Kaiji Translator Meltdown - -James "Sonickrazy" Bragg

[Bunny Tracks]

How hard is it to learn Japanese?

Extremely hard. Especially if you want to speak it fluently, and be able to read it, too.

Just for starters, Japanese has three different alphabets, and at least five different ways to just refer to yourself as "I". You might be able to grasp the basics, but holy shit, being both fluent, and literate in it is extremely difficult. It's right up there with Arabic as being one of the hardest languages to learn if your a native English speaker.

Frankly, I don't blame translators for going insane. Also, what's Kaiji even about? I've never heard of it before.

 

[Oh Shit I'm Sorry]

As someone who reads Kaiji I'd been following his blogpage for a while to scoop up new chapters when they dropped. Sometime late last year his old man got really sick and he made a post or two saying he was going to take time off to spend with his father and when he came back and said his old man died he was clearly shook up over it.

The weird thing is that the last thing posted before this meltdown was about his team getting DMCA'd and asking for advice on where to proceed from there and then a week later he comes back with this insane screed about how gambling is a sin and so is homosexuality.

I'd never seen any indication he was going to snap like this from his blogposts but apparently there were hints of it in his Discord

I get being shook up when a loved one dies but going completely off the deep end, rage-quitting the series you've worked on for years and ranting about perceived homosexuality (which you believe is a sin) is definitely not the ideal way to handle it. The question now is if he's going to keep digging the hole deeper or if this was just a stupid outburst caused by stress.

You can be religious and still enjoy translating a manga series ffs. If you didn't like a piece of work no longer, without going into a long-winded spiel about how "evil" a work is and that it's affecting your faith and getting into personal shit, just announce you're retiring and handing it off to someone else and move on. Just don't be a moralizing faggot. How often do fan translators and subbers go "woe is me, translating is pain", anyhow? Never thought to look into the fan-subbing scene to see what's up.

I haven't read Kaiji, so I have no fucking clue what he was going on about. Best I got from the times I glanced at it is it has something to do with gambling for your life and that no matter what the main character does, he can't get out of it. Right? How're you so shocked to learn about some heinous and ungodly shit that goes on in the gambling rings and the like?

Fukumuto does a ton of stuff (a lot of which FKMT translated) and covers multiple genres: Kaiji is a pure gambling manga (though the current arc is about trying to escape the country), Akagi (and its numerous spinoffs and side manga) pure Mahjong, Kurosawa a black comedy (which gets really dark at points), and stuff like Gin to Kin, Buraiden Gai and the short story Kokuhaku more drama-focused.

His complaints seem to be that Fukumoto doesn't punish his villains enough for their sins and/or humanizes them enough that it's possible to feel sympathy for them and that goes against his beliefs which seem to be that the world is black and white and evil must be punished. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense because Akagi (which is where Washizu came from) ended a couple years ago and all those things he's complaining about aren't anything new.

 

[No Exit]

I mean, if we remove the lol-esque religeous tones he has an interesting criticism that the series became torture porn. I don't really follow Kaiji (too much grim in my taste) so I don't know if he is right.

It's more a tale of staring into the abyss and having it stare back.

Kaiji goes from some nobody to a gambling addict looking for his next big game.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Japanese is a strange beast.

On one hand you can get a good understanding of their phonetic writing system, kana, in just a few days. They use syllables rather than individual sounds as the basis of their words, as a result of that they have an alphabet about twice the size of ours since it's a long list of combinations of consonants and vowels ie. there are separate characters for ka ki ku ke and ko. And you have to learn it twice over because they have two sets of symbols for the same sounds. Hiragana for native words, katakana for foreign ones. It's about equivalent to learning 4 new English alphabets, but ultimately it's just a matter of study. You learn the symbol and the sound it represents. And since each symbol has a single pronunciation, and they don't use long and short vowels or dipthongs, it's actually more simple phonetically than most other languages. That's the easy part.

But then you have to learn thousands of kanji which have no phonetic identifiers. You have to learn multiple readings of those thousands of kanji. You have to learn how kanji are intertwined with kana. You have to learn the bizarre syntax and the particle system they use to categorize words within sentences. It's basically an alien language if all you know is English. That's the bitch.

Extremely hard. Especially if you want to speak it fluently, and be able to read it, too.

Just for starters, Japanese has three different alphabets, and at least five different ways to just refer to yourself as "I". You might be able to grasp the basics, but holy shit, being both fluent, and literate in it is extremely difficult. It's right up there with Arabic as being one of the hardest languages to learn if your a native English speaker.

Frankly, I don't blame translators for going insane. Also, what's Kaiji even about? I've never heard of it before.

Bummer, it sounds like it's probably beyond my ability to learn, but never say never I guess.

 

[The Fool]

Bummer, it sounds like it's probably beyond my ability to learn, but never say never I guess.

It's really not, they're over-inflating it's quirks. Just do a lot of research on how to best study it (I don't feel like going into a huge paragraph here with a million links, but it's really easy to find resources on how to learn it properly, as in, not using shitty school textbooks). It's incremental like anything else and the more you learn, the more you can understand, so the more you can learn, and eventually you can talk to natives or fluent people online who can help you even more.
To start, I use this for kana: https://djtguide.neocities.org/kana/index.html
Just select one "row" at a time, unselecting everything you previously had selected, memorize/answer the questions until you think you've got it, then re-select every row you've done so far to drill yourself. You'll memorize kana within a few days if you're persistent. After that you can start reading children's stories (which are all kana) and start looking up the words to see what they mean.
For kanji, I dunno, I haven't studied them too much out of laziness, but they're not as bad as they sound. Like I said, they're basically words, and most kanji is just made up of other kanji, so you can pretty much figure out what a kanji means just by looking at the kanji it's made of. http://www.kanjidamage.com/ explains it well. Apparently people don't recommend this resource too much, but I think it's worth looking at. You can also use this https://jisho.org/ to look up kanji/words, and rikaichan to see kanji definitions/spelling on whatever web page you're viewing.
Some people insist you need to physically write down kana/kanji to learn them, but it's a waste of time, don't bother. You're going to be using your keyboard the whole time. Also get the Japanese IME pack for Windows so you can actually write Japanese on your computer.

 

[HumanHive]

There's being religious, and then there's being schizophrenic.

But yeah, I'm sure the Number of the Beast was put in the Book of Revelations juuuuust for you.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Checked the comments on the blogpost. He says he's going to make a video. This will be fun.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Ver archivo adjunto 1133217
There's being religious, and then there's being schizophrenic.

But yeah, I'm sure the Number of the Beast was put in the Book of Revelations juuuuust for you.

If he wants to disassociate himself from Kaiji, he should probably change his avatar, for starters. It's not helping his case.

 

[MoeChotto]

If he wants to disassociate himself from Kaiji, he should probably change his avatar, for starters. It's not helping his case.

chances of that happening are low. Tying your internet identity to FKMT for 8 years and suddenly stopping it because of God and Gay Urges... something tells me he won't drop the identity very soon.

On another note, I don't understand how he reconciles his hardcore christian stance with "Well maybe it's okay to be gay and Christian" as he seems to be doing on twitter. If the Bible says it's bad, it's the same kind of bad as the gambling and seediness of Kaiji.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

On another note, I don't understand how he reconciles his hardcore christian stance with "Well maybe it's okay to be gay and Christian" as he seems to be doing on twitter. If the Bible says it's bad, it's the same kind of bad as the gambling and seediness of Kaiji.

He acts like a born-again Christian fundie in all honesty, and social media's not helping him.

FWIW from a Christian, although it's taught homosexuality is a sin, it's the act that's the sin--but sexual acts in general outside of marriage are sinful according to the Bible, and in Christ's teachings. Sexuality itself is not a sin, that's a universal human trait, so therefore, being attracted to the same sex isn't a sin. But when it comes to following Christ, gays are asked to make a vow of celibacy, which is difficult for a lot of people (both gay and straight, in all honesty) to take up without a heaping of self-discipline. Note that the married apostles basically had to take up celibacy when they were called by Christ to follow him, and especially when they were called to go out to preach to the people after his ascension, so it's not unique to just the gays.

Dude should still just get off the Internet for a while for some soul-searching. It'll do his mental state and spirituality better than whining about it over social media, but it doesn't look like he'll do that. His loss, our gain.

 

[Safir]

Extremely hard. Especially if you want to speak it fluently, and be able to read it, too.

Just for starters, Japanese has three different alphabets, and at least five different ways to just refer to yourself as "I". You might be able to grasp the basics, but holy shit, being both fluent, and literate in it is extremely difficult. It's right up there with Arabic as being one of the hardest languages to learn if your a native English speaker.

lolwhat

I just wanna highlight this:

It's basically an alien language if all you know is English.

EVERYTHING is basically an alien language if you only know one, because you don't yet know how languages work, so the intricacies of your own look like normal order of business and you end up writing creepypasta like the above. Is there a difference between "goodbye, hope to see you soon" and "fuck off forever and die in a ditch"? This is politeness, too.

edited to add:
"aww, it uses freaky characters so I can't know how to spell a heard word or to read a written word".
I hear this about English a lot, from people who only speak Russian. THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM THAT EXISTS FOR NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS, you realize it as soon as you make the bare minimum effort to start learning, it's a bullshit weaselly excuse to never even start. If you don't know the word, you don't know the word; look that bitch up. If it's written, look it up in a dictionary, if it's spoken and your gaijin ear somehow correctly identified the sounds (fat chance), look up its hiragana spelling in a dictionary.

Bummer, it sounds like it's probably beyond my ability to learn, but never say never I guess.

Go to a language learning site for a language you know and look at the questions people ask. "But why is it the wrong word here, it's in the dictionary; but why is it rude", why, why, why, it never ends. Then the native speakers twist their brains inventing an explanation. It's a bit like explaining to that one reddit guy why he shouldn't have tried establishing masturbation rules with a roommate on a work trip. Rules are for lolcows.

Japanese is easy, because, despite looking wacky, it's suitable to the kind of media and learning infrastructure an amateur learner has access to.

First up, a warning: do not fall for anything "kanji-free, easy for beginners, tee hee". You're learning a new language wholesale, not a writing system for a spoken language you already know.

Based grammar guide. The guy is writing a more directed quickstart guide, but it's still in progress. Also exists as a crappy (doesn't preserve position on page) free app. Anyway, it tells you to learn the alphabets first, so:

Free alphabet app: Hiragana Cards. Actually supports both alphabets. This one makes you choose the correct character out of a set of 4, so use elimination to your advantage, brute-force it and git gud, then proceed to do harder quizzes in Kanji Study (below). Also download and fill in some trace sheets (I attached the ones I use). Mind the stroke order.

Free kanji app: Kanji Tree. Try learning to recognize the first 3 sets (440 characters), it should take you about a week to remember them all and build up a healthy shield against doomsayers. Inb4 "what about writing" - don't worry about writing kanji yet if your goal is to understand written Japanese and maybe ask a seller a question. Writing is good practice to solidify the characters in memory and get a better idea of how they're constructed, but the stroke order is a lot of overhead for nothing until you know the words to use them in.

Good kanji / dictionary / alphabet app: Kanji Study. No ads, free beginner demo version, no time limit, one-time payment. The dev is good, plz no pirate. This one makes you choose the correct character out of a set of 8 and is less suitable for brute-force learning than Hiragana Cards.

Unsupported casual language learning app: Memrise. Feeds you words and phrases to get a feel for the language. Do not pay for it, it's unsupported. Get a patched apk. Install a userscript for the web version or download an older modded apk to force typing tests only.

Shitty word app: Language Drops. Feeds you words 11 minutes per day for free and demands a horseshit payment afterward. Do not pay. AFAIK it needs root access to patch it, so if you don't have root (I don't, I have a rare phone with an expensive screen that I'm afraid to brick), 11 minutes is enough. Set it to use Kanji in the options. Screenshot your daily words (list of all seen words is paywalled).

Meh grammar app: Bunpo. Feeds you words and grammar, no ads, only the test schedule is paywalled.

The community: lots of weebs, lots of weeb media. Secondhand manga is extremely cheap on yahoo auctions ($1 per volume) and has an insanely high story/effort ratio. Start with something you haven't read. It only takes the equivalent of one 300-page novel to go from decrypting hieroglyphics to occasionally looking up unfamiliar words.

Use a mail forwarder to deal with xenophobic japs and consolidate packages. The latter is useful if your country has a high non-taxable threshold, or a low threshold and a minimum fee (with a medium threshold, ensure that the service allows makes you fill in the customs form on your own, hur hur hur).

 

[Tism the Return]

Jesus this guy went off the deep end. He reads like if early Chris and mr.Enter combined their respective autismos and reviewed FKMT spin-offs, since his grievances are almost exclusively there (Tonegawa gets shit on during Kaiji, gets a spin-off before he's shat on and same pattern with Washizu, blah blah).

 

[XYZpdq]

another big hurdle about learning serious levels of Japanese is as you learn the vocabulary and stuff you start to realize how much of Japanese in practice is built around weirdly vague statements in order to avoid directly addressing anything because rude
sorta like that star trek about "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!" where you may understand the words but the point of that string of words is hard to figure out

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

EVERYTHING is basically an alien language if you only know one, because you don't yet know how languages work, so the intricacies of your own look like normal order of business and you end up writing creepypasta like the above. Is there a difference between "goodbye, hope to see you soon" and "fuck off forever and die in a ditch"? This is politeness, too.

I find the linguistic approach helpful in learning foreign languages. Learn what each part of the sentence is doing in that instance. In English class in school we learned diagramming sentences, that shit is just as helpful for any foreign language. And Japanese isn't too bad since it marks everything with particles and has predictable word order.

To translate something, all you need to do is be able to read it (unless there's a serious spoken component which isn't subtitled). And a bit of Japanese instruction and plenty of immersion (anime, J-music) lets you be able to do so. The only hassle is the kanji which really is memorization, although the way the kanji are formed via the radicals is helpful in learning them.

In high school and college I studied Spanish, French, and Japanese, and I can honestly say Japanese isn't much worse but for the kanji. It's all about immersion.

Japanese is easy, because, despite looking wacky, it's suitable to the kind of media and learning infrastructure an amateur learner has access to.

Immersion really helps when learning a language, and most people who learn Japanese are weebs so they already have plenty of Japanese-language content to be immersed in.

 

[Calling]

Of all the shit that could come from the Kaiji fandom, I did not expect this.

I feel kinda bad for him honestly, grief is tough. He's pretty wacky, but he gets some sympathy.