I know what @kiki means but it's different in Japanese. As Nitrogen mentioned, men can say "boku-wa" for "I" but girls can say "atashi-wa." More formally everyone can say "Watashi-wa" or at the maximum formality "watakushi-wa." In Spanish you say "Yo" no matter who you are, and in French "Je" and German "Ich." Mercifully Japanese does NOT have genders for every noun, with matching gender endings for the related adjectives.
Here is my question for you guys. Am I right to assume that everyone has KnJ in paper manga format? Do you all have access to the raws? That was my underlying reason for getting into all this, because when you pick up a few kanji (like the ones for Sensei or Doutei or the girls' names) you can start to eke out a little meaning from the raws on your own.
@Newno... As I mentioned, I have a Mac, and any Mac with OS-X can type in Arabic or Hebrew or Russian or Korean (Hangul) or Japanese just using the system software. You go to the System Preferences, go to International, and turn on Kotoeri for Japanese. You then have a little American flag at the top of the screen. You click on that and get a drop-down menu, Romaji, Hiragana, Katakana. Pick what you want and type the sounds you want and it comes out in Japanese. And to go from the hiragana to kanji, if you have typed it in right, you just hit the space bar and you get a selection of kanji to choose from. Look.
Romaji: sensei
Hiragana: せんせい
Katakana: センセイ
Hiragana followed by space bar: 先生
And just to show off, here it is in Korean: ㄴ둔댜
This may be one of the best reasons to buy a Macintosh IMO.
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