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 1 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).
AdmiralAsshat 36 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!"
rootsudo 50 minutes 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
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?
JoeDaDude 3 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
traceroute66 1 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.
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).
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!"
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
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/