> Where did "Japan" come from when the locals called their country "Nihon"?

I hope it's not too strange if I think that nihon nippon sounds pretty much like Japan.

@snailboat I just played Snailiad! It was really fun!

And... less than a day after I comment that we don't really seem to have a "minimum acceptable knowledge" standard here, we get this example, which appears to have exposed one. (although so far it's only downvotes, not close votes)

@jkerian I thought the downvote was a response to japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/17955/…

(If it means "it has been a few months since I last opened it.")

perhaps

Afternoon ^^

It is!

:o yay!

Is it a good one?

It's too damn hot

It's not supposed to be over 20-25c in Sweden. Never.

It's actually an okay temperature over here. It's been pretty hot the last 8 days or so

Oh, wow, that sounds nice. It has been over 30 here xD

I could go for some 20-25

Yeah same here.. It's unnatural

Seems this summer there's two modes: 30 or 15 degrees.

Hahaha, yup, yesterday it was 25-30 ish, now it's around 15 or so with clouds and a chance of rain... Why can't weather just act normal

Saw this chat in the list and thought it looked interesting :)

My japanese is nowhere near conversational level, mostly lacking practice in grammar / the way sentences are built up and just vocab

But I've recently got a Rosetta Stone language learning pack from a friend that wanted to throw it out, been practicing with that :P

And need to brush up on my hiragana/katakana occasionally, can't seem to get some of the re/mi/me hiragana (they have a sort of similar shape) into my head

Or does discussion of the Japanese language in this chat require a certain level of knowledge?

Arigatou gozaimasu ^^

@snailboat Are you a native speaker? Or did you learn it?

決めっけて？ I don't think I've seen this conjugation and/or contraction before, anyone care to help? Reading Death Note..

please give about 5 characters more before

@gibbon Heh... it might possibly get down to 25c in the middle of the night here...

been closer to 35 for most of the day

Wut :o

Airconditioning or are you used to that sort of temperatures?

@Earthliŋ それだけで :)

Oh... I usually keep in the AC set to 27-28 or so... but outside it's been in the 30s

@jkerian Coming over there in two weeks.. Looking forward to experiencing the east asian summer heat/humidity combo again :)

Yeah... the humidity is the evil part... practicing a back stroke during my morning walk/commute is convenient though...

@gibbon In that case, I'd guess it's 決めつけて... but I don't know if that makes sense in context

@Earthliŋ ah that might be right.. I swear there's just no telling whether the つ in this book are big or small..

Could be small while still meaning 決めつけて

oh.. that makes sense :|

Well thanks anyway

Have people here learned the language, through either going to japan or taking courses, or are most mods here native speakers?

@AsadaShino It's more accurate to say the people here are currently learning Japanese through either going to Japan or taking courses.

I see, good point

but none of our three mods are native speakers. Two of us live in Japan, and the other one is actually pretty good at understanding the language.

Or struggling by their own with course books but no teacher :(

@jkerian Nice

Yeah... I kinda wish I could flip my diamond "off" when I'm asking or answering questions, as sometimes I think people think it means I know what I'm talking about

I belong to the one gibbon is in :P I've followed a very basic 10 week (1hr a week) course in which we did hiragana, some grammar and sentence-building and certain words/indicating time. After that I got more interested, but I think I started off wrong, I went for RTK, but I should have firstly gotten the basics down more, instead of jumping into Kanji

It matters for comments... as most of my comments are me growling at people to behave themselves, but I can't see how it matters for Questions and Answers

@AsadaShino RTK was... interesting

@jkerian I don't think I've seen such comments from you...

I have gotten interested in japanese culture and want to go there on holiday, but I wanted to learn some Japanese, so I would not be just an ignorant tourist

@jkerian They have quite... Creative ways of helping remember the kanji :P But that will not help much if I can't use/pronounce them :P

@Earthliŋ I've switched over to being far more willing to just edit things... easier all the way around

Now that I look back on it, I don't really know what the point of RTK is, since kanji have different meanings depending on how they are used in a sentence and thus different pronunciation. But neither are discussed in the book

@snailboat It sorta helps that you don't actually sleep

I got a Rosetta Stone course from a friend and have started that, to see if it's anything that would help. So far I've learned a couple of things already, so it's been pretty helpful so far. And it shows romaji, hiragana and kanji, so I can switch between them to learn pronunciation and kanji writing of certain words

@snailboat I had that idea too, after about 100 characters it dawned on me I wasn't really doing anything to further my knowledge of the language itself, just reading and writing kanji and getting a meaning with them

I'm glad I realised it relatively soon xD

Yeah, I guess. Vocab does not come quite as 'easily' as grammar I think :P

I dunno... I found RTK fairly helpful, the only real modification I'd make is to line up his keywords with the meaning of the most common kunyomi reading (if available, of course)

It's just practice and a lot of practical 'experience' speaking/writing the language and conversing with others, to learn these words?

A relatively annoying defect of his system is that he was overly focused on onyomi (and kango in general) when writing the book

I mean, when learning a new language, you don't just go through a vocabulary and learn new words through that

Yeah. Which means I'd need to find people that either are also learning japanese or already speak it, to talk to in japanese, hoping they'll be lenient with my bad japanese xD

今私の日本語は... (limited?) です

As you can see xD

Not sure if that is even right :P

this is just freaking weird...

@jkerian What in the world ._.

The temptation to add a comment "Mom, is that you?" is quite strong.

=)

@jkerian Lol

hehe

it is...

@snailboat Nope, but I could guess them comfortably enough. :)

always learning

A-ha! It's kinda like flash cards.

I'm curious about their extended kana. For example, tse, fe, vyo, ye, we, etc.

nods

@snailboat Thanks for the tip ^^

Ah! I can't tell the difference between ji and zu of katakana on that site!

Ahh... I see. It's much clearer in another font.

I chose another font.

The third from the end.

I think the angle of the twin short strokes helps.

I changed to the first font already. :)

The third from the end. It's the 7th font.

Hehe!

zu

I'm adapted to the font!

Question is, did you read them correctly? =)

Ahh... Tonight they rerun Stargate. It's a movie that reminds us how cool a linguist could be when we encountered aliens. :)

@snailboat I've been reading old questions and flagging everything in my way

You don't mind, right?

Usually, I flag truly obsolete comments, but if there are too many comments to display (and you have to click "show 6 more comments"), I might try to get the number down to a reasonable level, flagging comments which I think nobody will want to read anyway...

Let me know if it's too much =)

I think it makes the site look a little cleaner and less confusing for newcomers

Can you not see who flagged?

I usually upvote when I go, so when I've used up all my votes for the day, I stop. That usually means a handful (bagful?) of flags...

It seems to be similar indeed, except for in Stargate, there are characters related to ancient Egyptian inscribed on the gates! -- That's why the protagonist of this movie is a linguist. :)

きれいね！

Cute =) How old is s/he

can you tell whether it's a male or a female snail?

oh, i see

is the distinction obvious for other species?

i see

so female snails don't have long eyelashes...

I just remembered the story of the chick sexers in my philosophy class =)

Well, chick sexers are apparently able to distinguish between male and female chicks without consciously being aware of any difference between them...

and this is used in some philosophical debate

unfortunately I don't remember the details

I was just wondering if you are a snail sexer

but I guess for helix aspersa that's not really difficult