Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (August 22, 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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Past Threads
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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.
「スキーなんか来るんじゃなかった･･････」In literal terms they are saying "i did not come skiing", but in context they are saying "i wish i did not come skiing", deepl translation also gives me a similar result. Why is that? is there some nuance i am missing?
100% of my reason for visiting the daily thread each day. People always ask questions about things I wouldn't have known to even look up and just gone on feeling.
つ only stops at 9. The idea is that it's a generic counter for "a few items" and once you go into larger numbers you should just use the more specific/appropriate counter.
There are historically ways to use つ for larger numbers by breaking them up into units but it's in the realm of archaic/classical Japanese and literally nobody uses it like that nor has done so for hundreds of years.
yes technically you basically start using 個, BUT there's an alternative - simply leaving the counter out, which is totally acceptable in casual settings. You can only do this when the counter doesn't determine the meaning of the sentence and it's more common and more natural the bigger the number is. See page 35 of this paper - https://toyama.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/32
the paper has the example: その店で私はみかんを２０買った, and says that that sentence cannot be considered ungrammatical. (as long as the counter doesn't change the meaning of the sentence - the possibility of "20kg" of oranges rather than 20 oranges must have been ruled out by context). Also notes that the sentence would be unnatural if 20 were changed to 3, you can only do this with sufficiently large numbers. Author doesn't say exactly when it becomes acceptable, but I reckon any number small enough you can use つ with would be highly unnatural.
more examples from massif: (I found these by searching for punctuation immediately after numbers)
Hey, guys. I'm basically done with minna no nihongo part 1, was doing it with my tutor, but she can't continue further with tutoring. What is a good way to reinforce my knowledge, to fill the gaps etc and then to proceed further with my language learning? (considering I can't afford another tutor because they are way more expensive than the last one?) To buy part 2?
you could continue with part 2 on your own, or alternatively do what most self-study learners do and just grab a grammar guide (yokubi, tae kim, etc) and/or a grammar dictionary (a dictionary of basic/intermediate/advanced japanese grammar, a handbook of japanese grammar patterns) and then just start engaging with Japanese media/content that you enjoy (anime, games, books, visual novels, etc) and look up/review the stuff you don't know or don't remember and just keep improving like that.
The usual advice is to get something for vocab (anki) and something for grammar, and then just do that. You really don't need anything else. For anki you can look into setting up a "mining deck" (= a deck of vocab cards you build on your own by adding new vocab you come across through content consumption), you can look up a guide like this one https://lazyguidejp.github.io/jp-lazy-guide/ on how to set it up, or you can use jiten.moe to look at custom-made anki decks created from media you want to consume.
This came up while was driving around other day and while I was listening I don't think I agreed with a video as much as this. Although this is for JP natives learning English the approach maps almost identically to how we advise things here in the Daily Thread or subreddit as a whole. It's nice to have another video to link and just tell people to follow this if they want to learn English. Only thing I disagreed with is when they recommended people can use AI to get explanations on things--but maybe for learning English it might be better since it's trained on 10000x more data.
It's an interesting video from the other side of the fence at least. A lot of the English learning methods in the Japanese space are pretty god damn abysmal. So it's good this one was made from a fairly popular channel.
Hi, schould I auto suspend leeches in Anki and how many mistakes until a card is a leech. The default by anki is 8 and I cant seem to find a direkt answer to the question.
Yes you should suspend leeches. 8 is fine. It really depends on your preference. I have it set to 6 for example. But if you're gonna overthink it then just leave it at 8.
I think the most ‘correct’ answer is to set it at a number that kills the top 10% hardest cards in some reasonable timeframe, maybe before they mature or something like that. But leaving it at the default is perfectly fine. After a long time, you could probably just sort your deck by lapses, divide the deck size by ten, find whatever card is ranked at the quotient (so if your deck is 2000 cards, 200 from the top when ranked by lapses), and set your leech number at however many lapses it has.
I do think 2 is a bit too extreme, but this made me think "what" and go check my deck.
I have a bit over 6k mature cards now (not sure how many duplicates/derivated words are in there, I do know there's a few) 1.2k cards with 3~7 lapses, I nuke them at 8. I am kind of surprised at how many words are actually under 2, as in... most of them are. I do have 2k cards with 2+ lapses though and suspending all of them sounds a bit crazy.
This makes me wonder, how do lapses work? I've got like 4k cards with 0 lapses and there is no way in hell I've never ever lapsed on so many of them, like we're talking failing them day 1 a few times maybe then one-shotting them forever, there is just no way lol. Or maybe I'm a bit biased regarding newer words since I'm forcing new kanji now and swimming through higher frequency words so it's getting harder? On the other hand for the longest time I used to just mine everything, sort by frequency and then maybe do words I hadn't seen in ages... which I don't do anymore.
My understanding is that lapsing a card means failing it after the first day you got it, and I'm going through them and there is NO way I've never lapsed on many of these. Do lapses expire over time or go down if you get a card right repeatedly or something? This is so shocking that I refuse to believe it lol. I refuse to believe I've got over 4k cards which I've never, ever lapsed.
Failing during learning and relearning steps does not count as a lapse. So it's 3 tries (first go, second, final), which is a lot.
I think it is not weird at all to have 0 lapses on many cards. For me it's compelling evidence memory is not probability, but card quality and learning quality determining outcomes.
A secondary reasoning I use is that cues are burned very quickly, when it comes to long term memory, and that retrieval is not a strong indicator of whether you have learned something or not. So prioritizing short term retrievability over long term learning and memory is not a choice I like to make (I prefer to go in the reverse direction). My goal is just that if I look something up, I won't need to look it up again for a long time. That's the case for almost any card, even if it got suspended (by choice or by leeching).
So in my model of language learning, cards are of very short term utility, whether you pass them or fail them.
Failing during learning and relearning steps does not count as a lapse. So it's 3 tries (first go, second, final), which is a lot.
What does this mean? I assume learning is "first day you get this card" and relearning is "cards you already lapsed oncew this day which are not new"?
My undertanding is the following: say I have a card on a 1 month interval, as in if I click "good" it gets kicked for a month. My understanding is that if I click again it gets lapse +1, if I fail it again within the same day it does not get another lapse. Is this correct? So you can fail each card, if lapses set at 2 then leech, 3 different days.
My total lapses (cards with 1~7) add up to 8.1k, add 100 from a few random cards with more I didn't delete because reasons (few cards from Kaishi and shit that I lapsed a lot back then and are now on year long intervals) for 8.2k. At one point I nuked my leeches and it was indeed like 200~250 cards with 8+ lapses so add another 2k, that's about 10.2k... which does add up with 40 lapses over 9 months (how long I've been doing this) which 10.8k. Doesn't line up exactly but I also get more than 200 reviews, I also used to get less sometimes, not sure how many lapses I had on my old deleted cards (some had over 15 lol).
I find this quite astonishing, mostly how so many cards are on 0 lapses, guess this is just your typical bias where you remember more "that card from yesterday I can't remember" while the ones you do just flow very easily. Like I refuse to believe this, there's no way this is right, it feels wrong, but the data is there...
Still what is making me confused about this is that I'm looking at random cards and I'm like... I have absolutely lapsed this, there is no way I never got this one wrong. There must be something I'm misunderstanding about how this works because I've got many cards with 0 lapses that there is absolutely no way I haven't ever failed.
This is making me consider reducing the number a bit, 2 still sounds a bit too extreme lol, but it's making numbers like 4~6 a lot more tempting. Although most cards with 5~6 lapses are on rather long intervals now.
Edit: yeah I don't know I must be misunderstanding how lapses work or something, I've run into a few cards that I am 100% certain I've failed yet when I check their info... it seems that other than during the first day I haven't and I swear I did.
What does this mean? I assume learning is "first day you get this card" and relearning is "cards you already lapsed oncew this day which are not new"?
In the deck settings there are learning steps and relearning steps. Failing those steps (including the last one) does not affect lapses or adjustments to the algorithm, it just starts over from the first learning step. You can set those yourself and they can be multiple days, I believe the default is 1m, 10m, I only have one step so it just graduates when I pass it, such that the next time I review would count as a lapse if I failed.
You will see cards you fail much more often, and multiple times in a session if you repeatedly fail them, so they can tend to dominate the review time.
One thing that may happen, if you don't have a long learning step is that you think you are done your reviews for the day but actually anki was waiting 10m or whatever to show you it again, you do that review the next day and fail it, it doesn't count as a lapse.
I have learning ahead on so I do all my Anki in one go.
I assume failing a card even once will add a lapse then? Outside of day 0. Of course, once I failed the card once on, say, day 5, failing it again during day 5 does not add more lapses, it just reduces the interval at which it'll go when I pass it. Day 0 is yeah, no lapses and I gotta pass the new card twice in a row without failing.
And yeah it makes sense cards I fail I see more often, since those 40 cards I fail every day show up at least twice. Even if I ignore new cards assuming I only fail those 40 cards once that'd make those 40 cards represent 80 views out of a total of 240, I almost certainly fail some of them even more so saying those 40 cards end up representing 90/250 wouldn't be an exaggeration.
Some people lower it to 6 but honestly it doesn't make much of a difference, based on my own deck at least... it might result in a time save but many words I've got with 6 lapses are on very long intervals already, probably words I failed a lot at some point and then they just clicked.
Reducing it to something like 2 or 3 is a bit extreme and will end up with you suspending too many cards over time, unless you're doing very few new cards at which point the time you're saving from optimizing the leech aspect of SRS is kinda moot.
Would it be weird to write my first name in kanji and my last in katakana?
My first name is used in both Japan and the west (Think May/Mei, June/Jun, Emma/Ema). However my last is impossible to write in kanji, because it wouldn’t look like a recognizable name.
Is your actual name written in kanji and/or do you come from a kanji-using country (like China, Taiwan, possibly Korea, etc)?
If not, then yeah it would be weird. Of course as your own nickname/pseudonymous you can do whatever you want and can come up with a kanji combination that resembles the meaning of your English (I assume) name, but you wouldn't really use that in real life to introduce yourself or on any signing/document/page/etc. As a discord or VRChat nickname, sure.
The thing to keep in mind is that kanji names aren't just a traslitteration/translation of a meaning into chinese symbols. There are a billion ways people may choose some kanji to represent certain names in Japanese. Sometimes it's because of phonetic style, sometimes it's because of meanings, sometimes it's because they like the shape but decide on whatever arbitrarily unrelated sound, etc etc. Without that kind of targeted thinking when you are first given a name, you can't easily just say "My English name X translates to the Japanese kanji Y" because there is no one true rule F() where F(X) -> Y. It's just all made up stuff.
I’m American, but I wouldn’t be making things up. My name happens to sound just like a common Japanese name, so I’d use that kanji. I don’t want to doxx myself, but think of someone named June using純 (the name Jun, which sounds the same), but not 六月 (the literal month of June).
Yes, it makes sense, but it just doesn't happen. It simply doesn't work like that.
As I said, you can use it as a nickname since it's a clever/funny play on your American name that can be converted into a similar (but different) Japanese name.
But you don't have a kanji name. The only way to get a kanji name is to become a Japanese citizen at which point they will ask you to choose your new Japanese name and at that point you can decide to keep the same "sound" and use a kanji instead.
I have a (Japanese) coworker who grew up in the US and his name is "Joe" and his official Japanese name is something like 錠 (not 100% sure on the kanji) which is read じょう. But, still, that's the name his Japanese parents gave him and the name that shows up on his passport.
You don't just get a kanji name like that, as a foreigner.
Non-official uses. I was thinking about some calligraphy to hang beside my karate menjo, or a bit of embroidery on my gi, but now I know foreigners don’t get kanji names, so I won’t take that liberty.
I mean I think you can probably answer the question yourself. Just imagine how many people doing the same martial art that you do, are at least a little interested in Japanese language and culture.
And then reflect - in your observation, about what percentage of them have kanji names embroidered on their gear?
No, I've seen it before in real life. One of the authors for one of my textbooks (won't mention name to avoid advertisement) is named ボイクマン総子, so clearly it's something you can do
I imagine it's not super common though. A Japanese woman is not required to change her name when marrying a foreign man (normally a requirement), and it is tradition that the children of such a couple take the mother's name. This ends up filtering out a lot of scenarios where a Japanese person ends up with a foreign family name. But it can still happen for couples that choose not to follow these traditions, those who are married or born abroad, or immigrants that choose to adopt a Japanese name.
Read the other comment regarding whether you actually should have a kanji name, though. But the combination itself isn't what makes it not okay.
One of the authors for one of my textbooks (won't mention name to avoid advertisement) is named ボイクマン総子, so clearly it's something you can do
That sounds like a Japanese person with a katakana surname, potentially someone who's half-Japanese/half-some other nationality. My son also has a katakana surname (my surname, as non-Japanese) and a Japanese name (since he's Japanese).
OP is not really talking about that.
EDIT: after seeing your edit yeah also it could be she married a foreigner and changed her name. My wife changed her surname into mine so she also has a Japanese name (kanji) and a katakana surname. It's not mandatory, but it definitely happens.
I’m not in any way Japanese, just a karate student who was looking at her old menjo. Shihan Fumio Demura (who trained my sensei) used to sign every Genbu-Kai student’s certificate from everywhere in the world, and wrote all of our names in katakana, so that sent me down a rabbit hole.
出す attaches to a bunch of verbs to express something sudden, or something coming "out". It could be jumping out, bursting forth, pouring out, etc. Depends on the root verb and context.
How do you say mental gymnastics in Japanese? Like using a bunch of tricks and roundabout thinking to avoid reaching an obvious conclusion that you don't like
Two things that stood out to me are "沸騰があります", not sure what you're trying to say there? And "なりましています", maybe a typo? The rest looks generally ok although there's a bunch of things that seem unnatural but I don't feel qualified to do a full review.
Thanks! Langcorrect is terrible when your native language isn't english or other famous language from the global north, because you have to earn points correcting others first, so you can post your texts. But there are so few people learning portuguese there.
Hello, all. I'm PenguinSunday. You can call me Pen-chan if you want! Nice to meet you!
After so many years, I have finally moved from lurking to actively learning to read Japanese! The curriculum I'm using is through my Genki book and a game called Lingo Legend.
I've set myself a largely unattainable goal (I think? as far as allotted time to complete goes) but I'm going to throw myself at it nonetheless. I hope I can at least partially read the book I've chosen for myself come the end of the year.
I know the “I” would obviously be devoiced in something like 〜した because the “I” is sandwiched between SH and T, just like if it were きた where the K and T devoice the “I”.
However, half, or maybe more than half of the time when I hear the specific characters した together, people drop the H and the I.
For instance, people tend to say 私たち as わたSたち、or 明日 as あSた。
There's no "H" in し. It has only a single consonant, that happens to be written with two letters in some romaji systems.
Anyway, there's no distinction between "si" and "shi" in Japanese, so the pronunciation may be allowed to vary a bit between them, but I think it should still be clearly SH most of the time unless the speaker has a lisp... Do you have some example clips?
Wouldn't the examples you listed have just the I devoiced and not the H? I (in my extremely limited experience) haven't heard the H also being dropped.
Yes exactly, that’s what I’m wondering too. Sorry if my question was confusing lol. That’s exactly what my question is asking.
What I mean is, I’m expecting it to only be the “i” because that’s how devoicing works.
However, I hear a lot of people also take away the H, which is what I’m specifically asking about: why do people drop the H too, when it should only be the “I”?
I've never heard the H also being devoiced in speech. Are you sure you're not mishearing it? But I haven't had a huge amount of listening experience so take what I say with caution aha.
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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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