Can someone explain the difference between としたら and なら for me? I think I get it but I'm not sure if there's grey areas where either one can be used or if it's quite clear cut.

My textbook gives the example:

その話が本当だとしたら、うれしいです。

But I could also use なら here, right?

The other example is:

飛行機で行くとしたら、いくらぐらいかかりますか。

Could I use なら here too? I feel like the answer's either no or technically yes but it's not very natural. The textbook suggests you could use "行く場合は" instead.

I also tried to write my own example:

ね、えみちゃんは振られたことになったそうだ。それとしたら、おそらく日中泣き通する。

Is it correct? Is it natural? (Not just the use of としたら but all of it.)

yay conditionals!! i love conditionals!!! (i'll try to keep it brief though haha)

let's do なら first because this is the one that i personally feel is not made very clear by textbooks and such.

なら = "if, as you say..."

sometimes なら is called "assertive" なら, but personally i don't feel like that's a very helpful qualifier...for me, i like to think of it as a conditional based on assumptions. the gist is often something like, "assuming what you say is true/will happen..."

so, we can see now why なら doesn't exactly fit with the example from your textbook:

i don't think this sentence is grammatically incorrect or unavailable; however, it means something different than what i believe your textbook is going for. so let's go to 〜としたら to see the other option.

〜としたら = "if it were the case..."

there's waaaaay more to be said on the 〜たら form than i'm going to write in this post (rest assured i've written about it extensively elsewhere LOL), but i'll say that anything to do with 〜たら has the potential to be "unreal," meaning you can use this form to talk about things that haven't actually happened.

the phrase 〜とする means kind of like "to assume" (in this case), so in that sense it is similar to なら. however, the assumption that comes from 〜とする is often an imaginary one:

see the difference? 〜とする has the ability to deal in "unreal"-ness, which なら doesn't.

so, if we tack a conditional ending onto 〜とする, we get this kind of sentence:

hopefully the nuance comes out with my translation here. using 〜としたら puts the conditional squarely in the realm of unrealness, i.e., things that can't be confirmed (at the time of speaking) to be true or false.

examining the 例文

so, probably at this point we can make a judgment on op's practice sentence. our goal here (i believe) is to get a sentence that means, "it sounds like emi got dumped. if that's true, she was probably crying all day." here's the original that was proposed:

what do you guys think? for my part, i think なら is our better option here! that's because of the first sentence: since there's a 〜そうだ ("i heard") clause, we have evidence that the situation is actually true. that means we don't have to relegate ourselves to unrealness or imaginging that the situation might be true.

by using なら, we can show we're relying on external evidence to make this if-then claim.

on the other hand, we might find 〜としたら in a situation more like this:

in a case like the above, we don't have much good evidence to suggest emi has actually been dumped; rather, we're speculating on the cause of her bad mood. so, we can use 〜としたら to talk about that unreal situation, i.e., a situation that can't be confirmed.

phew, that was a lot! i hope it was helpful, and as always anyone can feel free to chat with me/ask me questions about grammar whenever :D

crying laughing at this tweet bc theres like 50 japanese people in the qrts calling them a fucking moron

"don't try to justify your stupidity with a half-baked understanding of japanese"

literally crying 😭😭😭😭😭

For those who don't know, Japanese has a fuck ton of first person pronouns, and gender is only one of the many things they can communicate. They can also communicate a level of politeness, social hierarchy, and also the relationship between those involved in the conversation (and probably a ton of other shit). You don't just use one (although you could stick to one specifically, but to my understanding few people actually do this), you switch between them as needed based on these factors.

Here's an article about them that goes into more depth about this whole system that covers a lot of the more common ones and some of the less common ones, it's aimed at learners so it doesn't write them out phonetically in English/romaji, but it still might be helpful in trying to understand this whole system (that honestly makes trying to work out how to refer to yourself as a learner a little bit of a nightmare):

I was trying to figure out what the word dosanko means which led me to this show

Fairly standard. Makes me think dosanko is a nickname for girls from Hokkaido, though it’s also a type of horse? (Turns out they’re nicknamed after the horses :) )

Mostly I was just very charmed to see this

When the last persimmon falls

Or, "I tried to search in Japanese: 柿 (かき kaki; persimmon) edition"

For about a year, this post was a few lines in my drafts. An open-and-shut case, I thought. Today, struck by the mood to get it over with, I googled (and DuckDuck went), got lost, then found the truth. It didn't take long - and I won't make this post too long - but the result wasn't what I expected.

Here's the story of why if I had a nickel every time I heard a character in Japanese fiction say their life depends on the last fruit hanging onto a persimmon tree in winter, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

Spoiler: One of my nickels wasn't exactly a nickel, but I still had another one I didn't know I had. And that's the correct currency.

Today's kanji that I fucking hated until 10 minutes ago is 財 (property, money, assets, wealth). Couldn't remember it for the life of me so I looked into the radicals more. Turns out 才 comes from 手 (hand) and this led me to do research and discover that yes shells were once used as currency. So having shells in your hand basically meant you had money and actually this kanji makes total sense. Love when kanji teaches me history!

Also here's a dumb mnemonic for the most commom onyomi readings:

By having lots of shellfish (貝), the genius (才) got wealthy by using them to make psychic (さい) xylophones (ざい)

The kunyomi is たから but it seems 宝 is used more often for that anyway?

How did I never learn that 才 comes from 手? This is a reminder to learn your radicals, people!

Unsolicited information: There are LOTS of wealth-related kanji that use 貝!

That's hardly an exhaustive list, but I hope someone else finds it interesting too :)

Vintage Japanese Movies

If, like me, you love old Japanese movies, here are two YouTube channels with subtitled vintage movies:

NipponKino

Cinema Japan Retrospective

Today I came across a reel talking about learning kanji. He said learn the basic once like 義 (GI) and then continue with exposure, not rote memorization.

I think I need to plaster "Give yourself exposure, not stress" everywhere though.

Give yourself exposure, not stress [when learning kanji].

the sheer difference in the amount of kanji that i've noticed that i have an easier time memorizing bc i've been consuming it through reading/interacting with media that i enjoy rather than flipping through flashcards or quizzes is ASTRONOMICAL

sure, i still study and use flashcards and quizzes, but i have noticed that i've had an easier time learning kanji that i had more difficulty with memorizing through flashcards and quizzes through reading bc im just constantly exposing myself to it

that is a-okay! @abnormalstudies . there are books that use furigana over the kanji. but also, it's completely fine to stop and look up words--you may not finish the book as quickly as you want to, but you will learn a ton of words. when a Seitokai bookclub is going on, we're all collectively adding to the shared vocab list.

you could also read books that are targeted towards people who haven't learn kanji yet! Try out the Tadoku Free Readers. If any of these aren't your speed (you think they're boring/can't maintain your interest), message me!

Does anyone know what the Japanese equivalent of itchi.io might be? Where do the Japanese post all their amateur indie games? I know about DLsite but they don't have much in the way of a free selection.

i was curious about this, so i asked my partner and he gave me two very good websites for indie japanese games:

unityroom

freem

hope that helps!

quick edit: he showed me a third here ノベルゲームコレクション

I was reading through Youtube comments and it seems the Japanese version of unalive is 4ぬ Edit: or at least a way for censoring the word. Slang is fun.

Start the morning reviewing kanji I often forget. Get frustrated because I just cannot remember 福（ふく=blessing, fortune, luck, health) and there's only one word on my N3 vocab list containing that kanji. "Why do I even have to learn this for N3 when there's only one word with it anyway?" I grumble. "I've never even seen the word 幸福 used in context!"

Watch Kiriko's Crime Diary and she sees a display of strawberry daifuku in the supermarket underneath the sign: いちご大福, which she reads aloud. Suddenly I have no trouble remembering the kanji or the meaning.

And this is why we do fun things that are meaningful to us personally when we learn a language and don't just look at word lists/flash cards!

Yeah, this is how I remembered 璃 (lapis lazuli). I also thought I will never use it when I had to study it for an exam because what are the chances that lapis lazuli will show up in anything I did?? Well, a week later it did.

Btw, 福袋 (ふくぶくろ), those bags vendors sell during New Years with random goods in it, also uses 福! (ngl both things are so common and very cultural it feels odd that neither is included in the list)

Why the tiger has become a transgender symbol in Japan

Gay Breakfast Pin Club writes:

Toransu is clearly a loan word from English ("trans") that has been adapted to Japanese pronunciation (adding vowels/vowel epenthesis helps you avoid unpronounceable consonant clusters).

See also: MishimaKitan

The pin is available here.

official linguistics post

In Japanese language, describing a third person’s emotion is different from describing a first person’s emotion: in English, the sentences "I am happy" and "He is happy" are grammatically structured in the same way. However, in Japanese, this direct equivalence is not possible: you can say "私は嬉しいです" (Watashi wa ureshii desu), but you can't simply say "彼は嬉しいです" (Kare wa ureshii desu).

This is due to cultural and linguistic nuances that emphasize the acknowledgment of another's internal state as somewhat inaccessible. In fact, Japanese typically employs expressions that convey a level of inference or indirectness, such as:

One characteristic of Japanese syntax is its extreme sensitivity to epistemological considerations based on the ego/nonego distinction or the distinction of I/the other. Our knowledge about the mental state of another person must necessarily come from our interpretation of external evidence, and this is well reflected in the Japanese language.

Source material: http://human.kanagawa-u.ac.jp/gakkai/publ/pdf/no157/15712.pdf