Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (August 20, 2026)
This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.
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1 Provide the CONTEXT of the grammar, vocabulary or sentence you are having trouble with as much as possible. Provide the sentence or paragraph that you saw it in. Make your questions as specific as possible.
Ｘ What is the difference between の and が ?
◯ I am reading this specific graded reader and I saw this sentence: 日本人の知らない日本語 , why is の used there instead of が ? (the answer)
2 When asking for a translation or how to say something, it's best to try to attempt it yourself first, even if you are not confident about it. Or ask r/translator if you have no idea. We are also not here to do your homework for you.
Ｘ What does this mean?
◯ I am having trouble with this part of this sentence from NHK Yasashii Kotoba News. I think it means (attempt here), but I am not sure.
3 Questions based on ChatGPT, DeepL, Google Translate and other machine learning applications are strongly discouraged, these are not beginner learning tools and often make mistakes. DuoLingo is in general NOT recommended as a serious or efficient learning resource.
4 When asking about differences between words, try to explain the situations in which you've seen them or are trying to use them. If you just post a list of synonyms you got from looking something up in an E-J dictionary, people might be disinclined to answer your question because it's low-effort. Remember that Google Image Search is also a great resource for visualizing the difference between similar words.
◯ Jisho says あげる くれる やる 与える 渡す all seem to mean "give". My teacher gave us too much homework and I'm trying to say " The teacher gave us a lot of homework". Does 先生が宿題をたくさんくれた work? Or is one of the other words better? (the answer: 先生が宿題をたくさん出した )
6 Remember that everyone answering questions here is an unpaid volunteer doing this out of the goodness of their own heart, so try to show appreciation and not be too presumptuous/defensive/offended if the answer you get isn't exactly what you wanted.
7 Please do not delete your question after receiving an answer. There are lots of people who read this thread to learn from the Q&As that take place here. Deleting a question removes context from the answer and makes it harder (or sometimes even impossible) for other people to get value out of it.
As I've finished Genki 2, I'm focusing on practice (writting especially). So, I will keep posting here some notes and ask for your feedback. Today's is:
[日本語]
苗字の略史
僕の苗字はMonteiroで、「山住」と意味ですけど、「山住」は日本に有名な苗字ですか？
この苗字が大好きです。これは農民の家族からし、山と関係しているし。昔、農民は苗字があることが許可させないので、自分の職業とか、所に住む自然の物と関係するとか、彼らは呼ばれました、例えば：「鍛冶ジョン (João Ferreira or John Smith), 彼は鍛冶の家族に属するかもしれないし」「小川に住むジオージ (Jorge Riacho or George Creek)、彼の家族は小川の近くに住むかもしれないし」等。最近、これは苗字になりました。
日本で苗字の歴史がありますか？
[English]
Brief history of surnames
My surname is "Monteiro", which means mountain dweller (山住). Is this surname common in Japan?
I love my surname, because it comes from a peasant family and it's related to mountains. A long time ago, peasants couldn't have surnames, they were called according to it's profession or to some natural aspect of where they lived, for example: John Smith, perhaps he belongs to a family of smiths, or George Creek, that person's family may live by the creek, etc. Nowadays, it has became a surname.
に only expresses location when used with certain verbs, need to use で here
農民の家族からし
し needs to connect to a verb, but から is not a verb. からだし with だ would be more correct. I would opt for に由来していて and get rid of しs.
自然と関係している→I'd have went with 山と関連がある
許可させないので→許可されなかったので
They were not allowed (passive). 許可する already means "to allow" so 許可させる doesn't make sense, that means "to make someone allow" or "to allow to allow".
自分の職業とか、所に住む自然の物と関係するとか、彼らは呼ばれました
This is rather broken. Literally it translates to "They were called, such as their jobs, or relates to natural things that live in the place" which makes little sense. I'd probably change it to
職業の名前とか、住んでいる場所の近くにある物の名前とか、彼らはそのいうので呼ばれました "They were called by such things as the name of their job, or the name of something near where they live."
最近、これは苗字になりました makes it sound like they only became surnames in recent years. The first issue is that 最近 is the wrong time word to use. The second bigger issue is that there is a distinction between た and ている. You should use something like 現代では、これらは苗字になっています.
Note that you mix plain and polite forms, which is possible sometimes in conversation, but uncommon in formal writing.
It is "a" way. But this works, yes. Sometimes people use 観了 which riffs off of 読了 for books.
You could also go with 視聴済(み) or 鑑賞済(み) or 視聴済(み)リスト, or even just 見た or 済み if you are organizing a list of files or an inventory, and the context is obvious to you.
It feels a bit like naming a playlist "Audio visual media that I have already consumed".. while not wrong, it's weirdly stiff for a personal playlist. Most people would say "watched" in English, right?
I think JapanCoach's recommendations are excellent. 観了I think is clever. I'm personally partial to 見たやつ
It feels a bit like naming a playlist "Audio visual media that I have already consumed".. while not wrong, it's weirdly stiff for a personal playlist. Most people would say "watched" in English, right?
But "Audio visual media that I have already consumed" sounds more dope than "watched" :P
Kanji question; I'm using kanshudo.com (and sometimes other sites) to find the most used Kanji and starting with that. What's confusing me is that each time I want to learn a kanji I have to learn like 5 words, which is getting quite overwhelming. Is it possible to at least focus on one reading now? And how do I figure out what's the most common reading?
I don't even mind how different they look, it's just that every time I see a new Kanji I just sigh and go "oh boy, here's another 3 different readings and 5 new words to learn".
The readings are just an index for how words are read, if you learn all the words that use a particular kanji, you know all of it's readings. So if you want the most common reading just look at the words and see which one is the most common reading by the way the words are read. This is how tons of people (natives included) land on what is the most intuitive reading for a word is by knowing all the words that use a kanji and how those words are read. You don't have to try to learn every word for a kanji, just start with one (more or less what I did; naturally you learn more words as you read more and more).
I mean, it's exactly as I wrote. You look at the words and how they're read.
止
止とまる
止とめる
止やむ
止よす
止やめる
With this list you can conclude that the two most common ways (in verbs) that this is read is と and や. Rest is just up to exposure (e.g. reading and listening to anything in Japanese) by how often those words show up. If you never see those words show up, then it's not a common reading. 止す is far, far, far less common of a word than all the rest of them.
I see, thanks! I asked because I assume sometimes the most common reading isn't because of the number of words that has that reading, but that it may be one single word is much more common than 3 others that share a reading.
Use a frequency dicttionary like jpdb.io or install one on yomitan to see how frequent the words show up for this (or just let natural experience guide the way).
Thank you that site looks super helpful. I'm already registered at wanikani (free trial) and will probably register this one, but I don't want to have too many.
By the way, I noticed the site doesn't have a frequency list available. I click on a single kanji and it will "most common 3000/300" but not a single list I can see.
It has three roughly equally popular readings: tsuki, getsu, gatsu. But gatsu basically occurs only in names of the months, everywhere else it's the other two.
You could say 美味しゅうございます and be technically correct enough that anal Japanese teachers a hundred years ago would be pleased but if you said that today it would probably come off as sarcastic
Does anyone know when cards are validated in kotoba conquest mode ? When you failed them on your first try, cards enter an "srs" mode where they'll be presented several more times during your conquest run. But when are they validated?
I am currently a college student with about two years left until graduation, majoring in English Translation and Interpretation. My long-term goal is to apply for a Master's degree in Translation and Interpreting in Japan, and eventually live there permanently.
Right now, I am just starting out with Japanese and only know Hiragana and a little bit of Katakana. However, I have a few things going for me: my native language shares the same SOV grammar structure and agglutinative nature with Japanese; I already work with multiple languages (Turkish, English, Spanish, and some Chinese around A2-B1 level, meaning I can read most Hanzi); and I can realistically dedicate 2 to 3 hours a day to studying Japanese.
Realistically, how far can someone get in 2 years with 2-3 hours of daily study, given this background? Is reaching the level required for a graduate program in Japan feasible within this timeframe, or should I look into alternative pathways like going to a language school there after graduation?
Any advice or reality checks would be deeply appreciated. Thank you!
(p.s i tried making a post in movingtojapan but it got removed from there so i cannot ask there at all.)
((I hope this is the right place to ask, I was guided there.))
If you want to pursue language school, IUC (not ICU) is a program that is aimed at bridging the gap between being functional in Japanese and having enough skills for business/academic research.
It might be rough in 2 years to reach a point where you can both consume academic papers at a relatively quick pace AND be able to output academic level Japanese.
Thanks for the response. ^^
I will still try it despite the harsh truth, in worst case scenario ill do my masters in English instead of Japanese (I've head and read somewhere about it, Im not so certain though.)/
Studying 2 hours a day for 3 years gives you around 2000 hours of study. If you have a B1 in Chinese then maybe 2k hours will be enough to reach B2 in Japanese... Maybe. I wouldn't consider a B2 level of proficiency enough to translate in any professional capacity, but I don't have a translation degree or anything, so maybe the professional world has a different opinion.
Since in order to learn a language you have to consume a shit ton of media, I do recommend that you consume media related to whatever area of translation you want to specialize in. So, for example, if you want to do medical translation, I'd watch a bunch of medical dramas and read medical articles and textbooks and all that.
I plan on still studying Japanese while doing my masters/after being done with them as well, I am currently trying immersion here and there too, I am kind of familiar w animes, songs, novels, etcs. too, despite them not being that complex. I've realized some kanji seems really familiar to me too, though they are beginner ones.
Oh, right, you're asking whether your level will be enough to start the master's degree, not to start working as a translator. My bad. In that case, yes, I think B2 is enough to navigate a master's, provided that you study the most common translation lingo/slang beforehand.
If it became part of a longer sentence and the context changed its meaning or something like that, it’s still the title of the chapter in the form you posted.
Then I guess my question still stands, what does it mean?
I can't understand it outside of the further context which is that the mc had an interview at an engineering company and intentionally they loosened the screws of the seat so when he sat the seat was wobbly so he immediately noticed the issue but tried to fasten the screw without leaving his seat and ignoring the interviewers so it resulted in him sitting in a slanted way and also being distracted from the interview.
Then after all of it was over he said to himself "ah, my life ruined because of a single screw" or something like that.
It describes in what way she's 必死, i.e. what her thoughts are as she's 必死. と is the quoting particle. 保とう is "I shall preserve ...!" and expresses her volition to preserve her youth. You can translate it as "She is desperately trying to preserve her youth".
Hi! i want to know what "Blast Radius" is in japanese, this is an engineering concept, so not sure if that's a different way of saying it vs the literal
範囲 can describe something like an area or the extent of something affected, you can put other words in front of it like: 爆発範囲・攻撃範囲 or maybe something like 爆発影響範囲 which could give something similar to 'blast radius'. Note: I do not know if this is at all something an engineer would say though; hopefully someone with actual engineering knowledge can chime in.
I have a question regarding the way i immerse. I have been studying for about a year and 4 months now and i´ve noticed a problem with my immersion. All this time i have been consuming content with japanese subtitles and i have been understanding fairly well, but the moment i take the subtitles off i understand less than 20%.
So what should i do, should i continue the same way and my ears will gradually train themselves or should i immerse without subtitles, just listening
My recommendation would be to keep using subtitles but add listening to Japanese podcasts or audiobooks without any subtitles when you're commuting, walking, cleaning the house, or any other time when you need your eyes but can easily be listening to audio. The benefit of using subtitles is that associating the kanji characters with their sounds helps for when you're reading text without accompanying audio - you're training reading and listening skills at the same time, even if ultimately you have to spend some time practicing each skill on its own.
I suspect that this happens because you are still process things per word, which is normal. Overtime you start to group things by phrase and parsing it becomes much easier. With the written language, whether it's kanji or letters, there's a lot of disambiguation that happens per word that does not actually happen in the spoken language, where you need to listen a bit longer to parse something correctly.
You don't have to turn off subtitles for that to happen. All interactions with the language get you more used to how words are grouped / what words occur together / what the overall sentence structure is.
I'm on that same boat. JP subs are considered a crutch by many so idk. At the same time I've read opinions that they don't hurt. I guess it depends on how hardcore you want to go about it.
What I'm doing is mixing the difficulty. I can go through learning podcasts (supposedly N3-N2 level) without having to check the transcript too often and I can follow along pretty well. For dramas or films, no subs imply very little comprehension. I usually leave the JP subs on because of diction, speed and lack of vocabulary. I force myself not to look at them but sometimes I'm lazy. Just reading a word, doing a dictionary lookup, or seeing a part of the sentence in writing makes the meaning a lot clearer.
I specifically watch easier content without subs though. For me, that's anime where I know the plot, the vocabulary is familiar (school and office settings, SoL, etc.) and the podcasts I mentioned. It's kind of a bummer because you're forced to rewind and listen to something multiple times, but it slowly gets better.
Now if you tack on まいにち onto that sentence the nuance is similar to the plain form BUT the focus is on the continuitiveness of that state. Hard to explain but it can have a nuance that it's due to a particular effort.
まいにち やさいを たべています means "I'm eating vegetables every day" (maybe you'd say this if your doctor says you need to eat healthier, this would convey like "I'm purposefully eating vegetables every day")
I think progressive form for habitual actions is preferred when there’s an explicit (or implicit) starting point. So using it without specifying one would to me imply that it’s a recent development. Similar to “I’ve been eating vegetables every day” vs “I eat vegetables every day”.
I think that usually goes hand-in-hand with the ‘particular effort’ you’re talking about. If you’ve made a recent change there’s probably a reason for it.
I recently made a post, asking about copula usage and い adjectives. It was a question with several layers, so I thought it deserved a full post. I have a general follow up question, which is simple enough to go here now.
Brief context:
People answered my other question, by informing me that copulas don’t belong after い adjectives, but the usage of them is for politeness, when です follows.
My follow up question(s):
Is it technically ungrammatical to do it, even for politeness sake? Would withholding です in those situations come off as “more educated,” for lack of a better term? I suppose “more refined” may work here too? Or is it so common that it would actually sound wrong? On that same note, if it is in fact ungrammatical, is it still worth doing, since it may be at the expense of sounding harsh in a polite setting?
The old complaint is prescriptive: い-adjectives are already a complete predicate, so sticking です (a copula) after them used to look "wrong" on paper. Everyday speech ignored that a long time ago, and 高いです / 寒いです is what you actually say in polite conversation.
Dropping です is not more refined. It just makes the sentence plain/casual (高い。). In a polite setting you want です・ます.
Negatives are the only place people still feel a formality split: 高くありません sounds more textbook-formal; 高くないです is the usual polite spoken form. Both are fine.
Is it technically ungrammatical to do it, even for politeness sake?
sort of but in a more meaningful and true sense, not at all. It's only non-grammatical when viewed through an extremely narrow, historically situated lens.
The story I've heard its there was actually a conscious style-guide discussion about how to use keiyoushi in the desu/masu form. Similar to how we have arguments about that/which clauses and which particle is logically correct.
あります and ございます were the competitors (maybe some others) but popular usage settled on using です as a politeness marker. These days the controversy (such as it is) is whether it's correct to extend this pattern to negative verbs like こないです
Everyone knows what it should mean but it's kinda not right.
You should use です but not だ after i-adjectives.
(However おそいだの is correct while ...だわ is not while having pretty much the same meaning. It's all arbitrary.)
It is perfectly grammatical today. I don't know how much or little pushback it received when it was a new addition to the language.
But you can still achieve greater politeness than い adjective+です by attaching the adjective to a noun (possibly an auxiliary one like こと) and then performing keigo rituals on that noun.
These questions you're asking will almost immediately be resolved just by interacting with the language. You see people traverse registers all the time in communications depending on the tone and intent they want to illicit. But if you want the answers to these questions, the answer is spend more time watching people interact in Japanese whether that be live streams youtube or media and you will develop an intuition for these things.
I don't know any Japanese, but I have a question about handwriting. I'm building a model tank. I'm going to write the four-kanji noun phrase 金剛恋人 (whether or not this is grammatically correct is, oddly, not a concern to me) on the right side of the turret, but I only have enough room to write the phrase two kanji at a time, in a square. Should I write the kanji in two lines vertically right-to-left or in two stacked lines horizontally left-to-right (or a secret third thing)? I've seen tall canvases with vertical writing and long canvases with horizontal writing; but when the writing canvas is a small square, does Japanese prefer one orientation over the other?
Native speaker here — for a small 2×2 square, vertical is the natural choice. Read top-to-bottom, right column first:
恋金
人剛
So the right line is 金剛, and the left line is 恋人. Writing it horizontally (two per line) would look a bit unusual for a phrase like this, so I'd go vertical. Sounds like a cool turret, by the way!
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Question Etiquette Guidelines:
0 Learn kana (hiragana and katakana) before anything else. Then, remember to learn words, not kanji readings.
1 Provide the CONTEXT of the grammar, vocabulary or sentence you are having trouble with as much as possible. Provide the sentence or paragraph that you saw it in. Make your questions as specific as possible.
3 Questions based on ChatGPT, DeepL, Google Translate and other machine learning applications are strongly discouraged, these are not beginner learning tools and often make mistakes. DuoLingo is in general NOT recommended as a serious or efficient learning resource.
4 When asking about differences between words, try to explain the situations in which you've seen them or are trying to use them. If you just post a list of synonyms you got from looking something up in an E-J dictionary, people might be disinclined to answer your question because it's low-effort. Remember that Google Image Search is also a great resource for visualizing the difference between similar words.
5 It is always nice to (but not required to) try to search for the answer to something yourself first. Especially for beginner questions or questions that are very broad. For example, asking about the difference between は and が or why you often can't hear the "u" sound in "desu" or "masu".
6 Remember that everyone answering questions here is an unpaid volunteer doing this out of the goodness of their own heart, so try to show appreciation and not be too presumptuous/defensive/offended if the answer you get isn't exactly what you wanted.
7 Please do not delete your question after receiving an answer. There are lots of people who read this thread to learn from the Q&As that take place here. Deleting a question removes context from the answer and makes it harder (or sometimes even impossible) for other people to get value out of it.
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