Hi, I use Rikaichan/Rikaikun at the moment but I'm not sure how to turn on pitch accent if it has it. Does anyone use a pop-up dictionary that has pitch accent, by any chance?

相席（あいせき,） means "sharing a table with someone you don't know (e.g. at a restaurant)" (Takoboto).

What other fun words have you all encountered that just don't translate well to English or require a short explanation?

I'd like to make a sentence that's very long in translation, and/or read a silly sentence like that.

({凸|のの})

{Testing, 1 2 3|Look I made a face!}, I just want to try this in a post.

I am designing a tshirt with a friend and we wanted to put some japanese on it. Since my japanese is extremely basic (こんにちは、ミカです) I wanted to ask whether the symbols DeepL gave us mean what we think it means. We want to have a skeleton inside a water bottle and the text should read "stay hydrated" and we got these symbols: 水分補給. Do they work in that context? Or are there any better suggestions we could use? Thanks in advance!

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/11661821

"〇〇だったば、...." is this legitimate?

I want to say "If it was 〇〇, then... ", is "〇〇だったば、..." the right clause?

Or 華金? Well, either way: TGIF!

In the car on the way to a castle (お城) with my host family's kids, no less. They thought it was hilarious that I was excited to see the お尻 (butt).

Any other gaffes out there? 🙃

救急救命士（きゅうきゅうきゅうめいし / paramedic） is one of my favorite Japanese words because it has きゅう three times in a row.

Any other fun words like that?

I met two Russian people who were running a booth at a festival. One greeted me and tried to converse with me in English, but it soon became apparent that that wouldn't get us very far. So, we switched to Japanese, and made small talk for a few minutes before I made my purchase.

Not a huge deal overall, but I thought it was super cool to be able to make use of Japanese in a novel context. It was also interesting to meet someone where the best language for communication for both of us was an L2. As a native English speaker, that doesn't happen very often.

聾者（ろうしゃ） looks like 龍（たつ・りゅう / dragon）＋耳（みみ / ear）then 者（しゃ/person）

Etymology-wise, it seems the "dragon" part was added just for the pronunciation, not because of dragons.

I love the visual aspect. They areでこぼこ and おうとつ and mean bumpiness.

If I understand this 使い分け explanation, the core meaning (bumpiness) is the same. However でこぼこ is spoken and can be used in more ways: to mean miscellaneous, as an adverb, or as an adjective. おうとつ is written, and strictly a noun about bumpiness.

Anyway, I still like these characters because they're awesome!

吉（き↑ち↓）= Lucky (especially from a fortune)
不吉（ふ↑きつ）= Unlucky

Why is it not ふきち!? Makes me want to quote Atsugiri Jason: WHY JAPANESE PEOPLE WHY!!!

/rant

many mistakes were made

こんにちは皆さん！ 久しぶりですね。このコミュニティが結構静かで少し復活しようと思っていました。

それに従って、これから（できる限り)日本語の週刊練習スレッドを始めます。

何でも書いても大丈夫ですから、ごゆっくり自由に日本語を使って、チャットしたり、自分にノートを残したり、なにか最近勉強した文法を練習したりしてくださいね！

Hello everyone! It's been a long time. This community has been pretty quiet for a while, so I've been thinking about reviving it.

Therefore, I've decided to start a weekly (as much as possible) Japanese language thread.

You can write anything, so use Japanese as you please, chat with others, leave notes for yourself, or even practice any recent grammar you've learnt.

よく考えると、なんかこのポストを書くのも自分にとって練習になって草

Where should I go to chat with natives?

When I encounter a new vocabulary word, it is often useful to see how that word is used in other contexts. Previously, I would use Jisho.org and do a sentence search for the word, but they really only have sentences from tatoeba.org, which are not always the most natural, and sometimes, there just aren't very many. I've found yourei.jp to be significantly better, as they take example sentences from real books and display them in order of readability.

Compare (example word: 円満)

• Jisho.org
• yourei.jp
• weblio.jp

One disadvantage is that yourei.jp doesn't provide English translations, so if you need those you might be better served elsewhere.

(For this particular example word I chose, weblio.jp seems to have decent results, but it overall seems to be hit-or-miss. For instance, ぼかす. Lots of sentences, but they're all basically useless. Most seem to be excerpts from technical manuals.)

I've been semi-casually studying Japanese for around 5 years. I currently live in Japan, but since I already have a remote job for an English-speaking software company, I've never had an interest in getting a job for a Japanese company, and having a good level of Japanese was really only ever a matter of convenience and personal achievement.

On a whim, I participated in a mock JLPT session that was held by a local university. To my surprise, I passed the N2 level. Not with flying colors, but with enough margin that if it were the real thing, I probably would have passed.

This is a win, because I have never passed the JLPT before, and haven't done any test preparation. I mostly just read books and participate in daily life. I have some Anki flashcards, but I'm far from consistent with it.

I signed up for the December test!

I watched a TV show with Japanese subtitles, and noticed the sentence: "秘密にしててほんとごめん。"

I was a bit confused because didn't know why there was a second て after the te-form of する. Because I didn't know how to look this up in my textbook or on Google, I asked a certain AI chatbot about it.

It tells me that してて is actually a contraction of していて (te-form of する and いる).

秘密にしててほんとごめん。 meaning "I'm really sorry for keeping it a secret."

秘密にしてほんとごめん。(without the second て) would only mean "I'm really sorry for making it a secret."

Is this correct?

Inspired by some concepts in programming recently I've come up with the idea that は marks an environment and が marks a variable inside an environment.

Environment and variable:

An example of environment:

猫は

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: cat            │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 └───────────────────┘

This is an environment with the name 猫.

Many things can exist inside this environemnt:

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: cat            │
 │ ----------------- │
 │ behavior nyan     │
 │                   │
 │ cute liquid       │
 │                   │
 │ mouse ...         │
 └───────────────────┘

An example of variable:

猫が

             v: cat

This is just a variable with the name 猫.

私は猫が

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: I              │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │           v: cat  │
 └───────────────────┘

This is the depiction of an variable with the name 猫 inside an environemnt with the name 私.

Some sentences

Sentence 1: 猫が好きだ

This sentence can have any of following meanings according to context

a) Generally speaking, cats are liked [猫が好きだ]

b) As for me, cats are liked (-> I like cats) [私は猫が好きだ]

c) As for ? (someone or something according to context), cats are liked [◯は猫が好きだ]

a)








             v: cat───────► liked



b)

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: I              │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │           v: cat──┼────► liked
 └───────────────────┘


c)

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: ?              │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │           v: cat──┼────► liked
 └───────────────────┘

Sentence 2: 猫は好きだ

This sentence can have any of following meanings according to context.

a) Generally speaking, as for cats, everything about cats is liked. [猫は好きだ]

b) Generally speaking, as for cats, ? about cats is liked. [猫は◯が好きだ]

c) As for me, as for cats, everything about cats is liked. (-> I like cats) [私は猫は好きだ]

d) As for me, as for cats, ? about cats is liked. [私は猫は◯が好きだ]

a)

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: cat            │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   ├───────► liked
 └───────────────────┘


b)

 ┌───────────────────┐
 │ E: cat            │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │                   │
 │            v: ? ──┼───────► liked
 └───────────────────┘


c)

 ┌───────────────────────────────┐
 │ E: I                          │
 │                               │
 │                               │
 │        ┌───────────────────┐  │
 │        │ E: cat            │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   ├──┼────► liked
 │        └───────────────────┘  │
 └───────────────────────────────┘


d)

 ┌───────────────────────────────┐
 │ E: I                          │
 │                               │
 │                               │
 │        ┌───────────────────┐  │
 │        │ E: cat            │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │                   │  │
 │        │           v: ? ───┼──┼────► liked
 │        └───────────────────┘  │
 └───────────────────────────────┘

Sentence 3: 猫好きだ

I think here 猫 can be either an environment or an variable.

Environment & variable vs topic & subject: I think this environment model explains things betther than the use of the terms "topic" and "subject", at least for me.

I took inspirations from following sources:

a) Lesson 3: WA-particle secrets schools don't ever teach. How WA can make or break your Japanese (by Cure Dolly)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9_T4eObNXg&list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj&index=3

b) Environment model in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO1aqPBJCPg&t=2023s