19 pointsby momentmaker3 hours ago5 comments
  • comrade12342 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...
    • traceroute668 minutes 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).

  • usrnm2 hours ago
    Replace YouTube with anime and I'm interested
  • 13172 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

    • 13172 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

  • psb2 hours ago
    this but for German please
    • weaksaucean hour ago
      agreed i'd love a german and spanish version of this
  • ranger_danger2 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?

    • traceroute6611 minutes 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/