Moonspeak

[Chibi-chan]

I hate that I can't understand moonspeak, it's ridiculous D:<
How can I properly fangirl when everything is in unreadable runes?!?!? Take doujinshi. I can get 30% of what's happening by what's being portrayed, but it's the words that make up the extra 70%! It's like watching a TV show on mute. It drives me crazy >X; For certain fanbases, it sucks cause no one's interested in the series enough to translate anything. Grr!

AND THEN WEBCOMICS. THOSE KILL ME. I can go browse every CG gallery with a .jp at the end, and they always have the most adorable looking webcomics I CANNOT UNDERSTAND. SCREW YOU JAPANESE. Occasionally I can get kanji cause I'm taking Chinese but STILL. It's so painful. OK, I SEE 'MARKET'. THAT EXPLAINS NOTHING. I can't even use translators for comics/doujinshi. Those don't work anyway. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Ok, that's enough. Translators are gods. I wish I could translate for people. If I suddenly got the gift of understanding Japanese, I'd translate everything asked on _____booru. And I'd also help translate games and comics and tons of other things! Language barriers are mean. Stupid Babylon.

 

[Cherrim]

Why not memorize the alphabets, at least? :( Just pick up a Japanese dictionary and memorize katakana/hiragana and you can get the jist of a lot of things.

Between that, WWWJDIC, and this site to decipher kanji, you can typically get the basic meaning of anything in a doujinshi, even if not the exact verb tenses and the like.

:( It's better than nothing if you have nowhere to learn proper Japanese. It's what I did for years before I took classes. (And the self-learning I ended up doing in that timeframe pretty much matched my entire first year of Japanese anyway.)

 

[Chibi-chan]

Thanks! :3
How proficient do you think you are now?

 

[Zet]

moonspeak was invented for the sole person to annoy you :3

/me runs

 

[Cherrim]

I have a good understanding of most video games I play in Japanese. I won't get every intricate detail but I can get through an RPG and come away knowing the main plot just fine. @_@ And I can skim a doujinshi and get the plot with only having to look up terms a few times to make sure I'm on the right track, but to literally translate still takes me forever because I'm so rusty. XD;

Back when I was still starting out on my own, I translated Yu-Gi-Oh manga/books for fun. Or did basic translations, anyway. You might not get all of it but if you just want to know what's going on without just relying on pictures, learning the alphabet and knowing how to look up kanji does wonders. :3

 

[Chibi-chan]

Thanks! I actually think it'll be something I'll do over the summer n_n