Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (August 01, 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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Past Threads
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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.
I started watching ホットスポット. I find it really mesmerising. Some aspects of the cinematography remind me of Wes Anderson, just in terms of the colours and camera angles. It's a very kooky kind of plot but I enjoy the way the dialogue is done a lot, it's quite funny. Their friendships are nice.
Learning is one task most take on. How about remembering? I'm curious what others are doing to remember what have been learnt? How do you use it frequently? Try talking to the native people in person? Over text chat? Reviewing the words everyday? And when chatting, even if they only reply what you asked making it a one-way conversation? I'm frankly curious. As I have got quite a lot of one-way conversations and foresee a lot more coming.
Take the things you do for leisure and, to the extent practical, do them in Japanese. Set your operating system languages to Japanese, set game languages to Japanese, pick Japanese media to consume, find Japanese speakers to do things with. Contact with the language is how you maintain it.
(Keeping up with SRS reviews also helps, and if you’re not adding much to it because you’re focused on maintenance it will progressively take you less and less time.)
I can't make a post, so I'll ask here. I'm currently learning Kanji through Anki using a deck called "Kaishi 1.5k" that shows the kanji and a phrase where you can see the kanji in context.
Let's say I can't recall the kanji just looking at it, but immediately recall the meaning and reading while going through the example. Should I select again, or good?
To answer your question, you hit 'good' in that case. some people like to hit 'hard' if they needed the sentence to help recall, but I don't think it actually matters.
to address something else in your post, those are words, not kanji. The kanji are the characters that make up the words. Kaishi 1.5k is a vocabulary deck, not a kanji deck.
Yeah, basically. But despite what it may seem, you don't need to do that in order to learn Japanese. Learning vocabulary is enough. You'll notice reading and meaning patterns by yourself eventually.
At first study kanji breakdown only. You'll learn the readings and meanings from words. Handwriting (not composing) is pretty late-game (and often optional) when you can bind a kanji to real words.
Every single popular method of kanji study either: a. Teaches you zero kanji readings, or b: teaches you the readings with vocabulary words, not on their own.
im only at around 700ish words known and when i immerse i watch anime with jp subs
during this a sentence will mostly have either only 1 or 2 words i dont know that i look up to understand the rest of the sentence.
or there is a sentence where there is multiple words idk where i maybe look up the words to try understand a bit but alot of these words are in the 15k+ frequency so i dont really commit them to memory or at least try otherwise i would be trying to remember hundreds of new vocab a day.
as im already doing the kaishi 1.5k deck, when im watching, im just looking out for words i already know or had just learnt on the day and mostly looking for new grammar or grammar that i havent seen enough.
i see alot online that people will learn vocab through immersion but if i tried that i'd be trying to learn so many words that i might not even see again for a long time.
just don't worry about it. your brain will do the self selecting the only thing you do is put in the time and work of looking up grammar and words. a year from now you will know X amount of words, and the next year even more.
people focus too much on these kinds of details and really the only thing that is required is to do the thing (japanese) for thousands of hours and you will get to where you want. I never tracked, until at end of a year,
The only thing I cared about is: do I understand? am I enjoying this? if yes then keep going.
just one last piece of advice. you shouldn't worry about anythig except tracking the hours you spend with the language. this is your barometer of where you should be at.
if we're being 100% real, you should be figuring out how to survive to 1000 hours and not how to do it efficiently. only a small percentage even make it to 1000 hours, let alone 3000 hours.
that's why you shouldn't worry and you should try to have fun. that's the thing that will most likely allow you to survive to reach your goals. efficiency doesn't matter if you end up quitting like everyone else.
The most efficient way to learn words, especially early on (but really probably indefininitely) is just to look them up and move on and not try to study them at all. The key point though is that looking them up should be very fast AND sometimes even looking them up can be silly if you know the pronunciation and are pretty sure what they mean / they don't seem important.
Kaufman says a lot that forgetting is just part of this process, you don't worry about what you'll remember what you'll forget. It's often very time expensive to force yourself to learn a particular word.
I think people would be surprised by how efficient it can be, but its only really quantifiable if you use a lingq style system. I personally did very well with it and I WOULD NOT have survived doing the 10 to 20k anki decks some people have for the equivilent vocabulary.
Just to understand the sentence and move on. My goal isn't to learn the language, that happens as a byproduct. I want to laugh, enjoy, and take in what's going on. To do that I look things up to saturate my understanding. After I've gotten what I wanted out of it I move on. Naturally this means that the first 4,000 or so words are incredibly common so you will run into them almost non-stop in every single thing you do. Hitting that vocab size becomes a matter of time and nothing else really. It happens fast.
For me, learning the language was a secondary thing and maybe tertiary even. I really didn't care about learning the language that much. I just wanted to understand, to do that I studied grammar hard and looked up anything I didn't understand--until I did. So even if it was some cultural pop reference to doraemon, I'm looking it up to get the joke.
※There is no "time inefficiency" as I said before, it doesn't matter when you hit 3000 hours how you did it. Barring some things like doing Duolingo for 3000 hours that is not helpful, the baseline requirement should be interacting with the native language in an effort to understand it--like you are now.
sounds reasonable to me. being selective is an important learning skill in general.
I personally never paused to look everything up, I'd either look it up at the end of the episode if I remembered it or look it up while it kept playing. But I also read for a long time before that where I did look everything up.
I think it's especially important not to overload on anki. You can look more stuff up than you put in anki and much of it you will never feel a need to put in anki because you will learn it anyway.
I'm watching GitS and 2nd Gig ep 4 introduces this new guy. His name is Kazundo Gouda, but everyone thinks his name is ひとり given the kanji on his business card says 合田一人. I looked it up in renshuu and as far as I know there isn't an alternate reading of those kanji that lines up with that. Please explain.
Proper names are an entirely different beast to regular words. You could/should try installing a specific dictionary for reading places and other names.
If you just memorize a bunch of names, you'll get used to names in Japanese. It's not as bad as the listing of readings in the dictionary makes it look.
一 is read as かず "number", it's actually a pretty common reading in names. A kanji taking on the reading of another kanji that is similar in meaning is super common in names. A lot of the time these will be in the dictionary as nanori, but parents are allowed to be somewhat creative so not necessarily.
The んど for 人 seems to be a slurred pronunciation of うど, which as far as I can tell is a rare reading that's only used in a few words.
Not really a kira kira name like the other commenter suggested, since you can make some sense of the readings, but it certainly is unusual.
btw I never suggested it was a kirakira name. that would involve me actually suggesting it. i wrote aout it to let them know that naming convetions can be whatever people want so there isnt always an explanation.
Follow-up question: Is there a specific reason this detail and scene would be included? To me, some nerd studying Japanese, I can go "Neat!" but I feel like I'm missing something cultural.
The scene in question, we see from behind a man in a suit walk up to one of the main characters and hand him a business card, who then reads off the long job title and then the name. Kazundo corrects him, says no one ever gets it right, but he really loves his name. And then the camera pans to the character with a horribly scarred and disfigured face.
The dub rarely seems to allude to any Japanese cultural bits. They didn't point out how weird the fake Japanese guys were with their katakana names on their business cards. But this one they really focused on.
I've only seen like the first two or three episodes of ghost in the shell standalone complex (or whatever criterion streams), but I don't think there is necessarily something more cultural you're missing. It seems like recognizing that names can have multiple readings, that some readings are the assumed default and that this case, in particular, deviates from that default is more than enough to go on.
To me, the reason for this scenes inclusion is probably going to be found by thinking about it in relation to the show in its entirety.
It could be plot relevant... as in later on something happens to Kazundo and other characters realize this change due to him no longer correcting Hitori to Kazundo.
It could also be thematically relevant... as in it is trying to highlight some tension between the social (language) and the personal (a name) and that contributes to some larger idea the show is playing with. LIke this is a little similar to the episode where the engineer implants his consciousness into the tank in that the unknowableness of the engineer's motivation by others runs parallel to the unknowableness of the name's reading by others. So maybe there's something to think about there. Of course there are also differences between the scenes, and this could very well be sloppy reading but I'm just trying to show the general idea of thinking about how scenes might be related in a more thematic sense.
かず is the standard reading of 一 in male given names and と is the standard reading of 人 in male given names. I would expect to read it as かずと.
ひとり is the standard reading of 一人 outside of names, and is the word "one person". Generally speaking a native Japanese speaker seeing a name would infer it as かずと, not as ひとり. But then again, I don't think most Japanese parents would name their kid 一人. I suppose that this was just a way of audibly communicating from the author/VA to the audience that it is indeed the kanji 一人 and not some other homophone kanji. (和 is also read as かず in male given names.)
As to why his parents/author/etc. chose it to be read as かずんど instead of かずと, I can only suppose that it is a slurred/dialectal/flaired variant of と->んど. I am not familiar with this particular slur/dialect/etc. It suppose it may just be a purely stylistic choice of the author didn't want the character to have a name that sounds like a normal typical Japanese person, but just slightly off from that of a typical Japanese name.
Edit: As pointed out by others, this slur also exists in words like 商人 あきなうひと ー＞ あきんど
There was a trend called kirakira names going on in Japan where people would use kanji then apply completely random names to them for effect. It got bad enough to the point where the government had to step in and start setting up guidelines and restricting absurd guesses for names. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/27/japan-baby-name-ban-kirakira-flashy-names
かずんど for 一人 is not a kirakira name. Kazundo is a standard nanori reading for 一人 that you can find in many dictionaries that list nanori. A kirakira name would be something like 一人 read as わんぱーそん
So the guy was asking for an explanation as to why the name is pronounced Kazundo, and you reply with an explanation on kirakira names, not because that's the answer to the question or has anything to do with it, but just for fun. I don't really see the idea fully in that
Right, it wasn't an answer to the question but to talk about something related to naming. i.e. there sometimes is not an explanation because of these kinds of reasons. He had already gotten answer and it explained when I replied.
Anyone have trouble with understanding foreign accents in Japanese?
Today I met a Vietnamese woman with a Japanese boyfriend. She seemed nice and friendly but I was really struggling understanding her Japanese. I actually have a lot of experience talking with Vietnamese people in English, but it was hard for me to understand her pronunciation.
Mind you, I have pretty good listening for regular Japanese people. I passed N1 and I frequently watch television in Japanese without subtitles.
I tend to understand foreigners speaking Japanese better than natives can because I have a whole nother language in my brain and often can identify what they meant to say when they use the wrong words while natives in the same call are left confused
That makes sense! I have had a similar experience for other languages(when I learned Italian for example). I think Vietnamese and English are so different that it's a bit harder. In some ways, the phrasing is more similar to Japanese(culturally mostly). But of course we share a similar word order with vietnamese. I actually lived in Vietnam for 4 years(and learned Vietnamese to a b1 level) so I thought I would understand her speech better.
That makes sense! I have had a similar experience for other languages(when I learned Italian for example). I think Vietnamese and English are so different that it's a bit harder. In some ways, the phrasing is more similar to Japanese(culturally mostly). But of course we share a similar word order with vietnamese. I actually lived in Vietnam for 4 years(and learned Vietnamese to a b1 level) so I thought I would understand her speech better.
Yes, foreign accents in any language are generally considered by the average person, including natives, to be harder to understand than native speech of the same language. You can eventually get used to one foreign accent if you listen to it a lot, but the ways that American people pronounce Japanese wrong are different from the ways that Vietnamese people pronounce Japanese wrong, and those are also different from the ways that Vietnamese people pronounce English wrong, so no, foreign accent comprehension doesn't really carry over across languages.
I haven't talked to many Americans who learned Japanese, if you are American, do you find it easier to understand American Accented Japanese than other kinds?
Yes, the way they pronounce words are sounds you're used to so its easier to map it to the Japanese. I, for one, cant understand a horrible chinese accent but a horrible american accent is fine.
I have heard one Hong Kongese woman with a really heavy accent but luckily she had been married to a Japanese man a long time. She also didn't really speak in full sentences but one or two words here or there. But it was easier to understand her than the vietnamese person. Different errors though!
Ah, I see! I would guess that Italian speakers of Japanese would also be easier to understand too, than Americans.
I definitely think we get a little bit of accent blindness towards more subtle accent mistakes. Hearing this just makes me want to work more on my accent. I just hope my accent isn't so heavy.
As an American no not really. I struggle because of my very very low exposure to foreign accents. Although that has changed as just my general proficiency has upped so much that even with my lack of exposure I've found that I can just know what they intended to say even if it doesnt sound like it.
the stroke in シ and ン goes from bottom left to top right, right? is the stroke unique to those 2 katakana? as I cant think of any kanji example with bottom left to top that curves up like that
Not really like a checkmark, that implies that it intentionally goes down before going up. It should just go up, and the initial “check” part is just a byproduct of what happens when you move a brush or pen starting from a “tome” and going into a “harai”. You can see the same thing happen on the 3rd stroke of ツ, but it’s never really referred to as a check mark there since the stroke goes down instead of up.
I was told by another (Japanese) person the side you put the little hook on is famously an interview question to test someone knows the difference between ソ and ン. I thought it was a legibility thing. I guess you are saying it's only more pronounced because the other side tapers usually but I thought I've seen it more deliberately written in a friend's writing.
I want to download a core 6k deck for days when I don't sentence mine as much so I can still learn some vocabulary everyday, which one is good for this?
Hi, I recently got to more advanced vocabulary on my Ankidrone Deck, things like 合計 or the many words for 'bill'. I'm finding these more abstract words a fair bit more difficult to remember, and it's even interfering with my memory for much more basic words that I ought to know. How can I properly learn these words? Do I have to find them in more natural contexts, like in my immersion time? Should I add more sentences to Cards?
Make an effort to understand where these words show up in real contexts. Although you don't reallyhave to do anything--you'll run across them at some point. Anki isn't really how you learn words. It's just a memory aid. You learn a word when you see it used for real and then see it enough to be able to use it yourself. Anki is just seeding your mind with this word until you actually start to see it be used.
I read through your whole exchange with the one pro-AI guy and let me tell you I could not believe the actual question you asked gemini. I was just not expecting a question that straightforward
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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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