Can anybody tell me what Japanese character this is? Tried OCR and nothing it comes up with looks right, then tried going through both alphabets manually and none of those characters look right either...
That's just a ya (kana).Looks kinda like a _y_ak. that's the help to memorize it.
>>1564644Just use Google Lens, it got really good at OCRing Japanese. And I mean it really. World of difference between now and a few years ago. I'm now relying solely on that and on Windows "select text on image" screenshot menu feature instead of looking up rare kanji manually by radical on Jisho and such.
Lens also of course lets you copy text on the image to paste it anywhere you want, I just happened to take a screenshot of the slop overview instead by accident
>>1564650But that doesn't look like the same character. I mean it could just be the font but the second slash (the one thats angled like "/" instead of "\") is still angled like "\" in the character it thinks it is. Maybe that's just another way to write it though.If there's one thing that trying to use OCR has taught me, its that character identification is probably at least as complicated as translation is...
>>1564651It's the same character, there are indeed several "ways" to write it and some fonts or handwriting style have differences just like with latin letters. When you start practicing/reading you'll get used to it really fast, different kana symbols are different enough so it's easy to recognize them from the general shape / stroke count. You'll take a while to get used to shit like ぬ/め, シ/ツ, and ン/ソ, but learning vocab solves that issue too as your brain stops thinking about it.
Basically with Japanese/Chinese some of the more handwritten-looking fonts are based on how you'd paint these quickly with a brush or write with a pen, so they may have some different angles or extra blots or broken curves, but it's all the same shit.
>>1564652Cool, thanks!I was wondering, is a halfway decent way to learn to read basic Japanese to basically do exercises/look at books meant for small children? Like that's how I learned English so why not with a second language? Although I'd guess it would probably be useful to have stuff written in English side by side since adult brains aren't really wired the same way toddler/small children's brains are. I think it might work better with just learning the alphabet and the sounds each character makes. Speaking of sounds, do sound effects "sound" the same across languages more or less?
>>1564656>Speaking of sounds, do sound effects "sound" the same across languages more or less?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyneiz9FRMw
>>1564656Exercises are good, definitely read-write kana using textbooks and apps to get a good grasp of it. Reading is very good, but specifically with Japanese children books are not always the best starting point. Japanese has a very limited number of syllables so it has a crapton of homonyms and relies on kanji to differentiate (when talking it relies on context and pitch accent, the latter being really hard for foreigners to pick up on). The thing is, small kids don't really know kanji very well yet, so toddler books are often written in kana only, or with very few kanji. And because it's Japanese, there will be no spaces and barely any punctuation beyond periods. So if you don't already have a good grasp of vocab, they can get really annoying to read. But if you use some kind of specialized graded readers it will probably be easy enough.Something that might work as an on-ramp to reading Japanese is NHK easy news - https://news.web.nhk/news/easy/ - it's fairly simple vocab and it uses both kanji and furigana on top of them. That's probably the best writing format to get used to reading Japanese.
>>1564656>is a halfway decent way to learn to read basic Japanese to basically do exercisesIf you mean following a textbook and doing exercises, yes. That's not enough in itself though, you need to use the language by reading, writing, listening, and speaking.>look at books meant for small childrenNo, looking at books won't make you learn. Reading in general will. Children's books are also often hiragana only and intended for kids who already know Japanese. Just because they're for kids it doesn't mean they're good for beginner learners.>Like that's how I learned English so why not with a second language? Learning a second language happens completely differently in the brain, the same logic is not applicable. Basically sounds good, doesn't work.>adult brains aren't really wired the same way toddler/small children's brains areYep, exactly. Looking at texts with translation is also not very useful. You need to know the grammar and structures and some vocabulary to be able to do anything with a text, especially as a beginner. It's best to read texts where you understand most of it and you look up the rest.For learning hiragana and katakana, that's very easy, just follow some youtube videos that teach you how to write them properly (the "textbook" style in a pic earlier in this thread).
