• tiredofsametab@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I’ve reduced my usage to ~3 subreddits also specifically to do with living in Japan. There’s just nowhere else with this info or discussion and people are just not presently interested in moving over here. I mostly lurk (between two reddit accounts (I nuked my online presence because of a stalker and took most of a year off all social media), I had something like 13 years on reddit and maybe 20 submissions), so it’s not like I’m producing alluring content on those places.

    I also don’t use facebook, meta, instagram, twitter, tiktok, etc. which further reduces any interaction I might have.

    EDIT: also having to deal with government, legal, visa, etc. things are not fun when little to none is in English (and that which is in English is out-of-date) and a lot of the characters and grammar are not in the standard set. Living and working in another language and culture is also not without its own difficulties and having people to talk to is important. For further info on just the language, 2 sets of characters containing roughly ~50 symbols each are required (not hard), and then you need at least ~2100 Sino-Japanese characters (kanji) just to be able to read a newspaper. That doesn’t include a lot of jargon used in legal, medical, and other things. I wonder if my downvoter /u/Veraxus has ever had deal with anything like this. I can speak conversational Japanese, know a lot of IT jargon, and can somewhat read Japanese and it’s still very difficult at times.

    • Shinhoshi@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      and a lot of the characters and grammar are not in the standard set

      What do you mean by “standard set”?

      • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Good question! “Standard” In terms of characters refer to the 常用漢字 which are the -er- “basic” 2160ish (I will try to remember to update with the exact figure; it was expanded in the last 5-10 years) kanji that are the basis to be considered “literate”.

        To look at it a bit different for Americans (which is the only basis I have; other counties even within English differ), one could think of reading at an X-grade level. Many publications can be around 5th-grade level (though this comes with its own can of worms).

        In English, we have 26 letters of the alphabet. I guess we could call it 52 differentiation lower- and upper-case. We could also double that to 104 for cursive. If we’re feeling generous, we could add a couple of shorthand signs (such as an & that is more shorthand).

        Now, for japanese, in addition to those 104ish, you now have to learn at least 2160ish Chinese characters (and, if you’re japanese, all the latin alphabet as described above, but this isn’t applicable to those of use whom are native English speakers looking to learn Japanese).

        And, until here, we’re only talking about the squiggles used to represent sounds. After this, we actually get into things like vocabulary and grammar and registers ( think something like manners.