ELSEWHERE

Chapter 3 review done. The developer was very nice about responding to my bug report and fixing the issue, but there is unfortunately a different issue making those same exercises nearly impossible and I just don't have it in me to make a report about that one because it will be a pain in the ass to document. I hate to leave lessons undone but I'll just eat the points, honestly, it's whatever.

Frankly I feel like the developer should not have bothered adapting those practice pages to web (they're kanji/kana stroke order practice, which you should be doing by hand) but it clearly took a lot of time and effort to get as well done as it is so I imagine there will be some sunk cost involved there. But mostly it's that I don't want to have to go through the rigamarole to make clear what the issue is.

Here is the real struggle with Japanese numbers: they have a specific number for 10,000, so while 12,300 is "twelve-thousand three-hundred" for us, for them it's "one-ten-thousand, two-thousand, three-hundred". A million is "a hundred ten thousand". So there's some conversion you have to do when translating between those and I'm having a lot of trouble remembering where to put each digit in the numbers.

 
Pretty tired, I expect an early night. Gonna eat something and then lay down and watch something or video game or both.

It's been 1,402 weeks and I still can't hear "it's been" without mentally launching into One Week

It's been 1,402 weeks and I still don't know what Barenaked Ladies mean when they say I soon will understand what they mean when they say they're the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral

I understand what it means to be the kind of guy to laugh at a funeral. I don't understand what Barenaked Ladies are going to do soon that would make me understand if I didn't.

Chapter 4 reviewed. It's taking so long because I keep having to go back and correct entries because I have no way of predicting which very specific answer the dev decided should be allowed for the open-ended questions, in that like, I have no way of knowing if it'll mark me wrong for including or dropping the 私は, or any other subject. There's no consistency on when "house" or "home" are 家 or うち. Sometimes it wants me to rewrite the entire question when answering "yes" or "no" and sometimes it just wants me to write "Yes, it is" or "No, it isn't". Like I don't expect it to accept literally any permutation of correct answer, that would be ridiculous, but a little consistency would be nice so I could just get it wrong once and then know what it wants from then forward.

Anyway, I am a third of the way through the book. Today I did that, played some Hiragana Forbidden Speech, watched a couple of videos, and napped. Last night I got to bed at a pretty decent time and then woke up at a pretty decent time, but neither of them were quite decent enough to actually get me enough sleep, but it's a start.

I would like to have time to do things that aren't Japanese review but as it gets into more complicated chapters I predict I will take more than one day per, so I want to knock out the easier ones as fast as I can so I don't end up falling behind.

For now I will pill the cat and get ready to climb into bed.

"Did you go shopping yesterday?"

Ways to say 'no':
いいえ、しませんでした。
いいえ、買い物をしませんでした。
いいえ、昨日買い物をしませんでした。
いいえ、私は買い物をしませんでした。
いいえ、私は昨日買い物をしませんでした。

Not even counting different registers (しませんでした vs しなかったです vs しなかった) or different personal pronouns or ways to change the word order. Or dropping いいえ.

So like I understand picking one and making that the canonical correct answer. But pick one version and stick with it!

("No, didn't." "No, didn't go shopping." "No, yesterday didn't shopping." "No, I didn't go shopping." "No, yesterday I didn't go shopping.")

家 (いえ) and うち both mean 'house/home' but 家 is more like houses in general and うち is more like your personal home, but the differences are subtle. For consistency I would probably always translate 'house' as 家 and 'home' as うち (and 家 as 'house' and うち as 'home'), or I would always translate 'my house/home' as うち and 'third-party's house/home' as 家, but I certainly wouldn't fuckin', flip a coin for it or whatever like the dev apparently did

Tangentially, what drives me nuts about this language is that 家 actually has both いえ and うち as readings, but いえ and うち mean different things, but not different enough to be able to tell from context which one is meant, so you have to just, guess, which reading someone intended. You see 家 in the wild and you actually have no idea which way the author means you to pronounce it and so you also have no idea what connotations they intend it to have

(Obviously that's not always true but like, it is a thing)

Another distinction I'm reading is that いえ refers more to the outside of the home and うち to the inside