Practice speaking Japanese with real YouTube videos, graded line by line
jivx.com
jivx.com
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).
> Its a historical thing which is gradually falling out of use.
No, not at all. Different sexes present themselves differently in every culture and therefore in every language. If you only learn from one sex, you won't be able to tell what parts of their language are sex-specific, and you'll learn to speak like they do.
I've gotten this criticism without speaking at all, by texting with people on Wechat. One girl remarked to me that saying 嗯嗯 [it's an agreement noise; very close in concept to "uh-huh"], with two syllables, came off as overtly feminine. As a man I guess I'm supposed to text 嗯.
I still use 嗯嗯, though, because it's as common as dirt in my experience and 嗯 is much rarer. Is that an artifact of my pool of conversational partners? Probably.
In Japanese its うんうん, Uhn-Uhn - it might read very slightly on the feminine side , but definetly not 女らしい - and not something that people would point out.
What's different in English? Apart from purely situational stuff ("going shopping with girlfriends" for example), what's specific to the language itself?
Are you sure?
Personal pronoun choice differs significantly between sexes. Women employ more onomatopoeia usage on average. かしら codes as feminine. Males have flatter pitch variation in general.
Those are just off the top of my head.
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
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!"
It would entirely depend on how you said it. Like sure, if you said it a flamboyantly feminine way that would be strange to some people, but you could easily say those things in a masculine way.
I don't think there is any situation where a ESL speaker is going to be told that they are speaking like the wrong gender.
There are plenty of others, but yes, not as many as some other languages.
That's the entire point. That you could say those things in a masculine way.
Anyone can train themselves to speak in ways that make them sound either closer to the gender the present as or the gender they'd like to present as.
Consider the tone, cadence, and word choice of a "hard cowboy" compared to a "dweeb streamer". They sound different, no?
Consider the vocal fry of the valley girl or the bouyancy of the "gay voice".
Hearing the following spoken over the phone, can you really not see that one might sound more like a women, and one more like a man?
"Hiya! Oh.Em.Gee! Okay! So! You're never ever going to guess what IIIiiiIII Saw! Today!" in a dynamic high pitch?
VS
"yo. wazzup. bro, I saw some shit today"
>I don't think there is any situation where a ESL speaker is going to be told that they are speaking like the wrong gender.
You might need to get out more. Or thank your fate that you're blessed to have never experienced it yourself, but even then I'd be surprised you've never had a friend experience it.
LGBT people grow up being told they're talking wrong all of the time. Women who prefer declaritve sentences are told they are being to manly all of the time.
Does this not exist yet?
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.
Maybe you didn't mean ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude but do you have examples of this not working with those? They work for me.
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
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
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.
Edit: Of course I have no driving reason to learn a language, might be different if I was a refugee trying to make a living
He's unaffiliated but just yesterday was raving about it, saying it's the best tool (like this) he's found in years.