5 comments

  • comrade1234 2 hours ago

    My cousin speaks fluent Japanese. He had another western acquaintance living in Japan that was a stay-at-home dad who spent his days with Japanese mothers. It seems that women speak differently enough from men where the guy was learning female speaking (accent? Structure? I have no idea) and so my cousin had to talk to him privately and tell him he speaks like a woman...

    • traceroute66 1 hour ago

      > accent? Structure? I have no idea

      Its a combination of many things, intonation and delivery, politeness (formality, honorifics etc.) level, word choice, particle choice.

      Its known as onnarashii (女らしい) speech.

      Its a historical thing which is gradually falling out of use. These days you tend to only mostly find it in situations where the politeness levels are needed/expected (e.g. hospitality industry).

      • AdmiralAsshat 36 minutes ago

        It may be more pronounced in Japanese, but it's not like it's totally without precedent in English either.

        Imagine a male, non-native English speaker learning from a group of stay-at-home moms. Deep South, Midwest, take your pick. He's gonna pick up some stuff. Men in the US aren't expected to say "Aw honey," or "Bless yer heart!"

        • rootsudo 50 minutes ago

          yes, you're precieved weak/femenine and possible for lack of better word, gay/lgbt

          the same goes for many langauges, but you need to learn the same japanese but different form and way its spoken. I had this issue too, luckily a few japanese women helped me OL/dates so I could steer but this is a big issue

        • 1317 3 hours ago

          well you have a reasonable enough sales pitch on the homepage but I don't see what youtube videos have to do with it

          and I put a video in to try and apparently there's a 26 minute wait

          • 1317 2 hours ago

            ok so it's meant to be speaking practice, expressing yourself in Japanese, but i go to actually try it and it's just translation exercises based on what the guy in the video said?

            Like it has a sentence he said in Japanese, in English, and you have to translate it back to Japanese? But the sentence isn't a really a response to anything, it's just something the guy said

            I don't get it

          • usrnm 3 hours ago

            Replace YouTube with anime and I'm interested

            • psb 3 hours ago

              this but for German please

              • weaksauce 2 hours ago

                agreed i'd love a german and spanish version of this

              • ranger_danger 3 hours ago

                I just want an easy-to-use offline AI chatbot that I can converse with in Japanese to practice with at native speed.

                Does this not exist yet?

                • traceroute66 1 hour ago

                  Isn't it called Mistral Voxtral 3[1]

                  Not that I would trust an AI chatbot with Japanese. Most online text translators can barely cope with Japanese, DeepL is the only one that provides passable results. Its a tricky language.

                  [1] https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral-3/