For the benefit of others in your position, missingno, what was your solution?

I’m well aware of the fact that search-by-radical is slow. However, in the absence of anything better than “um… Google [IME] it… I guess?” it works well enough.

What’s IME pad, and is it different to the international keyboard that you can install via the Settings menu?

[Squinting Fry image] Can’t tell if knee-jerk reaction or just a jerk…

Anyway, you’re unquestionably going to need your school’s involvement in this process, so my suggestion is research some programs and bring some information about them to your school’s guidance counselor (if you’ve got one. If not, pick someone else appropriate). A good place to start may be the Japanese consulate or embassy – http://www.atlanta.us.emb-japan.go.jp is one site I found, but don’t think Atlanta has the only Japanese consulate in America. The Japanese government often has exchange programs running, and may even offer scholarships. Alternately, http://www.studyabroad.com is a search engine specifically for, well, studying abroad. Admittedly (like Google) it’s never going to tell you which one is the best, but it’s a place to start.

Your guidance counsellor might have better ideas, but it’s important to show them that you’ve honestly put some effort into researching things first – much more likely to get their stamp of approval.

Well, if you’re speaking, that’s a bit of a silly thing to say. It sounds like you’re asking them to speak in hiragana rather than kanji.

Edit: Thought maybe I should perhaps clarify something here – unlike English (or Greek, or Hebrew) letters, hiragana characters don’t have names that are distinct from their pronunciation. That is, if you ask someone to spell out (say) おはよう “in hiragana”, all you’re going to get is “o… ha… yo… u”.

• This reply was modified 12 years ago by  Joel.

は is called the topic marker – it’s used to mark the topic of a conversation (which is may coincide with, but is different from, the subject of a sentence, so don’t get those confused). So yes, as you noticed, it means “As for beer, I will drink it.”

は is also called the contrastive marker – it’s used to contrast something from something else. So, for example, ビールは飲みます means “I will drink beer” yes, but could also be implying that it’s “beer rather than orange juice”. It might, for example, be an answer to the question ビールとか、ジュースとか、何が飲みたいですか.

Don’t think there’s any situations where you should always use は. There’s a number where it’s important not to use it – specifically, if you’re not trying to be contrastive. I seem to recall someone in this forum posting a quote from someone more fluent in Japanese, who complimented a woman on how tidy her house was on the day he was visiting, but the woman got offended, because he used は, which implied that it wasn’t tidy on other days. It gets kinda complex (and subtle) so I wouldn’t think too hard about it at this point – just focus on は = topic marker.

Probably. I was just trying to think “one at a time” in the sense of how 一歩 implies “one step at a time”.

They’re meant to be fairly distinct, but in real-world speech, things tend to squish up a bit.