Astro Hacker News - Practice speaking Japanese with real YouTube videos, graded line by line

comrade1234 |next [-]

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 |root |parent |next [-]

> 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).

xelxebar |root |parent |next [-]

> Its a historical thing which is gradually falling out of use.

Are you sure?

Personal pronoun choice differs significantly between sexes. Women employ more onomatopoeia usage on average. かしら codes as feminine. Males have flatter pitch variation in general.

Those are just off the top of my head.

netsharc |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Why do they speak in a high-pitch voice? E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m635Jrep30

thaumasiotes |root |parent |previous [-]

> Its known as onnarashii (女らしい) speech.

> Its a historical thing which is gradually falling out of use.

No, not at all. Different sexes present themselves differently in every culture and therefore in every language. If you only learn from one sex, you won't be able to tell what parts of their language are sex-specific, and you'll learn to speak like they do.

I've gotten this criticism without speaking at all, by texting with people on Wechat. One girl remarked to me that saying 嗯嗯 [it's an agreement noise; very close in concept to "uh-huh"], with two syllables, came off as overtly feminine. As a man I guess I'm supposed to text 嗯.

I still use 嗯嗯, though, because it's as common as dirt in my experience and 嗯 is much rarer. Is that an artifact of my pool of conversational partners? Probably.

TFNA |root |parent |next |previous [-]

It can happen with a lot of languages. I'm a man who learned Russian mainly through several months of traveling rural Russia where I learned quickly to avoid men: they were mostly hopeless drunks (or drug addicts) and could go from friendly to violent in an instant. So, when I needed to ask for information or directions, I turned to the women who were around. The result is that Russians find my speech distinctly female-coded.

branon |root |parent [-]

When were you travelling rural Russia? I assume for pleasure and not business? How was it?

AdmiralAsshat |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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!"

Jtarii |root |parent [-]

>Men in the US aren't expected to say "Aw honey," or "Bless yer heart!"

It would entirely depend on how you said it. Like sure, if you said it a flamboyantly feminine way that would be strange to some people, but you could easily say those things in a masculine way.

I don't think there is any situation where a ESL speaker is going to be told that they are speaking like the wrong gender.

socalgal2 |root |parent |next [-]

A man saying, "I'm going to powder my nose", is saying it as a joke. If a male ESL speaker said it not as a joke I think they'd like to know it's not a common phrase for men so they know to use it as a joke and not just a statement.

There are plenty of others, but yes, not as many as some other languages.

goodmythical |root |parent |previous [-]

>but you could easily say those things in a masculine way

That's the entire point. That you could say those things in a masculine way.

Anyone can train themselves to speak in ways that make them sound either closer to the gender the present as or the gender they'd like to present as.

Consider the tone, cadence, and word choice of a "hard cowboy" compared to a "dweeb streamer". They sound different, no?

Consider the vocal fry of the valley girl or the bouyancy of the "gay voice".

Hearing the following spoken over the phone, can you really not see that one might sound more like a women, and one more like a man?

"Hiya! Oh.Em.Gee! Okay! So! You're never ever going to guess what IIIiiiIII Saw! Today!" in a dynamic high pitch?

VS

"yo. wazzup. bro, I saw some shit today"

>I don't think there is any situation where a ESL speaker is going to be told that they are speaking like the wrong gender.

You might need to get out more. Or thank your fate that you're blessed to have never experienced it yourself, but even then I'd be surprised you've never had a friend experience it.

LGBT people grow up being told they're talking wrong all of the time. Women who prefer declaritve sentences are told they are being to manly all of the time.

dvh |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Could be worse. He could have ended each sentence with dattebayo.

rootsudo |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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

triyambakam |root |parent |previous [-]

A male Youtuber learning Swedish had this problem too

usrnm |next |previous [-]

Replace YouTube with anime and I'm interested

aizk |next |previous [-]

Is pitch accent included / noted? That can make a big difference.

jbm |next |previous [-]

This is great! I hope you add some N1 level stuff. Even native level Youtube videos often stick with certain simple grammatical patterns (obviously since most of N1 is literary). Just having a curated list of more complex conversations on Youtube by itself is worthwhile to people like me.

1317 |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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

psb |next |previous [-]

this but for German please

sivers |root |parent |next [-]

A Hungarian polyglot I know and admire (professional language learner and teacher) recommends this one:

https://yourteacher.ai/

He's unaffiliated but just yesterday was raving about it, saying it's the best tool (like this) he's found in years.

weaksauce |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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

999900000999 |root |parent |next [-]

Spanish is actually learnable to English speakers. I’m convinced Asian languages are impossible unless you start as a kid.

Edit: Of course I have no driving reason to learn a language, might be different if I was a refugee trying to make a living

musabilhan |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I've actually built something that you might find interesting. manalect.com

It's not exactly what JIVX is, but it can help you practice with sentences. And I'm currently working on a voice only mode.

It's something I'm still developing so it might have issues.

kulahan |root |parent |previous [-]

Immerse yourself as best as possible. If you’re learning Japanese, watch anime and J-dramas. If you’re learning Spanish, shop at local Mexi-marts and watch Telemundo. This was the game changer for me.

while_true_ |root |parent |previous [-]

Yes, good idea. After German is completed please do Mandarin next.

thenthenthen |root |parent [-]

Check out this game, its pretty fun and good https://pocket-taiwan-play.pages.dev/world/game/?scene=raohe (edit: somehow speaking doesnt work anymore here it seems :/)

ranger_danger |next |previous [-]

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?

JoeDaDude |root |parent |next [-]

Me too! I couldn't find one so I cobbled one together. I wrote enough python for all the parts to work together. I can speak Japanese into it, it gets recognized, and - all too eagerly - the chatbot corrects my mistakes.

My stack, running locally on a Windows 10 machine: - Vosk STT augmented with vosk-model-ja-0.22 for Japanese - Gemma4 LLM running in Ollama and with customized model card to act as a Japanese tutor - Kokoro TTS using Japanese voice jf_alpha.pt and augmented with the unidic Japanese dictionary

traceroute66 |root |parent |previous [-]

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/

socalgal2 |root |parent |next [-]

> Most online text translators can barely cope with Japanese

Maybe you didn't mean ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude but do you have examples of this not working with those? They work for me.

kulahan |root |parent |previous [-]

Wouldn’t AI be, by definition, better at translating than even a dictionary? I guess I don’t know if that translates to teaching, however.

retinaros |next |previous [-]

i do not understand how this works

dylanz |root |parent [-]

I don't either. Am I supposed to watch those videos or click the dots or...?

101rakibulhasan |next |previous [-]

Just watch anime bro

figmert |root |parent [-]

I've watched anime since I was about 19 (I'm 36 now), I've barely learned much. If you have tips on how to learn from watching anime, I'd love to hear them. I still watch anime, though much less, but it'd be helpful if I can learn still

1317 |root |parent [-]

Turn off the subtitles

golemiprague |next |previous [-]

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3BetLab |previous [-]

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