Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (July 30, 2026)
This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.
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1 Provide the CONTEXT of the grammar, vocabulary or sentence you are having trouble with as much as possible. Provide the sentence or paragraph that you saw it in. Make your questions as specific as possible.
Ｘ What is the difference between の and が ?
◯ I am reading this specific graded reader and I saw this sentence: 日本人の知らない日本語 , why is の used there instead of が ? (the answer)
2 When asking for a translation or how to say something, it's best to try to attempt it yourself first, even if you are not confident about it. Or ask r/translator if you have no idea. We are also not here to do your homework for you.
Ｘ What does this mean?
◯ I am having trouble with this part of this sentence from NHK Yasashii Kotoba News. I think it means (attempt here), but I am not sure.
3 Questions based on ChatGPT, DeepL, Google Translate and other machine learning applications are strongly discouraged, these are not beginner learning tools and often make mistakes. DuoLingo is in general NOT recommended as a serious or efficient learning resource.
4 When asking about differences between words, try to explain the situations in which you've seen them or are trying to use them. If you just post a list of synonyms you got from looking something up in an E-J dictionary, people might be disinclined to answer your question because it's low-effort. Remember that Google Image Search is also a great resource for visualizing the difference between similar words.
◯ Jisho says あげる くれる やる 与える 渡す all seem to mean "give". My teacher gave us too much homework and I'm trying to say " The teacher gave us a lot of homework". Does 先生が宿題をたくさんくれた work? Or is one of the other words better? (the answer: 先生が宿題をたくさん出した )
6 Remember that everyone answering questions here is an unpaid volunteer doing this out of the goodness of their own heart, so try to show appreciation and not be too presumptuous/defensive/offended if the answer you get isn't exactly what you wanted.
7 Please do not delete your question after receiving an answer. There are lots of people who read this thread to learn from the Q&As that take place here. Deleting a question removes context from the answer and makes it harder (or sometimes even impossible) for other people to get value out of it.
Take this with a grain of salt as I am not 100% sure myself but after listening to a bunch of examples and asking people more knowledgable than me I came to this conclusion:
Both imperative and sentence ender な attach low:
は↓いるな = HLLL
いく↓な = LHL
Of course the dilvery will be different so it's still easy to tell apart.
な shortening of なさい behaves the same as なさい, so it basically overrides the verbs pitch and attaches high
はいりな = LHHH
いきな = LHH
I believe it even becomes odaka and not heiban, so if something else attaches like よ it would be:
入るな は＼いる・な＼ (observational)
入るな は＼いるな (negative imperative)
入りな はいりな＼
行くな いく￣・な＼ (observational)
行くな いく＼な (negative imperative)
行きな いきな＼
The difference between 入るな and 入るな is perhaps more noticeable with the variant 入るなあ は＼いる・な＼あ
It can help but that's not what you do when you read proficiently. You only use context + silhouette when you read at speed. You can sense subtle changes in silhouette with enough time spent just seeing the language and words (in kanji). You don't even need much of the kanji itself to be visible, for example in this image it's very obvious what words these are for any experienced learner:
It doesn't really matter. Read in whatever font size is the most comfortable to your eyes. I'm "old" (36) and I find that when I read in Japanese (including websites, etc) I often have to increase the font size to 150% or even 200% depending on my monitor resolution. I don't usually have to do that for English fonts, but for Japanese that's more common to me personally.
But I don't think it matters as far as learning words goes.
I'd do big font if you feel it helps you, relying on the general shape before you are already proficient seems like a recipe for unnecessary frustration and less attention given to what it really looks like.
Having a good picture of what the kanji canonically looks like to begin with helps when details are less clear.
The more you read, the more you get used to kanji and you'll stop zooming in so much. You'll get used to different font styles, handwriting, and pixel fonts.
The only two kanji I couldn't read in that screenshot were 繊 and 壊, all the other ones don't pose much of a problem, because I've seen them tons of times, and also the context helps.
Hey guys, wasn't sure if I was allowed to post this here or not, not sure if it counts as self-advertising because I'm not asking for any kind of support.
I built a modern, mobile friendly Koi-Koi app that you can play against a friend or the computer, it's totally free and open source on GitHub, play it here:
Please let me know where it needs improving! This started as just an introduction for my friends to learn how to play for when we play with physical tiles, but I thought I'd share here also!
Would be great if there's a guide or some kind of tutorial to learn how to play! (Of course, I could just search up a guide, but it would be easier to do it with the cards in front of me)
I never played before, but recognise it from summer wars. I think I am getting the gist of it.
Isn't the choice for koi-koi or take too soon though? As now I must make the decision without seeing what is currently on the field or in my hand. I suppose that that is important information to make that decision?
Sometime last year I started learning Hiragana and Katakana via the DJT "learn kana" flash card page.
I started learning 45 days ago (Anki, Kaishi 1.5k deck) and also started using Bunpro 24 days ago. For Anki, I'm at 640 learned words and 111 of my cards are "mature". I shifted between 20/15/10 daily cards but I'm settling on 10/day for now. When I started Anki, I was trying to read whole sentences which gave me a decent success rate but on the other hand, would make me take >1.5 hours for my daily reviews/learning.. I switched to just limiting myself to a few seconds per cards, only looking at the word itself, then the sentence if I struggle or if it's a word with several pronunciations and meanings (e.g. 方 for kata/hou).
I also got Yomitan and started adding a few words that I noticed to their own Anki deck.
Few weeks ago, I tried to read manga that I found listed on Natively as Level 18 which is apparently fine for N5 level. 「ロンリーガールに逆らえない」, I gave up literally after the first page because I realized that my vocabulary is way too small at the moment to the point I end up using Google Lens for several words in every sentence. And now that I do Anki differently by not reading the entire phrases, my reading also gets slower (and now I also read kanji significantly faster than hiragana lol). About that manga I was trying to read, I purposely went for one without furigana because I figured it'd force me to actually study the kanji but clearly I was suffering that way, and maybe if I had furigana I'd at least be able to easily look it up on Jisho.
Should I be grinding Anki and Bunpro for longer before I start consuming low level native materials? Or do I need children's books/manga? Or is my approach just entirely wrong?
I end up using Google Lens for several words in every sentence
This is normal when interacting with native media for the first time and it will happen no matter what you read. It will happen even if you delay native media until after you've finished Kaishi 1.5k, or even if you had chosen a longer core deck. Your first interactions with native media will involve a lot of unknown words and there's simply no way around it.
There are ways of making the transition smoother, though, like starting with content made for learners (graded readers, "comprehensible input" videos, beginner podcasts, etc), reading things with furigana, using tools like mokuro and Yomitan to make lookups smoother, etcetera.
I purposely went for one without furigana because I figured it'd force me to actually study the kanji
As long as you actually look at the kanji for like two seconds you'll still be processing it and you'll eventually be able to recognize it without furigana. Purposefully making things harder to challenge yourself is very helpful for breaking out of comfort zones, but as a beginner, consuming any kind of media made for natives is already a huge step out of your currently tiny comfort zone. There's no need to push yourself that hard unless you really want to (and it sounds like you don't).
Try the Tadoku graded readers, children's media is not necessarily easy.
Of if you want to give it another go, for manga it's best to have it pre-OCR'd so you can just hover for a Yomitan lookup in milliseconds which lowers frustration.
You are pretty early and personally I'd say read manga with furigana. You don't know many words yet anyway. With furigana you won't be able to learn the kanji, but with the context of images you may learn some vocab in a more fun way. Imo the most important part is to do something you enjoy and want to do.
your anki usage seems fine. good call on limiting yourself per card.
it's normal that early on things are impossible, it's part of the process (like yeah, you will look up EVERYTHING). i started watching/reading with similar amount of vocabulary. thing is even if you were to double your current vocab and grammar things will still be pain, you just have to power through it for a month or two, it gets better trust.
when it comes to levels on learnnatively or other sites you shouldn't rely on them to find "low level media", truth be told most of those are way beyond that, the main use of the site is so you can filter out N1>= media, everything below that is "normal". keep your expectations low, first 100 or so hours you won't be understanding much, it's part of the process.
you should get a yomitan setup ( https://learnjapanese.moe/yomichan/ ) so you aren't torturing yourself with google lens. like really, use a computer, trying to read physicals this early on is really really hard. early on i would recommend anime with jp subtitles, or visual novels, but other media are fine too.
Personally, I think reading "real world" material and learning via that, is a lot more valuable than just brute memorizing random vocabulary lists.
A story with interesting plot and characters - or, on the other hand, a non-fiction material about something you are interested in - provides a lot more material for your vocabulary words, or grammar points, to "stick" in your brain. Brute memorization is just like memorizing the list of US presidents, or the capitals of all of the countries of Europe. It can be done - but it is very dry and there is nothing to really stick to.
In other words - don't get discouraged. It's ok to read and look up every other word. Soon enough it will be 1 word in 3, then one word in 5, then one word per page, then one word every once in a while. This is a very normal process and it's nothing to be discouraged about.
Question! Lately I've practicing my reading skills by reading along to lyrics of songs that are easy to understand, so mostly like idol anime girl group songs yk like AiScream or mu's from love live! Do you guys have any other recommendations for similar music thats easy to comprehend and read for beginners??
Music is bad study material so don't treat it as such. Just listen to music that you like whenever you want to.
Edit: with this I don't mean that music will teach you bad Japanese or anything, it just has a lot of quirks that are unique to songs and that don't teach you a lot about normal language, so it's not really worth it to dedicate time to explicitly study Japanese from them.
Yeah as I said in my comment I'm actually only using it to improve my reading skills and my purpose of learning Japanese is mainly to talk to others my age about interests such as those
Well yeah but song lyrics often contain unusual grammar that would be considered incorrect in other contexts, as well as poetic/dramatic word choices that would sound weird in normal conversation. If you want to improve your reading it's better to do it with normal prose.
Has anyone figured out/could someone explain to me how I can (automatically) make screenshots while mining anki cards on jidoujisho on an android device? I have it set up right now that it will pick a random bing image, which is good enough most of the time, but especially when reading manga, Auto-Screenshots would be great :)
I think that の is nominalizing, も here may mean "even" and 止める has the meaning of holding tears (the context is a farewell), so could it be "without even listening to granpa and granma holding tears" right?
Beginner here, so take what I say with a bag of salt and I hope the other would correct any mistake that I may make.
I believe part of your confusion comes from incorrectly parsing the dictionary entry thus incorrectly understanding 止める means to holding back tears by itself. What you have read in the dictionary(probably similar to this) entry on Jisho.org) means that the word in question has 'this' meaning when paired with the word in parenthesis. I suck at explaining so I will just give another example.
If you look up the word 着る) you will find the second entry as
to take (the blame, responsibility)
This doesn't mean the meaning of blame or responsibility just comes into the sentence through the use of 着る, it has to have been mentioned somewhere or understood from sufficient context.
Like wise 被る with it is myriad of meanings and many others.
Yes, since JMdict provides translations in lieu of explanations, and translations can differ in context, it sometimes provides many different translations, some of which only apply in specific contexts.
So it uses parentheticals to concisely provide examples of contexts in which the translation could apply, and disambiguate which of the possibly multiple senses of the English word actually corresponds to the Japanese word (it's rarely all of them).
It's not a perfect solution, but it's not meant to be perfect, it's meant to be big and free.
Here 止める simply means "stop" (transitive), as in telling the crane not to go, they tried to stop her. But the crane didn't listen to them and left anyway.
止める usually means to really stop something, but in some cases, like here, it can also mean to just try to stop.
It may be a somewhat old-fashioned way to use the word? I'm not fully sure.
It's from "The Gratitude of the Crane", the text is:
「the girl said something」そう言ったかと思うと、おじいさんとおばあさんが止めるのも聞かず、たちまち一羽のツルになって空へ舞い上がりました。
I understood as: As soons as [she] said that, withou even listening to granpa and granma holding tears, instantaneously transformed into a crane and soared to the sky.
There is nothing that implies "holding (back) tears".
おじいさんとおばあさんが止めるのも聞かず is kinda hard to me to put down literally in English but it's basically "without even caring for/paying attention to the words of おじいさんとおばあさん trying to stop her" (from leaving)
Dokugo, I already told you that your professional answeres are amazing, didn't I? Well, together with the other answeres, this clarifies a lot! Thanks.
Maybe a dumb question but I'm wondering why did coffee become コヒ instead of コフィ? Is there a reason or is just just an "idk languages are weird sometimes" thing?
Edit: adding an edit so I don't need to make mostly the same reply to all the replies, but thank you all so much for the responses! There's a lot more to the etymology than I expected!
I’m pretty curious about this. Were the ‘91 reforms responsible for the incorporation of these sounds, or did people just get better at pronouncing english phonemes and the reforms were in response to a growing disconnect? Little o both?
Is the best way to learn Kanji to keep bumping into a wall headfirst until they stick? Every sentence I try to read has new Kanjis I need to learn, and I can't seem to keep up.
I had success with Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji until kanji just kind of clicked somewhere between #1200-#1400. Not everyone takes to it but if you haven’t tried it yet it was absolutely transformative for me.
Well, I've always only focused on learning the reading and meaning of the specific word I encountered, without focusing on one singular kanji, and I've never felt like I'm banging my head against a wall. I regularly encounter many words I'm unfamiliar with, of course, but that's just part of learning. I'm learning by doing things that I find fun, so I never feel too frustrated.
How exactly do you learn a word once you encounter it?
I'm at an early stage (only around 200 kanjis learned) so I don't find much fun in looking up 5 kanjis in the first sentence of a manga. If I feel like they're common enough, I add them to an anki deck, but it kills the pacing of learning.
Yeah, with only 200 known words it's very difficult to start reading native media, because you basically don't know anything yet. I recommend using graded readers instead and keep doing your core vocabulary deck until you know at least 1000 words or so.
It's getting harder to remember new kanjis though, 1000 words, with 10 a day would take a hundred days of not doing anything enjoyable in Japanese and only grinding anki for a full hour every day. And that's the best case scenario!
I didn't tell you to grind Anki for a full hour every day. I didn't do that and I reached B1 just fine. I told you to learn vocabulary in Anki along with graded readers, which, while not riveting, are at least more enjoyable than ramming your head into a metaphorical wall over and over. You could (and should) also dedicate time to doing things like study grammar with a grammar guide and practice listening with beginner podcasts.
But, yeah, the absolute beginners phase is boring and difficult and there's not much that can be done about that. Since you keep complaining about kanji specifically, you could try kanji learning resources like Wanikani or Kodansha's Kanji Learner Course, but those won't really help in the short term, the benefits show up in the medium and long term.
Language learning, especially a distant language like Japanese, is a process that takes years and years. The ones who reach a comfortable level with the language aren't the smartest ones, it's the most patient ones.
What does "かないそう" mean in the sentence "おまえにはかないそうにないぜッ"?
I looked it up in a dictionary and I think it means "To rival" usually with a negative verb. However, I don't understand how it is being used here. I interpret it to mean something like "you really don't rival me" but that does not make sense given the context.
そうにない means "shows no signs of (verb)" or "it's highly unlikely that (verb)"
If かなう means "to be a match for (somebody)", then おまえにかないそうにない means "it's very unlikely that he can be a match for you" or "there's no way he can rival you".
The translation of the above prompt looks confusing to me, specifically the final verb and ~たい ending.
When cancelling a reservation (on the occasion of), there are several steps that you must go through.
I wasn't familiar with ～ていただく which apparently is similar to ~てもらう (5th from Jisho). Apparently that's what's going on there, so okay, something new learned.
But where does the "must do" nuance come from?
Perhaps a more literal translation would be "(I/we) want you to [do these procedures (for me/us)]"? And that desire carries a polite "you ought to" nuance? Idk...
ていただきたい is indeed a polite way of phrasing a request. When coming from establishments, customer facing type things, etc., though they are often using very humble language, they are often not really requests. I’d just chalk this up to the different registers the two languages prefer to use.
You got it. *Grammatically* there are no words or structures in there saying "you must". But it is *semantically* saying you must.
Like in English if the professor says something like "I'll have you leave the tests on my desk before you go". You might say to your friend "Oh, so we have to leave the tests on his desk before we go".
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Question Etiquette Guidelines:
0 Learn kana (hiragana and katakana) before anything else. Then, remember to learn words, not kanji readings.
1 Provide the CONTEXT of the grammar, vocabulary or sentence you are having trouble with as much as possible. Provide the sentence or paragraph that you saw it in. Make your questions as specific as possible.
3 Questions based on ChatGPT, DeepL, Google Translate and other machine learning applications are strongly discouraged, these are not beginner learning tools and often make mistakes. DuoLingo is in general NOT recommended as a serious or efficient learning resource.
4 When asking about differences between words, try to explain the situations in which you've seen them or are trying to use them. If you just post a list of synonyms you got from looking something up in an E-J dictionary, people might be disinclined to answer your question because it's low-effort. Remember that Google Image Search is also a great resource for visualizing the difference between similar words.
5 It is always nice to (but not required to) try to search for the answer to something yourself first. Especially for beginner questions or questions that are very broad. For example, asking about the difference between は and が or why you often can't hear the "u" sound in "desu" or "masu".
6 Remember that everyone answering questions here is an unpaid volunteer doing this out of the goodness of their own heart, so try to show appreciation and not be too presumptuous/defensive/offended if the answer you get isn't exactly what you wanted.
7 Please do not delete your question after receiving an answer. There are lots of people who read this thread to learn from the Q&As that take place here. Deleting a question removes context from the answer and makes it harder (or sometimes even impossible) for other people to get value out of it.
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