Japanese

i can pick out a word here and there but i would love to speak it.

"Wakaranai" can also signify "I don't know", as I've heard it in many contexts, but I really don't know the specific nuances of the usages of each.

Zenigata sounds familiar....where have I heard it before? The character for zeni means money, gata is shape or form....so....

so Zenigata chases Lupin. his custom status :

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Lupin Chaser

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is a good refresher.

Here is my educated guess on wakaranai/shiranai:
Even though I have not seen "wakaranai" in this context my guess is that when used in place of "shiranai" it has more of an ambiguous/double meaning of "I don't know and/or I don't understand" (i.e. "I am totally clueless")

use shirimasen if you haven't had a chance to get the information,
and wakarimasen if you feel you should know the answer, yet don't.

Well, I took like 4 years in High School, and two in college...but without an immersion experience, or really any point to ever use it, it all goes to waste pretty quick... Although, I do think it is one of the easier languages to learn, at least structurally.

In my Japanese class, every other sentance involved something blowing up. It started when I randomly picked a verb in my dictionary "bakuhatsu-suru" and added it to the sentance structure that we were doing that day. So imagine a younger Gymkata explaining in Japanese to his professor that he was late to class because his dorm room exploded.:lol: Subsequently by the end of the semester, millions of dollars worth of hypothetical damage was reported in my class.

Ahh.....I yearn for simpler days:)

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Originally posted by Stone
Japanese is an alright language - the syllabic thing is cool. If only they'd get rid of kanji, the whole thing would be perfect... Kanji really drags the language down.

Finnish, surprisingly, sounds a lot like Japanese at times. Kind of neat.

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really - a resemblance to Finnish? Heh - that's cool - I'm trying to learn German by myself right now and after i have a basic grasp of it (for i'll most unlikely be fluent in it) i'm going to have a go at Finnish - i know they use alot of Js and Ks in their language - heh - wierd.

BTW Stone - I miss your old Mel Torme avatar!! :(

Japanese reminds me a lot of German, at least in the way the sentence structure works. Everything else is pretty different.

I started teaching myself Japanese 2 summers ago, while I was bored out of my mind at my summer clerkship. I was making some good progress learning sentences, knew my hiragana and katakana pretty well, and even knew a few kanji. But then my second year of law school started up and erased most of my drive to continue.

But it's a fun language to learn, and I hope to visit Japan again soon, perhaps after I finish law school this year.

Oh, and romaji is the work of the devil.

I took two semesters of Japanese recently and can read/write hiragana/katakana. Kanji is a different thing. Understanding what I read is also a different thing. :(