User:SuperMidget

Userpage of SuperMidget.

1. Japanese Language Tutorial - SuperMidget/Japanese

General Interests

• Asian Culture
  • Martial Arts
    Just to watch, I would probably suck at it
  • East Asian calligraphy
    Writing of Chinese Characters
  • China
    Where those fine characters came from
    • C-Pop
      Chinese Pop music
    • Go
      The board-game that no-one will ever fully understand
  • Japan
    Subject of my Major study
    • Japanese food
      Delicious, strange, interesting food
    • Karaoke
      Who says you can't like doing stuff you're not good at :-)
    • J-Pop
      Japanese Pop music, mainly interests me because it's Japanese
    • Dorama
      Japanese Soap Opera's, highly addictive!
    • Japanese architecture
      World's most beautiful aesthetics and inventive construction methods combined
      • Castles in Japan
        Check out those roofs!
        • Himeji Castle
          One good-looking example of a Japanese Castle
  • Korea
    Why didn't they use Hangeul in Japan!
• Technology
  Whatever can make us enjoy life more and save us energy
  • tweakers.net
    Blogging my ever increasing tech-wishlist
  • Artifical Intelligence
    How does human mind work??
  • Robotics
    To emulate humans
  • Computational linguistics
    Modeling languages
• Communication
  On which mankind depends for survival
  • Wikipedia
    Ever expand thy knowledge
  • Language
    On which mankind depends for communication
    • Etymology
      The history of words
    • National languages
      To which we are often limited when born
      • Dutch language
        My native language
      • English Language
        Language of world domination
      • Japanese language
        Language soon to be world dominating ;)
      • Chinese language
        Inspiring, eye-opening, tonguetwisting
      • Korean language
        Really symilar to Japanese actually
  • Japanese Sign Language
    It's so logical, everybody should learn it!
  • Short Hand
    Writing shorthand, I would have finished this page by long
• Philosophy
  Let's discuss our point of views?
• Hobby / Creativity
  Creating means making yourself bigger
  • Scale model
    To remind us
  • Drawing / Sketching
    Either when bored or overly concentrated
  • Piano
    Some things can't be drawn. Or sung
  • 3D modeling
    You have to look at things from all directions
  • Web design
    Express yourself. Help the world. It's all in here
    • Php
      Translating thoughts
    • Mysql
      And storing them
    • Flash
      Or present them in a fancy way
  • Programming
    More than Script
    • Visual Basic
      Less than Programming

Studying Japanese?

My interest in East Asia started with Japan. I've been fascinated by stories I hear about Japan, such as ones about their culture of Honor, Discipline and Politeness. Besides that, I'm also generally interested in Technology, and since alot of new stuff comes from Japan, this also got me attracted. This feeling about Japan was more or less in an unconscious state which I discovered when I got in contact with the Japanese Language. It's sometimes described as being "One of the most difficult languages" to master and I guess most people have never really understood what it would be like to use a language that consists of litterally thousands of characters, that all would have to be learned. I didn't understand either, but I wanted to. One day I found (sort of by accident) a site where the Japanese Language could be learned. It started out with simple words and phrases, and just for the fun of it, I tried learning it. Usually I would spend my time during Computerclass in highschool checking out the lessons on the site, and practicing some audio conversations from the site at home. I found out learning Japanese was a really satisfying hobby and it challenged me to learn more. Soon I started out studying Hiragana (one of the Japanese "basic" phonetic writings) so I could write down or read a few simple words.

Just as a note, I wasn't really wasting hours and hours each day on Japanese, just when I didn't want to do homework or I found some opportunity to learn it, I took it now and then.

During that time, I was also introduced to anime by a friend, which I also really liked. Because of the fact that it was Japanese and because I liked cartoons in general anyway. One of the first anime I watched was called Hikaru no Go, a story about a young boy who somehow ends up dedicating his whole life to the game of Go. The story was so compelling that me and my friend wanted to learn how to play this interesting game. Well, I got just as addicted to it as Japanese. Actually we both kinda learned Japanese together as well so we were heading the same direction.

Anyway, it was spring 2004, around March, when I had to think about picking a study for after Highschool. It was that time when I was informed about the fact that a study of Japanese existed in a Dutch University. Ofcourse I didn't wait long to join a day in college, and check out what it'd be like - my friend came along. When I came in the "lounge" kinda hall, there's was like people studying Japanese, playing Go and I felt really happy. We instantly joined the Go-players and felt totally at home. Okay it sounds strange, but in Highschool, there was virtually nobody interested in Japan, Go, or East Asian culture in the least.

As for studying, my only real other option was Informatics. Yes. Computers have been a great hobby of mine. But it has some negative side effects I guess, so I didn't want to study it as it would probably result in me wasting even more time on the computer. Japanese on the contrary was something completely new. Learning a language, a culture and seeing the world from the other side. It felt so refreshing - like waking up. Usually waking up is the worst thing that happens to me on a regular day, but this was different.

So I happily threw Informatics overboard, and signed up for Japanese, after joining a day of College as a guest/visitor.

Currently I still study Japanese - in the second year of Bachelor - with as much enjoyment as I've always done. Though needing to write papers and prepare for history exams is not so satisfying, I'm planning to continue learning Japanese until I get my Master degree.

//More to come.