I am the readys! I am the willings! I am dirt ******* poor! XP And so I come to Divvy to ask if there are any that compleately know Japanese, if they will try their best to teach me via e-mail! Also, if anyone can tell me how to get my keyboard to type in Japanese, because I downloaded the text thingymajig to see Japanese when I view a website with it but I could never figure out a nice way of makeing the keyboard work to type it on it's own.

so far all I realy have down are a few random common words and this one conversation.

Simimasen, Eigoga wakarimasuka?

Iie, Nihongoga wakarimasuka?

Hai, watashiwa Nihongoga skoshi wakarimasu (sen)

Amerikajin desuka?

I get confused at that last part of the second blue sentince, and I forgot the rest of the conversation, which is just answering yes I am an american.

First of all... most of that is wrong.

Second of all, don't look at me, I'm kind of in the process of learning myself.

wow, last time I ever trust a learn to speak (insert language here) in three weeks with half an hour a day CD's from the public libarry

Good luck finding someone. There is another topic open right now involving Japanese. You could look there to see who knows it (Lyra and Sekai are two, but I know Lyra's probably super-busy, dunno bout Sekai though). I know *some*, enough to get by. My speaking is better than my reading, but it's been two years and so my vocabulary is nearly shot, though that's fixable.

I could probably teach you basics, it looks like you could use a lesson in their alphabet, because I'm guessing that you wrote all that from phonetics... "skoshi" should be "sukoshi" but the u is whispered, thus almost inaudible, and the "simimasen" should be, as Raven said, "Sumimasen". If you'd learned the alphabet you'd know that "si" is pronounced "shi" and thus wouldn't have made that error. ^^;;


But anyway, I'd try Lyra and/or Sekai... Or whomever else posted in that other topic, since it's now grown to 2 pages. Or, if they're busy or unwilling, I can get you some basics (I have plenty of free time I could use teaching instead of playing console games to delay my writing, lol).

Throw me a PM if you can't get help elsewhere. Like I said, I'm a poor alternative, but I do have a hair over 2 years of classes, and I've spent some time in the Japantowns around here...

Thank you, I wish I could get ahold of Kurosawa-sempai, he waas one of the first to talk to me on this site and he was living in Japan, but I havn't heard from him in soooooo long, and he won't answer IM's anymore...
Come back sempai!

I taught the level one and tutored everyone up through level 4 at my high school.

I'm by no means fluent, but it's likely I know the most out of anyone on the site. I mean, I could be wrong, but, just guessing.

I could teach you the basics, at the least. I can teach you the kana, a couple hundred kanji, correct pronunciations, and so on. I'm really good with verb tenses and such. Basically, you'd be getting enough to get a bit more enjoyment out of your anime and to survive if you ever got lost in Japan.

Be warned: I'm a strict (and oft-tardy) teacher.

Quick correction for you again, its Senpai, not "Sempai". If you look at Hiragana, the only letter that doesn't end with a vowel sound is N, so its not hard to see why spelling it as "Sempai" doesn't exactly work.

Watorie, if you have a Nintendo DS and about 30 bucks or so, you can go out and grab a copy of a game that's purely educational and teaches you Japanese. They also have one in Chinese and a couple other languages.

Yes, its called My Japanese Coach, I've actually been playing around with it a good amount myself recently. It really helped me out with my writing at very least.

Thanks, I was told once that it could be either; again I must have been misinformed.

And thanks Lyra, I'll take you up on that. And I don't mind if the emails don’t go back and fourth daily, in fact I probably check my email once a week to mostly twice a month because of the limits to my internet usage... limits made by my dang brothers internet buying addiction... and to think, I'm the one paying for internet...


And sadly, I don't have a DS, or $30. As I stated when I made this thread, I'm poor so I'm trying to get friends to teach me what they know for free XP lol.

Also, does anyone here know of a good program to type in Japanese [Kanji, hiragana, and katakana] I haven’t got one, just the program to see the characters if I visit a Japanese site.

I unno enough about Japanese to know if this will help you, but google seems to have a good translating function, and from what I've tested, english to japanese (not sure what character set it is) works pretty well. Again, I know nothing of japanese, just something I found. Hope it helps :).

Google Translate

Oh wait, you wanted to type. sorry >_>; I'll just leave that link up there anyway. Seems useful.
google search says do this >_>
Hope that works. I have no idea xP.

Thanks Stane, those links seem promising, but the second one I wont be able to use untill I get my new computer in about 5 months at the soonest... Oi, too bad I have the best paying job available in my area... O_O I live in a pathetic place...

My current computer is running on Windows 98 with a 7gb hard drive that has only 4gb free space left on it... Again, I fail at life. XP

There is a Language Toolbar you can install on the Windows OS that allows you to type in specified languages. (ie - on my older XP box I had the Language toolbar installed with the Japanese language kit which allowed me to type in both forms of kana, and allowed for conversion to kanji). I don't know if you can still get one that will run on 98, but I'd check the microsoft website and see. Once you're at www.microsoft.com search for "Japanese" or "Language Tool" and see what comes up.

It may take some work, but hey... it's free? ^_^