hanashimashoo

Konichiwa Hokie! Sono kanji choto yomenai desukedo, boku ima Nihon ni sundemasu..

nihongo dekimasen, hey Monger, I've been wanting to learn Japanese again. You speak it right?

My Japanese is actually pretty lousy, Craven. Yet I believe I've mastered the fine art of picking up 1 or 2 words per sentence, nodding thoughtfully and acting like I understood exactly what someone meant.

I was a master at that.

Hokie have you seen this.. The Quirky Japan Homepage ?

It's a cool web site, they've got all kinds of offbeat information on Japan there!

Cool site!

I've been meaning to ask: Is Luna Sea a big band there?

I've heard the name. I'm not exactly hip with my J-Pop though.

I don't blame you. I detest the stuff.

Trust me I know what you mean. "Luna Sea" is actually a pretty cool name though!

YEah, I really like the name Luna Sea. It's the antithesis to Engrish.

I am guessing that Shonen Knife are pretty much over...

ヨー！

僕はノルーウェーの大学生だ！ 今日本語を勉強してる。
後で韓国語を少し勉強するつもりだ。

よろしくね！

I couldn't have said it better myself . . .

ㅣㅐㅣ
I mean, LOL. Damn Czech keyboard and Korean input.

Monger, what's the deal with the three Japanese writing systems? Is one used more than the others, are they used in conjunction, or what?

I'll just pretend you asked me.

Hiragana (Round ones): Used for verb conjugations and words and expressions that are very common. Also used for some Portuguese and Dutch loan words.

Katakana (Pointy ones): Used for English and German loan words (actually, for loan words in general), and to emphasize a word or a phrase.

Kanji (The nightmarish Chinese ideograms): Used for writing Chinese loan words, and generally for writing the stems of verbs, adjectives and certain other words, and also to keep track of where words begin and end.

That was like the short, unscientific version right there.

They are used for different purposes.

There are only two that are really similar.

Romaji is not real, Hiragana and Katagana are like the difference between italics and no italics (monger can eleborate, I think Katagana (sp) is used when incorporating foreign words).

Kanji is a very different one, with each symbol representing a word.

So most Japansese will be a mixture of Hiragana and Kanji.

Oh, and what he said. :-)

Thank you both for your explainations; I thought for a while that kanji was to Japanese what learning Anglo-Saxon is to English- that is, a Quixotic gesture or a non-obligatory challenge. Yet, one has to learn kanji as well as the kanas.

Damn.

By the way, are there many Dutch and Portuguese loan words in Japanese? It's really interesting to see how such languages (of Asian colonists) are adapted to Japanese...

Naw, only a few. You do see them from time to time, though. Like "tabako", which has its own kanji, and "tempura".