@jkerian re the dictionaries in the data section: When I wrote it I was thinking the audience would mainly be programmers etc, so I was thinking it was logical to put all the "raw data" under a single section. I guess it could be merged with the dictionaries section though.
@Flaw I'm going to visit some Japanese professors that I don't know this week. I'm not quite sure what phrase I should use when I enter their office and when introduce myself... I know of the phrases but I don't really know if the situation makes any difference
@atlantiza Well, it's kind of something like this: ブリザド > ブリザラ > ブリザガ… Anyone have any inkling why the Final Fantasy series uses these naming scheme for spells?
I've seen some games use a similar naming scheme. But I'm not sure if it's just made up to "sound cool" or if there might be a reason to use katakana to indicate "levels of severity".
ah JLU and your ninja-downvoting. i think the only solution is to uninstall newt so i don't get notified every time my rep changes :P what i don't notice can't bother me
@LucasTizma That seems like a reasonable question for JLU. It will be unpopular with some and you may get downvotes, but it is on-topic imo and you're probably more likely to get an answer here than in gaming
@atlantiza I was about to give some advice I was given about Japanese job-interviews, but I don't think visiting a college professor needs to be anywhere near that formal
i guess it depends on the person, but in general i'd just say be polite/deferential, use です・ます, and don't worry about it too much
if you want to make it formal then you could start with お邪魔します、atlantizaと申しますが・・ state your purpose
@silvermaple I've used it in two sets of classes. I can't compare it with anything else (apart from Mirai - that book was a lot more fun!), but it was good enough that I was able to just study the book before class, and attending class felt like revision rather than learning, and I was able to miss a few classes and just study from the book.
Of course, you don't learn what 馬刺し is if you don't go to class. I can still remember the obaasan in my class asking what the Japanese for "horse meat" was so she won't order it by accident!
Non-nihongo culture question. When I was in Akihabara, my shiatsu masseur was apparently wearing a Qipao (旗袍), which is Chinese, not Japanese. Is that normal (i.e. a nihonjin otaku might have such a massage), or something that'd only happen in tourist traps with foreigners who wouldn't know the difference?
@AndrewGrimm well i don't know a thing about dress etiquette for shiatsu, but i do know that it's based on traditional Chinese medicine, so maybe the 旗袍 wasn't so out of place after all. i'm sure akiba has both kinds of places - i do remember that many of them have english-language billboards and according to a friend those ones tend to be rather tourist-trappy
@LucasTizma. I think it has less to do with language and more to do with naming. If you decide that you shall create a system where null<~ra<~ga<~gan for single target effect and null<~sa<~ja for multiple target effect, then it does not matter if there are external naming conventions because you define your own creations.
the English-language wikipedia page for horse-meat is full of info on various controversies. the Japanese-langauge page doesn't have any of that, but it does have 食べ方 >< i'll leave my opinion out of it
one (possibly) bad thing about my time in japan is that i became incapable of engaging in text chat without this exact set of smilies that's standardised across japanese phones
@ジョン What nihongo word would you use to indicate north America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand? In English we'd usually use the conveniently vague term "western countries", even though Sydney's to the East of Japan.
Japanese Language
Japanese Language