annoying guy in skype chat
this is how this guy talks, and he's been studying japanese for three years now and loves to brag about how he doesn't watch anime because you learn "strange, unnatural japanese from it", and brags about how he speaks to japanese people and just "learns through immersion" and "i don't know why things are said the way they are, i just know that's how you say them" etc:
"とにかく、ぼくはベッドに行きます。がんばろう！おやすみ"
yeah... i'm sure you're learning very well....
and he was trying to counsel someone about how to learn kanji - when he only knows like 100 himself - and i was talking about it and then he was going like "there's so many similar-looking ones but it's just part of the road to japanese"
and i said "they're not similar at all if you know why they are the way they are" and he replied "they are in appearance, smarty-pants"
what? hello? every single time anyone points out that he's wrong he finds a way to back-track and make himself look like he's not wrong. EVERY TIME. of course it's a very transparent attempt at saving himself but it's super annoying that he even feels the need to do it. was he bullied a ton as a kid or something?
EDIT: later on i was teaching someone about sentence structure (it's super easy in reality) and one of my examples was:
hito aru - a person exists
aru hito - "an existing person", someone, a certain person, a person who exists
and he was going like "you can't use hito aru, you use iru" and i said "well ignoring that, they do say aru hito a ton and my point was sentence structure, not vocabulary - i just picked words that every beginner knows", the reply came "i've never seen aru hito, it sounds slangy, where did you hear that, anime?" (aru = exists, iru = lives - so you say "a dog lives in the room" instead of "a dog exists/is in the room", because it's a living creature).
you must not be very good at japanese if you haven't ever seen aru hito. they use it ALL THE TIME. and for the love of god, the vocabulary and grammar in anime is hardly different from what exists in real life, otherwise i wouldn't be able to read japanese forum posts and novels one bit without special study. i even pulled "aru hito, hito aru" from a textbook for learning japanese from the early 1900's.
then because i was a bit curious if you can say "hito aru", i tried to google it in japanese. yes, it turns out that you can use it in some situations and in older times it was the standard form or at least acceptable dialectally, but organized education systems forced "iru" onto everyone as "proper grammar".
i've essentially only been studying japanese seriously for something over 6 months. i started in january or february of 2015, continued until june or july, then took a huge break without studying a thing... until now, january of 2016. and yet i can get the gist of a whole lot of manga, videogames and even at times forum posts. i learned 300 kanji in 2 months and didn't even work at it every day. clearly MY method of learning works, clearly i should know how to teach japanese so that other people learn it fast, and yet no one listens to me when i tell them how to do it!