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zoom909

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  1. Well the underlying point is, and I'm not sure if Chinese operates this way, in Japanese, kanji is context-driven. They re-use the same kanji character with multiple pronunciations. It's the neighboring symbols that let you know which pronunciation is in use for that kanji at that point in the sentence.
  2. Hi Mephisto, I'm sure other people will comment on the VNs. As for me, I'd like to know what kind of stuff you've been playing piano-wise. (I used to play, too).. Also, must be nice to be able to speed through the kanji (sigh) :-)
  3. OK, I want to correct 1 thing from the get-go: Onyomi vs Kunyomi has got nothing to do with compounds or not. When kanji are used to write a native Japanese word, that's kunyomi. When kanji are used to write a borrowed Chinese word, that's onyomi. The onyomi for 学 is "gaku" and the onyomi for 校 is "kou". These are the sounds that Japan thinks are the Chinese pronunciations of those symbols--at least, hundreds of years ago they were. But what you actually hear is "gakkou" (Japanese sound rules). The kunyomi for 学 is まな(ぶ) manabu, the reason the last part is in paraentheses in the dictionary is because, the way it actually works is that the kanji is used for the verb stem, and the hiragana is used for the inflected part. Like this: 学ぶ. まなぶ is a Japanese verb meaning "learn", so they write it with the character 学. But, there are compounds that use kunyomi, too, believe me. And there are single kanji that use onyomi. Like, 方 could be the word "hou" (onyomi) or it COULD be the word "kata" (kunyomi). And "hou" is a word by itself.
  4. Well, for your second question, the reason people play VN's, sure I could mention the branching plot, and first person perspective, you've got character art often with more depth/detail than anime (not restricted by animation needs), yet you've got voice acting which manga doesn't have, etc. But I like to think of it this way: all those cute VN heroines are so hopeful that a nice guy will come along and make them happy...and that guy is me. I'm suddenly reminded of an old saying that "God gave us wine in order to ease man's burdens on earth"... Suppose that there's an online psych test disguised as a popular online game...
  5. Somehow I've a feeling it's not that simple for me... so I need to find out how much voltage to use (5 volts?) then, I don't want to burn anything out... I'd better read the chips' data sheets first, it should say something about how much voltage and current it can take. Sometime this YEAR I will try it...
  6. Maybe some kind of power source? :-)
  7. Well, I'm guessing most visited sites (not counting Fuwanovel, as directed) would be: youtube google wikipedia nyaa WWWJDIC play-asia kinokuniya USA vndb emu paradise yande.re Honorable Mention: anime-sharing hardcore gaming 101
  8. I don't have total recall of the conjugations either. For reading, you just have to be able to recognize them and remember what they mean, as you say... Speaking of recognition, I've had more than one Japanese person tell me that they're bad at kanji. Meaning, they can't remember a lot of kanji well enough to get them right in writing. If they can just recognize them, then they figure it's okay. Somehow, that makes me feel better :-)
  9. Thanks, & take your time with the schematic. Right now, I don't even have the right tools to put it together anyway... As every human being knows, there's a big difference between reading about stuff/talking about stuff/making pie-in-the-sky plans, and actually sitting down and DOING something with it :-)
  10. Did the character artist change for side 3rd? Just googling it, looks different from side 2nd
  11. Yeah, that was what I thought as well. Even though I decided against learning speaking/listening without the opportunity to live in Japan, so my goal was just to learn to read. But the integrated approach seemed friendlier to me. I just don't learn stuff well in a vacuum. But, once you start actually reading your material, that's when the second 50% of the learning is done. I haven't really "studied" grammar for a while. Of course I come across new vocabulary all the time. And idioms, tons of idioms I don't know. Well, that's what a dictionary is for. I am resuming the study of kanji, though. Reading manga with furigana and vn's with AGTH has been loads of fun, but I want to know all the (non-exceptional) readings of the 1st 1000 kanji. Right now, I'm still iffy on them. Especially the ON readings... Once I get confident with kanji, I'll start reading seinen manga and console VNs. I dunno, the -tari part of the cheat sheet had the same rule my book has: start with the plain/familiar past tense verb, tack a "ri" onto the end of it. I think that works for all verbs. So basically it's right, isn't it? I must say, though, I've never ever run across "ja nakattari" or "shiranakattari" or any kind of negative conjugation like that in any manga or VN. I'm pretty sure I would've noticed it if I had. So I'm not sure that part is really valid.
  12. Yeah I found out about the BCD-to-7seg decoders already. But I was thinking about the kind of binary clock where there's a matrix of LED lights that turn on and off (I guess 4 lights corresponding to one clock digit). I wasn't sure was what a decade counter was, I thought that meant it counted to 10 (same as BCD), but I see there are "BCD counters" available too, so. Is it bad if the circuit is synchronous? Well, after a brief look around at other people's clocks, it seemed a lot of people just used a microcontroller for the brains of it. Maybe that would be easier to make and easier to change the way it functions, instead of individual ICs, just a small microcontroller and some LEDs and buttons...
  13. What're you going to do? Inquiring minds want to know. By the way, something occurred to me while reading your grammar cheat sheet. I never did it, but I think the very act of creating your own reference card is a good Reinforcement tool. When you condense it down, and write it out that way, I think it could stick in your memory better...
  14. The 555 generates the clock signal, is that right? And you used 7490 counters or something to control which LEDs to light? Or is there some other IC involved? Just curious (and ignorant)...
  15. I like those. Using LEDs? Is it true binary or BCD? Why so interested in ECEs? You want someone to build you a personal android or something?
  16. I also started off with a G Collections: Heart de Roommate. It was cute... First eroge: Cobra Mission (DOS). I won't say anything about that...
  17. OK, I read the other thread. Now that my initial surprise has worn off... I admit that what you said, about there being tradeoffs, is true. So, let me change "rules" to "guidelines." If you have a good reason, if you want to sacrifice some quality in order to obtain efficiency and so forth, I won't say you MUST follow them.
  18. Well, I like her. Seems like she gets embarrassed easily, and the way she tries to keep smiling/polite even when she's obviously angry, makes her cute. I'm only judging by the anime, though. I've only just started to play the first game. Also, didn't Sakura do something kind of not nice to Nemu in the first anime (I'm being deliberately vague here). Am I supposed to overlook that? I don't know, maybe my opinion will change after playing the game. Well, it's early in the game and right now everybody is friendly (except for Nemu being jealous), I guess I'll see what happens. Anyway what I meant to say is, what's Club Circus? Can you link me there? I want to see this ranking chart. Well I found the site but it looks like some virtual community thing that they won't even let me look inside w/o signing up.
  19. The Dos and Don'ts of Quality Translations (draft version): DO strike a balance, between keeping the original meaning of the Japanese, and rendering the English as naturally as you can. DO translate with the aid of multiple dictionaries and thesauri. DO maintain your finished work, providing updates whenever someone points out an error you think is legitimate DON'T crowdsource (dividing routes among translators is OK, but individual lines? No.) DON'T translate into any language other than your native. DON'T translate to/from an intermediate language. DON'T use MT (that should be obvious) Even supposedly simple "moege" can be affected when you violate these guidelines.
  20. Wait 'till there's a home entertainment center thread. Then I'll show you what can happen with wires. Also, I have 6 count 'em 6 computers. I don't have a home network or anything either.
  21. Nice to meet you, Rya. I like electronics, but I'm kind of clumsy...I'd probably shock myself or something. Have you made any interesting gadgets? I have been an anime fan for many years. I ended up accumulating a number of Japanese manga and visual novels (some PC, some PS2) based on anime--just in the course of collecting, going to cons, etc. That's how I got started on Japanese. And I don't mind straightfoward writing at all. On the contrary, it seems to be missing from a lot of the internet these days...
  22. Me too. I've got a working NES...but I think I spotted something even more arcane...looks like an ATARI system over on the far left edge of your photo?
  23. Okay, well...it's gonna be a little long :-) 1. I started with a textbook series called "Learn Japanese". Got 3 volumes of it cheaply, at a used bookstore. (Eventually I found #4 which showed up at a different used store later) By now I'm betting it's out of print. In any case, you can probably substitute some other textbook that follows the same flow. Basically they start each chapter off with either a conversation or a short essay which incorporates the grammar and vocabulary they're about to teach you. Then comes a bunch of grammar points and vocabulary list. Then comes an enormous number of example sentences showing you how the grammar points are applied. That was the thing I liked about this particular text the best. I know repetition doesn't sound exciting, but I really got a lot out of those examples. I didn't rush to get through them. When I was reading them, I thought not only about the grammar but also about how they would sound if spoken, and what each sentence means. So that was good. By the way, the writing system was introduced very gradually. They introduced the kana right away, but they gave me plenty of time to learn them (which I learned separately by flashcards and simply writing 'em out several times) before they switched from alphabet over to all kana. Then after a while, the kanji started showing up a little at a time, and usually just one reading at a time. 2. I made a bunch of kanji and kanji-vocabulary flashcards (3x5 index cards) based on info I found on the internet. I wrote the flashcards myself. I made about 300 kanji cards. I did not try to learn them "cold". I used only the most common readings (based on words I already recognized). If the reading involved okurigana, I wrote the okurigana on the card, too. Then I made vocabulary cards. The purpose of those cards was to learn the new words together with the kanji or kana that are normally used to write them. The source of the words was JLPT practice vocabulary. I made flashcards for all the words of level 4 and level 3. For level 2, I had to switch to JFC (Japanese flashcard program) because there were way too many words at that point. I eventually went back and did level 1, but that was later. 3. During the same time as #2, I worked on grammar. I looked around at several different books. I found a wonderful book called "Teach Yourself Japanese." I felt I really understood how everything fit together, grammar-wise, after reading this. And not only were the grammar explanations great, the dialogues were great, too. They covered people of varying ages and genders in both formal and casual situations (iimportant since Japanese changes a lot based on that stuff). I read the whole book through slowly (it's dense!) and then I would check it again a little later at odd moments, and make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. After that I tackled the Japan Times Dictionary of Japanese Grammar. It's a reference book, so I didn't read it cover to cover. I glanced through and read the parts that were "interesting", the parts that I weren't familiar with. I'm still reviewing this book occasionally. 4. During the same time as #2 and #3, I started to have fun trying to read stuff. For manga, I chose stuff with furigana and lots of semi-everyday life stuff. And I made sure to get an ELECTRONIC dictionary so that I could read manga at a reasonable speed. First I found some of Kimagure Orange Road at a used bookstore. Then I bought things like ToLoveRu, Nagasarete Airantou, Mahou Sensei Negima...um, well, you know. Seems like the first manga I was able to get through entirely and understand was Aqua Vol 1 (there's an anime called Aria, which I think is wonderful by the way). For VNs, of course I needed to set up AGTH and MeCab so that I could mouse over kanji compounds. And at first, I found the narrative too hard to understand. So I still had some fun reading ONLY the dialog, and just clicking past the narration. And I played Dream Club on the 360, and that was all dialog anyway. And that taught me another useful skill by necessity: looking up a kanji by Radical, Stroke Count, and Shapes. Again, I remember the first VN I was able to understand everything was good ol' Mirai no Kimi to Subete no Uta ni. 5. I tried several Kanji books, but they all seemed to have the same shortcoming. I finally realized that the best way for me to learn kanji was to identify the same character as used in many different compounds. That helps me keep all those freakin homophones straight. Sadly, most kanji books would show like 2, 3 compounds per char. Finally, I found the book I wanted. It's the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary. I got a used one online and it has a long list of vocabulary compounds for each character. For the ON reading. For the KUN reading. For the irregular readings. I'm going to use this book and a little flashcard applet to finish learning kanji. OK, I'm tired of typing now :-)
  24. Wow, interesting thread. It looks like in a little while there will be several more people to talk about games in Japanese with. Maybe even some more translators. Wish I could say something really helpful, but I can't...I didn't know squat about the psychology of learning, and I'm not a power learner for sure. I didn't even use the internet at first. All I did was to find some textbooks at a used bookstore near the university where I live. I just went through them as if I were taking a class. Plus I truly did it in my spare time. I only learned when I felt like learning (which is more often than you might think, I get interested in stuff that way). If I try to learn on my PC I always get distracted, since everything else is a click away...and I have a fondness for books & libraries and bookstores for some reason... Well, if somebody is interested in learning in a less demanding, old-fashioned book-oriented way, I can tell you what I did, I still basically remember. Otherwise, I'll get out of the way and just let y'all get on with it. Good luck!
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