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I wrote this this morning, but it didn't post then so I'm posting it now. It's really long. ---- As Flying Shogi said, hands on experience is the best way to learn once you've gotten a hand on basic grammar. I would like to practice speaking, but I don't think I'm good enough yet since my grammar/vocab knowledge is pretty low. @Tediz64 Two more things I want to tell you about: Rikaikun/rikaichan/yomichan: These are all Chrome web extensions which do the same thing - if you hover over a Japanese word, they will give you a dictionary definition of it. It's incredibly useful because you don't need to keep copy/pasting into an online dictionary. Japanese Ammo with Misa (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSyd8tXJoEJKIXfrwkPdbA) - A great channel which explains grammar nuances that's not always covered in a textbook, and tells you how Japanese speakers natively express things. Her videos are quite long though. She has a website too. Pronunciation is definitely the most difficult part, but once you've mastered it, you start to realise it's your intonation that really needs work, otherwise, your sentences will all sound monotone and flat. Like. This. Sort. Of. Like. A. Robot. And-If-You-Speak-Fast-It's-Like-This. What I did for pronunciation was to record myself making a specific sound, say, the Japanese R, and compare it to a native speaker. Then I would try again and get as close as I could. It took me several months of doing this each night for around half an hour, but now my pronunciation is pretty good. I wouldn't stress yourself about it though. As long as a native speaker can understand you, you're doing something right. I used to feel so upset and stressed out when I was recording my pronunciation since there were some I just couldn't get right. What I'm struggling with the most right now is that I want to spend more time reading Japanese things and learning/practicing it, but I can't because I have exams in my school subjects... (and kanji, god I hate kanji sometimes) I can't currently recognise Japanese dialects, even the most common ones like Kansai. I am just a beginner after all! I do love Ebina though. :P A lot of dialect-learning is just memorising that some people say things a bit differently, like how you already do for vocabulary. I don't think it's possible to learn it entirely through exposure if you don't live in Japan. I live in the UK, where we have a huge variety of accents for the tiny amount of space. However, I'm not too familiar with them all. This is because I don't watch British TV much, and I have no relatives native to the UK who would be comfortable with all the crazy accents and dialects. - Also, katakana is difficult once you're comfy with hiragana. I recommend playing video games which use it a lot (like Pokemon, where all pokemon names are written in katakana) to force yourself to learn it. Without doing that, I wouldn't have learnt it at all. :P @Flying Shogi Kirokan is great, I've checked out their website a lot of times. I love seeing their comparison posts and reading the 4koma. (Hey, maybe reading those in Japanese would be good practice? And I can use Kirokan's translations to check if I understood it or not.) Just wondering, how hard is it to get into JET? What kind of things do you think increases your chances? Kind of stupid of me, but I didn't realise it was so competitive. Of course it would be, it's so popular. I'm probably going to check out those YouTubers sometime after my exams (but here I am, not studying, and typing away at what is essentially an essay...) Thanks for your offer to contact your friend, too, but I'm kind of shy about things like Skype, haha. It's really nice of you though! In my head I've been making lesson plans of how to teach people English. One of them was to bring English-translated manga of really popular series like Sailor Moon, Fruits Basket, Naruto, Devil is a Part Timer, etc, because the short sentences in manga are usually great for people to practice a language in a fun way without being overwhelming. I would ask people to read a chapter or two for homework, with the help of a dictionary, and then we can discuss the grammar and vocabulary together in the lesson. It would be impractical for an entire class though... I might also bring cheap DS games, such as Animal Crossing (this DS game is less than 10 dollars on eBay, I think) and maybe Pokemon, but that's usually a lot more expensive (unless you buy pirated GBAs. DS Lites, here I come...) If the child has their own DS, I think would give them the game to play at home, but might also ask for a money deposit in case the game gets lost or isn't returned. I don't know how I would ask for that without coming across as rude though. I'd probably use this as a reward or as "fun" homework to do over the holidays.

I wouldn't say Dimitri is the naive one, but I'm surprised he's not as much of an edgelord as his appearance suggests. I assumed he'd be the cynical/snarky one, and Claude would be happy-go-lucky. Instead we have a scheming, plotting Claude and a kind-hearted Dimitri. Interesting. Maybe I'm just too used to the "cynical blonde boy" trope we've seen with Leo in Fates and Kliff in SoV. Based off what we've seen so far, the characters are very three-dimensional, which makes me excited.

Anyway - why the conspicuous difference in numbers between the English and Japanese titles? Any theories? A possible candidate for a fourth faction is the church and that mysterious woman who seems to lead it, but I don't feel like somebody who seems like an enemy would be included in with the protagonists. So could there be another, surprise protagonist who we haven't seen yet. Or maybe it's just Byleth who is the fourth one. I could also be misunderstanding what the Japanese title means.

@Tediz64 Sure! The most important one for me is Jisho (https://jisho.org/). It's a dictionary where you can copy and paste whole sentences to look up the meaning of each word. I know people use apps to learn how to read/write hiragana, katakana, etc, but I personally used flashcards on the Anki app. What I did was learn the really basic grammar (and I mean, really basic - just the first few chapters or so) from Tae Kim's guide (http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar) and then immediately start reading stuff in Japanese using Jisho. If there was grammar that was new, or I couldn't understand/remember it, then I looked it up in Jisho, which will provide links to Tae Kim's guide on grammar along with vocabulary. I put any new vocabulary into a flashcard deck which I go through from time to time. I don't go through it very often to be honest. ^^ By "stuff", it could be literally anything. I recommend NHK Easy News, song lyrics, and any manga that you enjoyed in English. At the early stages, don't try to read whole novels or anything, since that would be a little too overwhelming. (I know, I tried. :P ) Keep in mind that this approach is quite relaxed since I'm not learning Japanese for a class, it's just a hobby in my free time right now. One more thing - http://maggiesensei.com/ is a great site that explains grammar more in-depth than Tae Kim. If you need extra explanations after looking at something in Tae Kim, I recommend this site. However, I don't think it's laid out like a textbook, so it can't be used to learn from scratch like Tae Kim's guide can. @Flying Shogi Haha, your struggle does sound familiar. My family also want me to take Computer Science, despite me not being very interested in it. My experience relearning (to speak, I could always understand it fluently) my first language is also what pushed me to learn more about how people learn languages, and it's helped me a lot in understanding how to study stuff in general. I personally don't want to take classes because I feel like I would get bored and the class might move too slowly, which is what happened with French. The truth is I'm just too lazy for a disciplined class. :P My instagram is flooded with Japanese food/study accounts, and so when my friends look at it they're often quite confused. Most of the time they just assume I'm a weeaboo who has looked at so much anime that Instagram thinks they're Japanese, and move along. I was also considering watching NicoNico streams, but I'm never around when my favourite streamers are so I decided against it. Could you recommend some of the youtubers you watch? I've seen similar advice from other translators online, but I have no idea what I would specialise in. Based off what I've enjoyed so far, I seem to like doing literary translation the most. But I don't think that's a reliable source of income compared to say, medical translation. I'm hoping that I can become an interpreter, which seems to have better pay and stuff. I don't mind moving to Japan for work, either, so hopefully I will find something there. I'm planning on doing JET after university.

@Flying Shogi Wow, N1? That's awesome. I'm not taking the JLPT, but I doubt I'm anywhere past N4. So, why did you start learning? Maybe thinking about that will motivate you? I started because I want to become a translator. Japanese was a language which interested me because I've been listening to Japanese music and watching anime for a long time, and the other language I know doesn't have much demand for translation.

I'm going to rehash this, but bandwagons aren't necessarily bad. Anyway... Fire Emblem Fates. The first ever game I actively looked forward to before its release. I remember going on GameFAQs a lot (as cringey as that board was, it was pretty fun) and looking at all the crazy speculation for it. Then... the game came. Characters were entirely different than had been promised (I'm thinking of those detailed bios from Famitsu or something here) and the story was a mess. I was really happy with how they'd improved the mechanics, but that wasn't enough to save it sadly. Pokemon XY. After great stories (by Pokemon standards) in Gen 5, along with memorable and well thought out characters, XY felt as if they couldn't decide whether to stick to AZ or Lysandre's story and just shoehorned them together. Team Flare's portrayal as a joke also clashed with what they were actually trying to do (global genocide). The rivals varied from "who?" (Tierno, Trevor) to OK (Shauna, Calem), even though I liked the idea of travelling as a group from the start. The overall difficulty of the game was way too easy, too.

I like the snow, and I wish it would snow where I live. =.= And glaciers are to do with the snow. Just "Snowy" is quite a generic name. I've had a lot of usernames over the years, often relating to whatever franchise/thing I was into at the moment, or based off things about my favourite anime characters.

Quite a few people on SF are learning Japanese, and I thought it would be nice to have a place where we could all get together. We could help each other out if we're not sure what a word or sentence means, and maybe review each other's translations, that kind of thing. Basically just learning from each other. This thread isn't really for translation requests, though, so I'd like to keep those to a minimum. Exceptions may be made for Fire Emblem related content, like the recent FE3H scans, but that's not a guarantee. :P What do we discuss? Examples Tips on how to learn/get started Applying to English teaching programs like JET. Resources that are helpful Questions about specific words and phrases you have trouble understanding All abilities welcome, whether you're just a beginner or almost fluent!

I see, thanks again. ^^

@Thane Thank you a lot! (And also NekoKnight.) It's awesome to know what they are all saying, and my Japanese isn't good enough to understand them without copy and pasting into a dictionary every 5 seconds. :P I have one question - when Claude says 先生にしか分からない何かがあったはずだ does しか mean deer? Was it originally written just in hiragana?

Hyped for the new game. ZUN's art has really improved since the early Windows games (EoSD/PCB/IN, which is what I play most of the time) Also, nice figure. I've always wanted a Touhou figure, but can't decide on a character.

I'm very glad to see a move away from the rather limiting reclassing used in the games up until now. I always found it irritating when a unit was perfect for a certain class stat-wise, but had no way to get into that class... The designs are still a little hit and miss for me, but I think that's normal for any game. I'm glad that they're okay with experimenting and aren't letting the series stagnate. Story-wise, like a lot of people around in the Fates pre-release days, I'm not getting my hopes too high. Based off the dialogue we've seen, I'm really looking forward to seeing what the characters are like. I know it's not a whole lot of evidence, but everyone seems to be reacting to Byleth/Sothis's abilities in a realistic way (surprise) along with clearly defined characterisation (Claude being more thoughtful, Dimitri wondering if it's a joke). Small things like that make me think they've got a good handle on what the characters are meant to be like, and so they'll be consistent in supports, cutscenes, and battle quotes.

@ShinkaiNoAki No problem! Your translation helped me to make mine, too. ^_^

Late response, but I agree with ShinkaiNoAki about what the sentence means. But I wouldn't translate onushi as "master", since it seems to be an archaic term used to refer to your equals/inferiors. https://jisho.org/search/onushi "You'd better get used to me speaking! Even if you are so surprised that you fall over each time and feel embarassed." (Not sure about the last part there.)

-sigh- Looks like I will just have to study on the bus then... Lunchtime is a good candidate too. Music distracts me because I always want to stop and listen to it :D

I haven't played either of them but I'm considering getting it for my sister, who's around 5. Should I get RB or Sky, or is this game going to be hard to play for a 5 year old? She found the main line Pokemon games boring, so I thought this series would be a type of gameplay she likes.

I think my random ideas could fit into this thread, so... In this world, people with white hair exist. They are very rare, and are seen both as having divine dragon blood and are treated as outcasts anyway.The most common fate for them is kidnapping and sold into slavery... of any kind. Slave hunting group exist specifically for this purpose, since by catching a nice looking white haired girl you could make a lot of money. Far away from the plains where the slavery happens, high in a snowy mountain, is a kingdom where white hair is seen as normal and attractive. After all, the royal family has many white haired members. This kingdom also has a famous university, where Fio studies alchemy, Fio is a young girl who has a normal student's life. School, hanging out with friends, and that nice guy in her class... Until one day, she meets a runaway slave and a former slave hunter. Macks is a teen boy (16 years) who recently joined a slave hunting group. It's a secret - he just wants some money to help his family, and he knows his hard working parents wouldn't want him doing something as shady and dangerous as slave hunting. After all, the white haired have their strange and dangerous powers, the rumours go. Macks knows it will be violent, but he doesn't realise how violent it could get, until he is forced to capture young girl, Titania (12) and rout her family. In a hack or game, the slave hunters murdering Titania's family would be the very first chapter. Anyway, Macks takes pity on Titania and he decides to help her escape by making the journey to the supposed kingdom where the white-haired are not feared. Along the way they meet Fio, although I'm not sure exactly how. Fio is shocked by the way white haired people are treated outside the kingdom and tries to help them. Macks ends up in a conflict with his parents over the fact he ran away - with a white haired girl!, although that is resolved in the end. And that's the story so far. There are a few other things about the story that I know, they're mainly themes or goals. Neither Titania nor Macks ever become activists - they're just average people running away from a bad place. There's no overthrowing, trying to convince people to change their views, or political action. Fio is upset by what she finds out, but she also doesn't become an activist. So it's quite a small-scale, personal story. The royal family, on the other hand, eventually do get involved in Titania's story, and they probably start accepting white haired people as refugees. Maybe this could start a war with some other countries or something, which could be the second part of the story. Titania, Macks and Fio do become involved in the war, although all three find it pretty depressing. "We just want to live our lives in peace!"

Signed in just to say this, but this is great! Post more! I like that you've already begun introducing undertones of sadness into the story at this early stage, and you've set up Finn's internal conflict pretty well, and I'm assuming you will expand on Leif's character a bit later. The dialogue has the same pseudo medieval style as most Fire Emblem games, which is personally something I dislike, but I can't blame you or your story for using it since this is a FE fanfic after all. One thing I want to ask is if Nanna will keep being characterised as such a child. I know she is 8, but 8 year olds tend to speak a little more maturely than the way Nanna currently speaks. The way Nanna speaks makes me think she is 6, and there is a large developmental difference between 6 and 8. I haven't played FE5, so I'm excited to get a hold of the story somehow without playing it, because you know, the gameplay is a bit hard. Anyway, I'm looking forward to more of your story!

So I have a pretty long and tiring school day. I have a 45min bus journey there and back, so I get there at 8.40 and arrive back home by 6. But by that point I'm so tired that I can't actually bring myself to study, review my notes, etc even though I really need to or I'll fail my class. Any advice? :)

I actually haven't watched anything for over a year... I just sort of stopped one day. I've been reading Azumangah Daioh, though.

I try to avoid them too, but unfortunately, it's my whole class at high school. To be fair, I have heard that Microsoft and their XBox do not have good opinions among those who play games. @Dragoncat: Yep, there was that whole "Press A to Pound" thing in Pokemon too. Especially since the result was "Mmm, you made delicious white sauce!" It was so unsubtle, it was pretty hilarious. Hm, I never actually noticed that before, probably because I don't play those games very often since I don't have a PS.... but yeah, that's true, actually. @Tryhard: It probably depends on who you talk to, haha. Nintendo fans definitely do like to hate on Sony/Microsoft players more than they admit.

"Oh, you like Nintendo games? But aren't they for kids?" "Alright, but they aren't really proper game games, you know?" "But aren't games like Mario etc boring (because they're for kids)?" "Why haven't you grown up and moved on yet?" For the hundredth time, no, it's not just for kids. For the thousandth time, yes, they are actual games with a lot of good design and are fun to play. I'm sure this applies to a lot of other game genres and series as well. It's so annoying when people stereotype certain games as "just for kids." In the past this applied to all games, but there's so many "adult" games like, I don't know, LA Noir or Call of Duty that it's only stuff like Mario that gets this treatment. What do you think? (This has probably been discussed before somewhere on here, but I got an irl comment about it today, so...)

Hi there! Welcome to SF. I've always planned to get around to completing Genealogy but the hour-long maps with no saving ability put me off. (The story sounds amazing though, and is my motivation to try and complete it). Looks like I met another philosophy lover. Nice. None of my friends take it. :( Could you recommend me some eldritch horror? It's Lovecraftian stuff right? Always wanted to read some. Eldritches are cool.

Nice to meet you! I'm a Vocaloid fan as well, although I'm more into the utaite/indie side of it. I literally don't have any friends who appreciate my taste in music and the ones who bothered to try it waste no time in telling me KPop is better. Oh right, I was meant to say something about Fire Emblem. Whoops. I agree with other posters that this is a very friendly and open minded forum, by the way.