Posted: 6/21/2010 11:54 AM
Post subject: I should just learn the damn language already
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Xkeeper
Banned User
Joined: 12/23/2004
Posts: 1850
名前登録. Me and a friend saw this floating around a game's decompressed graphics, and it wasn't in the US version. Some graphics in the US version were suspiciously missing from the JP version, so ... what could this be? In order to look it up, we obviously needed the actual Kanji, not bitmap shapes of them. So, off to Kanjidict we go. Skip code guessing abound; take a random shot at the stroke count, if it's wrong try modifying the guess by +1 or -1 in a direction, rinse and repeat until one of the areas started to match what you had. ... About 10 minutes in, the first to are located. 名前... Name. About 4 minutes later, the next one. "Ascend"? Great idea to try to paste it into Google and see if it gives us the final one... nope. ... Then we get the last one about 10 minutes later, after a lot of wrong guesses (1-5-9, when it was actually 1-8-8. I had the right part close...) we get the next piece of it. ... Name registration. Of course this wouldn't be in the US version, because it's right on the JP version's menu. In case anybody is wondering, the game is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. We had problems getting the graphics to decompress properly for a long time.
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Posted: 6/21/2010 6:55 PM
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FractalFusion
Editor, Expert player (2073)
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 3282
Glitchy TAS of 2013 Gameboy TAS of 2013 PSX TASer of 2010
Searching by stroke count sucks; don't do it. Search by parts/radicals instead. This is the best one I've seen: http://jlex.org/search/parts Once you have the kanji (or if you already have it), dump it into here: http://www.manythings.org/kanji/search/ This will give you the meaning of Japanese words with this kanji. It might save you from searching another kanji.
Posted: 6/23/2010 3:42 PM
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neo_omegon
Player (160)
Joined: 5/20/2010
Posts: 295
I appreciate your studying Japanese. “名前登録” literally means name registration, as you said, but in that context, it probably means, “Please enter the player’s name.” Of course it’s “Link,” but you can also change the name.
Posted: 6/23/2010 3:46 PM
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
Kanjidict has parts searching feature as well, btw. http://kanjidict.stc.cx/componentsearch But sometimes it is difficult to figure out the parts, too.
Posted: 6/23/2010 5:59 PM
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Xkeeper
Banned User
Joined: 12/23/2004
Posts: 1850
FractalFusion wrote:
Searching by stroke count sucks; don't do it. Search by parts/radicals instead. This is the best one I've seen: http://jlex.org/search/parts Once you have the kanji (or if you already have it), dump it into here: http://www.manythings.org/kanji/search/ This will give you the meaning of Japanese words with this kanji. It might save you from searching another kanji.
Often it can be easier to count the lines and make an educated guess and tweak it for off-by-one or two errors and see if you get a close match. It can be useful for cases where picking out the components manually is not entirely working as well as you would hope (where it took me a good 10 tries to guess what made a certain one tick)
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Posted: 6/24/2010 10:06 AM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Xkeeper wrote:
Often it can be easier to count the lines and make an educated guess and tweak it for off-by-one or two errors and see if you get a close match.
The major problem in counting lines for someone who doesn't know the writing system is that it's not trivial. The problem is that it's not really "lines" (as in "more or less linear segments") but "strokes". There are many cases where there may seem to be two lines, but in fact it's only counted as one because it's drawn as one single uninterrupted stroke. There's a proper way of drawing kanjis (which is an entire artform in itself), and in order to know how many strokes there are in a kanji, you have to know how it's drawn properly. One rule of thumb which can be used is that if there's a horizontal line on top of the kanji and it immediately continues vertically down, it's one single stroke. But of course there are countless exceptions and special situations.