Greetings.

[Amatenshi]

Hello, everyone! Amatenshi here. I'm a 20-year-old game development major from Rhode Island, USA. My Japanese knowledge is very limited, and I figured that I needed to find a way to start making progress again. Maybe spending some time here will get me going. This forum seems to have a really nice atmosphere, from what I've seen.

I studied Spanish in high school, where most of the students in my class were a year older. I was able to carry on conversations in Spanish with the staff of the resort my family went to in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic. Sadly, my Spanish 2 teacher from freshman year doomed me to a path where I couldn't continue after Spanish 3, so I took other computer-related electives to hang out with one of my two really good senior friends. I don't remember a whole lot, but I've thought about picking Spanish back up again if I have room for it. For now, I'm focusing entirely on Japanese.

My college only offered one intro Japanese course, which I took a long time ago. Since then, I've done little bits of translation here and there to avoid losing any ground with my busy schedule, as well as small stints with editing (plus a little bit of dictionary-reliant translation checking) for anime subs and visual novel translations. I know only a little more than 100 kanji, and my vocabulary is quite lacking.

I remember starting college and being all disappointed that I had some gen-eds and other electives to get out of the way before I could take Japanese class. Over my summer vacation, I went and memorized my kana, and absorbed bits and pieces of vocabulary from watching anime (In the spring-summer of 2011, I watched so much anime that I now wonder how I was able to pull it off). Sure enough, the book we used in the class was the romanized version of Japanese for Busy People, which had absolutely no kanji in it. Fortunately, the class' awesome substitute teacher, a Japanese woman who was friends with my professor, helped me get a bit further than I would have been able to go that quarter. I have her email address, but writing to her in Japanese is a bit difficult for me, because of how reliant I am on Denshi Jisho. I could probably go back and read my last emails to her and not be able to make much sense of it. That's not good.

I'm hoping that I can finally take some time to become fluent in the language. That may take a long time, but I enjoy it enough to keep going.

よろしくね～！

[linguaholic]

Hi Amatenshi

Welcoem to linguaholic.com!! :karate:

I have been studying Japanese as well, but just for one semester at University. At the time I was able to write the kana and some Kanji ( I knew many of them already from Chinese) but I really struggled with the Japanese grammar so I stopped studying Japanese for the moment. I just couldn't do a double bachelor degree Japanese / Chinese. Was a little blt too much. However, I regret that I quit studying Japanese as it is a very interesting language! I will probably have the chance to go to Japan in April and until then I would like to get back in the mood for studying Japanese  :doubtful: