michicachan999 wrote:

Congratulations on your degree, the hard work is worth it, no?

I hope so. To be honest, while the class gave us plenty of listening and speaking practice – and the lecturers and tutors were native Japanese speakers who could help with pronounciation, I still suck at listening, and I clean forget everything when I’m actually speaking to people, sooo… That’s probably just me, though. One of my classmates is in Japan at the moment, and she says she’s using Japanese 95% of the time.

Justin wrote:

(because I don’t know the word for cream)

クリーム =P

Nakama, Genki and Japanese for Busy People are all roughly equivalent to TextFugu, in that they’re intended for someone with no knowledge of Japan, though I think they may go a little further than TextFugu – not too sure of that, though. Regardless, they can be helpful for another viewpoint anyway – the only one of those four I don’t own is Genki. Japanese for Busy People is slightly geared towards business-related Japanese, incidentally.

Tobira is the next level up – intermediate to upper intermediate. Maybe even lower advanced. It’s written almost entirely in Japanese – English is only used to explain new vocab and grammar. Honestly, I’ve actually never finished TextFugu, so I couldn’t tell you whether TextFugu on its own will raise your level high enough to be able to use Tobira.

Alternately, Koichi’s working on more advanced sections of TextFugu, which might be finished before the start of the next geological era…

Ooo, yay!

Buy a JR Rail Pass before you go. Since you’re going all the way to Hiroshima and back, it will be worth the money: http://www.japanrailpass.net/eng/en001.html

Get a Suica card for the private-line trains – and, for that matter, these days you can buy a lot of things with them: http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/pass/suica.html

For route-planning – also handy for checking the cost of tickets: http://www.hyperdia.com/

This might be a bit self-evident, but make sure you at least learn the kanji for major place names you intend to visit, so you can read them on signs in the off chance there’s no English or hiragana. For example, 広島, 新宿, 秋葉原… 神戸? Et cetera.

Don’t bring too big a suitcase – if you’re going to be travelling with it, and need to put it in station lockers, bigger lockers are more expensive and harder to find. On that note, the lockers always take hundred-yen coins, so don’t spend them all. Also, on the trains, you’re better off with a wheeled suitcase than a backpack.

Take photos for us. =D

MisterM2402 [Michael] wrote:

By “council worker”, I was assuming he meant “civil servant” or “someone who works for the council”, but maybe he didn’t.

Aye, that’s why I asked for clarification (which appears to not be forthcoming). Civil servant would be 公務員 (こうむいん).

従業員

Well that makes a bit more sense. I thought the い might have been a typo, or something..

Any chance you could copy the kanji that Jisho is suggesting? Having a bit of trouble working out what some of the middle bits are supposed to be. That said, I don’t think that’s quite the word you’re after.

Just so I can make sure we’re not getting English regional differences, can I just check: by “council worker” do you mean “someone employed by a city council to lean on a shovel all day pretending to do road maintenance”?

I’m thinking possibly 市会の労働者 (しかいのろうどうしゃ）, but I’m not at all sure. Having trouble finding “council worker” in its entirety in any dictionary…

That makes a little more sense. =P

Ooo, Kyushu. You’re fairly close to Yanagawa – I’ve been wanting to go there. You going with the JET program?

Don’t push space as you type? Basically, when you use an IME, pushing space while you’re still editing a word will start listing through the available kanji – you can tell you’re still editing the word, because it’ll be underlined. Hit enter to confirm the word, and the underline will go away, then you can push space all you like.

If you’ve accidentally forgotten and pushed space anyway, you can make it hiragana (again, while still editing the word) by pushing F6. F7 if you want to make it katakana (which is helpful to know if you’re trying to write long katakana words but the IME keeps trying to insert kanji). If you’ve already confirmed the word, you’ll need to delete it and type it again, sadly.

F5 brings up search-by-radical. Never knew I could do that. Maybe I should try playing with the other function keys and see what happens. =)