"Random" seems like a safe bet. It's not like they stuck to one language and extracted words from it - there's a bunch of loan words from other languages, too. Many of them are older than America's monolopy on Western pop-culture, too. Hilariously enough, the Japanese word for "England" is "igirisu", which comes the Portuguese "inglês".
Toilet! That's another one they took from English English. If it was American English it would be "Restroom" right?
Anyway that aside, I was wondering how someone (especially someone without a computer) would look up Kanji?
If you see a character, how are you supposed to know what it is? Do you have to hear it first? But if there was a dictionary, how would it even be ordered? Katakana and Hirogana don't even seem to lend themselves to being linear.
edited 22nd May '12 6:17:16 AM by UltimatelySubjective
I've just started seriously learning, and for some reason it makes total and complete sense to me in terms of grammar, even though I'm extremely Eloquent in My Native Tongue, american/hiberno-irish english. The writing systems still confuse the hell out of me, though.
T Vtropes is NOT Wikipedia, stop trying to make it that. I'm attacking the darkness!![]()
They can also be ordered by radical and number of strokes.
Haha! No longer shall I be at the mercy of translators!
Well, okay I'm still pretty low level.
But, that's Hirogana and Katakana mastered... Kinda. Now I just have to practise and gradually learn Kanji.
I'm thinking of finding some raw shounen manga and seeing how I go.
I know some words from anime but not a lot.
I am somewhat unsure of what the character that looks like る or ろ with a vertical line through them are supposed to be though. And also, if I see a long dash-like character, would that always be 一 (ichi or one)?
For example, if you have this
◊ wouldn't it just be ramen? Not sure why it says ラーメン unless it's supposed to indicate lengthening of a syllable or something?
By the way, I don't know if this is at all useful to anybody, but a while back I created a Javascript widget for practicing katakana and hiragana. It's online here.
Sorry if it seems pretentious of me to plug my own stuff, but it seems relevant and I actually found I was learning pretty well by using the widget.
*waits for an expert to come tell me I'm dead wrong*
Join my forum game!It's been said that the Japanese language is the second most hardest language to learn, and depending on your tone of voice, the meaning of what you're saying can change it. Might be wrong, but whatever. I'm thinking of taking it in the next five years, or in college. Seems like something I could get into...
GO AHEAD .... MR. JOEHSTUR .......And the dash is indeed used to lengthen a syllable in katakana. It can be hard to tell it apart from the ichi kanji. It's a lot clearer when the writing is vertical, because then the line is vertical, too, while ichi isn't.
It's a good thing this thread was revived. I was planning to practice actually using the language because my current skills at that are pretty embarrassing. So, who else is around anymore who's actually proficient at the language besides Hime?
Moreover, I've heard it said that although written japanese is among the most difficult written languages to learn, spoken japanese is actually fairly easy, at least for english speakers.
Join my forum game!![]()
"Ne" and "Wa"...
Okay that sounds right and makes me look stupid, but I swear there were stylisation issues in what I was reading, making them more resemble Ro and Ru.
So, are any of the digraph kana tricky to remember, or are there too few to worry about? Is this
all I need to know?
edited 21st Apr '13 1:46:26 AM by UltimatelySubjective
I took 3 and a half years of Japanese in school. After that it's self taught. I'd say it took until last year that I was pretty good at it and could usually understand stuff.
I wouldn't say I'm fluent since I still come across words I don't know and I don't think I could really hold a conversation in Japanese.
It appears to be from an early chapter of Shingeki No Kyojin.

I think I'll ask here. Seems like the right thread, although I'm talking Engrish and Separated by a Common Language.
Basically, which dictionary are the Japanese using to steal their English from? I mean, British English? U.S English? New New Zealand English!?
For instance, they use the British version of Pants (underwear) but I'm sure I've heard some U.S. usages for other things.
If it was a pop-cultural thing I'd expect it to be almost entirely U.S. usage...
Or is it completely random?