I see to your point, the joke leans to imply that Chinese people will lie about the ingredients served in their restaurants to save some money.
This stereotype, however, is predominant amongst Chinese people in China. This joke would fit right in on any Chinese TV show, questioning the legitimacy of the meat at a cheap restaurant is a joke older than the country. This may be why the author calls it "harmless".
It would be the equivalent of a Chinese sitcom where a character might suggest that visit a Texas Barbecue you might get shot by some revolver-wielding cowboy. I don't think many Americans would take offense.
But as the author mentions, strict self censorship amongst broadcasters has effectively cut all scenes that mention "China" or "Chinese" just to be safe.
> It would be the equivalent of a Chinese sitcom where a character might suggest that visit a Texas Barbecue you might get shot by some revolver-wielding cowboy. I don't think many Americans would take offense.
That’s fair enough, maybe I’m over analyzing. But you probably wouldn’t find that joke on TV in America either.
As an aside, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find a joke like that on an American TV show.
To the point: it definitely would not be removed from Foreign-made media before shown on American services. Especially as a result of some government-driven mandate.
Its interesting because I've looked into these "automated prescription" telehealth services for a year now without much luck.
I have prescription OCD meds that I've been on for a couple of years. I pay 100 USD out of pocket every 3 months for a telehealth appointment with my doc where she asks "everything okay? Same prescrition?" Its totally useless, but I've yet to find a service that is <33 USD/month to save me any money on this.
I think the benefits of these startups aren't that they are cheaper but that they offer new patient exams within a few days. My PCP won't diagnose let alone prescribe medication for ADHD (which is pretty normal from what I've seen) but finding a psychiatrist can be a real pain. I've heard of people booking appointments a month or two in advance which, for a lot of people, is outside of their work/life scheduling horizon. I admit this particular problem is a bit top of mind because I'm trying to see an audiologist and last week places around me were booking for February 2023 :(
I started studying Japanese in 2020 with 「みんなの日本語」(Minna no Nihongo). The book is entirely in Japanese and only assumes that you can read hiragana/katakana and have access to a dictionary for JP -> your native language. The book also includes an audio CD of each of the lessons to practice listening comprehension.
I used the two books, audio CDs, and an excellent YouTube channel called "Nihongoal" that provides supplementary lessons to each chapter in English.
In 2 years of daily study I have a better command of Japanese than I did in Chinese, my college major... Admittedly the Chinese study has helped me immensely with Kanji.
When you study Japanese in Japanese you are constantly reinforcing prior knowledge while acquiring new concepts. Minna no Nihongo does an excellent job of pacing these concepts in a way that is powerful but not overwhelming to a foreigner learning the language.
I guess I am just a bit apprehensive to teaching Japanese in English because of how much efficiency you loose in that concept reinforcement. If you want to learn words and phrases this approach might work, but if you want to actually speak the language I feel that its going to take a lot longer.
>I started studying Japanese [...] assumes that you can read hiragana/katakana
Can you explain how this works? This sounds like you were familiar with Japanese, not "started studying".
>When you study Japanese in Japanese
I've heard this before (with other languages, as well) but just can't wrap my head around it. The only example I can think of is full immersion (e.g. moving to Japan or wherever you're learning the language) and being surrounded by it 24/7, where context clues sort of boot-strap you into learning more. But how does this work without full immersion?
1. Hiragana/katakana can be learned in a week or two using flash cards and spaced repetition. It can be mastered through reading Japanese text for a few months to the point where you stop thinking about it. You don't need a $77 book to learn this, its just brute force memorization. I didn't know any other Japanese going in besides this.
2. Full immersion while ideal is impractical for most people interested in studying this language. You can still give yourself full immersion while learning anywhere in the world by using Japanese learning resources and limiting your English use to the minimum necessary (dictionary lookups, explanations for particularly troublesome concepts).
By the end of MNN 1 going into MNN 2 I swapped from a JP -> EN dictionary to a JP only dictionary. If I didn't understand a word from context in the book I would look it up in the dictionary, if I didn't know a word in the definition I would look that up and so on until I understood using only Japanese.
>I didn't know any other Japanese going in __besides this__.
I think that's where I was hung up. It makes total sense to first start with learning hiragana/katakana with whatever preferred method, then move onto something like the book you suggested. Rather than just starting with the book you suggested. And, I'm sure that point is obvious to many and why you left it out. But, as someone who only knows one language, it wasn't as obvious to me.
One more note that you may or may not be aware of:
Culture and language are closely intertwined, they drive each other, and Japanese is certainly no exception to this.
Japanese isn't spoken as literally or certainly as English is, especially to strangers. They use this system called "Keigo" which you'll find translated as "politeness" but that doesn't really completely encompass the idea. It is just a way of speaking in certain situations that covers your bases. Japanese is a language that is often stereotyped as needing to say a lot to say a little and this is often true.
Its useful to try and learn this intuitively. Hear and see it used often to the point that you just know the idea being communicated. Its difficult to translate many of these concepts to English because of how outside of our cultural sphere they often are (which is why I believe trying to teach them in English from the beginning is a fools errand, they must be learned contextually).
One can learn the kana in a few weeks to a month, depending on how diligently one studies. It's akin to learning a new alphabet (although with quite a few more characters), but it's almost fully phonetic. Know the sounds the mora make, and you can (basically) pronounce the word, and certainly be able to look up the meaning in a dictionary. It's the first step to learning the written language without actually knowing what anything means, and lets you bootstrap Kanji learning as well.
Learning Japanese through immersion doesn't necessarily mean getting thrown in the deep end watching TV, reading newspapers, etc. A just-starting beginner would understand none of that.
This other key to language acquisition is comprehensible input, meaning you're just barely pushing the boundaries of what you're reading / hearing. Adult learners have decades of context to lean on from their native language, and so a good language learning resource will leverage that knowledge as well. みんなの日本語 starts with the very basics and builds from there. Same with Pimsleur (for the spoken language) which contains minimal English.
I guess I'm just getting hung up on "started learning", which comes a few weeks or month after already learning all of the characters. It sounds like the OP is suggesting to learn hiragana/katakana first, then continue with their recommended book.
Which makes total sense! And the OP probably left it out because that's the sensible thing to do. But as someone who only speaks one language, I was a bit confused on where I would actually start.
I was in your shoes a year ago! I'm reading at about an N4 level now, and have some very basic speaking ability.
It's daunting, but many people have done it. The key for me was having lots of different resources to learn from. I've found that everything teaches things a little bit differently, and everything skips something that another resource doesn't. Some explanations make more sense than others for certain facets. And of course, the repetition is good (and required).
I'd recommend:
- Write down your goals for what you want to do. Do you want to converse with other Japanese speakers? Write the language? Do you want to read Japanese? Be able to visit the country and communicate? Watch anime without subs/dubs? How you answer these questions will shape the resources you focus your time on. To build a regular habit of studying, you want to feel you're making steady progress towards a goal that you're passionate about.
- Learn hiragana/katakana. You'll not be able to make progress without this. I used a combination of this YouTube video [1] along with the "Japanese!" hiragana/katakana iOS app.
- If you want to read the language, start studying a Kanji deck.
- If you want to speak/listen in JP, start an audio course such an Pimsleur.
- Make your way through Minna no nihongo and/or Genki I.
- Google around for Japanese graded readers for beginners, to practice reading "real" content that has been synthetically simplified.
- Start reading community posts in Japanese language learning communities, and see what resources are being shared around and how people are studying. You'll naturally find a good fit, eventually.
> Can you explain how this works? This sounds like you were familiar with Japanese, not "started studying".
An important piece of context here (for anyone not versed in Japanese) is there there's effectively two sets of characters you need to learn, kana and kanji. The former is sort of an introductory requirement if you plan on learning, and the latter is something that takes most people years.
Kana is (for all intents and purposes you care about as a beginning language learner) split into two sets - hiragana and katakana. These are phonographic and cover specific mora (similar to a vowel), and both cover the same sounds. The corresponding hiragana and katakana often look similar, e.g. (ni) に and ニ, some are identical in both such as (he) へ, some are totally different such as (tsu) つ and ツ.
There's not that many of them, and you can probably learn them over the course of a week if you study diligently. Hiragana is the more important of the two to learn, and katakana is used somewhat similarly to how we would use italics or bold, for sound effects, for foreign loanwords, and similar.
Kanji is the other set of characters, and it's one of the tougher aspects of learning Japanese. ~800 kanji make up the 90th percentile of usage, but then you need another 1300ish to get to the 99th percentile, plus any domain specific ones. To further complicate things, there are multiple "readings" for quite a few kanji. Most kanji are imported Chinese hanzi, and many retain the original (or something close to) Chinese meaning as one of the readings, and a Japanese-specific one for another. The Japanese specific ones will often have hiragana attached.
All kanji can be written in kana. It's not generally done in practice for a variety of reasons - there are plenty of kanji that have the same pronunciation, it takes up more space, it's slower, etc. If I write out "Please buy some sake" (さけ) in hiragana, you won't know if I'm referring to the drink (酒) or the fish (鮭) without further context. Content aimed at people up through high school will frequently have furigana - the kana used for the kanji in question - above kanji, as will most content that uses rarer or domain-specific kanji in a situation where you can't expect the person to be familiar with it.
But when it come to writing beginner textbooks, they can keep things pretty focused, provide enough context, etc., to make it pretty feasible. There's lots of great electronic dictionaries now, so you can pretty easily look words up if you know the kana, etc.
>But how does this work without full immersion?
I think you might be overthinking it a bit - you need to do a little up front before you start working on vocab/grammar/comprehension/etc., but after that it's really just look at word -> look it up if you don't understand it -> figure out the sentence via context and dictionary results -> internalize -> repeat.
Cliff notes: Learning the kana, specifically hiragana, is basically pre-work to start learning Japanese in this sort of situation. I don't know if it's the right approach for everyone - some people might care more about learning some conversational basics before they go on a trip, or just generally need more immediate progress to stay motivated, but it is a method that is constantly self-reinforcing and likely works quite well for the people that can handle that sort of approach.
Also learned from MNN. It's worth pointing out that there are companion books that explain the grammar points in English (also many other languages - different books for different languages). Here's a link to eBay for the companion book for the first volume in English (couldn't find it on amazon, for whatever reason):
The grammar note books are invaluable...MNN can be a little challenging if you don't think like a Japanese person, or have a native teacher to help decipher the content. But they're also dangerous, because you can spend too much time in them at the expense of the actual textbook (I know this from direct experience).
MNN is not my favorite (I recommend Genki for native English speakers), but I agree 100% with OP about learning Japanese from an English-language book. It is a waste of time. Learn hiragana and katakana (you can do this in a couple weeks) and dive into full grammatical immersion. There is no other way.
If you like material that teaches Japanese in Japanese you might like this website : https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html . It uses emoji to introduce new words, uses them over and over in simple short stories to reinforce them and let you guess the grammar from the context.
I looked through the first 4 pages and its cute! I think this could certainly be helpful to someone getting their feet wet with really studying the language.
One of the reasons I tend to hold MNN as gospel is the way that it doesn't treat you like a child. The conversations are very realistic to what you would hear in modern spoken Japanese, with Keigo and all of the clunkiness that comes with it from lesson 1.
I noticed your disclaimer:
"Despite being in the form of stories the Japanese used is beginner Japanese and may not reflect the way native speakers would express themselves. "
If its not used by native speakers, why learn it this way? Maybe they could understand you if you spoke like this, but you would be unlikely to understand them without the need to speak to you as if you were 4 years old.
Grammar rules start by learning verb conjugations, these can be learned through tables, although there are some exceptions you will have to learn individually. This is an excellent free tool for practicing those (not mine, just something I've used): https://baileysnyder.com/jconj/
For structural grammar there are a lot of different routes to go about this, MNN teaches these pretty well in my opinion. I tried using bunpro (https://bunpro.jp) with mixed results but I know some people who swear by it.
As for knowing if your understanding of a sentence is correct, if I have doubts at my level I assume that I am likely incorrect. I typically google the part of the sentence that I am unsure about and either look at images or posts that use it in different contexts. Reverso context is also useful for this (https://context.reverso.net/translation/)
Only with Kanji. Many share the same meaning, and onyomi reading often sounds a little bit like modern mandarin, but the kunyomi readings are exclusively Japanese and you'll have to memorize those separately (Wanikani was helpful for me in this).
For grammar you are out of luck. Japanese is a much more grammar heavy language than Chinese, typically much more complex.
For written Japanese, a lot (for the kanji). For spoken Japanese, it helps with the words that were borrowed from Chinese — and this is a lot, perhaps 50%. But pronunciation is, obviously, recognizable, but differing. For such words (those that consist of characters that are pronounced using the so called on-yomi reading), you're likely to pick on the sound conversion from Chinese to Japanese and vice versa, and at that point make educated guesses to the meaning of those words. That leaves pure Japanese readings of words of course (which includes almost all verbs excluding the nouns that are verbified by suffixing with an inflection of suru), but it helps in the basis.
This is the same reason a lot of alternative JP learning resources recommend against traditional resources (sometimes even native textbooks, tangibly related) and favor sheer immersion instead. It's the same way many non-English speakers learned English as kids before their schools even start teaching them English. Formal education can still fill in the gaps where necessary or cover areas not usually covered in daily life, but it tends to work better as a supplement rather than the bulk of learning.
I too am against it in general, and given the sheer volume of vocabulary and little quirks required to understand Japanese, you'd probably do yourself a massive disservice waiting to dive in any longer than necessary.
I don't think that calling someone what they prefer to be called is a political issue.
I personally don't know any right-wingers that wouldn't call you by the name/gender that you request them to. These people probably exist but it is a very small group.
Theres a difference between disagreeing with the concept at a societal level vs disrespecting someone on a personal level. Far fewer people do that.
That's... a new one for me. Ah, they're all over Etsy—if anyone else was thrown by that, they're exactly what your first guess would be based on the name: a big round pin with your preferred pronouns printed on it. Interesting.
Well, yes, obviously? They have a pronoun pin. That's not a matter of disrespecting that person (as you note, we do it to everyone); it's a matter of disrespecting pronoun pins on principle.
I find it personally helpful to get points of data like this.
Living in Switzerland, the cultural standards are sometimes astonishingly different between countries (e.g. I still regularly see job application forms that require both a headshot of the candidate and a date of birth).
Sometimes, when I can tell during a hiring process that it's just not working out, I do ask companies why they ask for a photo and a date of birth.
The answers generally are:
- "We've always done it this way" - Well sorry to hear that, but that's not a reason
- "Everybody does it this way" - Well, I'm a candidate and I can tell you that no, only 10% of companies are doing it this way
- "We want to get a first impression of the person before we invest time to look at them closer" - The first step in your application process is a 15min call with an HR person. Do you really need a step before that to reject someone based on age or ethnicity or gender?
So far, no one has reacted with any kind of understanding.
> I personally don't know any right-wingers that wouldn't call you by the name/gender that you request them to
I've never been faced with this problem personally, but what I can say that is that if you've known someone for any length of time say "Bill" and then one day "Bill" wants to be called "Jill" there is an ask that extends far beyond what is ordinarily reasonable.
That's why I think "deadnaming" is totally stupid. That name isn't dead. You just don't like/prefer it. But it was there and people know that name. They know you—and you just changed your mind. That's not their problem—that's yours.
While it's hard to shift, as long as you're making an effort it's fine. If you slip up from time to time, especially early on, that's understandable. But eventually you should learn it. You were willing to call them by what they asked to be called originally, rather than just calling them "big guy" or whatever, so I don't think it's unreasonable to respect their wishes on what they wish to be called in the future too.
There is a big difference giving someone a nickname vs. assenting to a reorientation of outward identity.
Someone wants a nick-name? Sure. No problem.
Someone who was a guy/gal and now claims to be something else? Especially if he/she is actively known in a space as something before and _then_ changes? That's a HUGE demand that honestly shouldn't be something anyone is comfortable asking others to do.
I do this too, but with people who change their phone number. No, that number still exists, and I associate it with them. They choose to change it? That's their problem.
Edit: Guess I should put a /s. Is there a tag for highly passive aggresive /s?
I don't understand how they got a network connection to load in the chat on an unmodified console. Was the TASBot connected to the network and pushing the messages via controller inputs? If so that is pretty insane.
TASBot was only controlling controller 1 for a short time, but it remained connected to controllers 2-4 for the entire run, giving it time to download additional content as the showcase was going on.
> The Chinese government is an adversary of the West whether we like it or not.
I'd like to se a source on this. I don't think different political ideologies imply adversarial intentions. China has been as friendly to the west as it can be while still protecting its own cultural and economic interests.
If western leaders would stop seeing China as the enemy and instead as a partner we would see a rise in infrastructure and economic opportunity globally.
China is not trying to do global charity work, they have their own motives as well. They are also not the devil incarnate. I would argue that their intentions in foreign policy are still _generally_ more morally palpable than most western nations.
>I don't think different political ideologies imply adversarial intentions
Your source could be human conflict for all of recorded history.
It's not primarily ideological, it's geopolitical realism. They are a growing economic and military power in a different geographic sphere, competing over global influence and power. The history of civilization is conflict over scarce resources, space, and power. China is a cohesive ethnic and political collective and nation that exists separate from the US, it's government and citizens.
Of course there is and will always be room for co-operation in many areas; economic trade is a big one. But conflict over competing interests is a fact of life and where that comes into conflict global adversaries and enemies are created.
"Morality" is not a good metric to guide geopolitics, where material national interests and power dictate more than anything.
There's literally a category of diplomacy called 'wolf warrior diplomacy' because of the recently aggressive nature of China towards foreign nations. I'm not sure they have been "as friendly to the west as it can be while still protecting..." unless you believe that to protect their cultural and economic interests they need to expand.
Can you help me understand the logic of "generally more morally palpable than most western nations?" When I look at China's global activities, I see lots of IP theft, aggressive trade deals, debt diplomacy, investing in infrastructure yes... but then bringing in their own people to staff the projects (I saw this firsthand last year doing work in both Kenya and Cameroon and traveling through Uganda), bullying governments and organizations to toe the CCP party line (e.g. Houston Rockets), taking over Hong Kong and shutting down the free media there, basically paying off Muslim nations to keep them quiet regarding the Uyghur genocide.... and this is just off the top of my head!
> China has been as friendly to the west as it can be while still protecting its own cultural and economic interests.
I'm not implying you're doing it, but whenever I hear people defend China, they always use the word "culture" to defend totalitarianism/communism, as if they're part of Chinese culture.
I’m not sure if “palpable” is the word you want, but in any case: China’s foreign policy intentions include making independent, sovereign nations part of China against their wishes and asserting military control over a huge part of the oceans far beyond any internationally recognized limits. The former is a done deal with Tibet, because the world grew weary of complaining about it, and Taiwan is next. The South China Sea is also basically a done deal. I can’t think of a Western nation right now that‘s behaving in this way, or anything close to it. This is not even to mention the ongoing genocide of at least one population within China.
The imagery of each of the words is significantly different. "Newhouse" inspires the image of what it says on the tin, a new house.
Casanova inspires the image of a castle (Casa), and maybe something new ("nova") or even a supernova. It's also likely that most English language people know at least one "Jacob," so the name has baggage with past associations versus "Giacomo."
In the same boat, from talking to higher up recruiting people at AWS it sounds like a lot of their cold leads are handled by recruiter contractors.
These contractors (usually overseas) are paid mostly on commission and there are thousands of them. Its not how most big tech companies handle recruiting. They hand a gigantic list of emails to the mob and implement the "casting a wide net" strategy.
Note that for many languages a flag is not displayed rather a symbol. Chinese languages in particular follow this (拼 for simplified pinyin, 注 for traditional zhuyin).
Also Japanese never displayed a flag (あ for hiragana, ア for katakana).
Arabic as well. Loads of examples of such languages, with huge numbers of speakers. I think this is a reasonable change (and always found the colored icon in the menu bar to be gaudy anyway).
I see to your point, the joke leans to imply that Chinese people will lie about the ingredients served in their restaurants to save some money.
This stereotype, however, is predominant amongst Chinese people in China. This joke would fit right in on any Chinese TV show, questioning the legitimacy of the meat at a cheap restaurant is a joke older than the country. This may be why the author calls it "harmless".
It would be the equivalent of a Chinese sitcom where a character might suggest that visit a Texas Barbecue you might get shot by some revolver-wielding cowboy. I don't think many Americans would take offense.
But as the author mentions, strict self censorship amongst broadcasters has effectively cut all scenes that mention "China" or "Chinese" just to be safe.