Very Amazing & Genuine Images of Netiquette Authorities

[gravity]

Yeah, I'm thinking I'd like to move to a prefecture that gets more snow in winter. But that would probably involve moving to one of the coastal prefectures, which means bigger earthquakes and tsunamis...

Yeah, the exciting parts! Besides, Saitama has already had two earthquakes since I got here, it's not that big a deal.

That was one of my motivations for coming here, I'm a big fan of Japan's "beauty in simplicity" theme that permeates the culture.

Until you get to the 'beauty in simplicity' of the food and have to scrounge in the international section for any food that isn't entirely bland. My life for chili paste! And also less sugar in things, Japan really loves their sweets. I found sweet korroke the other day by accident. Bleh. Thank Cthulhu they have good ramen most of the time.

[Rorschach]

I found sweet korroke

Were people singing Neil Diamond?

Oh, sorry. Misread.

[FireAza]

That's what she meant, I'm sure.

I figured she thought I had some fancy stand-alone camera. It's just my phone camera though!

Yeah, I'm thinking I'd like to move to a prefecture that gets more snow in winter. But that would probably involve moving to one of the coastal prefectures, which means bigger earthquakes and tsunamis...

Yeah, the exciting parts! Besides, Saitama has already had two earthquakes since I got here, it's not that big a deal.

That was one of my motivations for coming here, I'm a big fan of Japan's "beauty in simplicity" theme that permeates the culture.

Until you get to the 'beauty in simplicity' of the food and have to scrounge in the international section for any food that isn't entirely bland. My life for chili paste! And also less sugar in things, Japan really loves their sweets. I found sweet korroke the other day by accident. Bleh. Thank Cthulhu they have good ramen most of the time.

I've kinda lost track of the earthquakes, they're usually pretty small. Despite that, I've still got braces to hold my shelves in place just in case. Though I'm temping fate with the Tetris light I bought the other day, that thing wobbles just from walking past it.

Yeah, Japan really can't handle their spice. I've gotten used to just having to accept that I'll need to add extra chili powder to things. How about Japanese bread though? For a country that only had bread introduced to it quite recently, they've really taken the idea and run with it. I also find it really weird I could never find thick bread for making toast in Australia, but I found multiple thicknesses on my first day in Japan.

I found sweet korroke

Were people singing Neil Diamond?

Oh, sorry. Misread.

Well, "karaoke" is already a pretty mangled word to begin with. Stop taking words, shorting them and combining them together, Japan. Also, stop writing native Japanese words in katakana. Also, stop writing things in hiragana when I've gone to the trouble of learning the kanji for it. Just... Sort your damned language out in general!

[gravity]

Also, stop writing things in hiragana when I've gone to the trouble of learning the kanji for it. Just... Sort your damned language out in general!

Nevah! Actually, really don't stop with the hiragana because a lot of towns have old kanji for names and need that hiragana if I want to get off at the right stop, especially in the countryside. Getting lost in the Totoro Forest is not something I ever want to do for an extended period of time.

[Deacon]

No single language should have so many different ways of writing it. Seems like you have to know the language before you can even read the language. Do they mix hiragana and katakana in a single written sentence? Do they label things in kanji just to make sure you're paying attention?

[gravity]

Hiragana and katakana are mixed in sentences all the time, some words are only written in hiragana as opposed to kanji, and words that are in katakana are only in katakana with few rare exceptions (names generally have hiragana reading above the kanji, but sometimes katakana is used instead if it's a foreign reading of a kanji as a name, like Hong Kong). It's fairly easy to master how the writing system is used, learning hiragana and katakana takes about a month or two, it's the kanji that takes significantly longer.

Kanji is actually fairly well used though. There are a lot of kanji, but only about 3,000 words in kanji are expected to be known to be considered literate at the adult level. If a kanji outside of those designated 3,000 is used, it will have hiragana written above it because it is assumed not everyone knows it. Names will frequently also have hiragana written above them as a lot are written based on old kanji pronunciations that aren't used anymore unless it's a very common name (Tanaka, for instance, is very easy to read and uses very easy kanji and is read with the same kanji readings that are used today, so it doesn't get hiragana written over it unless it appears in a 1st or 2nd grade aimed book). Once you start seeing kanji around on a constant, day to day basis, you start picking it up rather quickly. The kanji for 'push' is something that is a little hard to remember when you're studying Japanese in America because it never comes up, but in Japan it's on every door in every public building, so you quickly learn that kanji just by interacting with it on a daily basis. The Japanese are very literate, and the culture has been for several hundred years (it was seen as a benefit for even farmers to be able to read so that the government could quickly issue laws and edicts and everyone could understand them), so encountering writing on a regular basis really reinforces what you simply might forget if you weren't in Japan because of lack of frequent contact.

Sure as fuck doesn't help you learn how to write everything though, that's for damn sure. Which is an issue for Japanese schoolchildren over here as well as most of them know how to write everything on their phones or on computers, but have forgotten how to write more complicated kanji by hand as they just don't do it anymore. Much like with handwriting in the US, really.

[JermCool]

Korea had a similar system with hanja. I was only there a year, so I didn't get fluent by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd be trying to pronounce what was written in standard hangul and suddenly this block of lines would show up in the middle of the sentence. And I'm all like "screw it, I'm out" and go get drunk in Itaewon.

[Deacon]

Sounds like something I could really get into if I were otherwise interested, meaning I lived in Japan for some reason.

[gravity]

Eh, just get into a Japanese book series that isn't published in English and you easily find yourself quickly acquiring the language as well. Although just be careful which form of the language you acquire. Yes, there is a masculine and feminine form, but it's not like in the Romance languages, it's which words are used and how. I'm lucky, women tend to use a more polite, formal language and the books I tend to pick up have female main characters so I've acquired a feminine slang that sounds normal for a women to speak in Japan. A lot of Western guys tend to sound like teenage girls because of the language they get exposed to (formal language from classes is fine, it just sounds a little cold for men, but a lot of anime is aimed at teenagers, and that's not really the slang an adult man sounds normal for using). A woman sounding like a teenage girl when she's in her 30s is completely normal, complete with Hello Kitty and Disney obsession.

I'm going out of my way to avoid TokyoDisney because it now terrifies me.

[FireAza]

I'll say this about the Japanese language: when you're having to include what amounts to subtitles (furigana) for some of your words so that grown-ass adults know how to read them, you've fucked up somewhere.

To give a simplified version of it, Japanese originally had no writing system, so they stole China's. But since it was hard for people to learn Chinese just to read and write, they adapted for Japanese and called it "Kanji".

This was all well and good if you were an educated, wealthy male and able to dedicate the time to learning a symbolic writing system, but sucked if you were a woman. So a group of women took a handful of kanji, simplified their design and assigned them to all the phonetics used in Japanese, creating the "hiragana" writing system. This was great since you only needed to learn a few characters and you didn't need to bother with readings since they're phonetic. Along the way, "katakana" was created, which is like uppercase and lower case in English. Same number of characters, same sounds, they just look different.

As to how they're used, kanji is used for old things that already had a kanji assigned to them. Things like say, "mountain" (山), "person" (人) or "voice" (声). Hiragana is used for Japanese origin words that don't have a kanji, like say "green onion" (ねぎ). Katakana is (supposed) to be used for loan words, like say "guitar" (ギター). Some words are a combination of hiragana and kanji, like adding "ball" (玉) to "green onion" (ねぎ) to get "ball onion" (玉ねぎ) which are what the Japanese call what we call an onion. It's a ball-shaped green onion isn't it?

Written Japanese is very interesting, but from a practical standpoint, it would be better to just do away with kanji and use hiragana and katakana only.

[gravity]

One correction: hiragana is feminine, mostly because of its origin, and katakana is seen as more masculine. The fact that they stole kanji from China, and not only kept the Chinese pronunciation but added the Japanese pronunciations as well is what makes it hell. You're always left guessing about what the pronunciation is on some words until you either see the furigana or someone says it out loud. Lovely language, really, but it's like that crazy cousin that should have been kept locked in the attic but escaped and peed in the potato salad at the family gathering and no one said anything.

Women were literate though. There are actually a lot of surviving books that were only for women, and a lot of writers would use the excuse that their writing was only for women and children (lowly writing yes, but women and children were considered basically literate), to escape punishment if their writing was seen as seditious (the penalty for which could be death). The nobles and high ranking members of aristocracy would use their literacy to play word games and make up puns and the like, so you would get a lot of the fancier usages of the language at that level, whereas your common farmer wouldn't have time to sit down and read the Tale of Genji and the like, but he would be able to read the farming and growing notices that would be posted in town square and sent around by government officials. Literacy existed, but there were different levels of it.

[Mav]

[FireAza]

Does it count as weaboo-ism if you're genually studying Japanese? Instead of knowing only what you picked from anime? Which for most weeaboos is limited to "neko", "baka" and "kawaii", damned foreigners...

[gravity]

It only counts as weeaboo if you're overly obsessed about Japanese for no good reason. Being in Japan and studying the language and the culture isn't weeaboo, especially if you're enrolled in university courses and using it for such inane tasks and grocery shopping, using mass transit, and paying your bills. Super especially if you're willing to submit yourself to kabuki theater performances. No weeaboo would sacrifice their Friday afternoon and night for kabuki, trust me.

[FireAza]

I find learning Japanese to be most useful when living in Japan.