I see to your point, the joke leans to imply that Chinese people will lie about the ingredients served in their restaurants to save some money.
This stereotype, however, is predominant amongst Chinese people in China. This joke would fit right in on any Chinese TV show, questioning the legitimacy of the meat at a cheap restaurant is a joke older than the country. This may be why the author calls it "harmless".
It would be the equivalent of a Chinese sitcom where a character might suggest that visit a Texas Barbecue you might get shot by some revolver-wielding cowboy. I don't think many Americans would take offense.
But as the author mentions, strict self censorship amongst broadcasters has effectively cut all scenes that mention "China" or "Chinese" just to be safe.
Its interesting because I've looked into these "automated prescription" telehealth services for a year now without much luck.
I have prescription OCD meds that I've been on for a couple of years. I pay 100 USD out of pocket every 3 months for a telehealth appointment with my doc where she asks "everything okay? Same prescrition?" Its totally useless, but I've yet to find a service that is <33 USD/month to save me any money on this.
Grammar rules start by learning verb conjugations, these can be learned through tables, although there are some exceptions you will have to learn individually. This is an excellent free tool for practicing those (not mine, just something I've used): https://baileysnyder.com/jconj/
For structural grammar there are a lot of different routes to go about this, MNN teaches these pretty well in my opinion. I tried using bunpro (https://bunpro.jp) with mixed results but I know some people who swear by it.
As for knowing if your understanding of a sentence is correct, if I have doubts at my level I assume that I am likely incorrect. I typically google the part of the sentence that I am unsure about and either look at images or posts that use it in different contexts. Reverso context is also useful for this (https://context.reverso.net/translation/)
One more note that you may or may not be aware of:
Culture and language are closely intertwined, they drive each other, and Japanese is certainly no exception to this.
Japanese isn't spoken as literally or certainly as English is, especially to strangers. They use this system called "Keigo" which you'll find translated as "politeness" but that doesn't really completely encompass the idea. It is just a way of speaking in certain situations that covers your bases. Japanese is a language that is often stereotyped as needing to say a lot to say a little and this is often true.
Its useful to try and learn this intuitively. Hear and see it used often to the point that you just know the idea being communicated. Its difficult to translate many of these concepts to English because of how outside of our cultural sphere they often are (which is why I believe trying to teach them in English from the beginning is a fools errand, they must be learned contextually).
1. Hiragana/katakana can be learned in a week or two using flash cards and spaced repetition. It can be mastered through reading Japanese text for a few months to the point where you stop thinking about it. You don't need a $77 book to learn this, its just brute force memorization. I didn't know any other Japanese going in besides this.
2. Full immersion while ideal is impractical for most people interested in studying this language. You can still give yourself full immersion while learning anywhere in the world by using Japanese learning resources and limiting your English use to the minimum necessary (dictionary lookups, explanations for particularly troublesome concepts).
By the end of MNN 1 going into MNN 2 I swapped from a JP -> EN dictionary to a JP only dictionary. If I didn't understand a word from context in the book I would look it up in the dictionary, if I didn't know a word in the definition I would look that up and so on until I understood using only Japanese.
I looked through the first 4 pages and its cute! I think this could certainly be helpful to someone getting their feet wet with really studying the language.
One of the reasons I tend to hold MNN as gospel is the way that it doesn't treat you like a child. The conversations are very realistic to what you would hear in modern spoken Japanese, with Keigo and all of the clunkiness that comes with it from lesson 1.
I noticed your disclaimer:
"Despite being in the form of stories the Japanese used is beginner Japanese and may not reflect the way native speakers would express themselves. "
If its not used by native speakers, why learn it this way? Maybe they could understand you if you spoke like this, but you would be unlikely to understand them without the need to speak to you as if you were 4 years old.
Only with Kanji. Many share the same meaning, and onyomi reading often sounds a little bit like modern mandarin, but the kunyomi readings are exclusively Japanese and you'll have to memorize those separately (Wanikani was helpful for me in this).
For grammar you are out of luck. Japanese is a much more grammar heavy language than Chinese, typically much more complex.
I started studying Japanese in 2020 with 「みんなの日本語」(Minna no Nihongo). The book is entirely in Japanese and only assumes that you can read hiragana/katakana and have access to a dictionary for JP -> your native language. The book also includes an audio CD of each of the lessons to practice listening comprehension.
I used the two books, audio CDs, and an excellent YouTube channel called "Nihongoal" that provides supplementary lessons to each chapter in English.
In 2 years of daily study I have a better command of Japanese than I did in Chinese, my college major... Admittedly the Chinese study has helped me immensely with Kanji.
When you study Japanese in Japanese you are constantly reinforcing prior knowledge while acquiring new concepts. Minna no Nihongo does an excellent job of pacing these concepts in a way that is powerful but not overwhelming to a foreigner learning the language.
I guess I am just a bit apprehensive to teaching Japanese in English because of how much efficiency you loose in that concept reinforcement. If you want to learn words and phrases this approach might work, but if you want to actually speak the language I feel that its going to take a lot longer.
I don't think that calling someone what they prefer to be called is a political issue.
I personally don't know any right-wingers that wouldn't call you by the name/gender that you request them to. These people probably exist but it is a very small group.
Theres a difference between disagreeing with the concept at a societal level vs disrespecting someone on a personal level. Far fewer people do that.
I don't understand how they got a network connection to load in the chat on an unmodified console. Was the TASBot connected to the network and pushing the messages via controller inputs? If so that is pretty insane.
> The Chinese government is an adversary of the West whether we like it or not.
I'd like to se a source on this. I don't think different political ideologies imply adversarial intentions. China has been as friendly to the west as it can be while still protecting its own cultural and economic interests.
If western leaders would stop seeing China as the enemy and instead as a partner we would see a rise in infrastructure and economic opportunity globally.
China is not trying to do global charity work, they have their own motives as well. They are also not the devil incarnate. I would argue that their intentions in foreign policy are still _generally_ more morally palpable than most western nations.
In the same boat, from talking to higher up recruiting people at AWS it sounds like a lot of their cold leads are handled by recruiter contractors.
These contractors (usually overseas) are paid mostly on commission and there are thousands of them. Its not how most big tech companies handle recruiting. They hand a gigantic list of emails to the mob and implement the "casting a wide net" strategy.
Note that for many languages a flag is not displayed rather a symbol. Chinese languages in particular follow this (拼 for simplified pinyin, 注 for traditional zhuyin).
Also Japanese never displayed a flag (あ for hiragana, ア for katakana).
Couldn't browsers just designate the .local tld to not check for SSL certs and enforce that it resolves to an IP on the current network? Seems like a simple solution for this.
When I was in college my friend figured out a major fast food chain had a flaw in its API with the way it validated coupon codes.
The server validated that the coupon code was legitimate, but the actual discount value of the coupon code was validated client side in JS for some reason.
So he could turn any 10% off coupon into a 100% off coupon by modifying the API requests during the checkout flow. I'm sure this was illegal but he ate a lot of free fast food before they ever fixed it.
That account still spews misinformation, encourages continued invasions of Ukraine, and condones violence responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. These are in direct violation of Twitter ToS but they only enforce that when its politically convenient.
I see to your point, the joke leans to imply that Chinese people will lie about the ingredients served in their restaurants to save some money.
This stereotype, however, is predominant amongst Chinese people in China. This joke would fit right in on any Chinese TV show, questioning the legitimacy of the meat at a cheap restaurant is a joke older than the country. This may be why the author calls it "harmless".
It would be the equivalent of a Chinese sitcom where a character might suggest that visit a Texas Barbecue you might get shot by some revolver-wielding cowboy. I don't think many Americans would take offense.
But as the author mentions, strict self censorship amongst broadcasters has effectively cut all scenes that mention "China" or "Chinese" just to be safe.