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So, if you've been following along with my Deutschdeduktionspiel blog, you will probably know what this is all about. Does this mean I'm giving up on German? No, I'll still be reading stuff in German, and watching films and other things in German; I've just decided to extend this thought experiment to Japanese.

For everyone who don't know what this is all about, this is a blog where I detail my findings on learning new words, phrases or grammar constructions in a foreign language by deducing (or inducing) it from books, newspapers, magazines, Internet, games, movies, music, etc. (anything really) that are typically used by native speakers. Again, I am not perfect. I may make mistakes in my induction or deduction of things. It may be humorous; it may even be silly. Feel free to laugh or fix it.

DISCLAIMER: This project makes no use of the dictionary or Google Translate in order to find out what words mean. That is the whole point of this game. It's the same with Deutschdeduktionspiel; no learning materials, no references, no dictionaries, nothing at all. That's considered cheating.

So why Japanese? First of all, I found the Japanese equivalent of DeviantArt, Pixiv, and while I realize they're working on a fully functioning English interface, it would be convenient right now to be able to browse that site with at least some basic knowledge of Japanese. Plus many of its users will be conversing in Japanese, and it would be nice to be able to know what they're saying, I might even be able to talk to them, it's fun to deduce, and I like Pixiv. The artist mentality there seems to be good quality artwork; I won't be bored. Secondly, there are some games which will probably receive no localization from lack of interest in the West, so I'll most likely be unable to make sense of them unless I understood some Japanese. Besides, many games are made in Japan, and there's less likely to be a problem with a bad translation because that's the language it was made in originally. It's the same reason I preferred picking on Edna Bricht Aus and Harveys Neue Augen for the German version of this blog.

As for any assumptions of what I know about Japanese, I took two classes in high school on it, but you don't learn enough kanji in it to be able to read a regular newspaper, and I've most likely forgotten most of it. So I'll know some really, really, basic stuff, but I'll have to remember a lot of it.