@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.

@jkerian Just an idea: what if you made it a video series, with each video focusing on something tricky (like g versus nasal g)?

Or, well, I don't know how you'd break it down into videos exactly.

I feel like I'm getting better at listening as I practice and identify my weaknesses (the mistakes I make)

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

Finished reading my book! :-) That took me a while.

I feel like the transitive and intransitive tags should be merged into transitivity

I also noticed that your profile says that you're "super interested in programming languages". Are you familiar with the concepts of coupling and cohesion? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohesion_%28computer_science%29

I think the concepts are somewhat applicable

Ideally you want each question to be a single module that does one thing and does it well.

You can choose to couple questions together if they're closely related

Let's look at your latest question, though.

First, you ask about the 「し」 in 「バックダッシュし」

Second, you ask about 「入るより」

Does understanding one help you understand the other?

Personally, I don't think the questions are conceptually related.

Why does that matter? The purpose of asking questions isn't just to help the asker. It's to help future users of the site who have the same or similar questions.

If someone wants to refer to your question down the road, it's easier if there's only one question per actual question.

That is, it's unlikely that someone will want to ask "What is the meaning of A and B?" at the same time when A and B don't depend on one another.

So, since A and B don't depend on one another, they should be in separate questions.

I'd also like to point out Troyen's answer to a meta question I asked: meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1003/…

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.

@gibbon "What does English have to do with it?" Well, there's research by Jim Flege showing that sounds exist (for a learner) in a "common phonological space" and that there's always L1-L2 interaction. That doesn't mean you can't describe L2 sounds without referring to another language, but "how does this sound differ from a similar sound in my L1 language?" seems like a useful question to me.

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

Different people start with different sets of sounds they're able to recognize and produce, so different questions are useful to different people. :-)

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.

What is the kanji-above-all attitude?

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.

Ah, I see. That attitude

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)

I actually said something like that myself, maybe a decade ago. I was probably mindlessly repeating something I had heard. I don't remember

I got taken to task for saying so :-)

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.

Certainly you can. Ask a blind native speaker how many kanji they know

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!

Hah.

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).

I am pretty good at kanji. This is because I am a dork and really like kanji

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

My personal feeling is that it's easy to pick up kanji as you pick up vocabulary

(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.)

And that vocabulary is the real challenge, rather than kanji

I pick up practically all my vocabulary from anime.

At least, that's true for me. I don't know about anyone else

A-ha

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.

Have you heard or read about the "four strands" concept?

Well, I suppose that's tangential.

I didn't use Heisig, but my study buddy and his fiancee did.

Gotta head out here, ttfn.

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

@djahandarie later

It was a lot of fun to compare what each of us learned about kanji. My study buddy did RTK1, and his fiancee RTK1+3

It seems to have faded into the background since then, though

It's not like you end up learning entirely different sets of information just because you use a different method.

I've never used Genki, or indeed any textbook. (Though I'm working through the listening exercises with my friend who's in second year Japanese.)

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

And I continue to use Anki. I like it!

Anki helps me remember things I would otherwise forget.

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

I do a lot of my studying on paper away from the computer. It goes into Anki later.

One thing I've become more aware of since I started using Anki is how long it takes me to remember something.

If I can just barely remember something, sometimes it takes me extra time to call it to mind. I understand that that builds stronger memories, that extra time spent working to recall

So that's a good thing in terms of long-term retention, but it's frustrating when I'm listening and need access to the information in real time

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

When I end up replaying something in my head to figure it out because I couldn't process it fast enough

One problem I've identified is being able to guess a card based on when I'm seeing it. For example, if I had added 感 a long time ago and just added 惑, I'm going to get 惑 right, but I might not be training myself to recognize what distinguishes it from 感.

I've noticed that I still make mistakes where I recognize something based on a non-unique part, so I must have trained myself incorrectly

Admitedly... RTK does help with that

That's a good point, and I do use mnemonics to distinguish pairs that I mix up

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

I use some mnemonics from Henshall as well, though I don't think he comes up with the best mnemonics all the time.

I have never used math.se, so I'm unaware of the drama! Should I be happy that I'm unaware?

I need to come up with some kind of mnemonic for the word うんざり. For some reason, my brain refuses to memorize that word no matter how many times I see it.

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.

Wow

@gibbon I've seen similar abbreviations before, but only in a corporate environment, hostname.[firstletterofcompany]

At least, that's the only time I can specifically remember seeing abbreviations like that.

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

Probably I'm just forgetting!

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

@jkerian Hmm. Not that I'm aware!

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..."