Cure Dolly's Japanese Grammar Lessons | Hacker News Reader

Cure Dolly's Japanese Grammar Lessons

kellenok.github.io

113 pointsagnishom29 comments

For people not in the loop, Cure Dolly was a youtuber who taught basic Japanese grammar lessons using a digital avatar. She had (and continues to have) a cult-like following (in a good way) among a section of the online Japanese learning community. She was also ill at the time and eventually passed away.

I happen to come across the original videos ~3 years ago and they are good.

https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 "Organic Japanese with Cure Dolly"

https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49/playli...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOF... "Japanese from scratch: the game-changing course in organic Japanese" (93 videos)

Cure Dolly’s explanations of Japanese grammar are so much better than those of the textbooks and typical teaching that it blew my mind after already becoming conversant in Japanese to hear the concepts I had to struggle to figure out on my own explained so clearly.

I live in Japna and have a high-intermediate level of Japanese. I wish I had been able to read and think about these well-expressed observations when I was just starting out as it would have saved me from having to intuit things over time.

Like Cure Dolly writes, no one tells you what you really need to know when you're learning Japanese (all languages?)

I found Cure Dolly's guide very helpful as a launching point for Japanese. Just don't take her "all you need" marketing too seriously, it is more an introductory level than a complete guide.

> だ = the one-way equals sign

What on earth did I just read?

https://i.imgur.com/Z6OUVSp.png

> I would of course explain that the equality sign is not symmetric with respect to such notations; we have 3=A(5) and 4=A(5) but not 3=4, nor can we say that A(5)=4. We can, however, say that A(0)=0. As de Bruijn points out in [1, 1.2], mathematicians customarily use the = sign as they use the word “is” in English: Aristotle is a man, but a man isn’t necessarily Aristotle.

— Donald Knuth, Teach Calculus via O Notation (https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a... or http://micromath.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/donald-knuth-calcu...)

Off: mathematics is kind of moving away from the asymmetric element symbol "∈" to the symmetric type of symbol ":", which, I think is a loss. I'm sad about it.

For example with the element symbol you can do

   let x \in R a real number

and you also can do

   let U \subset R, U \ni 0 a neighborhood around 0

Which you can't do with the type of symbol. I'm probably more picky about the notations following the sound in my head than the rest, but I still think that an asymmetric typeof symbol would be a net win.

You must be new to mathematics. There is no standardization. Every paper and book essentially has its own notation system.

I think it’s kinda a weird translation. To be something is to have a relationship with the thing that one is, like an identity relationship, one is one, 1=1 for example. A one way equals sign would communicate to me something like (square)=>(rectangle) to represent that all squares are rectangles, while emphasizing that they do not represent the same thing, as they do not use a standard equals sign, as that would imply a shared identity.

That’s just me spitballing though, I definitely can’t read that character or understand the language. I’m just assuming that your translation is accurate and following the context clues to their logical conclusion.

In most languages, "to be" is used to express at least 3 kinds of relationships, which can be distinguished depending on whether the words connected by "to be" are e.g. pronouns, proper nouns or common nouns:

1. identity: "He is John"

2. membership: "He is engineer"

3. inclusion: "Wolves are carnivores"

For the non-symmetric membership and inclusion relationships, in natural languages the order of the words does not really matter, because a speaker will recognize which of the 2 words connected by "to be" corresponds to a bigger set, of which the other word may be a member or a subset, so "he is engineer" and "engineer is he" will be understood to mean the same, even when one alternative sounds weird (i.e. Yoda speech).

This is why, unlike for the agent and patient of a transitive verb, which need special markers, e.g. the nominative and accusative case markers, in the languages that do not have a fixed word order, for the subject and the nominal predicate that are connected by "to be" no distinct markers are required, they can use the same case (e.g. nominative), because they can always be recognized regardless of their order.

"To be" can also express other relationships, like position in space or time, qualities or quantities and so on, all of which are also distinguished by the kinds of words that are connected by "to be".

In an unambiguous language, like in formal mathematics or in programming, each kind of relationship should use a different notation.

That makes sense. It would really have to be read in context to tell how poorly it might read. I didn’t mean to say it was bad, just saying that I understand the confusion.

Were you around for the thread about if LLMs “know” things? It would have benefited from more precise language.

だ is what linguists call the copula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_(linguistics)

In English, it's words like "is", "was", "are" or the verb "be". It follows the rules of linguistics, not mathematics, so there shouldn't be pressing need to stress its non-commutativity.

That's helpful context, but I didn't really consider them separate contexts for the purposes of using context clues to try to understand it. I thought you didn't know what that part might mean. What did you mean?

In most Japanese lessons in English, when you are introduced to だ/です/である, it is simply explained as being like "is", or if they've already set a rule that sentences end in verbs, it's introduced as the verb "to be". That conveys, rightly or wrongly, all the things English speakers understand about "is".

This Japanese lesson starts with the assumption that part of the "だ" hiragana looks like "=", which I already don't agree with! Even the dakuten (゛) on the character looks more like an equals than the swooshy bowl they're comparing to "=".

It then says that だ is comparable to equality and mathematical equations, rather than like the lingual is/are/be, and then has to qualify that the equality is non-commutative. They could've saved time by not making that comparison, and instead comparing with is/are/be, which English speakers already understand is not commutative. "John will be early" != "Early will be John" (unless Yoda, you are)

I haven't studied many languages, but there's something about the flavor of so-called "foreign" language learning which is culturally anchored to the language of the teaching materials themselves. I wonder if these issues you have about comparisons that don't make sense and so on are about your own personal context and point of view, or if the issues reveal some differences between native Japanese teaching methods versus Japanese as she is taught to typical English language learners.

There's a subset of people in the Japanese learning community that claim to have found the "one true way" of understanding Japanese and sometimes this amounts to making very grandiose claims about how to think like a Japanese person (in an almost Neo-Whorfian way). You can tell these people likely never had any sort of formal linguistic training.

Which is whatever - if you want to use some analogies that make sense to you, go for it - just don't pretend that this is what Japanese really is like.

(There is an element of truth to it, namely that Japanese works rather differently in most respects that European languages including English. But also, there are 6-7000 languages in the world and many things that happen in Japanese have analogues in other languages, even if the specifics play out somewhat differently.)

In the case of だ the much more mundane understanding is that it's the (nonpast, plain form) copula. Yes, there are some rules about when you can/should leave it off and when not, but those IMO belong to the realm of pragmatics not semantics.

I'm so glad someone is taking these forward. Her videos were a god send when I started out learning this language. Besides the sometimes strange rants about text-books, her videos are top notch.

This looks like it took a lot of effort to transcribe with all her helpful graphics too.

Thank you for doing this!

R.I.P Cure Dolly

Another great source is https://imabi.org/

I did some digging into the identity behind the Cure Dolly character after finding the videos quite helpful. There is what I recall being a fairly credible trail of evidence that the proprietor is formerly associated with the Silver Sisterhood, AKA the "Lesbian Spanking Cult", which has popped up on HN a number of times due to their involvement in the early text adventure video game industry.

Could you provide some sources for this? I'm worried that this could be considered as spreading rumors.

This is what I could find from a few minutes of searching, although it's not really much evidence either way: https://pastebin.com/eHtG45pf

I have no skin in this game, but I wouldn't be surprised that someone with a brilliant mind would also have, to put it bluntly, "a bunch of weird shit."

take a look at the long comment on that pastebin, this is some really interesting hobbydrama

Given her presumed age, and what happened in 2020, I am not surprised that she died in 2021. The connection with Japanese lessons and early text adventure games is rather unusual, however.

The online Japanese learning community is pretty notorious for its drama. I previously worked at a small language learning company and the amount of drama we got from the Japanese learners was totally disproportionate from the drama we got from other learners.

i randomly stumbled upon the connection as well while reading about the St. Bride's School. such a random connection between two completely different interests of mine that i joked the universe is a simulation with limited RAM and reuses assets

Cure Dolly has _some_ connection to this group which, to me, just adds even more mystique to an already fascinating story[1]

[1] https://if50.substack.com/p/1992-silverwolf

Having come across the connection from somewhere else entirely, I found it a very curious rabbit hole. I saw recently a website that attempts to summarise the whole thing (not quite complete) [1], with a section on St. Bride's.

Then there's the oral history someone posted on Something Awful some years ago [2] -- from someone who may have accidentally indirectly derailed the entire movement.

[1] https://aristasia.guide [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230817170434/https://forums.so...

So eroge. Makes a ton of sense. Nowadays it'll probably be dojinshi. Why don't anyone else make and ship ton of those? It looks like foreign exports of pornography, especially generative than recorded, is not at all an insignificant source of soft power for Japan.

Overseas there is barely enough demand in cities with high Japanese population to support a subset of new releases of physical Japanese comics, I don't think physical eroge would be viable. Considering how niche it would be for overseas people it makes sense to just have them buy it digitally on dlsite and not have to worry about logistics for it.

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