日本語を勉強しているうさぎ

Ashley's ongoing attempts to learn Japanese. You know, for funsies.

[vitalrabbitstudies]

凸凹 this can't be a real word. this is Tetris

[vitalrabbitstudies]

the dictionary's begging me for its life

[vitalrabbitstudies]

専用機 technically just means 'machine for personal use', but in practice it seems like people mostly use that combination of words to mean 'private airplane', which is the only definition my dictionaries gave. anyway this book has the viewpoint character complaining about the love interest spamming her phone so much that このままだと専用機になってしまいそうだ。 and I spent several minutes trying to figure out the logic of 'if she keeps spamming me my phone is gonna turn into a private jet'

[vitalrabbitstudies]

reading books while plucking vocab out of them for future study is a really good way to become hyper-aware of which 2-3 words each author is inclined to reuse over and over.

[vitalrabbitstudies]

i've never actually seen Kanazawa's name in writing that I can remember, so looking around businesses there I kept going 'why do so many have golden swamp in their names?' before I realized

[vitalrabbitstudies]

last night while reading in bed I encountered 縮小化 and correctly guessed from the kanji that it had to mean 'miniaturization' in context, and I'm still riding that high.

[vitalrabbitstudies]

just saw 私 as part of another word for a first time and spent a good 30 seconds trying to twist the grammar to make a わたし make sense there. (私服)

[vitalrabbitstudies]

壳 売 having these be two separate characters is just cruel.

[vitalrabbitstudies]

one, uh, fun feature I've discovered of machine translation, at least DeepL, which is what I've mostly been using as my fallback when I wanna check the overall translation of a sentence:

if I give it a chunk of text in which the characters' genders aren't identified in some way, it'll always default to assuming they're men. to the point that I gave it a sentence along the lines of 'she grew up with a single father, so she had to be extra-responsible' and it decided that it actually had to be 'he was a single father, so he had to be extra-responsible.'

[vitalrabbitstudies]

i just learned of the historic pronoun 拙者 and I'm pretty amused. I walk up to a group of strangers and start referring to myself solely as 'the fuckup'

[vitalrabbitstudies]

このままキスをして、舌で口の中をめちゃくちゃに蹂躙してやりたい。 ――落ち着いて、光。 私は静かに深呼吸をする。そんなことをしたら、私が彼女を好きなことがバレバレになってしまう。

yeah in my experience people usually do draw some inferences from tongue-fucking another girl's mouth

[vitalrabbitstudies]

「この間、一人で駅前のクレープ屋さんにいたんでびっくりしちゃいました。当然友達か、まぁ彼氏か？といるのかと思ったら一人でクレープ食べてるんですよ」

haters will see you eating a delicious crepe and say "why doesn't she have a boyfriend?"

[vitalrabbitstudies]

このままキスをして、舌で口の中をめちゃくちゃに蹂躙してやりたい。 ――落ち着いて、光。 私は静かに深呼吸をする。そんなことをしたら、私が彼女を好きなことがバレバレになってしまう。

yeah in my experience people usually do draw some inferences from tongue-fucking another girl's mouth

[vitalrabbitstudies]

i'm glad that at this point my listening comprehension is good enough to mostly follow Nihongo Con Teppei, because he's pretty fucking funny sometimes, and having some entertainment value kinda helps with something that I'm trying to listen to for 30-60 minutes per day.

[vitalrabbitstudies]

金額 of course means 'golden picture frame', which is the customary unit of currency for paying bills.

[vitalrabbitstudies]

pros: I understand enough now that if I stumble onto an argument about international relations between Chinese and Japanese people, I can now understand a solid chunk of the Japanese side.

cons: I understand enough now that if I stumble onto an argument about international relations between Chinese and Japanese people, I can now understand a solid chunk of the Japanese side.

[vitalrabbitstudies]

a secret hard part that nobody warns you about is big numbers being expressed in terms of 10,000. If you tell me something is five hundred and six ten thousands you've effectively given me math homework

[vitalrabbitstudies]

sometimes kanji make perfect sense when you know all the elements, and then there's 'smallpox' being written as 'sick beans'

[vitalrabbitstudies]

actually I think my favorite is 淑 'wet uncle' = 'graceful'