Sayo

Basically a case of no time. I'm trying to get a lot of the donor projects updated because there have been a huge number of donations in the past few weeks. I'll try to have the bath house special ready within the next week or so. The vol.6 compilation with the missing pages will likely need to slide into the week after.

Kikiskeeter

Cool thanks for the update.

nitrogen

Two questions: 1) Sayo, how did you learn Japanese so well? I have some Japanese manga myself - bought when I was on business there - and my wife knows some, but translating it takes a lot of time. Any tips would be appreciated.

Second question: I have all six volumes of Kaworu Watashiya's manga before KnJ - Seishun Binta i.e. 青春ビンタ - and I must say they are really funny. Any plans on ever having these translated?

Sayo

1) I took courses while I was at university. Since then, I've been learning kanji and expanding my vocabulary on my own. I started learning the language formerly(ie: with an actual teacher) 7-8 years ago and I've been doing translations for a little over 4 years now.
Tips on what? How to translate faster? Practice, I guess...? Unless you're doing something horribly wrong...

2) I think I've got that one somewhere on my drives. Not totally sure where I placed it anymore. If you happen to have download links on hand, that would save me the trouble of hunting it down on my royal mess of a hard drive. Either way, I'll see if I can hunt them down and maybe I can start it up as a new donor project once I've cleared up some of the backlog I currently have.

shiki_arc

@Sayo
this is off topic but i just want your opinion..do you think its hard to learn reading kanji?i self-taught myself to read hiragana but i'm troubled by kanji..it seemed hard to memorise..or am i doing it wrong?should i memorise or you have some cool tip on hand?

Sayo

Yes, it's hard. And it takes a ridiculously long time. I memorized the full hiragana table in about 2 hours, which is a piece of cake compared to kanji. The thing is, hiragana only has one reading and one meaning, whereas kanji can have several meanings and readings.
I don't really know any official tricks to memorizing them. If you take very advanced Japanese courses, they may have some pointers on how to make it easier to learn. Memorizing the radicals first would probably help, but even that will take you a long time, and all it'll do is help you recognize patterns in more complex kanji. It won't necessarily help you understand the kanji. That's still a memorization game, but it'll probably make specific kanji easier to recognize if you can essentially see the kanji as "radical #4" + "radical #200" instead of "kanji #3793". This might sound like gibberish to you, but I don't know how else to explain it.

shiki_arc

so in short you need to memorise and get used to the kanji through practice..hmm..i'll see to it if i have the time..XD

Ugetsu

Shiki, there are flash-cards that help some. And there are books to give you mnemonics that help a bit too. Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" is pretty good. Len Walsh's "Read Japanese Today" is out of print but you might be able to find it. I haven't made all that much progress, but I haven't had a lot of time to devote to it.

Lowrider

that might be one reason im leaning more towards korean. Its an alphabet, not a syllabic(or something along those lines >.>), which would make it easier to memorize, and not have to learn every kanji there is.

Cuz' you can't, you won't and you don't STOP!

Ugetsu

Stoner, while that is true (that Hangul is rational and alphabetic) I have talked to people who studied the language several years ago and they told me that the Kanji problem was exactly as "bad" as it was in Japanese. Now I think there is a language reform and they are cutting back on the use of Kanji in Korean. My problem is -- all of these mangas are in Japanese. If I am not personally Korean, what will there be that I will want to read if I go to all that effort?