wildweathelです。

ええ、はじめまして。

言語によって、wildweathelとか荒イタチとか申します。14ヶ月位前に、やっとアニメの字幕を読むのに飽きて、日本語を習いに出ました。それからいろいろな発見した面白い物語のうちには、得にポケットモンスターＳＰＥＣＩＡＬが一つだから、ポケSPアニメの制作を目指すグループが成立されると知ったら、一度見回すしか仕方がなくなりましたのです。

まだ、14ヶ月だけの結果になって実用的ではないのでせけれども、プロ翻訳者になりたいから、次第にできるようになったら何かお手伝い致しましょうと考えています。次の数日に事業と会員を知り合いたいと思います。ようろしくお願いします。

Hi.

I'm wildweathel or araitachi (depending on language). About 14 months ago, I finally got fed up with reading anime subtitles and set out to learn Japanese. Since then, I've discovered all kinds of interesting stories--particularly Pocket Monsters Special--so when I heard that there is a group established to produce a PokeSP anime, I had no choice but give it a look.

So far, I only have 14 months experience--not nearly enough to be useful--but since I want to be a professional translator someday, I'm thinking I might offer my skills as they mature. Over the next couple of days I'd like to get to know the project and staff. yorushiku onegai shimasu.

Hi wildweathel
I'm Sai
Read the rules ok.

A Japanese translator we can always use one of those. I think more of us try and want to larnd japanese.

The best I can do for japanese is copy plaste the writing and I can tell if something is writen in japanese or not but that dosen't mean I can read it then again I have a hard time reading english and that's the only other language I know.

Welcome to the forums wildweathel! My name's Alexie. I'm hoping to join the music team. ^^
Oh how neat! I've been meaning to learn japanese for some time, but I
dont know where to go to learn. x_x I'm sure your abilities will be of great use to our staff!

I'm gonna be starting a Japanese class in a couple weeks! 8D I am so excited, right now I'm only mediocre in reading and understanding a lot of Japanese, you shall be my idol! 83

Wow! I'm so impressed that you've learned Japanese on your own initiative. Nice job! Anyway, welcome to the forums! I'm dirksies, a vice VA head. If you have any questions, feel free to ask =]

Woah, I just got back from my trip!

...eh? New member?

mmk, Hi! I'm mrtweetums! Welcome to the forums! I hope you can help in anyway possible! Any contribution to the project is welcome!

Hajimemashita Araitachi-san! Minna-san de saizen o tsukusuda to, kono anime o sakusei! Yokoso!

(Nice to meet you wildweathel! Let's all do our best and create this anime! Welcome!)

I'm still not very good at Japanese >///< but I just CAN'T memorise all those katakana so written Japanese seems so distant to me. But hopefully my very plain Japanese is still good somewhat in the romanization terms...

Either way, nice to meet you.

@Sai Turtle,

Consider them read. No cussin', hunh? I grew up in the shadow of the White Mountains in a little French-Catholic neighborhood, so for me cussin's as natural as taking a--*hm* nevermind--but I guess I can be polite if I have too.


@Joyful

No, don't idolize me. Find some Japanese person to idolize. They're a lot better than I am and they don't have to spend hundreds of hours pouring over flashcards like I do.

カザーズさんへ
@Kazaazz

失礼しますが、
shitsurei shimasu ga,
If I may... (literally "(I shall) do a loss-of-politeness, but..."

Minna-san de ->
皆で
minna de

皆さん (mina san) means "all of you" or "all of them." "All of us" has to be 皆 (minna).

saizen o tsukusuda to ->
最善を尽くして
saizen o tsukushite
te-form sequence of verbs. "exhausting saizen..."

@Everyone who wants to learn Japanese

(Note: what follows is a monster essay on adult language aquisition. If you don't have the time to waste on it, please skip it.)

Wow. I'm kinda surprised there'd be so much interest in learning Japanese. I guess I've gotten too used to the "that's weird" or "why not Chinese" (or "why Chinese, it is Chinese, right? but all those little pictures look like Chinese") attitude of my coworkers. But, if you give a weathel a soapbox...

Learning Japanese is very easy--in fact over a million Japanese babies do it every year. Now, I don't know how much you know about babies, but I can attest that they're not very smart. No Nobel prizes, no chess grandmasters--I've never seen a baby balance a checkbook. Cute, yes（赤ちゃん＝超可愛い）, but not smart. So, you have to either come to the conclusion that language learning is so easy you can do it whilst drooling over your megablocks, or that babies have magic baby juice that makes them able to perform amazing linguistic feats long before they're ready to learn what a toilet is.

I, for one, do not believe in magic baby juice. It's messy to produce and after a while the scruples really get you down.

The one big difference between babies and adults is that babies haven't yet closed their minds. Now, this isn't really a bad thing--in fact a good part of growing up is becoming more descisive and confident in applying the rules you've learned in everything from science to social interaction--but it seems that a lot of people abandon openmindedness altogether even when it would help them, and I think this is in large part a cultural thing closely related to extended, institutionalized childhood. That's a whole other can of worms.

Particularly devilish is that "open-minded" has been hijacked to mean "tolerant," or "morally relative." What it really should mean--and what you have to become if you want to learn a language is playful. The only way to learn a language is to play with it. To put it in even more frustrating terms you "just do it."

The reason why is when you consciously think *about* something, what you're really doing is calling up a set of symbols associated with your experience and knowledge about that something. That set of symbols is in fact language, so if you follow your usual habits and try to understand Japanese by studying it in English, you're gonna get in trouble real fast.

Imagine a juggler who has juggled rings for a while and has gotten pretty good with them. He's thinking of moving on to learning to juggle clubs, so he starts with his usual nine-ring act and, to ease himself into clubs, replaces one ring with a club. But, that club is so much heavier and flies so differently from the rings are that there's no chance he'll learn to juggle clubs. So, he gives up and is jealous of all the jugglers who do clubs so well because they started with clubs or were born in another country or whatever.

What he needs to do is set the rings down and learn to juggle all over again--even being able to do a three-club fountain will be a big achievement for him. Once he can juggle clubs decently well, he can try mixing clubs and rings. So, if you want to learn another language, you'll have to spend a lot of time alone with just that language and no English distraction.

So, here's the deal:

There's a code you need to figure out all by yourself, because no one can explain it to you. This code connects human experiences to an arbitrary system of grunts or ink-marks--which we'll call "text" because it makes us feel all warm and academic to think about grunting but say "text."

text <----code-----> experience/thought-stuff/meaning

There are several stages to how this happens. The stages overlap--you'll end up doing them all simultaneously--but each little part of the language flows through all of them.

First, text has patterns. Some sounds are more common than others. Some combinations are more common than others. These patterns come at you fast. If you have no experience with real Japanese, your're probably hoping for really slow stuff. Normal stuff sounds hopelessly fast, but it isn't because there is in fact stuff out there that even the Japanese think is hayaguchi.

(And, yes, I kinda sorta understand that last bit:
-- Uhh, speed...
-- Minori san, this is what I think: To travel is an amazing thing; in this land there are local delicacies, historic ruins, and people to meet all kinds of new experiences to have, knowledge to acquire, but ~something about arriving~ is a pain in the but, so ~something about good weather~ and that's why I love to travel. Are you listening, Minori san?

1:00-1:20)

The only way to acquire that speed is literally grow new circuitry in your brain. But, the cool thing is that you can do that without really paying attention. Ears. Japanese goes in. Listening fluency out.

The same is roughly true of reading. Get paper books and curl up in a comfy chair without a dictionary to level up your reading fluency. But, before you do that, you really do need to be able to read a little bit.

Holy cow, look at the time. I'll have to cover the other stuff later because it's just about bedtime for me. Speaking of bedtime, what do kids like at bedtime? Stories! And you want to be a kid again, right? Boogie on over to http://fantajikan.tea-nifty.com/ . Most recent post should be 『ばにばにベンジャミンのはなし』 作：ベアトリクス・ポッター -- or for those of you who don't read yet "The Tale of Bani-Bani Benjamin" by Beatrix Potter (you know, "Peter Rabbit"--which incidentally is the next one down).

タイトルをクリックすると、「ダウンロード」のリンクを見つけて、お楽しみにください！
click the title and then find the "download" link. Enjoy!

^ What a great read. Thank you for taking the time to type that

And welcome to the forums! We hope you'll find us to be a warm, accepting community.