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@studyjapanesewithme

[studyjapanesewithme-replies]

How to say ‘almost every week/day/month/year’

To say this you use the structure ‘毎 + time frame + とように’

Example- 

毎週のように日本語を勉強します。= almost every week I study Japanese

毎年のように休みでフランスに行きます。= almost every year I go on holiday to France

[studyjapanesewithme-replies]

Sentenceと（考えられている・思われている）

とびら- Grammar Chapt 4

Using と考えられている/ 思われている means ‘it is generally believed that/ it is considered that’. 

The difference between the two phrases is that  考えられている is an opinion that has arrived through logic, and 思われている is an opinion based on emotion. 

Example- 日本人はとても丁寧だと思われている。= It is generally believed that Japanese people are very polite. 

As you can see, 思われている has been used because this opinion is not derived from fact or logic, but an emotion based opinion. 

[onigiriforears]

N5 Grammar | から・だから

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[politishaun-deactivated20230409]

The Netflix show Old Enough! offers a glimpse of an alternate reality.

The premise of Old Enough!, a Japanese reality show newly streaming on Netflix, is childishly simple. In each 10-minute episode, a tiny kid sets off to complete the child’s first errand alone. (Well, “alone,” with the cameramen.) The children totter off into the neighborhood, forget what they’re supposed to be doing, burst into tears, and ultimately make their way back to Mom and Dad laden with plastic shopping bags, having succeeded in their mission. Hajimete no otsukai, which is based on a children’s book of the same name from 1977, has run on Japanese TV for more than 30 years—long enough that some kids on the show’s newer episodes have parents who were on the show!

In the first of the 20 episodes made available to Netflix subscribers, a 2-year-old travels to the town convenience store to buy groceries for Mom. In the fourth, 3-year-old Yuka crosses a five-lane road in Akashi, a city the size of Cincinnati, to get to the fish market. “Can you go all the way to Uonotana without getting hit by any cars?” Mom asks.

Needless to say, if the show were set in the United States, the parents would be under investigation by child protective services, and the children in foster care. Like many things about Japan, it would be easy to attribute Hajimete no otsukai (literally, “First Errand”) to some cliché about Japanese essentialism. But the Japanese are not so different from us. They’ve just made policy choices that make it possible for kids to run their first errand a decade before their American counterparts get to do the same.

“In Japan, many kids go to neighborhood schools on foot and by themselves, that’s quite typical,” said Hironori Kato, a professor of transportation planning at the University of Tokyo. Typically, Japanese children don’t actually run errands for Mom and Dad in the city at 2 or 3 years old, he notes, as they do in the show. But the comic, TV-friendly premise exaggerates a truth about Japanese society: Children in Japan have an unusual degree of independence from an early age.

“Roads and street networks are designed for kids to walk in a safe manner,” Kato said. Among the factors, he said: Drivers in Japan are taught to yield to pedestrians. Speed limits are low. Neighborhoods have small blocks with lots of intersections. That means kids have to cross the street a lot—but also keeps drivers going slow, out of self-interest if nothing else.

The streets themselves are also different. Many small streets do not have raised sidewalks but depend on pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers to share the road. Curbside parking is rare, which creates better visibility for drivers and pedestrians and helps give the smaller streets of big Japanese cities their distinctive feel. In fact, I first heard about Hajimete no otsukai from Rebecca Clements, a research fellow at the University of Sydney who has written a dissertation on Japan’s approach to parking: Car-buyers must show proof of an off-street parking space to make their purchase. For Clements, the show is evidence of how Japan gives children a “right to the city.”

Japanese kids make a lot of weekday trips on foot—especially those between 7 and 12 years old, who walk for almost four in five trips. Neighborhood schools are the driving force behind a lot of this travel, with many schools employing “walking school buses”—a morning parade of kids in which the older ones help guide the younger ones. But the school trips also introduce children to their neighborhood, which can facilitate other kinds of travel.

“I went into it saying, ‘Is it the built environment or the culture?’ ” recalled E. Owen Waygood, a professor at Montréal Polytechnique who wrote his Ph.D. thesis at Kyoto University on Japanese children’s travel and land use. “There is an underlying cultural value—Japanese parents believe kids should be able to get around by themselves. And they build policies to support that. Japanese cities are built on the concept that every neighborhood should function as a village. That planning paradigm means you have shops and small businesses in residential neighborhoods, which means there are places to go—places these kids can walk to.”

[hearthfire-heartfire]

i’ve been watching this show with my mom and it’s the cutest shit. everything around the kids is staged for their ease, but also all the neighbors get excited to help the kids on their first errands! a two year old had to walk four blocks to deliver her dad’s apron to him at his restaurant and all the other shop owners on the street are watching her and calling encouragement, giving her treats and showing her where to go. i love it