Beta-guy's Blog

I just got back from Otafest (my first anime convention) and it was great,  alot of anime was available to watch, as well as the Death Note movies, had 2 Japanese lessons while I was there Watched Cosplay chess, and even bought a souvenir. While I was there I even saw the Canadian premier of “Death Note: L, Change the WorLd.”. I regret I didn’t take any pictures, Next year I’ll try to take a more active role. All in all in you haven’t gone to an anime convention before but have an interest, it’s definitely an exciting atmosphere, filled with interesting people, and fun events to participate in, even if you just want to watch your favorite anime, it’s still a great time.

I’ve tried learning other languages, and there was one thing that kept scaring me away, hundreds of thousands of words to memorize, that’s a very scary thought, but Japanese solves this issue in a unique fashion, Kanji.

I’ve come to think of Kanji like a list of basic words that the rest of the vocabulary is built on. If you remember the Jouyou kanji (1,945 kanji characters) it’s easier than learning over 100,000 words, plus if you don’t know a word written in kanji you can separate the individual kanji to get the general idea being spoken of (unless the kanji is being used purely for pronunciation). This also helps in learning the vocabulary, because you have a foundation, for example tenki means weather in Japanese, but if you take the kanji 天 (ten meaning sky or heavens) and 気 (ki meaning mood or atmosphere) it speaks of the mood of the heavens or the atmosphere of the sky.  Once you see how the combination of the kanji works,  you might react like I did  by simply being amazed that you now you not only remember the word but now you understand it.

There are probably better kanji combinations then that, but I’m also learning, try to learn the kanji at your own pace, try to read the kanji combinations if you see a kanji you are unfamiliar with try this, it helps you find the kanji by  elements of the kanji called radicals. Personally I use this alot, and find it quite helpful. Glood luck in learning the kanji.

This is the first post on my new Blog, and to start things off I’d like to point out about a contest (not mine) For those not familiar with poken check out this link http://poken.jp/en/ I found out about Poken during a gathering of bloggers about Japan, basically this poken is a fun business card, if you meet some one at an anime convention or something and you’d like to keep in contact with them poken would allow you to do so as in 2 -3 seconds the information would be transferred, and once you get home you can chat on your social networking sites.

Personally I’d love to get a Poken as will be going to an anime convention next month, and it’d be great to stay in contact with cool people I meet there. if this sounds like fun, then follow the link http://blog.japansoc.org/2009/04/12/japansoc-poken-contest/.