@snailplane For your information, the analysis of the pronunciation of ん (the phonetic realization of this phoneme) is complicated; see Wikipedia. ん at the end of utterances is realized by uvular nasal [ɴ], and I heard that this phone does not exist in many languages. This may explain why it is difficult for you to hear it.

@snailplane That would be the point, actually. Alot of the online material for new learners just gives a bare minimum, like classroom material does. For a classroom it's okay, since you have examples of speech and an instructor who can fill in the details.

@snailplane Don't get your hopes up too much... this idea is very much in the 'idle speculation' phase

Japanese is hard.

I feel like there are recently a lot of questions that have been downvoted.

Yes it is. What questions? Your questions?

I'm usually more in favor of editing questions...

No, my questions have been okay, but I've seen other questions getting downvoted. They were definitely not of high quality, but downvoting into the negatives seems a bit harsh to me.

(My questions usually escape from getting downvoted, but usually don't get upvoted too much either -- generally due to being some combination of obscure and poorly formed due to lack of understanding on my part).

Yeah... I actually think this is a pretty good question... japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/11121

Well, voting is tricky business.. For whatever reason, the current "score" seem to affect people's judgement when casting a vote.. ie. they're targeting a score rather than saying "I liked/disliked this"

@gibbon Yeah, in some idealized world you wouldn't take the current score into account. But in the end it's the overall score that has the psychological affect on the question asker and the viewers. Even if you dislike a question, you may not want the affects of a negative score on the asker/viewers.

@jkerian I had not seen that question before but it seems rather "bad" imo.. They're simply different sounds, what does English have to do with it at all? It seems he's asking more about the romaji than the sounds themselves.

@gibbon He's asking for an actual description of how the sounds are different. The writing system is utterly and totally irrelevent here.

@gibbon But, while the core of the issue may be the "score" vs. "vote" thing, I think there's also a correlated issue related to JLU (or perhaps all language SEs), which is when there is a "I don't understand [concept]/[sentence]/[grammar]" question, usually people downvote when it's poorly formed, but only upvote when it's something they don't already know... which can lead to a very negative score especially on a beginner question.

For most beginners, however, し is approximated as "she" for English speakers... but it isn't exact... he's asking HOW it's different

If he was asking about た, the answer would involve the 'dental' aspect of the Japanese たつてと (although not ち)

I think the answer to his question is that the sound formation is done farther forward in the mouth... between the top of the tongue and the upper teeth, but I need to verify that with someone who actually studies these things (I could easily be misremembering)

@jkerian No, he's really asking about "sh", "ch", "j" and how it's read in different languages, which in a way is kinda nonsensical.. I understand what he's really asking about, and it's a fine question to ask, but he didn't ask the question particularly well.

You understood exactly because you maybe had the same problem when you were a beginner - but for some people this was never an issue and so it just seems "stupid" (excuse my word choice there)

That is... quite unnecessarily insulting

The question should probably be reformed along the lines of "What are the physical characteristics of making the X sound in Japanese?", but the meaning is easy enough to understand without that.

@gibbon Frankly, if you haven't thought about the contrast of sounds between the languages (and the different set of sounds that need to be produced), I wouldn't be insulting ANYONEs language ability

@snailplane very true

@jkerian I think you may have misread what @gibbon said.

perhaps

@jkerian My reading: "You understood [that question about phonology] because you maybe had the same problem when you were a beginner - but for some people [that specific question about phonology] was never an issue and so [that specific question about phonology] just seems 'stupid' [to those people]".

Perhaps... the phrasing still sucks

Well, such is the downside of live chat. :P

The actual reason I find it a reasonable question is that I have a somewhat kneejerk reaction against the "kanji-above-all" attitude of the Internet-based Japanese studying community. But I do understand that part of the reason for that is the information about how to speak/listen-to the language is so shitty.

You come across it pretty strongly on most forums. (reddit is probably the best/worst example) The idea is that you couldn't possibly "know" Japanese unless you have the whole Jouyou set memorized.

I haven't noticed that very much on JLU.

But I'm new around here.

no, we're not too bad (the presence of actual native-speaking Japanese tends to keep that in check)

Kanji is certainly important, but on the other hand you can probably learn the entirety of Japanese grammar without learning any kanji. I guess it just comes down to what "knowing Japanese" means.

There are three dictums of most online Japanese-learning communities: 1) Thou shalt use Genki, no other textbook shall come before it 2) Thou shalt use anki, and shall worship before the alter of SRS 3 ) Thou shalt use Heisig, and kanji shall eat all of your study time for at least a year!

I don't hold the "kanji-above-all" attitude, but only because I'd be a massive hypocrite if I did (I'm very bad with reading and writing kanji :p).

(Which unfortunately makes reading Daijirin definitions and other online .jp resources a massive headache for me.)

(Which sucks, because they often have all the answers I'm looking for. It's really annoying not being able to skim, I have to read the entire thing from start to finish otherwise I might miss what I'm looking for.)

I pick up practically all my vocabulary from anime.

Note... I actually did use heisig, and do use anki. (Genki is... dreadful) It's just that they are good for studying "kanji", mostly in isolation.

Gotta head out here, ttfn.

@snailplane This is chat... it's all tangential

@djahandarie later

My personal attitude is that RTK is worth doing if you do it QUICKLY. If you can cram through the entire set in less than 3-4 months... it's worth doing. Otherwise it's probably a waste of time

Yeah... the important thing to remember about anki is that it isn't designed for "learning", just for "retaining"

Since most people's model of flashcards is cramming before a test, that concept is sometimes hard to get across

That's the theory, and it makes some intuitive sense... I'll admit that I haven't actually read the SuperMemo papers though

Admitedly... RTK does help with that

Holy crap, I had no idea there was so much drama over on math.se

Fights breaking out between the moderators in the open, some of them resigning in protest of actions of Atwood, two moderators being suspended, one being sacked

lol .se again.. confuses me every time.

@snailplane but in that case, the company probably internally redirects, so the URL actually works

Yeah I've seen that too. We've got .osa at opera..

We have something like that here... I can't recall what it is though (too many conflicting IT departments)

Would you use 売る or 売っている for "This shop sells..."