pronounced もっと

Huh, okay, I'm seeing a few places say the kunyomi is もっと, and the onyomi is サイ. I haven't read much about the differences between kanji readings, or why the onyomi is written in katakana, so I guess that tells me what the next step for my studying should be. Thanks for the help, anons.

Kunyomi is generally how the kanji is pronounced on its own, while onyomi is generally how it's pronounced when paired with other kanji; though this is not always the case.

think of 初 more as "new" instead of "first". It's a common kanji, but for some reason the first word that pops into my head when I think about it is 初心者, commonly used in video games for "beginner mode". So in the case of 最初 it's "the most new", which of course is "the very first"

最新 would be "most new". 初 is more like first, like with 初体験

Yeah, and I had forgotten it can also be used as a different writing for 初め and the various forms of that, guess whether to interpret it as "first" or "new" depends on exactly what the word is, but it doesn't matter too much

though it's been long enough since I've played an eroge that I completely forgot what 初体験 was, maybe it's time to go back to those for a bit

...

I can't read entire pages of Japanese manga in seconds like I can with English, so I can't skip through all the crap as fast to get to the good parts. Also, I would be significantly less inclined to stop and look up words I don't know if I was trying to jerk off.

You get faster the more you read. 一石二鳥

Wouldn't -ておく be more appropriate for that use?

Hey you folks know any good places to stream raw anime? I want to have some fun while I do my listening exercises.

I don't know of any streaming sites, though I'm sure some exist, but I just torrent off of nyaa.pantsu.cat

Just download and turn the subs off.

Fuck this thing: 飛
It's so different from drawing any other kanji.

What's "quest" (in terms of video games) in nipponese?

探求 or クエスト mean quest, or 使命 means mission. 目標 means objective.

usually in the JRPGs I've played it's just クエスト, but I've seen 使命 used in dialogue like when someone is giving you a quest, but in the actual menus/game mechanics wise I've only seen クエスト, though I'm sure exceptions exist.
(nice dubs)
also, it seems when describing the quests/objectives of others, 目的 is often used.

If by that you mean it can be similar to ている in representing an ongoing effect, but with the additional implication that someone did something to put it in that state then I'd say sure.

Again I think the main differences come down to the effect of the action being in affect during the time of conversation and the fact that it's more about the effect than the actual action. A lot of the time てある will use a が or は rather than an を for the verb because of it, though not always. To use one of the example sentences from Daijirin, "表に車を待たせてある" The car is at this very moment out front. But if it's 待たせておいた it could be a conversation about a week ago. ておく more about the action taken and not about the state of something as the result of an action.

依頼 is a pretty common word for jobs you might take on at an adventurers guild, from individuals or elsewhere.

Or 任務

I thought 客観的 meant objective. Or is that objective, like as opposed to subjective?

Yes. On the other hand 主観的 is subjective.

バンプ～

Thanks. These showed up in dictionaries, but I wasn't sure what is actually used.

This shit has got me bamboozled. What the fuck does the bubble on the right say? I can't even make a good guess at this one.

"そ　それはよくあらへんこともあらへんこともあらへんけど"
Duh.

big if true

If you're only doing this shit for dickfeels and "waifus" you need to take your heretical ass to church

Yeah, how about you fuck off back to /christian/

I miss clicked in Anki, and accidentally added a fuckton of new cards for review today with the custom study option. From that I can see it looks like my best option to fix this is to suspend all the cards I accidentally added, then go un suspend a few every day. Is there a better solution? Can I just undo the custom study?

How fast can you learn Japanese if say, your a NEET with all the free time in the world?

Sorry, I don't know how to help

It will take a long time. However, let's use Anki and the core2k/6k deck as a baseline. If you do 20 new cards a day, it will take you 300 days, or the greater part of a year, to be done with the deck. However, you likely won't absorb every word at such a quick pace, and you'll have to spend more time to understand how these words are used and little grammatical nuances and whatnot.

Worst case scenario, it's going to take 5 to 7 years to become reasonably fluent, but I think that more dedicated learners can get to a basic fluency a bit faster. I'd put my money on 2 - 4 years. Of course, you're technically still going to learn new things long after you've reached the point where you can comfortably understand most native material. Learning is a lifelong process, and there's always more to learn.

Pro tip: Don't ask how long it's going to take, just continuously take steps towards learning on a regular basis. Time spent studying will compound and eventually you'll see the fruits of your labor pay off. Learning a language is a "lifestyle" of sorts. It's not something that can give you any instant gratification, unless you're gratified by the ability to say common words and phrases.

If you go into the deck's options you can set "new cards/day" to zero and then tomorrow you wont have any.
Or you can restore from a backup. They should be in: \Documents\Anki\User 1\backups

Just because you have all the free time in the world doesn't mean that you have the requisite motivation to dedicate a good portion of that time to studying, and it takes a while to learn to study efficiently, since everyone has different methods that work best for them. It's impossible to measurehow long it would take, but if you want to learn Japanese, you can start plugging away, just make sure to do at least something with the language every single day.

Alright its decided, I'm going to be that one weird English teacher in Nippon that fucks his Daki when he's on break.

...

Wohoho, I'm worse than a worst case scenario. (Well, actually I'm only learning nip for about 4.5 years, but still don't know dogshit.)
Is it possible that someone's so retarded that he physically can't learn a language?

it's possible, but I'd suspect it's probably that you didn't study consistently or studied passively (not really focusing or trying to absorb the information well). I'm not you though so that's just my guess.

I'm not an expert, I'm just sharing my opinion. If it's taken you that long, then perhaps you haven't found an effective style of learning that fits you. Some people are visual learners (I am a very visual learner, that is why I don't have much trouble with Kanji at all, but I have a difficult time remembering pronunciations), whereas some people are tactile learners who must find some way to "touch" or "taste" the information they're trying to absorb, etc. Everyone's different.

e.g. get a list of words that can be associated with "kitchen" then actually walk into your kitchen and touch the objects that those words reference. Actually touch the fucking refrigerator and make a point of speaking the word while you observe the facets of the 'fridge.

There's no such thing as being so retarded that you can't learn a new language, unless you're actually a retard with downs syndrome or some other mental debilitation.

Well, my parents say that I didn't say a single word until I was 3 years old, so who knows?
Tbh even my English is much worse than when I still had I don't know how many English classes per week back in high-school, even though almost everything I read is in English. Maybe I should try to write/converse more, but I'm going offtopic now, and I want to learn nip, not English.

If you're implying that English is your second language, I'd say from your 2 short posts that you've learned it to an acceptable level, which means you're not so retarded you have no hope of learning Japanese. You need to try different methods of learning until you find something that sticks.

Well, the thing with English is that you pretty much have to learn it, especially if your native language is like mine, with something like 10-15 million native speakers, and you like computer stuff. But when it comes to learning Japanese, it's different. I can find enough shit in English so it's not that urgent, it's more like a nice to have feature… and it just dies there. Even though I do my Anki reps daily. And burn out if I try to have more than 3 new words per day.

If you lack an interest in Japanese media to the point where you can't find ""anything"" you have the motivation to slog through for reading practice, then you probably won't be able to learn.

Well, yeah, maybe I give up too easily, and start to work on things where I have at least a marginal amount of accomplishment.

Somebody once told me that I should focus on vocabulary, and only learn the 500 most common kanji. At my current pace, I'll have those 500 finished in about 1.3 months. Once I do finish them, how do I go about reviewing them so I don't eventually forget? If I set that deck's new card count to zero, won't I eventually stop getting review cards as the due dates get pushed farther and farther back? Will I have memorized them permanently enough that it won't matter by the time that happens?

...

あらへん=ありません

I know, but I still can't really make sense of it. The explanation of seems plausible, as it suggest that the whole point was that the exact meaning was unclear.

Google Translate says it means "Well, it does not matter whether it is okay or not."

Something like this.

...

Ideally, by engaging the language on a daily basis. I mean, if you're doing this to play vidya, then playing vidya is the obvious way to prevent your investment from depreciating. Though it's more time-efficient to just read a couple newspaper articles or something.

あらへん = ない
It's not polite.

Stop lying nigger.
This is what Jewgle translate says:
"Often it is neither nor ridiculous nor ridiculous".
And Jewgle translate doesn't even really recognize it, because if you highlight that phrase it says it's a translation of something else.

She's unhappy. odd number of negatives = negative.

Kill yourself, you illiterate faggot

Heh. Without the extra そ which is nothing but stuttering and has no impact on the meaning, jewgle gives a completely different answer. Just goes to show how utterly worthless it is.

I'll give you that. I never said it was accurate. I just said that's what it gave me.

I find it's the best service for identifying drawn kanji, and while it can't into sentences at all, it can offer a good second opinion on individual words.

"ワニは彼女より好ましい。また、よりかわいい。"

Trying to say something along the lines of. "A crocodile is nicer than she is. Cuter, too." Would this be correct?

Bonus points if it can sound casual.

ワニは彼女より優しくて可愛い
I could be wrong about connecting multiple adjectives likes that. I'm not sure what word you'd use for "also" if you really wanted it to be 2 separate sentences, また could very well be the correct one.

Thoughts on Lingq as a tool for combining flashcards and a reader?

Look I understand that japanese vocabulary and the writing style itself is complete garbage, but can you at least interpret it in an intellectual manner that doesn't sound like a retarded autist?

Oooh suuuch things how dreadful, hah huh ooohhh ahhahaa I'm fucking retarded oh god please kill me oh god.

The archaic flamboyant style coupled with the 2-7 year old mumblings make it seem like a geeky pseudo-intellectual passive-aggressive 10-20 year old with the philosophy, humour, behavior of a newborn baby still sucking on a pacifier.
The mixture of informal technical answers and immature slang tells me the character is mentally retarded or meant to be fake.

The pseudo-poetic style and pathetic attempt at anxiety show off a 7-9 year old roleplayer which a 14 or 18 year old true literate rper would whip the floor down with him.

Have some self awareness when translating these things and understand the meaning behind them. Japs naturally are completely unable of writing something laidback and intelligent because they're violent anxious autists with no sense of ridiculousness.

why do you write like such a fag

t. Reddit-Spacing Faggot

is this a pasta? or at least a future pasta?

It certainly reads like one.

This may seem like a really specific question but does anyone know of a word where /i/ comes directly after an /a/ in the same morpheme without being followed by /N/ or /Q/ or being long, and the /i/ is accented?

In layman's terms?

Roughly: any a-kana before い, within the same kanji, where the い is not followed by ん, ー, っ, or another い also in the same kanji, where the い is accented as opposed to any other mora.

愛?

The あ is accented in 愛

合?

Don't know jackshit about accents so can't help you there.

Neat. Gratz user.

This guy did it for like 3 years I think user.

Looks like osaka-ben to me.

THREE YEARS?

I finally found all my Japanese 1-3 books and homework sheets from high school in the mid 90s. I can't scan the books, but I made scans of all the worksheets so I had blanks to practice on after completing the assignments.

Anyone interested in scans? If so which format?

...

Post the name and maker of them, there may already be full PDFs of the books and worksheets commonly available.

Ye, iirc. Why the surprise user?

B-but that's what I'm doing and it's working decently. I think.

You don't need much more than 20 minutes a day of studying. If you mean only 20 minutes a day of exposure (through video games, anime, etc.), then that's not really ideal.

I do Anki for 18-25 minutes a day and I seem to be retaining things well. My exposure isn't what it should be, since most of the games I like either don't gain much from being played in Japanese, or are still too complex for me to understand, and I'm only occasionally in the mood to watch anime.

Speaking of vidya, at 0:45 of vid related, it sounds like he says もっと力わ, but I don't understand what the purpose of わ would be there unless it's just to emphasize what a fag he is. The sentence after that is said so violently I can't understand at all.

もっと力を

僕たちは日本語を習うのが出来るか？

Just to clarify in case you still don't get it, there's an implied verb there. Something like 力をくれ or 力を貸して

当たり前

本当にか？　でも、　僕の語学力はまだ下手だ。

Reminder that even AVGN is learning Japanese

意外だね

I gotta switch careers. The rare times that I don't have any work to do for a while I start to find my old passion and start going out of my way to play games in Japanese again.

How much do you make and how did you get established? Did you have to pass JLPT N1?

It depends on the company, but several hundred to a thousand dollars depending on what I work on, which is usually manga. It's not a shitload of money, but I'm single so it's manageable. I got lucky that a small company liked my scanlations and I started working with them and eventually started working with others. I've never taken the JLPT. I know some companies either require or prefer it, or you get paid more if you have an N2 or N2 certification. I'm not taking it unless I someday need to, all I cared about was teaching myself Japanese for personal use, so I don't care about test scores. I got into freelance translating by accident basically.

What's it like? Can you work from home, or do you have an office space you go to? Can you work on projects alone or do you have to suck up to some head translator? Maybe the work is monotonous, but is the content you're translating at least interesting from the client's perspective?

I work from home. Talk to anybody I need to through email or chat clients. From my (admittedly limited) experience, that seems to be pretty normal for manga companies. Some companies will only accept local people and have an office for them. Atlus is one such company. I mostly have a lot of freedom. I expected some of the bigger companies to have one of their translators go over everything with a fine tooth comb, but it's just some general QA person who mostly just looks for grammar issues and sometimes suggests alternate wordings. Some places actually require another translator to go over the work, but I tend to have a lot of sway in what changes get implemented.

Yeah, the work is monotonous. Some stuff I work on is interesting, some isn't. Can't really give examples unfortunately. Some people really love working in translation, and I thought I would since I had loads of fun with scanlation (I still do. I don't do as much anymore, but I do still scanlate) but it turns out that I'm not really into it. I still try my hardest to turn out good translations though, I couldn't do a lazy one if I tried.

Casual you say? Gotcha
>as it is, even a crocodile is nicer, they're cuter too
If you're going for casual and natural I would also use the girl's name or maybe even 奴 or あの女.

i am sure you know but in case you don't, word of advice, whatever you do stay away from any company trying to localize vns to the us. i have been ripped off many times by numerous famous and infamous companies. that being said i was fortunate to find a company that i can actually commute to, since staying at home the whole time and having no contact with people really takes a toll on my work and mental attitude.

also, even though i am also a translator, i find it that it is more relaxing for me to be able to play a game in japanese that is not related to work. what kinda games do you like to play. i find playing old vns really helps me relax and it keeps my reading sharp, when i am not actively reading novels or the like.

I actually didn't know about the VN thing. I haven't had anything to do with VN companies. I know one person who works in one, but I think the company is relatively new.

I play a lot of games, but action, adventure, and RPG are my primary ones. I played a shitload of RPGs in Japanese and really enjoyed it despite it not always being easy before. I still do when I don't have too much work to do.

In the "read me" within the user anki package, it suggests that I go through "Japanese the Manga Way" and "Tae Kim's Guide" in less than two weeks. Is such a rapid pace truly necessary?

Nope.

I haven´t even read fully Tae Kim and i´m maybe already 8 months into learning the language. And honestly i don´t even think the grammar is the problem for me right now. When i´m trying to read texts I mostly struggle with lots of unknown vocabulary but can decipher the grammar just fine. When I have trouble with making sense of a grammatical phenomenon then i just google that expression specifically. I think i´m doing fine until now.

I don't fully understand why some people suggest rushing through grammar guides so quickly, but I'm guessing they probably say that so you don't spend too long going over the same basic example sentences forever and get to reading native material where the heavy learning starts. Two weeks for even just one grammar guide seems too fast to me, unless you're studying it hours a day.

Yeah, I think it would be better to say "don't spend too long reading grammar guides over and over, it will sink in with reading" rather than "rush through as quick as you can"

Pretty much. Grammar guides are more of a reference. I couldn't comprehend them at all until I started reading.

So I've been using this app on android that lets you study Kanji and Kana. It breaks everything into hiragana, katakana, then all the kanji by school year. So far what I've been doing is running through a set practicing writing it in the morning when I get to work. Then before I leave I run through it's multiple choice quiz seeing how much I maintained. I do this until I get a consistent 95%+ on the writing and quiz. Doing this so far I've learned all of the kana and just about done the first year of kanji.

Just wondering if this is a good way to go about learning and when I should start looking at grammar and stuff. The android app has example sentences and text-to-speech built in to sound everything out. It seems like a very good piece of software and is updated regularly. Just learning Kanji alone probably won't work in the long run. Eventually I will probably start forgetting them once I learned enough if I am not using the knowledge in some way. I just don't know how to find stuff to read and how to check it as I'm reading it.

oh forgot the link to the program play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindtwisted.kanjistudy&hl=en

I used that app when I was starting out, it's pretty good, and basically serves the same purpose as any flashcard deck without SRS. You should start looking at grammar as soon as you feel 95-100% confident with reading kana correctly.

As for reading, start with childrens stories (some in all kana can be found at life.ou.edu/stories/), and NHK easy news. Eventually you'll be able to move up to regular media meant for japanese natives, like simple manga and VNs. You are correct in assuming that only doing flashcards to the exclusion of all else will lead to a bunch of useless knowledge and a poor ability to recall it all.

Is there anything good to study grammar with only kana? Preferably if it can be used on an android phone since most of my studying is done during my commute and breaks at work.

the tae kim app is good because it uses a lot of the more common kanji and provides the readings in kana, so you can get a basic understanding of grammar and start to familiarize yourself with some kanji that you'll be seeing a lot of. Just search "tae kim" on the google play store. Keep in mind it's not very in depth but it'll teach you what you need to know at a basic level, and it's searchable and broken into sections that make it very easy to find specific topics if you need to use it as a reference.

I ran into something that confused me, but I think I figured it out; do y'all agree that this analysis is accurate?
Sentences that contain both a ～は and ～が phrase must be rewritten as a ～が～が sentence if the first noun is an interrogative. A nominative (～が) before another nominative is either a genitive of the second nominative, or an adverb with emphasis; that first instance being identical to a ～の～が phrase. Because any instance of ～は can become ～が when the topic changes, ～は～が = ～が～が = ～の～が, unless the ～は is an adverbial.
In other words, スーさんは書くのが上手です ＝ スーさんが書くのが上手です ＝ スーさんの書くのが上手です

Well I'm not sure about any of that. I thought that these particles merely place emphasis on certain elements of the sentence. In other words, は is supposed to mark a topic for discussion in general terms, while が is supposed to identify a subject to make a specific point about it.
Sue is good at writing (said in a general sense and with the implication that the speaker and listener already know this information about Sue)
Sue is good at writing (said with an air of revelation and with the implication that either the speaker or the listener did not previously know this information)
(i.e. It's Sue who is good at writing)
Sue's writing is good (same air of revelation as before but now emphasizing her writing on its own rather than as a component of her being, i.e. you might say this after you read an especially riveting piece of material that she wrote but that you were not aware was authored by her)

At least, that is how I understand it. I am prepared to be wrong, though.

In a は～が～ sentence, は is a topicalization of the thing would be marked の if it weren't a topic.

For example
象の鼻が長い
象は鼻が長い
象の鼻は長い

[スーさんが書く]のが上手です。
"That stuff that Sue writes is good."

There can be a double が in the example you gave because the first が is actually part of a subordinate clause. が in a subordinate clause can also be replaced by の anyhow.
like 私が書いた日記　and 私の書いた日記 mean the same thing, "the journal I wrote"

most grammar takes like a day or two to learn and maybe a week to fully memorize and makes actually reading japanese something you can actually do, which helps with memorizing the kanji and helps with what most people want to do which is actually read and listen to japanese instead of just memorizing terms they're going to forget because they won't be able to effectively practice them

you don't even know english.

good thing this isn't an english learning thread faggot

Not for you, cause you're shit at it and you could stand to brush up on your comprehension, faggot.

it was a stream of consciousness post that i wrote while on a call at work, suck my dick

How bout you learn to read faggot. stop shitposting while on the clock, and more importantly, stop shitting up the thread.

i guarantee i can both read, write, and speak english better than you can if i actually care to
make me
you first nigger

What are you, 12? Get the fuck back to work you bitchboy.

projection is a nasty drug

Anybody know a good place to download Japanese manga? I'd buy it but it takes forever to get here.

mokuroku.neocities.org/
nyaa.pantsu.cat

Thank you very much. sir

I'll also add that I think VNs are an equally good tool, since most of them can be used with a text hooker you can copy and paste unknown words into a dictionary (and you're going to be doing a lot of looking up when you're a beginner), they also have voice acting and it's often repeatable, making them good beginner practice for listening too.

Very good advice, I was thinking about starting with Fate Stay Night since that seems to be the most popular one I see.

That sounds like a terrible idea. I don't know what the language is like, not having played it myself, but I know that it's considered extremely long and starting out you're going to be reading very slowly, you don't want to play something that has a slow story or that you'll never see the end of. Play some mediocre eroges and save the good stuff for when you have a good understanding of Japanese. There are plenty of lists about good VNs for Japanese beginners out there.

Haha! Thanks for the advice man. I'll be sure to look around for a good list then.

If you can't find scans of what you want, or just want to be a good goy, ebookjapan is an easy place to buy digital copies.

Thank you both. I should have specified that by "equal" I meant in a thematic-role sense and not in an information-structure sense.

Do any of y'all ever supplement your learning by reading 学術研究 research papers?
Recently I read pdf related over the nature of ～た vs ～る (tense vs aspect). tl;dr: the answer is 'fuck you'
Before that I read some studies on how embedded clause boundaries are marked in speech using prosody (i.e. in speech,
how do you tell if the sentence「たけしがコンビニに行ったと言っていました」means "(They) said that Takeshi went to the store" or "Takeshi said that they went to the store"; is which caluse is Takeshi the subject of.

So I've been getting a lot of practice reading via anki, but not much else. I feel like having an excuse to write would give me a good excuse to help drill in my conjugations, grammar, and other fun stuff.

What excuses do you guys make to write? Make Japanese friends or something like that? It'd be nice to have something enjoyable and not just rote.

Maybe start a diary where you just write simple stuff and observations? Also if you get bored with anki maybe you are already good enough to read manga with furigana. You should try it out. Reading and writing stuff for yourself is way more fun than just stale memorization of grammar and vocabulary. It should keep you from burning out.

bascially, some companies that localize games to the US don't actually do the localization. there was a period 2 years ago where they would just buy out projects done by fan-translations for a set fee and either change them completely, release them as is (usually incomplete, or even worse, poorly translated) or they would not release the game at all.

tbh honest thought translating is fucking boring as hell, ive been freelancing for 3 years now i basically do it out of necessity. now that my teaching business is gaining enough revenue, i can start to do less and less translations, since id rather just stay as a private tutor where i can charge $80-100 an hour instead of work 8 hours for pennies.

Yes, in fact there's a good linguistics book that goes in depth into every detail of the Japanese language and provides thorough explanations for everything. If you're advanced enough to understand it, it can be enlightening.

geocities.jp/niwasaburoo/index.html

I think you might be onto something. I'd like to keep Anki in my routine because I haven't missed a day since last April, but I really do need to work on grammar and stuff because not working with it enough is making me lapse.

I guess what I'm mostly worried about re:writing is that if there's nobody on the other end of the conversation parsing it, I'll never get any feedback on what I'm doing wrong and I'll drill in bad behavior.

ナイス

That app is decent at what it wants to do. Just remember that knowing Kanji is not the same as knowing words (in most cases). You'll want to get into studying vocabulary too.

I used to write out my own example sentences when I started studying grammar. It's typically easiest to just read shit to get grammar down though since you can go at your own pace, see the context of how/when things are used, and possibly be entertained in the process.

バンプ～

I need to start reading this again.

pic related

My year 1 books and worksheets are: "Tanoshii Nihongo" by Yoshio Satoh (unknown publisher). My year 2 book was "Japanese for Everyone" published by Gakken Co.

Here's something for people to think about, and apply to whatever decks you use. Core2k has 5 cards per vocab word, and KanjiDamage has 2 cards per kanji. Since I divided my effort between the two decks evenly, it means that I unintentionally started learning kanji at 2.5x the speed of vocabulary, and know much more kanji than vocabulary at this point. If I had to do it over, I would probably put more effort toward the vocabulary deck instead.

In my case, I'm doing 10 cards per day as 5 cards per deck, which yields 1 vocab word and 2.5 kanji per day. If I wanted it to be close to even, I should have done 11, as 8 in Core2k and 3 in KanjiDamage, which would have yielded 1.6 vocab words and 1.5 Kanji per day. At least this way I'm getting the unfun part out of the way faster than expected. Knowing vocab has proven to be much more enjoyable than knowing kanji, even though kanji has been very useful. I suspect that putting a heavier focus on vocab is more likely to keep people from burning out, even if they do learn some kanji at the same time.

I learned the jouyou kanji before I even started vocab. Maybe not the fastest way, but it helped me read vocab easier.

杏鈴杏璃杏鈴杏璃杏鈴杏璃

kill me

it's pretty comfy so far though

That's beyond retarded because the meaning of compounds often doesn't logically follow from the meaning of the individual kanji. Here's a brief example of a few compounds, but there are probably thousands of compounds like this.
退治
"retreat"+"fix" = "exterminate"
目方
"eye"+"direction" = "weight"
宿直
"inn"+"fix" = "night watch, night guard"
普請
"general"+"ask" = "building, construction"
発作
"emit" + "production" = "fit, spasm, attack (as in heart attack), seizure"

this

anyone reading who's just starting out, please don't do this

I'm going to play devil's advocate against your and my own arguments for a moment, as an excuse to bump the thread. I've found that learning kanji and radicals has been very helpful for learning vocab, regardless of whether or not the compounds make sense, since it lets you think in less abstract terms about each character's construction, and create mnemonic devices for the ones you're having trouble with. This may be less useful for different learning styles, but it's been a big benefit to me as a novice, and I can see an argument for it.

It also helps you by giving hints for the pronunciation of compound words, which jogs your memory on recall. If I encountered 自転車, but only knew the sound that one of those characters made, I would still have a much better chance of remembering what that word is, even if it was a word where the compound didn't make any sense. It's something like solving an incomplete Wheel of Fortune puzzle because you recognized pieces of a phrase, even though you don't understand why that phrase means what it does. You would eventually pick up which characters generally make which sounds, but at a much slower rate than if you learned kanji directly.

Also, if I didn't know any radicals or kanji, words like 飛行機 would be too visually complex for me to reliably remember the construction of, since the whole couldn't be broken up into easily digestible pieces, as it can if you know its component kanji. It would just be a giant mess of lines, with an arbitrary meaning and sound assigned to the whole, which wouldn't assist you in recalling it. In contrast, starting from radicals and simple kanji lets you build a knowledge base where all arbitrary assignments are done with very simple sounds and shapes, so rather than having to remember complex items immediately, you can remember a series of simple ones, and you'll eventually passively memorize the complex wholes as singular entities as you encounter them more often, just like you do with words in English.

But all of that said, learning 2,136 kanji before touching vocab at all sounds like a retarded, joyless chore, and I'm impressed that user didn't burn out.

I don't translate often but here's what I got, it's pretty similar to yours
I see. Well, let us start off with hand holding.

I did burn out, but I recovered.

Still incredibly new to this language. It seems that sentences written in hiragana/katakana lack the spacing im used too in english. How can I discern where one word ends and another begins well my vocabulary is still extremely limited?

I suck at reading time. It's boring. How do I get better? Does it matter

How do I say 7:40? i know how to say say しちじ but what about the 40 minutes? is it よんじゅっぷん？　or よっじゅっぷん？

The first one.

...

stop writing in (only) kana.

Read things with kanji instead of just kana. Most words will use kanji and make it easier to discern individual concepts and from there you can reliably assume most kana are things like particles and conjugations. As you further acclimate to grammar you'll be able to discern the kana-only words you DO see at a glance.

Bottom line: don't be a little bitch. Learn the kanji for every single word as you learn.

Grinding out Hiragana atm. Doing as instructed by Nama-sensei and writing it 50 fucking times, but I just fill the entire page because I can't be assed counting. Afterwards I grind some more in RealKana to get that pattern recognition going.

Fucking nips man, no wonder they like grindfests so much considering how masochistic their language is.

Make sure you double check the stroke order before writing them, because I am pretty sure Namasensei wrote some of them wrong.

That probably has more to do with how stressful their lives can be. Although I have been thinking about if their strict rules for writing kana/kanji is a result of their autistic obsession with doing every thing a certain way, or if they developed that autism over time in part due to how strict their writing system is. Maybe having such a complex writing system is actually beneficial in some ways, like it can teach discipline or something.

I suspect it teaches carpal tunnel. It would be interesting to know if they have the same "doctors have shit handwriting" meme that the west does.

Wouldn't they use some sort of stamp or seal instead of handwriting for that?

Google "hentaigana", handwriting is much more standardized now but it used to be a few tiers past doctor-level shit handwriting.

Are you better at Japanese than Ai-chan is at English yet, anons?

Stop posting this corporate whore you nigger.

Maybe, but that's not saying much.

Then I crouched in the corner and wondered what the fuck was wrong with me.

You should probably never go to Japan, user…

Playing too much Pikmin will do that to you.

...

Thing is, you most certainly fucking could not get away with it. Japan's conviction rate is incredibly high. Or at least if they didn't catch you, they'd catch someone.

You are not a dog you autistic sperg. Actually, if you were a dog, it would be dangerous, cause a gook would try to eat you. to be less ambiguous you could say 私にとっては or 私にとっちゃ。In a world of crazy trannies and 49 billion genders its understandable that you were mistaken as a dogkin.

wouldn't the most simple way to get the point across have just been to say "一番動物は犬"?

Bullshit, his sentence is perfectly fine and faggots who are either retarded or who are trying to hard to be funny should be castrated.

I don't doubt it to be possible, I think I can do it. But…

How in the fuck am I supposed to memorise 2k fucking scribbles.

It's simple user you can't

That's like calling someone a retarded potato, or an ATM an ATM machine

Short answer: You can't yet. Study more.

Long answer: As you learn more words/grammar and get used to reading you will naturally be able to spot individual words regardless of how they are written. Some words are usually written in kana, some usually in kanji, and some are common in both. You just get used to it after seeing it a lot, to the point that the lack of spaces or horizontal/vertical writing styles aren't an issue.

The same way you use those 2k scribbles to memorize tens of thousands of words, time and effort.

Anyone heard of Kanji Portraits? Seems like a good site for learning radicals and kanji history.

It's fine normally but remember the context. He was talking to gajin at a (((Jewniversity))). It's understandable that they thought he was coming out as a dogkin. I simply suggested a clearer alternative for the pozzed environment.

Im back, turns out i've pretty much hit a brick wall in trying to understand "How to read" kanji

Any tips you guys have that could help me better understand the concept?

There anywhere outside of language exchange sites where I can find japs who I can talk to on skype or disagreement or whatever?

Try the book Remembering the Kanji. It lays out an easy way to learn them.

It generally gets easier over time. Don't worry about learning those 2,000 kanji at once, learn a few at time, and slowly build your collection of known kanji. I've found that writing them out, and looking at the individual kanji on jisho helps a lot with memorization, but don't worry too much about which pronunciation to use, you'll get that through vocabulary and practice. There's dozens of ways to learn, and the best way is the way that keeps you motivated. 頑張って！

Rote memorization of every single individual word is the only way. There are no short cuts.

I was about to finish my reviews for the day on ankidroid and then it crashed on me, wheb I opened it up agai al the cards I had left were gone anf in their place were a bunch of new cards I havent seen yet on the red and new stack, none on the green stack

What happened here? Did I accidentally add a bunch of cards that were supposed to appear tomorrow?

No idea. When the desktop version of Anki crashes I just have to redo a few cards.

Do you guys have any strategies for walking your way backwards through conjugations? When I'm engaging with media I always trip over incidental rules I've forgotten, or worse, get so hung up on the conjugations that I assume I don't know the root word when I absolutely do.

Do you guys have any experience with this?

Im freaking out I dont know if I just fucked up 20 days of core 6k grinding
Hope tomorrow it corrects itself

You never learned the conjugations well enough in the first place if you're having trouble with that.

It's that in part, the other part is that a lot of them are so uncommon that when I run into them I've forgotten them all over again.

For example?

Don't worry about it, I think I'm just making excuses again. I need to consistently engage with stuff more often so I can drill this stuff in.

I've basically mastered kana and I started kanji and vocab about a week or so ago. Up until now, I've only retained some of the kanji and vocab I've been exposed to. Is this normal or am I wasting my time or doing something wrong?

I think it's normal, learning to remember kanji is a skill in and of itself, and once you start reading you'll have an easier time remembering the kanji because you've seen it contextualized.

Remembering what things mean is much easier than remembering how to pronounce them. That is the part I have such a hard-time retaining

Are you using mnemonics? Why did you hyphenate "hard-time?"

No, I haven't been using any mnemonics. I probably should. And to answer your other question; I have no idea, haha!

You've gotten advice on how to learn kanji but do are you asking how to understand what it is that you're memorizing? In English Writing (this is a bit simplified) letters combine to describe sounds, and then you match those sounds to meanings. This is also how kana work.
Kanji work the other way around, they are made up of smaller parts that combine to describe the meaning of the kanji (and then in words with more than one Kanji, those meanings combine to describe the meaning of the overall word) and then you match that meaning to the sound.
In other words, when you read kanji, the process is

That was the answer I was looking for. It's still going to take me a while to fully wrap my head around all this, but thank you.

I can't believe they put this filth in a 3DS game

Absolutely degenerate. I see the (((Japanese))) are one of the lost tribes after all, to promote such filth.

Or you might not be.
鳩尾
"pidgin" + "tail" = solar plexus; pit of the stomach
It's not even unusual for kanji compounds to be this nonsensical, either.

It's more common for them to be logical though.

new thread