gegegeno

Oh sorry, I didn't see your edit. I'd say it's about as usual to shorten names and give people nicknames in Japan as it is everywhere else. The same goes for fictional characters. The way that names get shortened can be quite different from how it's done in English (not a name, but think of how different the abbreviations are in the case of Personal Computer -> PC and パーソナル・コンピューター -> パソコン), so perhaps that's why we notice them more.

I've been slowly getting into Japanese novels. I first read one that was translated from English - one of my favourite Roald Dahl novels so that I was already familiar with the story. Since then I've been mainly sticking with novellas and short stories by Japanese authors. I have some novels but not enough time to really get into one when I'm studying full-time. I even have a couple of "hard" novels by the likes of Natsume Soseki so I have something to aim at in the future. I also have a couple of Swedish children's books - Pippi Långstrump and some of the Moomin series in my reading list. Whether I'd have better luck trying Japanese literature or Swedish children's stories is yet to be seen...

On the topic of the new Dutch course on Duolingo, has anyone here who knows Dutch had a look at it? I've been meaning to learn some Dutch, and this could be an excellent resource for me, but I'm just wondering if the course (and in particular the audio) is much good at this stage of development.

You were right, it's 捨てうどん. The literal meaning is something like "discarded udon". I googled around and followed some links, and there's a character called "Reisen Udongein Inaba" (鈴仙・優曇華院・イナバ) in a computer game called Imperishable Night. I think this is an inside joke from that.

いつ (when) いつだれかがこのスレッドに返事するかな…

Japanese works quite differently to English in this regard. You tend to directly describe things rather than describe your feelings about them. So instead of "I'm happy with the service", you would instead say "The service was good" (サービスはよかった). "The sales representative was very helpful" is fine because you're describing them, and is 販売員は大変助けになりました. The last one might be phrased "The service was unsatisfactory and I cannot recommend (that place)": サービスは不満で、進めできません. (I'm a little unsure of that last one, because it's not such a common phrase). If you want to find how Japanese people say things like that, try finding websites for rating restaurants and shops and the like. See what you might be able to pick up from how native speakers write about their service experiences.

That's strange, where were you looking? At least on Amazon Japan and in Japanese bookshops I've never noticed that his books are any differently priced to other authors (then again, the postage is awful to send it outside Japan). You can get most of his books on Kindle too, as long as you have an Amazon Japan account. On the thread topic, I've been making my way through a collection of Murakami's novellas and short stories. If anyone's interested, it's his contribution to a series called はじめての文学. The great thing about this collection is that it is aimed at Japanese high school students and so the stories are chosen to be relatively easy to read and there's furigana for a lot of the more difficult words. Also, since they are short stories/novellas, I find each story to be a manageable length - not something you can say about Murakami's longer novels!

生け花 （いけばな） - (Japanese style) flower arranging ともこさんは生け花の大家になった。 Tomoko has become an expert at flower arrangement.

In a general artistic sense, I'm totally on the fence for this one. I study translation, so I have a slightly different perspective on the pros and cons of each method and the whens and whys of using each. If you're learning Japanese though, 100% go for subs. You're not going to learn any Japanese by watching a movie or TV show in English! As your Japanese improves (hopefully not only through watching anime), I highly recommend dropping the subs or trying Japanese subs so you don't get distracted or rely on the English subs to get the meaning. As an aside, if something has official subs, grab those. Fan subs are occasionally good but usually range from average to bad, and I'm saying that as a student of Japanese-English translation.

Another lesser-known use for it is for "scientific" names for things, even if they are Japanese. A great example I've encountered is different ways of writing "dog": 犬 - the kanji, just "dog" in a general sense いぬ - what you might use for your own dog - it's "softer" than kanji イヌ - canis lupus familiaris - "the dog" as a species of animal (the Japanese Wikipedia page uses this form, for example) I totally disagree that Japanese should get rid of katakana just because there's a Latin alphabet for loan words, not least because it's an argument reeking of Western imperialism, but mostly because it's been around for a long time (c.f. Edo period and earlier texts using it where hiragana is standard now), and serves a greater purpose than rendering English in Japanese. I notice that English doesn't use the Cyrillic alphabet to write "Moscow" or kanji to write "tsunami" (indeed Russian uses Cyrillic for loanwords, and Arabic uses the Arabic alphabet for them too), so why shouldn't Japan use their own "alphabet" to write loan words?

Make sure you come and visit the Japanese forum, too! There's some good threads with links to usefuf learning sites, advice for beginners and that kind of thing. We'd also love to help you with any questions you might have, so don't be afraid to start a new thread (or jump in on a related one) if you have anything to ask. You mentioned you want to be able to watch stuff without subtitles. Just out of curiosity, what are you watching?

来る (くる - "to come") 兄はいつ来るのでしょう？もう一時間待ったけど…　

I think what everyone has said here about using romaji to make the initial step into Japanese is absolutely valid. It's really one of the main reasons romaji are even in existence (the other one being so we can name places and things in Japan - where would non-speakers of Japanese be if Tokyo appeared on maps as 東京, for example). Interestingly, I know Russian learners have their own version of romaji that uses the Cyrillic alphabet instead of the Latin one - for the same reasons. But like others have said, romaji isn't Japanese. There are no Japanese books written in romaji. The pronunciation of Japanese is kinda approximated but doesn't perfectly match the letters in romaji - ん and が are the most glaring examples - the first is a nasal sound that sounds like "n" sometimes and isn't really pronounced at all other times, and "g" sounds more like "ng" a lot of the time (actually it varies even on where in Japan someone's from). So learn kana! It's kinda hard to start with and takes some time to get used to it, but if you put the time in to learn it, you'll never have to turn back and the way forward will be even more open for you. The same argument goes for kanji too - try and learn some because Japanese isn't (all) written in kana either!

怪獣　（かいじゅう - monster) 怪獣映画が面白いのです。

Interesting topic and discussion. I've been mulling over this a bit for myself as I've been learning a lot of words in Swedish, actually about the 1000 most common of them so far, and am not exactly "fluent" just yet (even in the most broad sense of that word). Maybe if I was at a point where I could internalise the grammar well and use all the words I know to form sentences, I could be fluent but the words alone just aren't enough. Looking at the data for Swedish, the most common 1000 words are used 65% of the time. So I think that with about that many, you could be fluent and be able to get through most basic things (like going to buy food or exchanging basic greetings), but I'm not sure you'd get too far in a conversation if they used any of the 2/3 of Swedish vocab that you didn't know yet (or you wanted to say something not covered by your 1000 words). I had a look through the list and words like "dyr" (expensive) and "sjukhus" (hospital) were way outside the top 1000, so maybe that's not quite enough. When you get to 3000 words, you have 75%. I feel like that's almost enough to be reasonably competent, though still far from "proficient". That's meant to be between A1 and B2 level, so kinda like you can express and understand most basic idea well, but not yet enough to understand or express anything too complex (Swedish is a pretty bad example though, because English natives get a tonne of words for free - "trafikpolis", in the 7000s, is something I could understand easily). So in summary, I think you could be fluent in the broadest sense of the word with around 1000 words assuming your grammar is good and you have confidence, but 3000 is about where I might be willing to say that of myself. Fluency and proficiency are totally different things though.

Ok, I totally understand that the idea of the Japanese-only forum is pretty scary to anyone new at the language (and I'll be honest, those of us who aren't even new), but why don't you try out writing a little Japanese and reading it too? If you want an easy way in to learning some more Japanese, come and join the "shiritori" game going on in there right now (unfortunately just between me and Miya up until now). The idea is that you take the last character of the previous person's word and use it for the first character in your word. But don't let your word end in "n" (because then no one else can make a word, because no Japanese words start with ん and you lose)! We've been holding a little conversation in between the game, which you can feel free to ignore. Choose a word, give us its meaning in English (how else will we learn?) and add an example or join the convo to practise your Japanese. Without further ado: link to the game thread Come join us!

ガラガラ (gara-gara - "noisy rattling" or "vacant or bare") 1. ガラガラと音がする - make a rattling noise 2. がらがらの電車 - an almost-empty train 擬音語(ぎおんご - onomatopoeia)、擬態語(ぎたいご - mimetic words)はかなり難しいんですね。電車の例文で「電車はすいている？もしくはうるさい？」という問題もあるかもしれません。 モモンガを見たことがあっても、動物園で見ました。日本にいるんですか。かわいくても飛べるネズミじゃないでしょうか。

子ども (こども - child) 漢字で書けば、「子供」ですが、「供」はservantの意味なので、最近使われなくなってきました。そして、ひらがなで書くのがもっとやわらかい感じをするのじゃないでしょうか。 （名詞でも使い方がおもしろい単語もありますよ！）

It depends, I think. My "real" experience with Japanese has been as a college student studying the language and society, so I have a lot of use for learning key phrases for talking about current news and so on. I'll agree that they can be very hard to understand though. I found it took me a long time to adjust to the speed and register of NHK News, but once that hurdle was jumped it was a lot easier to follow and if I knew about a news story I could understand just what they were talking about. I'll see if I can find a good internet source, but there are a lot of news panel type shows in Japan where they go over a few stories and explain them in depth with pictures and diagrams and things. Because they are supposed to be making the news more understandable, they use less jargon than a regular news bulletin. Apart from those, the people on variety shows speak somewhat regular Japanese, even if they go a bit over the top. Same with interview shows and the like. The dramas I've seen go a bit over the top (think of how in some bad American daytime dramas all the actors put on ultra dramatic voices, but turn it up a notch), but are still relatively normal compared to most anime (which are just as OTT but in even sillier voices). Basically, my point was to diversify your resources. If you only listen to news, you'll sound a bit weird and formal when you speak Japanese, and if anime (or drama, or variety) is the only Japanese you hear, you'll sound weird too. Get some variety into what you watch. PS: The other day I posted a link to this subforum on reddit where a lot of variety-type shows are posted, and they can be a great place to start. If you really like a particular show, you can just search on youtube or dailymotion for more of them.

眼鏡（めがね） glasses. 賛成です。名詞と形容詞などの使い方はほとんど簡単ですね。動詞はより難しいんですね。たぶん動詞と使いにくい名詞だと例文を書いてみましょうか？

チーム (team) チームでしりとりのゲームをがんばりましょう！ （すばらしいアイディア、ミヤさん！しりとりが好きなんですけど、実際に1、2回しかやったことがありません。こんなフォーラムですごく簡単にできますよね。定義だけでなく、定義と例文を書いてみましょうか？）

I've used NIJI for streaming and it does pretty well. You download an app, but it's Japanese and all above-board. I recently stumbled on Reddit's /r/JTV, which has episodes of Japanese shows (mainly variety shows), and seems to be updated every day or so. I don't watch a lot of Japanese TV (or much TV at all), but if I find any other links I'll post them here

これはひらがなだけでかいたぶんです。 これ　は　ひらがな　と　すぺーす　だけ　で　かいた　ぶん　です。 これは日本語で書いた文です。 There's a bit of a comparison for you guys between hiragana only, hiragana with spaces and kanji+hiragana. The first is a total mess in my opinion. I don't know at first glance if only hiragana is huge, maybe (ひらがなだけでかい、多分）or it's a sentence only written in hiragana. Where do the words start and finish? The second is easy to understand but super long, and homophones are awful (how could you tell if この　たび refers to this time, this trip or these socks?). The last one is harder to read if you don't know many kanji (these are all grade 1 or 2, but imagine they were more complicated), but since it's in kanji it's harder to mix up the meanings.

There were a bunch of students like this when I started my Japanese degree. Their intonation and pronunciation were pretty good, but they spoke like anime characters, not real people. There's nothing really damaging about watching a lot of anime in Japanese to help your learning, but it's good to also watch dramas or other types of TV shows (news is the "gold standard" of good Japanese pronunciation, but admittedly can be boring) so you can get a better idea of how real Japanese people actually speak. On the topic of things to know - keep in mind that Japanese and English have very little in common, and try to get away from the habit of thinking about everything in terms of English (because there's too little in common). If there's something you want to say or write, think about how you express that idea in Japanese and don't translate it from how it's said in English.

I agree with those above who've said it's useful for learning hiragana - あ="a" for example, but shoud be dropped as soon as you can read enough hiragana to live without it. The reason why I think like this is that the way you write things in romaji isn't the same as how you actually pronounce them. ら isn't pronounced the way you say "ra" in English, because the Japanese "r" is a hard "r" that sounds a bit more like L or D to a lot of listeners. ん isn't usually pronounced as "N", but more like a nasal sound that sounds kinda like N in some situations but not others. The word げんいん (原因 meaning "cause") isn't pronounced "gen in" like it's written in romaji, but more like "gei-yin". What I'm getting at is that while it makes things faster at the beginning, your pronunciation in particular is held back by thinking in romaji, and once you get past the first few chapters of a textbook or course, it'll be all in hiragana anyway. There are NO real Japanese texts written in romaji. The majority of Japanese dictionaries don't have the words in romaji, just kanji with hiragana readings. The few extra minutes spent now learning to read everything in hiragana will be paid back in hours later when you can get through real texts much more easily and not have to spend as much time working on your pronunciation because you've always equated る and "ru" (and those aren't the same sound).