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 12 hours 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).
xelxebar 55 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
> 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 10 hours ago [-]
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.
AdmiralAsshat 11 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours ago [-]
>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 5 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
>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 9 hours ago [-]
Could be worse. He could have ended each sentence with dattebayo.
rootsudo 11 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
A male Youtuber learning Swedish had this problem too
jbm 5 hours ago [-]
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.
usrnm 14 hours ago [-]
Replace YouTube with anime and I'm interested
1317 14 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
1317 13 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
aizk 10 hours ago [-]
Is pitch accent included / noted? That can make a big difference.
psb 14 hours ago [-]
this but for German please
sivers 7 hours ago [-]
A Hungarian polyglot I know and admire (professional language learner and teacher) recommends this one:
He's unaffiliated but just yesterday was raving about it, saying it's the best tool (like this) he's found in years.
weaksauce 13 hours ago [-]
agreed i'd love a german and spanish version of this
999900000999 7 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
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_ 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, good idea. After German is completed please do Mandarin next.
ranger_danger 14 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?
JoeDaDude 11 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours 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.
> 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 9 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
i do not understand how this works
101rakibulhasan 6 hours ago [-]
Just watch anime bro
figmert 5 hours ago [-]
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
golemiprague 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
3BetLab 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 05:26:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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).
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.
> 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.
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!"
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.
There are plenty of others, but yes, not as many as some other languages.
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.
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
and I put a video in to try and apparently there's a 26 minute wait
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
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.
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
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.
Does this not exist yet?
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
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/
Maybe you didn't mean ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude but do you have examples of this not working with those? They work for me.