Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

I just wanted to take a moment to share a document with those who are interested in learning Japanese. This is a book that I translated from Romanian to English about the Japanese language a few years ago. It's called: "Japoneza in 30 de zile" (Japanese in 30 Days) by Florin Vasiliu and Stefan Benea. I've also added some corrections and my own personal notes in as well (mostly towards the bottom of the document). There's also a second smaller text file called "Essential Japanese verbs" that I copied off a website which no longer exists. I gave credit at the beginning and end of both documents for all used content. Hopefully, this will be helpful to those who are studying Japanese. Included within the document is a full table of Katakana and Hiragana as well as a few common use Kanji along with the English translation and Romanization (Romaji). Which let me tell you, was not easy manually inputting into a text file! Well anyways, thanks and happy reading!

Thanks for the hard work, Recca. I'll definitely have a look at it and I'm sure others will find it helpful. Great job as always.

No problem, I hope that it's of some use to you and others as well. I must thank you as well, Taskforce. Without this message board, my hard work would have gone to waste. At least now, I have it uploaded somewhere on the internet to archive and preserve it. I should probably put it somewhere else as well, I'm just not sure where yet. But before that, it would might be a good idea if I cleaned and formatted it a little. I should probably also save it as a rtf, doc or pdf instead of a simple txt file as it is now. And in retrospect, I should also remove that "summarized" part. When I first began translating this book years ago, I wanted to make it as brief as possible. But in the end, I translated the whole thing and added some additional notes, a few corrections and some more words to the dictionary part. Or rather, I should say "parts" as each chapter has a small dictionary section which features all of the new Japanese words that have been used.

After looking through it once more, it seems that the only part that I left out was at the end which was just advertising other books written and published by the same authors that worked on this one. If I ever do get around to reformatting this into a cleaner, more professional format, I may translate that part as well. In matter of fact, I probably should. But for now, this is good enough. The entire guide and lessons have all been fully translated into English. I've had it sitting on my computer completed for years now. It's nice to finally post it somewhere.

I just wanted to say that it's pretty funny to see that this text file has received more downloads than most if not all of my current Romanian game translations so far. Well, at least those hosted over at RHDN since there's no download counter for patches here at D-D. So who knows from which site most people downloaded their patches from. I'm quite pleased to see that my translation of this book was popular enough to reach this many downloads. With this, I'm going to seriously consider finishing and reformatting the translation into a more proper and professional format than simple plain text when I have the time.

Edit: Also please note that this text file is best viewed using Times New Roman font, size 12. That's what I used when I translated this. Other fonts and sizes might make the Kana tables appear strange.

How big is the retro-gaming community in Romania? I'm genuinely curious. I know what things look like in Poland and Russia, because I have many friends and relatives there, and they're much more PC-oriented overall (Amiga etc.), but also various Famiclones/SFC/Mega Drive clones tend to be popular, as opposed to western Europe where the Master System reigned supreme (well, generally Sega and even more PCs, naturally). I'd assume that, just like in most other countries, only a small fraction in Romania nowadays are interested in retro-gaming, and then you also need to know a foreign language well to play some of these games. Even in Japan, many consoles sold poorly by comparison with SFC (Mega Drive sold worse than PCE/Turbografx16, for example, and they had some stuff like Wonderswan too on the side), but it's just a really damn populous country, so releasing games only there generally doesn't mean that a given company would go bankrupt.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. I just translated what was in the original book and added some of my own notes as well as a few more words to the dictionary sections. This book/document was intended to be used more as a tourist and business guide rather than for anime and video game fans. Not that it can't be useful to them, it's just not really aimed for pop culture usage. Here's a picture of the original Romanian book that I translated into English as a text file:


Most Romanian video gamers already seem to know enough English to get by whatever game they may be playing. Especially since games translated into Romanian are very hard to come by there. It's rare enough just to find fan translations and professional translations are even harder to come by. Besides English, other European languages such as French, German, Italian and Spanish are also often spoken by those living there, so there are many options available to fans in Romania regarding games and TV shows. As for what type of games they usually play these days, it seems to be mostly modern ones now like in most other parts of the world, but there's still some active retro video game fans and communities of course.

Edit: I also wanted to mention that the title of this book is rather oddly written in Romanian. It should read "Japoneza in 30 de Zile" (Japanese in 30 Days). I'm not sure why they chose to leave out the "de" part. Maybe so that it sounds more like it would in English if it were written in a more literal way? I'm not quite sure why...