Almost Fluent @Almost_Fluent

@Magnum702 I’ve been using Genki, supplemented by Tai Kim’s guide to Japanese Grammar

@Japanese__yuki I had fun with my 6 year old seeing how many of these words she knew. She could name 9 of them

@moe_laboratory Is Japanese slang as stupid as American slang?

@hokkori_buzz They just hate success

I have entered the world of verbs. 入る？ Yes. To enter. I feel as though every other topic suddenly seems simpler. Hiragana. Katakana. Basic greetings. Even the shopping words from last week. They all feel manageable now. Both Genki and Tae Kim are talking about conjugation in chapter three. Conjugation. What does that even mean? I open the book and stare at the charts. One verb becomes many shapes. たべる becomes たべます. のむ becomes のみます. いく becomes いきます. The same action wears different clothes depending on who you are talking to and how polite you need to be. I practice them out loud in the kitchen. たべます。のみます。いきます。 My younger kids look up from their snacks and giggle. My teenagers pretend they do not hear me. I keep going anyway. The charts look neat on the page. In my head they still feel like a puzzle missing half the pieces. I have entered the world of verbs. I am not sure I am ready to leave it yet.

Realized I can now greet people at roughly seven different levels of formality and still have no idea what to say after ‘how are you.’

In the US, there is almost no such thing as polite speech anymore. As a child, everyone was called Mr. or Mrs. Lastname. Titles were automatic. Now, when my own children interact, those titles are rejected. “It makes me feel old,” I am told. Thanks. What’s up. See ya. And now… no cap? Slang moved in fast and took over. Formality feels antique. I have spent the past few days browsing through Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar. It marks a dramatic departure from the way that Japanese is taught through textbooks, like Genki. Genki - building a fundamental vocabulary of polite form Japanese. Tae Kim - building a fundamental vocabulary of every day speech. Which is right? I am not sure if I need both. As an American, formal speech seems so useless. Yet, Genki gives the impression that it is still very much alive today. Tae Kim tells me he was confused after learning that way. That’s not how you really speak. In the US formal speech is dead. And archaic relic. In Japan?

Hiragana is remastered.
 Katakana… not so much. I can write the soft, rounded shapes of hiragana with something approaching confidence now. They feel familiar again, like riding a bike you haven’t touched in many years. The curves make sense. The flow feels natural. Katakana is a different story. Why are so many of the shapes so similar?
I stare at the chart and start seeing faces. A smiling face? Yes. 
Another smiling face? It seems so. 
That one is winking. 
This one has no eyes at all. I sit there turning the page slightly, squinting, trying to force a difference into existence. One looks like a backwards “E.” Another looks like a backwards “E” that went to the gym. A third looks like the first two had a child and then abandoned it. The more I study them, the more they start to blur into a single expressionless crowd of angular twins. I write one carefully, check the chart, and discover I have somehow produced its nearly identical cousin instead. Again. At this point I begin to wonder if a break up is in order. “It’s not you katakana. It’s me.” Hiragana feels like coming home. 
Katakana feels like being introduced to a large family of people who all insist they look nothing alike while standing in identical outfits.

@japan_nobunaga 仕方がいない

I don’t even know who this is and, somehow, I am even less inspired than before.

Japan Embassy DC🌸 @JapanEmbDC

3 months ago

We were delighted to welcome Kleine Powell to the Embassy to thank her for inspiring so many people to study Japanese. Are you thinking about learning Japanese? Now is the perfect time to start! 🇯🇵 日本語を勉強しましょう！ Find learning resources ➡️ linktr.ee/japanembassydc

8 26 293 79K 64

@JapanEmbDC I don’t even know who those is… but I’m now less inspired than I was 2 days ago

@JEucv0ve1C54247 These are helpful charts for me. But the worst part is the conjugation…

I have a discovered Tae Kim’s guide to Japanese Grammar. Currently exploring its usefulness as a companion to Genki. Anyone with experience?

I am learning about shopping today. Chapter 2 of Genki has me wandering the grocery store like a man who has just discovered that everyday objects have secret names. I walk the aisles muttering under my breath, practicing the words out loud before they slip away again. “これはりんご,” I whisper to a pile of apples. “それはパン.” “あれは… みず?” A woman reaching for the same shelf pauses, looks at me, then slowly selects her bottle of water and backs away. I keep going. “いくらですか,” I ask a bag of rice that cannot answer. “にひゃくえんです,” I reply on its behalf, even though the price tag clearly says $3.49 and we are not in Japan. The produce section gets the worst of it. I stand in front of the vegetables repeating “やさい… やさい…” until a stock clerk pushes his cart past and gives me the polite smile people reserve for someone who might be rehearsing a very strange play. By the dairy aisle I have progressed to full sentences. “すみません、これはいくらですか.” The milk does not respond. The man beside me does, with a concerned glance and a slightly faster walking pace. I am getting some stares as I mutter under my breath. That is fair. To everyone else I am just a grown man having a quiet argument with the grocery store in a language most of them do not speak. To me, I am simply trying to make the words stick before they float away again. Chapter 2 is about shopping. Apparently it is also about learning to look slightly unhinged in public.

@LoveChickenParm It is. But AI is getting more crafty as it trains on user writing. People are getting savvy with their prompts, too. But, yea. Real guy.

What first got me interested in learning Japanese? I didn’t have a Mr. Miyagi. No wise old man telling me to paint the fence or catch flies with chopsticks. What I had was a four-year-old’s unshakeable belief that putting on a gi made me basically invincible. I started karate at the age of four. The first time they handed me that white uniform, I thought it was the coolest piece of clothing ever invented. The thick fabric, the mysterious belt, the way it made ordinary living-room furniture look like potential training obstacles. I watched every karate movie I could find. Samurai and ninja stories followed close behind. Somewhere between the flying kicks and the dramatic final battles, Japan stopped being a place on a map and started feeling like a world that clearly had better outfits than I did. At the dojo, every new student received a small booklet introducing the basics of karate. Inside were lists of techniques, belt ranks, and commands—each one written in both English and Japanese. At first the Japanese words were just mysterious symbols next to the English, like a secret menu I wasn’t allowed to order from yet. Then, in middle school, I started trying to memorize them. I got myself a dictionary and began flipping back and forth, sounding out the terms with the confidence of someone who had no idea how wrong he probably sounded. It felt like unlocking a cheat code for a game I still didn’t fully understand. Around the same time I met a Japanese girl at the dojo. Her father had moved to the United States temporarily for work. We became friends, and I spent a lot of time with her family. Through them I heard real Japanese spoken in everyday life—not just the formal commands from the booklet. That was when I started using the Japanese for Young People series. The book felt like a bridge between the dojo vocabulary I had been collecting and the living language I was suddenly hearing at the dinner table. Those early pieces—karate, the gi, the booklet, the movies, a friendship that brought the language into my actual life—planted something that never fully went away. Now the reasons have shifted. I want to read and watch anime in Japanese without constantly leaning on subtitles. I want the stories in their original form. And more than anything, I want to be able to make new friends, the kind of friendships that only open up when you can meet someone in their own language. The white belt is long gone. The interest is not.

To date I have completed Chapter 1 of Genki and more or less mastered my introductions. At my age, the heavy emphasis on college majors and school years feels a bit outdated—though that might just be the dinosaur in me talking. Still, Genki has not left me wanting. The extra vocabulary around occupations and family titles has been genuinely useful. I did have to look up a few family words that better fit my own situation, but the foundation is solid. My teenagers are not amused when I try Japanese titles on them. My younger children, on the other hand, smile and giggle every time they refer to their mother as 母. My wife is enjoying the whole endeavor. She has even committed to starting herself. I now have my first enthusiastic speaking partner.

@LoveChickenParm Lucky me. ☺️

I find that as generated text gets better, I get accused of it more often (especially on my other account). I almost need to insert intentional spelling errors or grammatical mistakes…but that too may eventually feel fake. The AI take over makes nothing seem real and yet everything seems real at the same time.

Am I a sensei? In the American dojos where I grew up, the answer felt simple. Teachers introduced themselves as Sensei Kevin or Sensei Judy without hesitation. It was practical. Clear. Everyone knew who stood at the front of the room. Once I earned my black belt, the same logic applied to me. Students started calling me Sensei. After class, little kids would run up, bow a little too deeply, and say it with the serious faces only children can make when they believe something important has just happened. I would smile, correct a stance one more time, and feel that quiet warmth that comes from being trusted. For a while I even half-jokingly referred to myself as Sensei Almost Fluent. The title felt like a convenient label that fit neatly over years of sweat and repetition. Then I began studying Japanese in earnest and the ground shifted under that comfortable word. In Japan, the practice does not work that way. A teacher does not introduce themselves as Sensei Tanaka. They simply offer their name. Sensei is not a badge you pin on your own chest. It is a relationship that other people choose to enter with you. It is the soft, respectful distance a student places between themselves and someone they trust to guide them. It is the quiet decision to look up to another person, not a title claimed in the mirror. I keep thinking about those moments after class in the old dojo. The kids who waited to say goodnight. The way the word “Sensei” came out of their mouths with a mixture of formality and genuine affection. In the American context it was warm and familiar. In the Japanese sense, that same word would have carried a different weight. It would not have been something I could put on myself. It would have been something they chose to give. That difference stays with me. In the U.S. dojo it was a convenient label. In Japan it is a relationship. One is easy to wear. The other has to be earned, quietly, every day, in the eyes of someone else.