--------

March 3, 2002

Chris Harris
#earthbound/#chronotrigger
irc.dynastynet.net

Clyde Mandelin
Starmen.Net
The Internet

Dear sir,

It has come to my attention that I am going to make a suggestion on
improving the Internet website, http://www.starmen.net/

There are many members of the SM.net community that wish to learn the
strange, exotic language of Japanese. Some of those members have even gone
out of their way to learn the language from books and even horrid anime and
manga.

I believe creating a section on the site devoted to teaching these members
and future visitors Japanese would be beneficial to the site. The section
could be run by an able person* or by able people*, and overseen by the Big
Red Fruit of Japanese Godliness.

My ideas for such a section are as follows: The section would incorporate
text (in English, roomaji, and kanji/kana) and compressed audio clips to
teach the visitors basic Japanese phrases and bits of basic grammar. There
could also be a subsection involving the text from the game, Mother 2.
Perhaps, if the endeavor evolved into a successful section of the site,
advanced Japanese could be taught a little at a time.

In conclusion, I wish to say a "Learn Japanese" section would most benefit
the site, its members, and future visitors that wish to learn Japanese.
People that have been learning incorrectly (*cough* anime *cough* h0 h0)
could be guided in the right direction through the section's teachings.

Thank you for taking the time to read through my suggestion, and I hope you
will consider implementing such a section.

Sincerely,

[Chibi in cursive]

Chibi

* able person/people, meaning Kyosuke, ROFISH, myself (Chibi), and/or anyone
else having a basic mastery of Japanese.

By the way, I suck at English and writing, which is why I'm failing it (no,
that must be because of F. Scott Fitzgerald). So anyway, this persuasive
block-format essay probably sucks.

---------

Okay, first I need to know what kind of stuff specifically would be in the section, and I need whoever's working on the section (Chibi/Kyo I think) to actually make that content before I can authorize a new section.

So other people, give suggestions on what stuff you want in such a section, if you want such a section.

ATTN:
Tomato
Webmaster,
Starmen.Net

Mr. Tomato:

It has come to my attention that you have authorized a certain Japanese language tutorial to be placed on your website by one Chibi the Great and one Kyosuke. As the part that I love most about this website is its contests, I have a proposition.

Would you allow someone - possibly me, for instance - to create within the tutorial a contest involving the Mother and Mother 2 electronic games? The contest could involve translating a portion of an English game back to its Japanese counterpart.

This is just a suggestion, but it is formal, so I advise you consider it.

Sincerily,

Anyway, I could probably come up with the content; I just need to know what kind of content to come up with. Like I said in my letter, we could do stuff with English, roomaji, kanji/kana, and audio clips to do basic stuff, and maybe Mother 2 stuff, but maybe there's other cool stuff we could teach the masses or whatever.

I'm guessing we could maybe teach some words in the beginning and maybe a few hiragana, and gradually work our way our way to all the kana and even a few basic kanji, plus simple sentence structure, and so on. Just an idea though. Feel free to post feedback stuffz

I suggest you start with the very very basics, and then build up around that. Start with some way of teaching hiragana and katakana, then once people have mastered that give them simple words and stuff. Then start with simple grammar. Then after that, easy kanji.

In unrelated news, I am going to Carlsbad this weekend (actually it's Thursday-Saturday) and the seniors had the great idea of making the whole team do initiations again (a team custom for new members). So I figured I'd karaoke Chicken Guys by Yaen. I'm sure I'll botch it up and I'll be laughed at, but I'm gonna do it because it's a cool song :D

Another edit: Maybe I'll just do one of the Digimon opening themes instead. Chicken Guys seems a bit hard, but it'll be by far more fulfilling to sing. :D

[This message has been edited by Chibi the Great (edited March 04, 2002).]

even though it wasnt kanji, i learned the word "hamburger" in japanese using mother 2, you know with the two little lines and.. aw man! why does every post i make turn out wrong?? blast my insignificant life..

I support you guys, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Hopefully the first thing you come up with will be a very well-thought-out plan, as I know the visitors to Tomato's Insanity Board are generally more intelligent than normal forumers and would have the foresight to think this out instead of jumping in headfirst ;D

quote:

---

Originally posted by Chibi the Great:
with the exception of well-recorded, high-quality, compressed audio clips, because I don't have the software or the quiet room to record in.

---

Actually, let's start with a story. A while back, I tried to self-study German with this book that I borrowed. Essentially, the book's method was to throw words and passages at you and teach you verbs somewhere in between. I learned absolutely no German. Well, except that "ﾟ" was not a strange "b," but a "ss." But I digress.

Anyway, I took a German class over the summer... And on the second day, my teacher taught us to conjugate verbs. And I saw that it was good. And now I'm doing pretty well at German... I suppose. Who knows, really?

Now then, the "lesson." Every time that I've been taught, or sorta self-taught, a language in a way that allows me to make sentences immediately, even simple sentences like "You are" and "I come," I've achieved some degree of success. And every time people have thrown words and/or phrases at me before I'm taught how to use them, I've failed to learn anything. (Which is why I've never managed to learn Japanese.)

So... Alphabet -> VERB CONJUGATION/basic grammar/Simple verbs/subject pronouns -> Kanji/more advanced grammar.

(If this is essentially what you meant, Tomato, or if someone else has said this, or if this is a TOTALLY INCORRECT way of learning Japanese, then go ahead and kill me or something. Or just tell me I'm stupid. Either/or.)

But hey, I read a Spanish grammar for fun on a car trip. Unless everyone else does this and they're not telling me, I'm PROBABLY not the right person to listen to on this. XP (That, and I know maybe six or seven kanji and only one point of Japanese grammar.)

EDIT: Yeah, it gives us MySQL, and we get double of whatever they give us because we have 2 servers. Why do you need a SQL database for this anyway?

I don't want to learn it unless it's a class in school.
-Motto by me

I'm lazy

... any suggestions?

However, probably, it should say,
exceed and wait about Japanese correspondence.

Although Japanese EB sites of present many is in a surveillance attitude,
it is not an overstatement.
Refer to the lower address for the details of that.
http://www.starmen.net/ubb/Forum11/HTML/000240.html

In order to draw the stability of Jaoanese EB sites from now on,
I think that cutting down and watching calmly is desirable
as for Japanese correspondence of Starmen.Net for a while.

And probably, these translation is also by no means
indispensable does not have a problem.
They are because machine translation is used frequently.

Kyosuke and I have (finally) started coming up with ideas for content, and I think we pretty much know what we're gonna do; we're just figuring on how to do it.

I suggested the idea of using Flash movies for parts of it, but unfortunately, I deleted Flash from my computer because it was TEH ILLEGALZ0RZ! Luckily, however, Kyo has Flash, so yeah.

I think the plan is we're going to put up a hiragana chart and have visitors practice writing them, while simultaneously teaching them basic vocabulary (I'm guessing stuff like "sun," "moon," "1, 2, 3," and whatnot). Then after we finish hiragana, we'll move onto katakana with practice things, then we'll move onto basic phrases and more kana practice, then basic sentence structure/grammar stuff and a few kanji.

I have nothing else because I'm actually writing this as I'm discussing plans with Kyo (probably not a good thing).

k thx bye

"Ronin no neko kawaii desu!"

La bonita maestra es en my casillero.