How long ago was this? I don’t think I’ve used the IME regularly in at least four, maybe five years.
Heh, I’ve thought of it as easy, too, at least the grammar of it. Now Sanskrit… That one was a bitch.
Just asterisk them and put the translation inside spoiler tags at the end of the post. That should satisfy the rules, while still allowing Awesome Japanese Fun for the people who know it.
Not quite sure, but I remember having to constantly click on the little boxes in the system tray that said EN or JPN to switch back and forth, and that it didn’t always work, and didn’t work in all programs I needed to type in, and that the conversions to Kanji weren’t always correct, and that’s when it even gave a kanji option. All in all a pretty frustrating experience. When I got my Mac, I set up the three syllibaries in two seconds and it’s been great since then.
Now you’re just showing off. 
ありがとうございました。 助かりました。*****
Arigatou gozaimashita. Tasukarimashita.
Thank you very much. You were very helpful.Feh. Too much trouble. 
Nah, it’s pretty painless. I’ve been using Japanese at work since the early 90s, all on PCs, and have never had any problems at all, in any of the MS Office programs. True, some software doesnt’ work well when trying to input Japanese, but it was pretty rare. So no major problems, really. Well, I mean, no more problems with typing in Japanese relative to problems with Windows overall 
There *used *to be hassles with using double-byte characters in some Microsoft Office apps - Excel, for existence. But I haven’t had a problem with that since Office 2003.
My problem is writing up reports etc. for the Powers That Be, getting on to the third page or so, then realizing that I should have written in English since an overseas branch head is going to be on the list of recipients!
A bit more of an advanced tip - probably after a couple of years of steady Japanese lessons: find a short, well-known book (or a book of short stories), and get the book in English and Japanese. I did that with Old Man and the Sea, and Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window (which is a beautiful little story that I think everyone in my entire extended family in the US has read! The book is by Kuroyanagi Tetsuko, a very well-known, respected actress and goodwill ambassador - and she is also very well-known for having Japan’s first-ever talk show on TV).
Eh, I didn’t get very far (about a semester of it), and most of what I learned, I’ve forgotten. These days, I can do something like *Nripasya balaha grammam gacchati *and that’s about it. (“The king’s boy goes to the village”… I think.)
いいえ、どういたしまして。
Iie, dou itashimashite.
You’re very welcome.
Works for me.
Though of course, it may not work for you…
Seriously – I truly appreciate you guys working with me on this.
Psh. You “moderators” with your “rules.” What, you think you’re the boss of me?!
Huh? What’s that?
:cups ear to listen to the whisper:
Oh. Um. Carry on?
Obviously I’m too much of a beginner to really tell yet, but it seems to be all about tagging phrases (?) with words that indicate what they are doing in the sentence, then just stacking them up, with the verb at the end. Our teacher showd that we could arrange any of the non-verb parts in any order, and the sentence would rtetain its meaning. I wonder whether this is relatively easy for me because I’m used to Esperanto, which subsists on a diet of affixes that you can attach to words on the fly to change the meaning, and indeed has many words that are nothing but affixes? Maybe my brain is used to modularity?
It’s on my list. Right now I have Kanji in mangaLand 1 to explore, and well as Japanese in MangaLand 1 and its workbook.
Hmm. When I get that far, I’ll have to see.
I found that Asterix cartoons were great for learning both Esperanto and French because the same stories are available in English and those other languages. Haven’t seen one in Japanese though. Let’s take a look.
:: pause ::
Amazon.co.jp has a number of Asterix books listed, but I can’t tell whether they’re in Japanese or English. My own Asterix books don’t say whether versions are published in Japan.
ど–er, I mean, “No problem”! 
So Join us. The really cool people are learning Japanese. I know you want to be cool, right Twicksy?
Join us! We have [del]cartoons[/del]* calligraphy! and extremely cool paper folding that’s like 3D sculpture!
I am on the way home from a nice little “culture class” put on by the Japanese school, in which we were introduced to writing characters with ink and brush, and also to paper-folding.
We took 12 squares of paper each, and folded each square identically, until we had 12 …folded paper things. Then we put 3 paper things together to make a pyramid. Then we made 3 more pyramids, and locked them all together to make an icosahedron. And it was all held together by friction!
the calligraphy: we practised four characters, then brushed them onto a little scroll suitable for hanging in the house. I have got to get one of these brushes. It’s totally different from any pen I’ve ever used.
[sup]*Me? Obsessed? [/sup]
One of the most liberating moments of my life was when I realized I was never going to be cool … and that it’s okay.
So instead I’ll just hang out here, and hope that, whatever you’re talking about, it ain’t me. 
And that, in a paradoxical kind of self-reference, ups your coolness level.
Heh. You are not alone, my friend.
Hey guys. I took the level 4 JLPT today. If you want, you can read about it in this thread.
On to level 3!
May you pass with flying colours!
I agree with this. I’m sort of trying to learn Chinese now, and it’s much more difficult to pronounce and hear the different tones. Japanese is much more straight forward.
This is one of the reasons I don’t think I would attempt Chinese. However, as you know, there are a number of Japanese words the meaning for which changes depending on the intonation, pitch, or stress, placed on a syllable.
おめでとうございます!
Omedetou gozaimasu!
Congratulations!
Japanese actually uses what’s called “pitch accent.” It’s not quite pitch… It’s not quite accent… It’s pitch accent! 
IMO, a truly tonal language like Chinese would be much harder for an L2 learner, just because the older you are, the harder it’s going to be for your brain to distinguish the pitches.
Wikipedia has a decent article on the subject, which includes a native speaker pronouncing some words, which would be written identically in kana, that change in meaning depending on how you pronounce them. IIRC, the recording corresponds to the table under the heading “Examples of words which differ only in pitch.”
ありごとう！ 頑張りました。Arigatou! Ganbarimashita.
Thanks! I did my best.
My brain meats are having enough of a challenge with Japanese, thank you very much.
Yep, I already new the three はし (hashi) examples.
Whoops. I misspelled “Thank you” in Japanese in my post above. The hiragana spells out ‘arigotou’ instead of ‘arigatou’. エラーを許してください。eraa o yurushi te kudasai 。
Please pardon the error.
JLPTを受けた方に聞きたいことがあります。聞いてもよろしかったら、あの試験を受けたのはなぜですか。批判するつもりじゃないんですが、自分だったら、わざわざそんな試験を受ける必要ないと思います。なんか日本語との関係のある仕事を探しているなら、日本語能力を証明するものとして役立つかもしれないけどそれ以外、ただ自信を築くためにやってるかなと思います。もちろん、それは決して悪い理由じゃないんですが元々試験の嫌いぼくにとって時間とお金はちょっともったいないと思います。
けどさ正直に言えば、同時に、自分の日本語能力をはかるため、ちょっとやってみたいと思うこともあります。けっこういい加減な独学で学んだので、ちゃんとした授業を受けた人々と比べられる資格などないんですね。どれほど日本語ができているかと聞かれると、JLPT Level3を受けた、などと言えたらいいと思うけど今、だいたい「え。。。何となくできているような感じですね」みたいなあいまいな答えをしています。（笑）
けっこう長くてわけわからない話をしてしまってごめんなさい。けど、JLPTを受けたなら、実際になぜそうしたかを説明していただきたいと思います。
[spoiler]
I’ve got something I’d like to ask those who’ve taken the JLPT. If it’s ok to ask, why did you take it? I don’t mean to criticise, but if it was me, I don’t really see the need to go through the trouble of taking a test. It might be handy to prove your ability if you’re looking for Japanese-related work, but aside from that, I figure it’s probably just to build confidence in your ability, right? That’s definitely not a bad reason, but it kinda seems like a waste of time/money to me…
But honestly, at the same time, sometimes I kinda want to try it, to measure my ability. As someone who learned via pretty haphazard self-study, I don’t really have any qualifications to compare w/ those who took a ‘proper’ course. When asked how my Japanese is, it’d be nice to be able to say, oh, I passed JLPT3 or something, but as it is, I usually say something vague like ‘I seem to be getting by somehow.’ Heh.
Sorry for the long, rambling post, but if you have taken the JLPT, I would like to know why you actually did.[/spoiler]
It’s so hard to write coherently in Japanese. I’m sure it doesn’t flow very naturally. And I don’t doubt I’m awkwardly mixing spoken & written Japanese, but that’s how I talk in real life. Heh.