2046: Reading Material

Since my post a few days ago about getting into manga, I’ve been well and truly bitten by the bug, as it were, and I’m also about to branch out into my first light novels, which we’ll come onto a little later.

So far, I’ve read the first volume of Monster Musume, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? (better known as DanMachi) and High School DxD, and have subsequently picked up the subsequent five volumes of Monster Musume and two more of High School DxD. (The later volumes of DanMachi have proven surprisingly difficult to track down, a fact not helped by the fact that Amazon has its listings for the light novel and manga versions all squished together into a not-particularly-clear form.)

Longtime readers or those who know me will recognise all of the above titles as series that I’ve watched the anime of, and this was a deliberate choice. I was initially hesitant to do so, but it turns out that reading the manga having seen the anime (or, I imagine, vice versa — I haven’t done this way round yet) doesn’t particularly diminish the experience any. In fact, in many cases the manga, being slightly longer in form than your typical anime’s 13 20-minute episodes, goes into more detail than its animated counterpart, often with new story threads, deeper exploration of characters and sometimes even a different overall tone.

Light novels, meanwhile, are something I haven’t explored at all, and until recently I wasn’t even particularly sure if there was a distinction between them and, you know, just a plain ol’ novel. “Light novels” are very much a Thing in Japanese popular culture, though, with many popular series starting as a light novel and subsequently being adapted into other forms of media such as manga, anime, video games and visual novels, so I was curious to investigate this particular part of culture.

I haven’t read any yet, but I have picked up two volumes of Sword Art Online: Progressive, a retelling of Sword Art Online’s original Aincrad arc, focusing on more personal stories and a single “floor” of the game at a time. It’s an ambitious project, considering the Aincrad arc supposedly unfolded over the course of several years and 75 floors — the first two volumes just cover floors 1 and 2 — but I’ll be interested to see if it comes to fruition, plus the Sword Art Online anime drew some criticism from certain quarters for rushing through the narrative of the original light novel it was based on, so I’ll be interested to see the story retold (and tweaked a bit, from what I understand) from a new perspective.

Anyway, if you were wondering, a “light novel” appears to be the Japanese equivalent of young adult fiction: relatively short works, often illustrated, but primarily text-based rather than the visual nature of manga. I’m interested to dive in; it’s actually been quite a while since I’ve read any book (i.e. one with words rather than one with pictures and speech bubbles — not that there’s anything inherently “inferior” about that format) so this will be a nice return to form if the Progressive novels prove to be a compelling read; I used to absolutely devour books, but for one reason or another, I’ve not really found a lot of time for reading in the last few years.

Ironic, really, considering the number of words I’ve typed on this here blog over the last few years — including a substantial number of fiction prose — but perhaps this will give me some ideas of my own!

1564: Study Resume

Japanese classes started again this evening. I was a little nervous about going back, as I frankly haven’t done as much independent study as I intended, but I was pleased to discover that I had actually retained a fair amount of knowledge — including, to my pleasure, a significant amount of the hiragana and katakana character sets required for basic reading and writing in Japanese. (We haven’t looked at kanji at all yet; that’s something I’m saving for when I’m thoroughly familiar with the kana sets and basic sentence construction — I’m getting there.)

So, if you’ll excuse me practicing for a moment…

はじめまして。わたしはピーターです。(I had to look up how to spell my name in katakana, but now I know. Yay me.) どうぞうよろしくおねがいします。

わたしはさんじゅさんさいですそしてジャーナリストです。わたしのかぞくはよにんです。ちちとははとあにとわたしです。

Or, you know, something like that.

It was actually a rather interesting lesson this evening as there was a second native Japanese speaker in the classroom for the second half of the session. Our teacher is a native Japanese speaker herself, but the addition of a second person — who, naturally, we all had to introduce ourselves to using something similar to the phrases I clumsily (and possibly incorrectly) constructed above — added an interesting dynamic to the mix. She was a teacher, too, so she was evidently well-versed in the clumsiness of English people attempting to speak Japanese, and thus supported any unfamiliar words and phrases she used with plenty of gestures and the like, allowing us to discern the overall meaning of what she was saying even if we didn’t quite know the exact words or would be able to recreate the sentence ourselves.

Language learning is really interesting. Despite my joking with school friends about German lessons slowing time down (I swear, those lessons always felt like they were twice as long as every other class at school) I actually quite enjoyed gradually picking up an alternative means of communication. Of course, the one time I went to Germany and attempted to speak the language to a vendor, they responded in perfect English, much to my chagrin. Now, school German lessons are literally half my life ago and I haven’t retained a huge amount of knowledge; the German I still know today is pretty much limited to Zug um Zug (the German name for the board game Ticket to Ride) and proudly singing Essen mein Scheiße whenever university music friends get together. (Don’t ask… and yes, I know it’s gramatically incorrect.)

Japanese has the added interestingness of not only having to learn a completely new spoken language with completely new grammatical structures — actually quite a bit simpler than English in its basic form, though I’m aware I’m still very much at “beginner” level — but also a completely new written language, too. Sure, German had umlauts and whatever the ß thing is called, but Japanese doesn’t have anything even vaguely recognisable. And those things that do look like English characters are almost inevitably something else. You think ヒ might be “t”? Wrong, it’s “hi”, unless you write it ビ, in which case it’s “bi”, or if you write it ピ, in which case it’s “pi”. Obviously.

I exaggerate for comic effect; knuckling down and actually attempting to translate and read these characters gradually burns them into your brain. I was delighted to find myself able to complete a revision sheet using entirely hiragana earlier this evening; granted, it was considerably slower than if I just wrote in Romanised characters, but in the long run it’s going to be beneficial to get as much practice as possible using the kana characters. And, when the time comes, kanji.

I’m currently torn on whether to continue classes in the new academic year, though — assuming a more advanced class is actually running, which I don’t know as yet — or simply to study myself. The book we’ve been using in class — Japanese for Busy People — has proven to be a well-designed textbook with plenty of good supporting material (the Kana Workbook in particular has been invaluable in drumming those characters into my mind) and that is suitable for both classroom and independent study.

Either way, though, this is something I’d like to take further. And who knows, it might even push me in the direction of a new career one day. But that’s a long way off as yet. For now, then, おやすみなさい！

1534: Self-Study

I successfully managed to get up early and do some Japanese self-study today. I’m glad I finally managed to make myself do it, because with a month off from my classes for Easter, I really, really need to undertake some independent study if I’m going to continue to progress.

Today I prioritised the reading and writing aspect, as those are areas where I’m weak. I want to get away from reading in romaji (Japanese words spelled using Western characters) as soon as possible and into being able to parse and understand hiragana and katakana before moving onto the more complex matter of kanji.

I’ve been gradually building up my hiragana knowledge in particular quite a bit for a while now, but I’d somehow convinced myself that I only knew about half of the characters involved. Actually, I knew a whole lot more than that, with it only really being the characters for ね (ne) and ぬ (nu) giving me a bit of grief — that said, writing them down like that will probably help me remember them a bit better.

I’ve been working through the companion Kana Workbook for the series of Japanese coursebooks we’ve been using in class (Japanese for Busy People, if you’re curious), and it’s proven to be quite a good resource. It walks you through how to draw each of the characters accurately, and highlights common sticking points such as characters that look similar to one another (ぬ nu and め me, for example, or ね ne, わ wa and れ re for three even more confusing examples) as well as little quirks such as the ability to change the basic sound of some　characters with a smaller character following it — に ni plus や ya becomes にゃ nya, for example — or the ability to double a consonant by adding the つ tsu character in small format — for example, いつ itsu versus いっつ ittsu. And then there’s the times where characters don’t mean what they normally mean — は is normally ha, for example, except when it’s being used as the particle wa, while お is usually the character for the vowel o unless you’re using the particle o, in which case you use を instead because of course you do.

I’ve hardly touched katakana as yet and I was a bit concerned as it’s a whole new set of characters that refer to the same syllables but which, in many cases, look completely different. For those unfamiliar with Japanese script, katakana is used both as a means of highlighting text similar to how we use italics, and also to denote “loan-words” from other languages such as English. For example, you’d write the Japanese word for “computer” — konpyuutaa — in katakana rather than hiragana since it’s a loan word from English, and the two character sets make the word look rather different: こんぴゅうたあ versus コンピューター, to be exact — note how katakana uses a long dash for long vowels rather than the extra vowel characters hiragana uses. Confusing, non?

However, then I thought back to learning English and how we effectively have to learn two alphabets — lower-case and upper-case, not to mention how different fonts depict certain letters such as “a” — and it suddenly didn’t seem quite so bad after all. I mean, what’s another forty-something characters to learn? Yeesh.

Still, I’m getting there. I’m making good progress and I’m confident I’ll be able to read at least some Japanese script a bit more fluently in time if I keep practicing. In the meantime, it’s back to studying.

1424: わたしはいぎりすじんです。(Or Something.)

Last Japanese class before the Christmas break this evening. I’ve been quite pleased with my progress to date, though there are still things I struggle to remember — and the second half of the hiragana table continues to elude my memory. I’ll get there in the end, though, particularly if I make some time to revise over the Christmas break.

One thing that’s really struck me after each session is how much I get into the “other language” mindset when I come out of the class. Immediately after finishing a session, my brain is still in “Japanese” mode and I find myself having to stop myself saying ありがとう rather than “thanks” when someone holds the door for me, or attempting to respond to someone’s initiation of a conversation with some random Japanese phrase. (“So, how did you like that?” ”スミスさんのほんです。”　”That’s… nice. See you later.” ”おやすみなさい！”　”Yeah, whatever.”)

This is a positive sign, I guess. And more and more phrases are coming readily to mind, too. Not necessarily enough to make a conversation flow particularly naturally, mind, but enough to be able to state some basic things and ask some basic questions.

Japanese is a challenging language to learn for sure, but the fact is it’s perhaps not as challenging as its crazy non-Roman alphabets might suggest. In fact, grammatically speaking, it’s a lot simpler than English, and its pronunciation — reading kanji aside — is very straightforward, since there’s only one way to pronounce each hiragana/katakana character. Once you get your head around the correct pronunciations of the vowel sounds in particular, it becomes very easy to read Japanese words and phrases out loud — if they’re in romaji, anyway; deciphering hiranaga and katakana takes a little longer to learn, but once you get your head around it, it should be reasonably straightforward.

I have no idea how long it will take to get my use of the language to a functional standard for something useful, such as going to Japan, speaking to a Japanese person without the aid of an interpreter or even seeking a career that makes use of said knowledge.

Actually, the latter point is an interesting one; I’ve mentioned a few times on these pages that over the years I’ve realised I don’t have a whole lot of “ambition” to be a particularly successful, well-known or famous person. I have accomplished one personal goal by becoming a professional games journalist — and believe me, there are days when that isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — but beyond that? Who knows.

Well, that’s not quite true; since getting considerably more interested in Japanese entertainment — video games, anime and other related material — I’ve found myself thinking that a career in translation and localisation would be something I’d really enjoy doing. I’m under no illusions, of course; I follow a few localisation specialists on Twitter, and they put in long hours, do hard work and regularly have to deal with some of the more idiosyncratic aspects of both English and Japanese… but that’s the sort of challenge I think I’d enjoy. I can see myself poring over the script for, I don’t know, a Legend of Heroes game and mulling over the best possible translation of a particular idiom; arguing with fellow localisers about whether or not it should be a straight translation that keeps the Japanese character intact, or an Ace Attorney-style localisation that transplants the overall narrative thread to a situation that’s a bit more “Western”.

Anyway, that’s at least a few years off yet, but it’s something to potentially aim for, anyway. And in the meantime I can satisfy myself with starting to understand more and more of the unsubtitled battle callouts in JRPGs and fighting games, or recognising particular common words and phrases in anime.

わたしはうちにかえります。

おやすみなさい！！

Or, you know, something.

1375: Desu

A few weeks into my Japanese evening class and I’m enjoying myself. There’s been a fair amount of stuff I’d managed to pick up naturally simply through watching anime, playing games and looking things up myself out of curiosity, but it’s nice to know that I was at least correct in all of these cases.

I’m finding the process of learning enjoyable. It’s been a while since the opportunity to learn something in a classroom-style environment — and no, I don’t count teacher training days — and it’s good to get back to it. I can’t help but feel that, having chosen to do this, I’m appreciating it far more than if I was obliged to be there at, say, school or even, to a lesser extent, university.

It’s also enjoyable to be in a group where there’s a decent mix of abilities. I know first-hand how frustrating it is to teach a mixed-ability group, but it’s quite satisfying to sit in a room with other people and be able to tell — this sounds bad, but what the hell — that I’m not the worst person there. In fact, so far I’m feeling quite confident in my own abilities with regard to pronunciation, remembering phrases and so on.

The part that’s doubtless going to be somewhat more challenging is the learning of the Japanese characters, beginning with the hiragana set. I can remember a couple of “sets” of these without too much difficulty, but others are a bit harder to remember — and it takes me time to parse them into the syllables they represent. I’m sure that’s something that will come with practice, but it’s my one real stumbling block at present. It’s not a massive problem since the majority of the initial work we’ve been doing is in romaji rather than kana, but I rather optimistically picked up the textbook the course is using in its kana incarnation, not realising that it pretty much expected you to have both hiragana and katakana pretty much sorted by the time you start learning words and phrases. I may have to invest in the romaji version for at least the early weeks — that or spend a bit more time doing self-study on hiragana and katakana, anyway. It’ll come in time, I’m sure.

So far we’ve only learned a few basic words and phrases — introducing ourselves, saying good morning/afternoon/night/bye, giving our phone number — but things seem to be moving along at a reasonable pace, and the class is working well together. I still feel a bit nervous about interacting with relative strangers, to be honest, but I’ve been going for three weeks now, including talking to people, and haven’t exploded or shat myself or anything like that, so that’s good.

I’m interested to see how far this initial course takes things. I’ve certainly got the taste for learning again, so may well end up continuing my studies once it finishes in January — or perhaps that’s the time to switch to self-study. We’ll see. Either way, I’m enjoying myself at present, and hopefully it will prove useful (or at least vaguely bragworthy) at some point in the near future.

1361: Hajimemashite

A new experience for me tonight as I started an evening class. That’s a symbol of being a “grown-up” isn’t it? Something like that.

I’ve actually been looking to do something like this for a while, as I’ve been missing the experience of learning stuff. And I’m not talking about the interminable tedium of corporate training or the equal horror of teacher training days; I’m instead talking about actually sitting there in a class, learning something that won’t necessarily be directly relevant to your life and/or job immediately, but which will provide some sort of knowledge you can whip out on occasion and impress people with.

Those who know me will be unsurprised to hear that it’s Japanese I’m learning. My choice of this is partly due to my own interest in Japanese culture, but also for the fact that it might genuinely be useful in the future depending on what directions my career goes in. If I can get good enough at Japanese — this is a big “if”, obviously — I’ll be able to talk to Japanese developers more easily, or move into localisation (something I’d actually quite like to do) or any manner of other things. The prospects are quite exciting — a hefty period of concerted study away, sure, but still exciting nonetheless.

I impressed myself with how much of the first session’s content I already knew having picked it up from various places. Anime and games are not always the best place to pick up Japanese since there’s often a lot of dialect and deliberately “wrong” mannerisms used (Squid Girl’s use of “de geso” at the end of every sentence springs to mind, as does Compa’s overuse of “desu” in Hyperdimension Neptunia) that will probably make you look rather foolish if you were to use them in conversation desu.

This evening, we largely focused on things like introducing yourself, giving some basic details like where you’re from, what you do and that sort of thing, and asking questions. A lot of it was stuff I’d already figured out for myself from a combination of my own deductions and occasional Internet searches prompted by an “I wonder if…” thought. I was pleased to discover that a lot of things I’d figured out for myself turned out to be correct, so I can now reasonably confidently introduce myself, say good morning, good day, good evening and good night, and say “excuse me” and “sorry” — both rather important.

I felt a little of my usual social awkwardness when we were required to talk and practice with the other students in the room, but no-one bit my head off, yelled at me or called me a prick, so I guess it was successful. I’m sure everyone — including me — will loosen up in the coming weeks, too; after all, the very nature of an evening class means that everyone there actually wants to be there to learn something, so it’s unlikely anyone there is going to be a cock deliberately.

So a success for now then. I have absolutely no idea how much I’ll learn over the course of the next few months, but I’m interested to find out, and the structure of a class will hopefully spur me on to keep practicing and studying in my own time too.

On that note, oyasumi nasai.

1236: On Being That Guy Who Picks ‘Japanese’ in the Sound Menu

I always used to be one for having my game’s voices in English. I liked being able to understand what they were saying as well as reading the subtitles on screen. In some cases, I didn’t have the option; I’ll always associate Persona 3 and 4 with English voices, for example, even though, in retrospect, it would probably be better with Japanese voice acting. In others, the English voiceover job was so genuinely good that I didn’t want to try the Japanese version — Xenoblade Chronicles springs immediately to mind in this regard.

I can remember the moment that I realised Japanese voice acting was something worth exploring even though I didn’t speak the language, though. It was while I was playing the utterly terrifying PSP visual novel/adventure game Corpse Party — one of my favourite games on that platform, and legitimately one of the most disturbing games I’ve ever experienced — that I realised that, frankly, Japanese video game voice actors aren’t afraid to let rip with the utterly raw emotion. They’ll shout until their voice cracks; they’ll scream; they’ll cry. And by God, they sound like they mean it.

It was around one of the many points in Corpse Party where one of the characters is bawling their eyes out and screaming in terror at the horrific situation they’ve found themselves in that I realised when it comes to voice acting in games — which are typically accompanied by subtitles, particularly in the visual novel and JRPG genres — it’s not about the words that are being said, but about how they’re being said. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand the Japanese words that were being screeched into my ears (seriously, play that game on headphones and you’ll never want to turn the light out again) — the meaning was all too clear simply from the tone of voice.

Those who have been reading regularly will know that I’ve been playing Ar Tonelico 3 recently. I played the first game in that series in English, largely because I found the English voices in the video cutscenes too jarring when paired with Japanese speech in the main game. I played the second in Japanese because I’d been warned that the English dub, much like the overall translation job, was somewhat questionable. And I started the third in English, but after not very long I switched to Japanese. It is a decision I did not regret.

It’s very obvious from the huge rift in quality between the English and Japanese voice tracks in something like Ar Tonelico 3 that the English actors are, for the most part, phoning it in somewhat, while the Japanese actors care about what they’re doing. In many cases, it is the difference between a rush job (English) and having well-known professionals handle the voices.

I witnessed a scene this evening — no spoilers — that had me more than a little choked up due to the amount of raw emotion and passion that the actress playing one of the characters was throwing into the delivery of her lines. I believed that she meant what she was saying. This character was supposed to be upset, and I believed that.

The other thing that comes into play is that when a game’s dialogue has been translated relatively literally from the original Japanese rather than fully localised, reading it out loud in English often sounds very stilted and artificial, simply because that’s not how English people talk. We don’t say things like “what is this, all of a sudden?” and start entire conversations with “By the way”. We don’t refer to ourselves in the third person to be cute. (Usually. Saki will do it!) And we don’t use the term “lovey-dovey” anywhere near as much as Japanese people apparently do.

There’s nothing wrong with doing a literal translation from the Japanese — so long as you do it with enough care to make it understandable, of course — but if you’re going to take this approach to translation, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s best to leave the voices as they are. If, on the other hand, you’re going to take the Ace Attorney/Cherry Tree High Comedy Club/Recettear approach to localisation and actually make the dialogue significantly and noticeably more “Western” in the process, then we can talk about English voiceovers.

I must confess to always having found an attitude like the one I just described a little snobby in the past. Having immersed myself in this side of gaming (and anime) culture for this long, though, I totally get it. Once you get used to the infinitely more professional job Japanese voice actors do on productions like Ar Tonelico (and even on lighter fare like Hyperdimension Neptunia, for that matter) you’ll likely never want to go back.

#oneaday Day 996: はじめまして

I’ve been doing a bit more on my 日本語 studies recently thanks to the excellent iOS app Human Japanese. This app is essentially little more than an electronic textbook, but it does a few things that are enormously helpful, particularly when attempting to learn hiragana. For starters, when learning the various characters, you can tap on them to see the appropriate stroke order, which is apparently important. Then there’s revision quizzes throughout the chapters that, in the case of the hiragana chapters I’ve been trawling slowly through so far, allow you to test yourself by attempting to read the characters and determine what the various “words” (or, more accurately, combinations of syllables) make up. I was quite pleased when I realised I knew how to spell one of School Days’ characters, whose name also happens to be the word for “world” — せかい.

I’ve also learned how typing in Japanese works, and I think it’s probably going to be quite a helpful way to learn the hiragana characters, particularly with the way the iPhone’s Japanese keyboards work.

For those unfamiliar (and curious enough to continue reading) it works like this: the Japanese hiragana character set, which tends to be the first “alphabet” that beginners learn, is split into “sets”, and the iPhone hiragana keyboard simply represents these sets — press and hold on one and you’ll see the five different characters that make up each set. Rather than simply vowels and consonants like we have in English, hiragana characters all represent a complete syllable rather than an individual sound or, as more commonly happens in English, a number of possible sounds. Think of how many possible ways you can pronounce the letter “O” depending on where it is in a word, for example — confusing when you think about it that way, isn’t it? Not so in hiragana — each character always sounds the same when read aloud.

Each of the aforementioned “sets” is made up of, at the very least, a vowel sound, and often a consonant. When learning the vowels, rather than the order A, E, I, O, U we English speakers are used to, Japan uses A, I, U, E, O. In hiragana, the symbols for these vowel sounds are あいうえお. These, of course, have absolutely no resemblance to the Roman characters we use in English, so it’s necessary to actually drill them into yourself by repeatedly writing them down over and over. I already have several pages of a notebook devoted to effectively writing “AAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOO” which I hope is never used as evidence against me in a Japanese court because it makes me look proper mental, like, innit.

Anyway, yes, sets — beyond the initial vowels, each set is combined with a consonant. For example, the K-set runs ka, ki, ku, ke, ko or, in hiragana, かきくけこ. Just to make matters more complicated, certain characters can add a little symbol called a ten-ten or dakuten to themselves to “soften” the sound and make another set of sounds. For example, the K-set can be softened to the G-set, which runs ga, gi, gu, ge, go or, in hiragana, がぎぐげご. It might be difficult to see at that font size, but the little quote mark-like symbol in the upper-right of each of those characters is the ten-ten that softens the sound — or, more accurately, turns an unvoiced consonant into a voiced one.

I’ve actually been quite surprised how quickly some of these symbols have stuck in my head — though the problem with learning them by rote is that you start to remember them according to the patterns rather than in context and out of order. I seem to find some symbols much easier to remember than others — I can remember all the basic vowels without much difficulty, for example, and the K/G sets are also reasonably firm in my mind, but the others gradually drop off in memorability. This is probably nothing more than a side-effect of the order in which I’ve learned them — I’ve known the vowels and the K/G sets longest, so it’s unsurprising I know them the best — but I’ve still been quite impressed with myself that I can successfully decipher if not the meaning of words just yet, then at least the sounds therein. It’ll come with time.

The thing to keep doing, I think, is just to keep immersing myself in as much of it as possible. I’m picking up words all the time by listening to Japanese language-track anime and games, and now that I’m learning the hiragana I’ll be able to spell (and, by extension) read them before long too. When I can read and understand a Japanese sentence, I’ll be truly impressed with myself, but it remains to be seen how long that will take me. And then there’s kanji to worry about after that, but we’ll cross that particular bridge when we come to it.

Anyway, so, if you’re the slightest bit interested in learning Japanese via self-study, check out Human Japanese. It’s available on iPhone, iPad and Android and there are lite versions to try out before you splash the cash. Pretty generous lite versions, too — you should be able to figure out whether or not you’re going to have difficulty without having to spend a penny. Which is nice.

がんばって！Or something.

#oneaday Day 952: 伝説のブログ

I’ve been pretty much immersing myself in Japanese culture recently thanks to the various games I’ve been playing. Between Yakuza 3, School Days HQ and the Persona 4 anime that I’ve just started watching in preparation for Persona 4 Arena’s delayed European release, it’s been super-Eastern around here, to the extent that it actually felt a bit strange to boot up Guild Wars 2 earlier and hear people speaking English.

I would like to learn Japanese. I have been saying this for years, but worrying about it being difficult has stopped me on several occasions. I have, however, now found a decent iOS app (Human Japanese) that walks you through both the spoken and written forms of the language, so I will use that to give myself a good introduction and then see where I need to go after that. I am trying to devote a few sessions per week — ideally each day, but that’s not always practical — to studying. So far I have learned how to write the hiragana for the vowels, which is more hiragana than I have ever learned. I would type some to prove it, but I have no idea how to type Japanese characters on a computer as yet (except by copy and pasting from Google Translate, which is how I got the title for this post), so we’ll cross that bridge at a later time.

What I’ve found, however, is that through immersing myself in Japanese media, I’ve actually picked up a surprising number of words and phrases. Okay, I can’t spell them, write them in Japanese script or, in many cases, even say them properly, but I recognise plenty of words and phrases. Words like “densetsu” (legend), which I first came across when I heard the Japanese name of Secret of Mana — Seiken Densetsu, literally Legend of the Holy Sword. For quite a while I didn’t know that “densetsu” meant “legend” but I picked it up somehow, meaning that when someone in School Days HQ mentioned a “legendary break room” in the subtitles, I deduced that the part of the Japanese sentence that meant that bit was densetsu no kyuukeishitsu. (I know Romanji sucks, but it’s all I’ve got right now, yo!) I knew that the “no” after “densetsu” meant that “legend” was being used to describe another word (essentially the equivalent of tweaking a noun to become an adjective in English) so therefore I figured that kyuukeishitsu means “break room”. And sure enough, it does. Hurrah for apparently having the right kind of mind to work out language.

There’s a few other phrases I’ve picked up from Japanese media, too, some of which might even be useful. I can say hello in various ways (konnichiwa, osu! (tatakae! Oueeeeeendaaaaaaaa– wait, no)), good morning (ohayou!), sorry (gomen nasai), yes (hai), no (iie, pronounced confusingly similar to someone saying “yeah” hesitantly), goodbye (sayonara — if you’ve never studied any Japanese before I was as surprised as you are that it’s an actual word in another language rather than a made-up one) and express gratitude before a meal (itadakimasu, apparently bellowed by everyone before diving into one’s bento if School Days HQ is anything to go by). Oh, and strawberry (ichigo). And laughing like a shy schoolgirl (ufufufufu!).

Now all I need to be able to do is 1) incorporate these snippets and phrases into actual Japanese conversation and 2) be able to figure out how to write them in scary squiggly script. Both of those things will probably involve a lot of practice, so if I start talking about the densetsu no bento next time I’m having lunch with you, gomen nasai.