If you have much lag at all, just resign yourself to the fact that you'll probably never get a Perfect Score. You should be able to get to level 22 though, if you can get around enough lag and place your dudes right.

Being a Gackt fan, I tried that with his lyrics. But he has a bad habit of writing down fancy obscure kanji, and then SINGING a TOTALLY different word. I'm told this is to help clarify his meaning, but it's hard to read.

Oooh thanks for the tips.
And yeah hehe, both of those are good ideas for practicing. actually a lot of the useful words that I didn't learn in class I picked up from songs and movies. (Well not basing my study on that lol)... but like, you hear it so much, you look it up. :3

I learned 抱きしめて right away after listening to Gackt. He uses it in a majority of his songs, and I was all - what does it MEEEEAN? XD

I cut down on a lot of lag by closing all of my other windows, tabs and running programs. It's helped a bunch.

Have you both taken actual classes to learn? I don't think there are any offered anywhere near me :c

I had a whole semester of Japanese 101 in college before life forced me to leave. But I'm stubborn. I have to say that after taking mock tests for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test level 4 last year, I realized that my self study was full of holes.

I knew way too much of the wrong vocab, and my grammar was very spotty. But when reading, a person tends to skim along, getting the general gist of what's going on. People don't read books( or *coughmanga*) trying to spot the Dangling Participle, or whether the character is speaking 'properly'.

Hahah, yeah. I learned that by some lyrical means also :B

Squid; I have taken formal classes, yes. But this has been my study life for Japanese XD

1. Be born Japanese. Speak bits and pieces of Japanese from my dad who moved away from Japan at age 3, and consequently only knows baby words and basics XD

2. Be dissatisfied with low amounts of knowledge in something I would be happy to know

3. Make contacts of people who I could converse with in the language and learn from.

4. Google. A lot.

5. Check out books at the library.

6. Don't give up. Even if you take breaks, don't stop using it altogether. At least use some of it in your daily life, even if you only have time for a little bit.

7. Go to Japannnn : D

8. Japanese lessons in school, study on the side

9. Make thread on Menewsha after switching to homeschooling, where language classes were not provided save for English.

lol

Sounds pretty dedicated, Strange Dreams lol

Ahh well, the reason is, once you see yourself growing, why would you want to stop? I mean me learning Japanese is not hurting anyone. It might even be helping people lols. How much each person chooses to learn is up to them but personally I think it is fun. I mean, in my head, the language makes a lot of sense. There are obviously some questions that I can't answer about how it works; the same goes for natives too lol. But it is just fun :)

Do you happen to know any hiragana/katakana yet?

Yuh, I can recognise them, but no kanji.

Yeah, I have dreams of getting a job translating for people later. That would be helpful to a lot of people. And even at my current level - I've done a better job translating some things than the guys who get paid to - like the Trinity Blood novels. I've been slogging through those looong before they got officially ported to the US. It makes me mad to see such a shoddy job on so many of the 'official' translated manga. Grrr.

If someone who's barely past entry level Japanese thinks so, how much better of a job will I do when I'm "proficient"?

Squid; あ、そうですか。　これをわかりますか。

Jez; mm yea wow... I'm curious to see them now XD; And I'm sure it would make quite the difference o-o;

n_n

It only took me a few minutes, but yes. And yes.

+1 me <3

hehe xD
ひらがなで？
ね、かわいいなこねこがいます。
わかりましたか。

Hmm. I don't know how to make my laptop make the characters turn in to hiragana. But... um...

I'm pretty sure you've said to write in hiragana. Then said something about a cute cat. (I've got two!)

And then asked, again, if I understood.

Yes?

Yeah, yeah :) I have a cute kitten. (ko from kodomo meaning child).
Oh, do you want to type in hiragana? Or does it matter to you? It could help your learning process speed up :) Soo many people have asked XD All but one have it now. And that one, well, it's because they need a CD because of a special circumstance.

Is it very difficult to do? I'll have to see if I can figure out how to do it when I get home. Which word meant have, so I will know it for next time?

I should probably go look at picking up some vocab lists or something, to help me out.

n, ya ^^ it's easy. and of what subject of vocab?

First question is, on the computer you are going to have it on (at home : P), is it Mac or PC?

I've got a PC.

And hmm. I don't know what subject. Maybe I'll just see if they've got some sort of beginners list, or commonly used words or something.

Who is "they"? :0

ok, what operating system?

Vista.

Just ... the internet. The internet is they xD

Oki ^_^ well lol in step b is the link to where I explained it before, but for the first part of the post, (the 1-8 part), it applies to XP. Which you can skip step a if you really want to, but looking at it instead will give you exact instructions for Vista.

A. Adding An Input Language
B. How To Use

Ahhh. I can't get it to work! :c

How far did you get?

Well, I did all of the steps, and it just isn't working =/

Ok, so what is happening?