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Hello everybody

Discussion in 'The Welcome Lounge' started by SHACH, Sep 20, 2015.

  1. SHACH

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    Hi, I'm SHACH, that's basically my intials muddled up, I'm 17, a tomboy but still identifying as female, and I'm sort of confused about my sexuality. I won't go into detail on that because I have another post for it, but that's basically why I joined the forum. My main interests are guitar, Japanese rock music (specific right?), video games and tennis. When I was younger I wanted to be a writer but now I want to be a guitarist, though my mother thinks I'm too smart for that. I live only with my mother because my dad died when I was a little kid. Most of the time you'll find me studying Japanese, playing guitar, listening to music with great concentration, playing an RPG or singing. My favourite foods are sushi and beef wellington, my favourite colour is blue, my favourite band is called Scandal, my favourite song is called Shunkan Sentimental, blah blah blah. I live in England and I love tea :lol:

    Ask me anything you want to know about me. Seriously just ask anything it'll probably be fun.
     
  2. loveislove01

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    Welcome to EC Shach~

    Ah! Shunkan sentimental is a great song. I'm actually quite into Japanese rock myself, just, the heavier side, sometimes bordering on metal/ visual kei.
    How long have you been studying Japanese? That sounds so much fun. I've always wanted to learn.
    Do you write songs? I love music myself, and you seem very interesting. I'd love to be your friend if that's not a bit straightforward~

    Everyone's pretty friendly here, so yeah :slight_smile:
    Welcome
     
  3. MyMoribundMask

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    Hello there, SHACH!
    Welcome to EC. :slight_smile:
    Also, I like sushi too. :icon_bigg
     
  4. TheSeeker

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    Welcome aboard, we love you already!
     
  5. SHACH

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    You're all so freindly! Love that.

    Hey, loveislove. I'll give you a list of my fav bands and see if we have any in common: Scandal, Number Girl, UVERworld, Tokyo Jihen, One Ok Rock and The Oral Cigarettes are my top few. In terms of metal and visual kei the only ones I've really listened to are Nightmare and Maximum the Hormone, both because of Death Note.

    In reply to your questions, I've been studying Japanese for about 2 years now, I can give you some advice on getting into that if you want. I mostly teach myself, you see. I took an AS exam in Japanese last year and got an A (AS are the qualifications you take in England at age 16, they are high level and were not compulsory until recently. They are made to prepare you for university). I do write songs. Me and my friend have been writing lyrics since we were 13 and I've recently started writing guitar riffs etc. but I'm not yet happy with how I've been trying to string all those bits together into a proper song! And you aren't too straightforward, I like that you just jumped to it; let's be friends!
     
  6. justin88

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    Welcome to EC! :slight_smile:
     
  7. heyKittie

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    Welcome to EC, I'm heyKittie! I see we have some stuff in common, like video games, music, and interest in Japanese things. Q: What's your favorite RPG, and how hard is it to study japanese??
     
  8. SHACH

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    Hello heyKittie,

    My favourite RPG is an oldie, Fallout 1. I was sort of put off by the turn based combat at first, but started to enjoy the strategy in it eventually. My favourite thing about it is the characters, the interactions etc. I love how odd and interesting exploring the world is and I love how I won the game by convincing the creator of the mutants that he was a failure and that he might as well blow up his whole project now and he did. All from a game from the 90s, can't beat it.The RPG I'm currently playing is Skyrim, since I only just started catching up on the past generations of games when I bought an old xbox 360 recently (I much prefer PC, but since I can't even afford a current-gen console, a gaming pc seems out of the question). I play as an archer. I usually play games as some sort of sneaky sniper-type, in fallout 1 I combined that with a diplomat.

    How hard is studying Japanese.... in terms of how I feel about it, I find it much mre enjoyable thn anything else I've ever studied and so I never really think of it as hard. This is because I only do things with Japanese that I enjoy, and I dedicate time to them. I study grammar and the writing system obviously but that takes up a tiny amount of my time. I spend most of my time doing the following things with my Japanese (and yes, this was right from the get go, I do not beleive you must understand first to enjoy a langauge; you understand through enjoyment): watching Japanese TV (without subtitles), listening to Japanese podcasts, listening to Japanese songs, reading Japanese manga/blogs etc. To process all this fun I'm having, I investigate what I want to know from these TV shows/podcasts/songs etc. E.g. I will look up random words that keep appearing in a TV show, write them down and make flashcards; I will translate the lyrics to a song because I am interested in the story behind the emotion it makes me feel etc. Therefore, even though some of these things may be hard, I am only doing them of my own desire, so the difficulty seems irrelevant. However, such an approach only works with time and so when I say I spend most of my study time on leisure in Japanese, you must also understand that that means about 4 hours a day. Buuut, it's leisure, because I want to do it, and that's what makes the method effective. That's how you should approach learning anything, and its also why I hate formalised education, but let's not go on about that.

    In terms of the objective difficulty of the mechanics of the langauge... Well there are fewer words that sound similar to English than French or other romace or germanic languages (you would think there would be none, but they borrow a lot of words for more modern things from English) and a new way of writing and reading to be learnt. I would say, the reading is infuriating if you read novels but perfectly fine if you read manga. The writing is time-consuming but fine. The speaking is very easy, it has very regular unchanging sounds, and the basic grammar is very regular. There's much less irrational variation and changing verbs than in European languages (for example, why do we say I have, you have but he has? - such an odd variation wouldn't happen in Japanese). And the listening iiiis fine.

    Maybe that was too much... Another thing you should know about me is that I always write too much in response to questions. In exam papers I always run out of lines.
     
  9. beanboy

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    Hi SHACH! Welcome to EC! I'm also really into music, although I prefer the American side of rock (or sometimes the German) and I play the drums. We could be in a band, lol.
     
  10. loveislove01

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    Awesome! I love One Ok Rock, they're One Of my favorites! And scandal is nice too, if I'm in the mood for it. Same with UverWorld, though I really love "Core Pride" (blue exorcist theme song) I also like Eri Kitamura, she is classified as pop according to iTunes, but she leans more towards visual kei in my opinion.

    Oh! Yes! I would love to learn Japanese. My girlfriend and I are planning to create a club at our high school next year where we all learn Japanese, but I don't know how that's going to work out. I've always wanted to learn though! I'm currently learning Italian, I speak fluent (ish) Hindi, and English, of course. Japanese has always been high on the list of languages I want to learn, but, most schools don't offer it. I would enjoy learning by myself, but I don't know how to start. If you have tips, I would love that.

    You write songs too? That's amazing. I do myself, I'm very proficient at the piano/ keyboard. Currently I just use GarageBand during my music period, and make a song almost every day. I go back to it later to edit things, and they are usually pretty cool. I've never been great at writing lyrics though. I really want to, but I'm not a very poetic person. I appreciate nice lyrics, a lot.. Ah, I wish I could write that well. Ten-page research papers, narrative stories, summaries, no problem. But when it comes to songwriting or poetry of any sort, I just can't.

    I started guitar lessons but sorta gave up. I hope I pick it up later on. How long have you been playing? Do you do any other instruments? I sing, and play piano. Piano, seven years. I'm quite good at that, but the guitar is so different. I can't get the hang of it. I admire nice electric guitar. Ah, I realize I wrote quite a bit :slight_smile: oh, that's good! I'll send you a request.
     
  11. blueshadedsoul

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    Hi & welcome! Hope you like it here :grin:
     
  12. YuriBunny

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    Welcome! I'm learning Japanese too! Pleased to meet you! ^.^
     
  13. Zen fix

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    Hi SCHACH. Welcome. I lived in Japan for almost three years. Unfortunately my use of the language was garbage as I was stationed with the US Air Force and we all spoke English. Just things like thank you, one beer and how much?. I loved it there though and really want to go back someday.

    You said ask you anything so here's my question. You said you like tea. How do you feel about coffee?
     
  14. SHACH

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    Wow, loveislove, you sound like a much better songwriter than me. But yeah lyrics are hard, I think we only got decent at them by just blasting them out. We would write lyrics every day and test them on each other, weave them together as a team and then show them to our other friends and eventually worked out what sounded decent. My lyrics are so rusty now that we've stopped doing that for a while (it's sort of hard to keep up now we go to different schools and he works so much). I play a bit of violin and keyboard. Violin I played for quite a while but I wasn't really that into it, keyboard I dabbled, but I really actually wanted to take piano lessons but my school didn't have a teacher (I don't know if it's the same in USA, but poorer kids over here can get free lessons through teachers that come to schools and use the school's funding - basically I couldn't afford a private teacher). Oh, and the ukulele but I never feel that counts because it takes like 1 week to learn.

    Anyway, I've been playing 2-3 years. I mean for one year while we were in the height of our lyric-making I would find some chords to strum to the songs on an acoustic, but it's only like the last two where I've been really practiced a lot to learn lead guitar techniques and learn some rock stuff since that's what I'm into. Sort of pathetically short amount of time to most music people of my age but I practice a lot!

    Electric guitars come in all sorts of great designs don't they! I actually made an electric guitar as a extra-curricular type project at school. It's like a strat but with a pointier headstock and I painted it black with orange spikes coming in from around the edge. It's badass.

    Hi Zen fix. Wow, you lived in Japan? That's awesome. Also, you're in the airforce, that's a really big job, I'm impressed. What made you want to be in the airforce? In response to your question (I love it btw): Yes I love coffee, but I don't drink it often because the extra strength is much more of a shock to the system than tea and if I'm not in the right coffee mood it just sort of gives me a headache and then makes me sleepy. There are tmes I drank so much coffee I got used to it (mostly while in Europe, because nowhere outside the British isles does proper british tea!), but it's sort of bad for you, so a went back to mostly tea.
     
  15. Zen fix

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    Not in the AF anymore that was years ago. There were quite a few brits in there with us. I had one friend who was married to a coworker, they had met when he was stationed in the UK. They later split but she must have liked the AF because then she joined and has been in for quite awhile now.
     
  16. SHACH

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    What did you think of the Brits (don't be afraid to offend me, if I disagree I will simply tell you why)? Over here we are pretty much bombarded with American culture so we develop loads of ideas about America but I imagine (well I pretty much know) there is less exposure to British culture in America, so I'm wondering what things you notice about us when you actually meet us in real life.
     
  17. Reciprocal

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    Welcome to EC, fellow Briton!
     
  18. SHACH

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    Hello recipricol! Into maths are we? I was never that into maths but I like Physics so I did Maths AS Level last year; I quite liked the course, I enjoyed the algebra stuff in the core modules, but there was just a lot of it and it was hard so I failed and had to drop it despite getting an A at GCSE. Missing maths a bit right now, but knowing I couldn't have continued it! :frowning2:
     
  19. happydavid

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  20. SHACH

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    Hi happydavid, love your name. I'm happySHACH.