Return of the Revenge of the Son of Saying Hi to Josiah!

[BionicleMandi121]

Konbanwa.

Learning how to read hiragana and katakana actually isn't too bad. Kanji, on the other hand, can be rather annoying, especially since one kanji can have several different readings. I can't say much about the grammar, though. Japanese is somewhat similar to my native language when it comes to sentence structure, so it was slightly easier for me than it was for most of my classmates

Ugh. Kanji. /twitch
I hate kanji.
And while I'm not that bad at Japanese grammar, I've long since forgotten which particles go where in order to mean what. - -

Oh, yea, I know about the kanji, that's probably gonna be the most annoying part about learning it, but I'm determined, I really want to, at the very least, go to or move to Japan one day! It'll be so nice to not have to have a translator, plus I'd be able to watch raw anime ;)

I feel I must point out, there is an actual difference between the way anime characters talk and the way real Japanese people talk. For one thing, real people go a lot faster (in my opinion). To the point where I can more or less understand RAW anime and then get totally lost when trying to listen to what the seiyuu are saying. For another, speech patterns are highly idealized and exaggerated in anime; people don't really talk like that.
Aside from that, though, Japanese is pretty hard to learn. It's not just the writing system, although that's challenge enough for some. There's also grammar (which is backwards, in relation to English), all the particles (already mentioned that above), the levels of politeness, specific phrases to say at certain times, and other...stuff (I recall acting out this huge long bowing sequence when my Japanese teacher tried showing us how to exchange business cards).
In other words, if you're going self-taught all the way, prepare to be in it for a veeeeery long time. ._. (Or I'm just being pessimistic)

[Winters Rage]

I feel I must point out, there is an actual difference between the way anime characters talk and the way real Japanese people talk. For one thing, real people go a lot faster (in my opinion). To the point where I can more or less understand RAW anime and then get totally lost when trying to listen to what the seiyuu are saying. For another, speech patterns are highly idealized and exaggerated in anime; people don't really talk like that.

I know that, It's not live I've just started learning and researching it XD I already know the bassis of it and stuff. Right now I'm using Google Translate to help me figure out where the words and stuff go and using The Japanese Word thread too. Helps. XD
In other news, finally finished the kitchen and it's about 5:15am! ^^ It's starting to get light out, the sky is a very dark shade of bluish purple but I doubt that blue shading thing will happen, too many lights are on and I think the tilt of the earth might have something to do with it too...

[Blastotoise]

Hey! I just got back from my friend's house, and he has a laptop and it's kinda hard to post, which explains my absence the last couple days.

Alas, so many quotes to quote, so little time. And I wasn't about to quote NG's Wall of Text (that I totally read)...

[Metalheadz]

Well, now that I'm getting a little tired of listening to so many rock songs, I decided to get back a little into my interest in hip-hop. So far, I'm enjoying a few good songs by Jay-Z and Eminem, and some of my old favorite pop songs from the 90's and early 00's. lol, no homo, but I listen to a little of N Sync, the pop band I grew up with when I was little. Heck, they weren't that bad. I'm not really the type of guy who cares about what's hot today and what's not, or what to listen to or not to listen to. Justin Bieber I will never listen to, though, just as long as the song is good than I'll listen to it. That being said, I'm now looking for older songs I grew up with such as Destiny's Child and maybe Britney Spears.

Got a prob with that? That's just me, lol.

[Saber Knight]

Hey.

Hindi grammar is different, too, but I'm not doing too bad in getting used to it. 'Course, I can only form like 3 sentences in Hindi, but that's besides the point :P Basic sentences go: subject + modifiers/object + verb. Like, My name is Saber would be "mera naam Saber hai", my name Saber is (in Devanagari, मेरा नाम Saber है). PurplePrincess told me that I could just as easily say "mera naam hai Saber", but I feel like that's Americanized grammar. Everywhere else I've looked tells me verb goes last.

Sooooooo home alone for the next five hours. Party?

Homework, actually >.<

[Josiah]

Hi! Hate to break it to you NG, but Google Translate (and every other computer translation program for that matter) kinda sucks and should in no way be used to try and learn a language. At best it can (mostly) translate single words ok. Mostly... Long as they're not complicated ones. It can also give you a very general idea of what something is saying but that's about it.

Anime isn't bad for practice, and in some cases anime characters speak much faster than real Japanese people (*cough*Excel Saga*cough*), but many anime characters (especially girls) do tend to have exagerated speach patterns in order to sound cute or cool or whatever. Some also have special regional accents (like Osakaben) and pronounce many words differently. Plus, charaters in anime often tend to speak in a very casual and informal manner, which is something you'd only do around close friends and family. Speaking that way to other people comes across as very rude.

A few more comments about Japanese...
1. Grammar isn't that bad once you understand basic sentence structure and ordering, but there's a lot of rules and verb conjugations to memorize.
2. As I said before, Kanji is a huge pain in the neck to learn (2000 symbols all with multiple meanings and pronounciations to memorize). Heck, Japanese people often don't finish learning all the kanji until they're in highschool. That makes learning to read Japanese a huge pain, except for kids books and manga which either don't have kanji or include hiragana translit of the kanji.
3. Politeness and social standing are extremely important. Based on the social and personal relationship of the speakers, the language can change considerably (different words, different verb forms, the addition of extra poilite words and phrases, etc).
4. Counting objects is a huge pain. Counting itself is each enough, but to count objects you need to add different suffixes to the numbers depending on the type of thing you're counting. Even Japanese people have trouble with this.
5. An average persona's volcabulary is something like 10,000 words. Memorizing that many words is difficult and takes a long time.

And that's just for starters. Japanese isn't an easy language to learn. I've been studying it for several years (albiet on and off) and lived there for eight months and I'm only intermediate (on the four level Japanese proficience exam, I could probably pass levels 4 and 3, but am nowhere close what's required for level 2, much less 1).

[Winters Rage]

I'm very aware how... bad... some translations are, I'm just using it as a very vague starting place, but it seems learning Japanese is going to take longer than I though although I'm not gonna give up, I might push the most of it aside until I have more time for projects...
1: I've noticed that, it seems simple but then something weird comes up and it's another rule that needs to be learned. :/ And I'm not to good with conjunctions and congregations(?) with words/verbs, I always am using the incorrect verb form when I speak Spanish.
2: Yes, we've talked about Kanji to death now...
3: Ohhh yea, I noticed that, all of the different words just for saying 'I' for example @.@ I need to make sure I can remember all of the different ones...
4: Yea, kinda like in Spanish but they don't change the word depending on what your counting, they just have a different word for everything, like 7, 70, 700 all sound kinda similar but then when you wright it and think about it, their very different and kinda hard to remember. Also, since 6 (seis) and 7 (siete) are very similar and people down here speak super fast and slur alot of words together it's really hard to distinguish words of another. It's really annoying because the 'b' and 'v' make the same noise and they have different words for the time on a clock than just counting (although people here aren't very educated so they just use numbers)
5: True, but think of all the words you learn just with English! People say English is also very hard to learn because of all of the rules and everything. But then learning, say, Spanish, on top of that adds a ton more words on top of English.

Anyways, I noticed that the donation gauge went up I've been waiting for part 8 for a long time, ever since I started reading the comic, actually DX Well, I'm still planing on donating it's just not going to be the very first thing I do when I get home...
On other news, I stayed up all night! :D I was fun to watch the sunrise and see the people start getting active for once. I figured since there's only 1 more week until we leave I might as well try to enjoy it as much as possible~

[Blastotoise]

Hey

150k posts every body! I think I'll take the credit for that. We should all get prizes Josiah!

[Winters Rage]

Orrrr maybe you can drop it a pretend we didn't just add 5 pages to every game thread in the forums over night...
I think certain people here are... too random...
(Ref: 2nd to last post HERE)

[Josiah]

Hi! No one gets prizes for the forum's overall post count. I've never done that before plus, even if I wanted do, I really don't have the time.

Back to Japanese...
1. If you don't memorize all the verb conjugation rules, you're not going to get far.
3. The different ways to say I barely scratch the surface...
5. Not sure what exactly you're getting at. Memorizing 10,000 Japanese words would be a long and difficult process regardless of how many English or Spanish words you know.
In the end, I'm just trying to say that Japanese isn't something you can learn quickly. It takes years of study and dedication to get good at it.

Nothing too new with me. Working hard on my book and Car Washer and that's about it.

[Winters Rage]

Yea, I probably should just try to learn it when I'm older and have more time and just look at every now and then to help me remember what I know already instead of just trying to learn it now and forget most of it by the time I need to use it.

Speaking of car washer I downloaded the trial about a week ago and tried it, it was pretty fun, good work all around but I noticed that the cars drive straight and don't exactly follow the dirt road that leads to your wash.
That and at the end of 7 days you can't really earn enough money to buy the top-notch everything.
I did enjoy the sarcasm and funny remarks though :P "If only I had an extra space bar laying around..." or "I can switch between the cleaning tools using Q and E... Or I could just go pick them up, you know, like a normal person..." That made me laugh.

[Silver]

Yay I finally got my raise! Now I can show up at BK at 5:30 AM for $7.65 instead of Minimum wage! ...Yeah it's still kinda pathetic, but knowing how rare it is to get a raise makes it seem special. Even though most of my friends started at a higher rate than that and do less work at their jobs...

[PoisonWing14]

Hello!

Plain Old News: Well, I have only had 2 hours of sleep today...that, mixed with coffee make for....me doing much better at SSBB? Well...yeah. I also am having an easier time drawing, which normally I can only do If I have an Idea in mind. I don't have any ideas in my mind, but I can easily doodle right now. It's kinda cool.

News: I found some Index cards that I never used during school, so I'm using them to doodle on and make paper airplanes out of! I find it very amusing.

Random News: Fox-Clam Hand Puppet! @w@

[Cheezdude]

HELP ME D:

[Josiah]

Hi! Congrats, Silver!

Glad you liked the Car Washer demo, NG. The full version is going to have a whole lot more game modes (including a full story mode) so there will be lots more chances to buy stuff, along with tons of new items, ninja, and vehicles. Lots of tweaks and bug fixes too. And it will hopefully be done sometime this fall. BTW: If you want to buy everything and can't earn enough, the demo has a cheat mode. When playing the game (you have to be washing cars, not in a menu or the shop, to use it) hit F8 to enable it. Then you can use T to give you money and F1 - F7 to spawn all the different types of ninja.