|
Static Rook posted:I have an Android phone. There's a couple lovely free mahjong apps but nothing good. I'm pretty much reduced to playing those creepy arcade mahjong MAME games and skipping the HAWT HAWT early 90's anime nudity. You're welcome. It's in Japanese but if you understand the rules then it shouldn't be a problem. It's my go to mahjong app for my android phone. Also it says you have to login to play but that's a lie. I haven't even made an account yet and I can still play.
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2012 00:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 03:55 |
|
|
I couldn't find a video version featuring all the characters, but here's a little something from Taiko no Tatsujin Portable DX for PSP: Edit: Cropped out the game part. 
Armor-Piercing fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jun 11, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2012 02:25
|
|
|
Policenaut posted:If you're searching "Mahjong" you've already made the worst mistake. Go copy/paste the Chinese characters for Mahjong then search, you'll find all the hot hot mahjong action you can handle. Some of the games are even in English! You mean 麻雀. I agree because mahjongg turns up mostly mahjongg solitaire. edit: By the way, if you learned the Chinese rules to the game, forget them because the Japanese rules are all different. Well not "all" different but different to the point where all the strategies you've learned are wrong.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2012 02:58
|
|
|
Armor-Piercing posted:I couldn't find a video version featuring all the characters, but here's a little something from Taiko no Tatsujin Portable DX [/timg] Oh god Majima's face here is priceless 
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2012 04:17
|
|
|
Zettace posted:https://play.google.com/store/apps/...19zb2xvbWoiXQ.. Awesome. I learned Riichi rules first, so those feel the most natural. Now if I could just support my real life gambling habit by beating up Street Punks. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2012 16:29
|
|
|
This probably came up in the old thread, I only caught the tail end of it, but it is neat enough to post up here. Kabukicho on Google Street View. I lost myself for a while wandering around and comparing the real district against Kamurocho.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2012 22:12
|
|
|
Rebel Blob posted:This probably came up in the old thread, I only caught the tail end of it, but it is neat enough to post up here. My parents wandered in there by mistake once at night when they were in Tokyo. A suspicious looking guy walked by and deliberately hit my mom's shoulder, they took that as a sign that they were somewhere they shouldn't be. edit: I accidentally walked into that place's equivalent in Sapporo once (where I presume that part of 5 takes place). It doesn't gradually ease into it or anything, just suddenly in the space of a block you go from being completely surrounded by ordinary Japanese shops to being surrounded by porn shops and hostess clubs. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jun 12, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2012 22:15
|
|
|
So Sega of Japan's been releasing a bunch of full resolution screens of Yakuza 5's previously released media every so often. Here's Kiryu and now today here's Saejima.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2012 06:44
|
|
|
That's the same Saejima, right? He looks younger. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2012 07:05
|
|
|
Yeah, they really changed his face for some reason.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2012 07:06
|
|
|
Sindai posted:Yeah, they really changed his face for some reason.  I don't think his face is that different. His eyes look a little less sunken and bloodshot, his cheeks are less gaunt, and his stubble/pores have higher-res textures. I mean, I know people in real whose faces changed even more than that over a year or two because they started taking care of themselves better. I'd be shocked if he did look the same because of how much his character changed over the course of 4.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2012 15:11
|
|
|
MacGyvers_Mullet posted:
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2012 15:25
|
|
|
My toddler just (accidentally) broke my Dead Souls disk. I wasn't even done with the story yet.  Hope prices fall soon.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 18:10
|
|
|
Rebel Blob posted:This probably came up in the old thread, I only caught the tail end of it, but it is neat enough to post up here. There's a kinda cool video someone put up on Youtube showing off all the real-life places that look just like the games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5kNS5EZ5ok&feature=my_liked_videos&list=LLVBLkw76MjT15LahSZGi5vw Kabukicho's pretty safe at any time of day, too. Japan's got nothing even close to equivalent to the old Hell's Kitchen or anything. It's not like people mug you or pick fights, you're just more likely to get the high pressure treatment from barkers trying to rope you into visiting a hostess club or strip joint with a ridiculous cover charge.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 20:00
|
|
|
How easy is it to learn to understand Japanese? I ask because I can't wait nearly 2 years for Yakuza 5 . I binged through 1-4 a couple weeks back. I'd already played through 4 before and found that interesting enough as an introduction to the series, so I tracked down the other games and basically hibernated for a couple weeks. I think 1 was really difficult to play through, mainly because the gameplay itself is really not there and the script/localisation/voice acting is pretty garbage. I'd recommend that anyone interested in playing through the series just straight up skip that game and read through/watch a decent synopsis. Although it'd be interesting if someone has done a Japanese language replacement for the English version. But yeah, after playing through the other 3 games, I found I was occasionally not even looking at the subtitles because there were a ton of phrases that I just understood because of hearing them in context a lot. There seems to be quite a few of these sorts of phrases in the language, and reading the subtitles as certain phrases were used was interesting because of the different ways they were translated. Sometimes there was a bit of over-translation, liberties taken with the script, etc. It's like there was this whole other layer to the games that was super interesting aside from the game itself. I generally think the English subs are quite well written, and interestingly it does that slang laden style when translating characters with the Kansai accent, which I see a lot with Japanese subs. Our own Zar-gani does it with Gamecenter CX subs. Is it weird that I love stuff like Yakuza but 95% of JRPGs just make me groan? I'd like to see more games of this style come out of Japan.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 20:47
|
|
|
cat doter posted:How easy is it to learn to understand Japanese? I ask because I can't wait nearly 2 years for Yakuza 5 Now the writing system though, that is an absolute bitch. edit: I also want to see more games like this get out of Japan. There are others kind of like it over there but are of much lower quality and don't usually get localized. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jun 14, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 20:49
|
|
|
In fairness, you're not a TRUE Yakuza fan unless you've gone through a two year wait for a Yakuza localization. It's a rite of passage. It's like putting your hands together before you team up to take on corruption in the police force. This stuff's important. Hell, I'm STILL waiting for Kenzan. If Kiryu can put in 10 years, then so can I.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 20:51
|
|
|
Samurai Sanders posted:Not as hard as you've heard I bet. It's a fairly middle of the road language in most respects. Yeah I've some acquaintances that have attempted Kanji and basically given up. I guess any calligraphy heavy writing system is really difficult to learn. I'd rather just learn how to understand it though, maybe not speak it (at least not fluently) or bother with writing it. Isn't there another writing system that most Japanese people understand as well? Like, written Japanese with the English alphabet? Romanji or something? Or is that mainly for the benefit of people like me?
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 20:52
|
|
|
cat doter posted:Yeah I've some acquaintances that have attempted Kanji and basically given up. I guess any calligraphy heavy writing system is really difficult to learn. I'd rather just learn how to understand it though, maybe not speak it (at least not fluently) or bother with writing it. edit: The first game I played entirely in Japanese (and understood it to some extent) was Shenmue, that was during my second year of college Japanese, and I'd like to say that I picked up the language more quickly than most. Shenmue is a fairly similar game to Yakuza language-wise, but with two differences: it has a "kid mode" that uses fewer kanji, and much more of the characters are voice acted. Oh and people aren't using ridiculous yakuza slang. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jun 14, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 20:55
|
|
|
Samurai Sanders posted:Japanese is really written using a combination of four sets of characters, kanji (chinese characters), two kinds of kana (phonetic symbols derived from kanji), and as you say, Roman characters. Roman characters are used the least of those four though, there's no way you could expect to read very much only knowing that, or just that and kana either really. Remember that most of the important quest descriptions and stuff in Yakuza games is delivered only in text though, as most NPCs don't have voice actors. Oh yeah, good point. Guess I'll just have to wait then. I could probably teach myself the language to a certain degree, but I doubt I'd get far enough to start reading it with any degree of accuracy. Hell, I'm a musician and I don't even bother with sheet music. Laziness is a hell of a thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 20:59
|
|
|
Yeah. The kanji are definitely what push these games over the edge for me. Like in Kenzan I can understand most of the spoken language just fine, but as soon as it becomes text only...yeah. Though this is me who has been taking Japanese for something like 5 years and is still fairly terrible at it, so it's probably at least partially my bad.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 21:16
|
|
|
Learning enough to understand the game by the time it's out is my goal. There's a whole half a year to do it, so it should be a piece of cake!
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 21:50
|
|
|
cat doter posted:But yeah, after playing through the other 3 games, I found I was occasionally not even looking at the subtitles because there were a ton of phrases that I just understood because of hearing them in context a lot. There seems to be quite a few of these sorts of phrases in the language, and reading the subtitles as certain phrases were used was interesting because of the different ways they were translated. Sometimes there was a bit of over-translation, liberties taken with the script, etc. It's like there was this whole other layer to the games that was super interesting aside from the game itself. I just want to point out that it's a good thing when set phrases in Japanese are translated into English in various ways, since that's the way English is. The right expression depends more or less on context in a given language depending on the situation. Like, if you literally translate はい or そうか or 分かった exactly the same way every time it's going to sound really strange. Sometimes you even want to cut lines if you can get away with it because saying anything at all would be really unnatural in English. For an example, see the fact that Kiryuu constantly repeats statements made by other people as confirmation. Solid Snake and other Japanese game heroes do this too. It's weird and kind of annoying in English, but natural in Japanese. The Yakuza localization team does a great job with Majima, and his lines are probably the most changed. He uses a lot of colorful expressions that wouldn't sound right to us and a lot of his character comes through in the way he says something (accent, verb forms, etc) rather than the actual words he uses. EDIT: Yeah, it's really only doable if there's no voice acting, and even then probably requires more reworking the code than it's worth. vvvvvvvvvv Egomaniac fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Jun 14, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 23:23
|
|
|
Yeah, translation is, among other things, making an expression that sounds natural to speakers of one language into an expression that sounds natural to speakers of another language. If the source phrase is not context dependent but the result phrase is, or vice versa, then that kind of variation should happen. However, a possibly unresolvable problem is if someone says something when the natural thing to say is NOTHING in the other language. People won't tolerate something just not being translated, or a translated phrase being stuck in when the character didn't say anything in the source language. That's the problem with "metal gear?!?"
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2012 23:26
|
|
|
Check it out, full resolution shots of Akiyama and Haruka I can almost guarantee Haruka will kick him in the balls at some point. Like it's just a feeling.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2012 04:36
|
|
|
Samurai Sanders posted:I haven't been there but I'm told its a perfectly normal place during the day, as soon as the sun goes down it turns into the red light district we all know. Susukino (I assume that's where you're talking about) isn't really that bad. Like, none of the Nigerian crime syndicates trying to pull you into stores that you hear about or anything like that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2012 04:48
|
|
|
Policenaut posted:Check it out, full resolution shots of Akiyama and Haruka That is remarkably not even as close to as sexualized as I was worried they were going to take Haruka. I'm actually really impressed by that; I figured the pop idol plotline would've been an excuse to try and tart her up, but she just looks like good old Haruka.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2012 04:48
|
|
|
Samurai Sanders posted:Not as hard as you've heard I bet. It's a fairly middle of the road language in most respects. Yeah, pretty much this. I actually find it easier to understand spoken Japanese than spoken German, even though I technically know a lot more German than I do Japanese.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2012 04:53
|
|
|
Samurai Sanders posted:Not as hard as you've heard I bet. It's a fairly middle of the road language in most respects. How do you figure that? It has very little in common with English with regard to syllabification, grammar, or vocabulary, so it's not particularly easy for an English speaker even without its writing system. Anyway if this is the first thing you try to read that's not out of a textbook you probably won't understand what the hell anyone is saying since it's not textbook Japanese.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2012 04:58
|
|
|
RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:How do you figure that? It has very little in common with English with regard to syllabification, grammar, or vocabulary, so it's not particularly easy for an English speaker even without its writing system. It's not polysynthetic, it's not fusional, it has medium levels of agglutination, it has a common five vowel system, it has a fairly stable SOV word order (minus topicalization), verbs are inflected with suffixes for tense and aspect, objects and genitives are clearly marked... I'll know more after I take advanced Japanese syntax next semester. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Jun 15, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2012 05:10
|
|
|
RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:How do you figure that? It has very little in common with English with regard to syllabification, grammar, or vocabulary, so it's not particularly easy for an English speaker even without its writing system. Japanese has pretty rigid rules for grammar that follow a logical pattern and are easy to memorize. All the possible verb and adjective forms can fit on a single page and shouldn't take more than a few hours to get down. Compare that to when I took German in high school and we needed multiple supplementary books that were just conjugation tables for each verb, one by one. There are also no tones or anything to worry about - something that makes Vietnamese a much harder language to learn even though it uses Roman letters. However, vocabulary can be a sticking point, and not just because of kanji. As you say, most words don't look or sound similar to English, so it's pretty much straight memorization or visual association and that will probably be your slowest point of progress. Vocabulary is certainly still my weakest point.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2012 05:10
|
|
|
I just watched the Yakuza movie, its scenes could be divided up into two categories, one of them good, one of them bad: scenes with Majima in them were good. Kinda like Batman movies and the Joker. Miike only knows how to direct completely batshit insane characters well anyway. edit: I particularly liked a shot where Majima was peeking around a corner at Kiyru menacingly, except he was doing it with his bad eye. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jun 16, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2012 20:59
|
|
|
Samurai Sanders posted:I didn't say "like English", I said "middle of the road", though they both are.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2012 04:03
|
|
|
In spite of myself I'm getting into the story of Kurohyoh 2. It's real cheesy and cliched but it's still kind of cool if you can get over the "friendship is magic" stuff and Tatsuya being kinda annoying.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2012 04:08
|
|
|
RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Languages are only easy or hard relative to your own native language -- a native English speaker has a much easier time learning Spanish than Korean, but the opposite would be true for a native Japanese speaker. Any discussion of the difficulty of a language divorced from the reference point of what language(s) you already know is pointless. That's partly true, but some of the things Sanders and I were talking about are objective measurements. Besides, since this is an English language forum I'd say it's a given that we're comparing it to English. Also, most Japanese have an easier time with Spanish than with Korean. Not as easy as English speakers do because of the shared vocabulary, but the syllables of Spanish are very close to those of Japanese while Korean is pretty much completely disconnected from all three.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2012 04:09
|
|
|
RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Languages are only easy or hard relative to your own native language -- a native English speaker has a much easier time learning Spanish than Korean, but the opposite would be true for a native Japanese speaker. Any discussion of the difficulty of a language divorced from the reference point of what language(s) you already know is pointless. edit: syntax-wise I mean. Either way English speakers shouldn't have much problem with Japanese phonology, but the reverse is definitely not true. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Jun 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2012 04:09
|
|
|
Egomaniac posted:That's partly true, but some of the things Sanders and I were talking about are objective measurements. Besides, since this is an English language forum I'd say it's a given that we're comparing it to English. Here's professor Jay Rubin: quote:The US government itself knows just how difficult Japanese is. When the government wants to teach its employees Class One (i.e., easy) languages such as French and Spanish, it puts them through twenty-five weeks of concentrated study at thirty hours per week, for a total of 750 hours, at the end of which students have attained what is called "Limited Working Proficiency." In reading, this means:
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2012 04:12
|
|
|
None of that contradicts anything I said. They're also almost certainly including written proficiency, which we've already said should be set aside. Kanji is a whole other ball game.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2012 04:15
|
|
|
RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Here's professor Jay Rubin:
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2012 04:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 03:55 |
|
|
Samurai Sanders posted:He's talking about reading, we're not talking about reading. I said in the first post on this subject that Japanese writing system is completely bonkers. There is absolutely no disputing that. OK, man, but the huge differences in vocabulary (like 60% of English words are at some point from Latin and many mean just the same thing in other European languages; the same dynamic is going on with languages influenced by Classical Chinese), grammar, and syllabification are still there, as well the thinking about tense and aspect, agglutinative verbs, particles and a whole host of things that are totally alien to Western European languages. None of these things are insurmountable but to claim they're no big deal is bizarre. Like, you thought the subjunctive voice in Spanish was weird? At least it has (slightly archaic) analogues in English. What does English have that resembles the causative passive?
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2012 04:20
|
|