Practice speaking Japanese with real YouTube videos, graded line by line (jivx.com)

33 pointsby momentmaker4 hours ago12 comments

comrade1234 3 hours ago

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 an hour 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).

rootsudo an hour 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

AdmiralAsshat 37 minutes 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!"

1317 3 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 3 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

usrnm 3 hours ago

Replace YouTube with anime and I'm interested

psb 3 hours ago

this but for German please

weaksauce 2 hours ago

agreed i'd love a german and spanish version of this

ranger_danger 3 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?

traceroute66 an hour 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.

[1] https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral-3/

JoeDaDude 4 minutes 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