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...
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).
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.
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!"
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
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
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.
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
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.
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...
> 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).
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.
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!"
Could be worse. He could have ended each sentence with dattebayo.
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
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
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
Replace YouTube with anime and I'm interested
Is pitch accent included / noted? That can make a big difference.
i do not understand how this works
this but for German please
Yes, good idea. After German is completed please do Mandarin next.
agreed i'd love a german and spanish version of this
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.
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.
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?
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
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/
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.