Leaderboard

The limit of dictionaries is in the lack of a connection to cultural knowledge. One problem with becoming dictionary-reliant is that it becomes more difficult to learn common usages and more specific meanings of given words in given situations. So much of the language is situational, especially idioms that are presented as simple verbs, adjectives, or nouns. A great deal of it requires background knowledge of cultural minutiae and/or a lot of experience with the usage. That's why you get a lot of seriously off-base results with even the best machine translations (which are essentially advanced dictionaries connected to a translating program). I don't even want to get into kobun and VNs/books that use archaic forms of Japanese... the effort it takes to read that stuff even with external aids is ridiculous for non-native speakers (and even some native speakers). Edit: Example of one such headache below.

I've spent enough time learning Japanese, befriending lots of other people who were learning Japanese, and hanging out on otaku forums to know that at least half of what you hear is... misleading at the very least. Anyone genuinely interested in jumping the gun and learning Japanese should read this: A Friend of Mine Learned Japanese in 1 Year From what I've witnessed in my own irl observation (and I've met safe to 100 people that have studied Japanese), unless they grew up speaking Chinese or Korean it took them a minimum of 4 - 5 years to get good at the language. I'm talking JLPT N2 - N1 level. And pretty often, it took more than that. Because people learn at different paces. Now if your only concern is reading, and you genuinely have no interest to ever communicate (speak or write) in Japanese, then you can probably get to an N2 - N1 reading level in 3 years if you study grammar and vocab diligently, and after getting a solid foundation in those read Japanese nonstop. I have known a handful of people like this, but most normal people can't and shouldn't do this. Most people burn out if they go too intensive for too long. Language learning for most people is like the Tortoise and the Hare, slow and steady wins the race. Please don't feel ashamed if you aren't N1 fluent in 3 years, or even 5 years. Because I feel in their push to encourage people to learn Japanese, sometimes Otaku communities unintentionally instill a sense of shame in people who don't learn super fast. Again, if you aren't Chinese or Korean, taking 5 - 10 years to get to JLPT N1 level is entirely normal. To specify, Koreans have an advantage because their grammatical system is relatively close to Japanese. And many words sound similar as well. If you know Chinese you already know the meanings of most Kanji, which is a huge advantage because this easily knocks out the hardest part of the language for many people. I should also add, anyone that is already multilingual, even if its not in Korean and/or Chinese also has an advantage because their brains are already more flexible when it comes to languages.

Parsers are overly maligned; it doesn't actually matter unless you consciously decide to never even try to parse from game window yourself and only look at hooker output. If you are afraid you will become a true hookcuck, they may be slightly suboptimal. source: I used only JParser for years of course the way clephas speaks about them as providing "furigana" is overly imprecise and dumb, they provide a list of dictionary definitions. The furigana is generally the least accurate and most useless part furthermore, there is no need to """master""" (did u know words mean things???) grammar; just get ok tier at basic grammar and refer back to your reference / an actual grammar reference you caught me in a very shitposty mood enjoy

Hot take, but I literally can't stand Dies Irae. I'm halfway through Rea's route and I can't take any more pretentious dialogue (that portends to be 'grandiose' and 'insightful') and random Nazi bullshit. Also, Rea and Ren has no chemistry. Gekkou no Carneval is SOOO BORING. Probably gonna wait until something more worth playing comes up. Until then, there's a huge backlog of games to start on.