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Hi Everyone,
My name’s Jack, I’m a 20 year old university student from the UK. I recently finished season 1 of TextFugu and thoroughly enjoyed it, hence I decided to bite the bullet (that’s quite a bit of money for a lowly student) and buy a month subscription.
I have been interested in Japanese for a long time, but I think my first memorable experience of it was around the age of 13 when I sat and watched Akira on videotape with my dad (I know right? Irresponsible) Similarly I think being introduced to the band Radwimps online around the same time was also a large influence. Since then I have been a big (cliched) fan of Anime, Manga and Japanese music and have often entertained the thought of learning.
I’m currently studying games development at university, and I’m an avid programmer and developer. At the moment I am enjoying the down-time after my second year by staying on in my mostly vacated student housing and continuing to study and develop game related things, as well as studying Japanese.
My reasoning for learning Japanese is a little abstract and flimsy, I would say a practical reason would be that I’d be very interested in eventually having a job in the games industry that required me to speak both Japanese and English, but I think a much larger reason is that Japanese is a rare subject for me, in that it’s something I’m very interested in learning that doesn’t have much at all to do with computing or games! It’s because of this that I find studying Japanese a really effective way to clear my head and get some time away from programming.
I’ve already spent far too long writing this post and I’m itchin’ to go and start on Season 2, nevertheless I look forward to talking to any of you and hopefully being a somewhat active member of the forums (probably by asking for lots of help)
So, thanks for reading my intro!
Best regards
Jack
Hi Jack! I also use my Japanese studies as a break from all of the heavy thinking that programming requires. What’s your favorite language/framework for developing video games?
Not from the desk of Eihiko. Eihiko's boss took his desk away from him.Hi Eihiko,
Glad to hear someone else feels the same, there’s something nice and relaxing (although not so far removed from programming) about assimilating bits of a language and trying to build up an understanding. I also find it nice and therapeutic to work on paper sometimes!
It must be said I’ve not studied a wide spectrum of programming languages. I started off working in Java at college where I built some simple text based stuff, since being at uni I’ve spent most of my time working in Unity, and though it is a bit flavor of the month I’ve really enjoyed getting used to the Unity API. I generally work in C# but I’m not at all adverse to a bit of JavaScript, especially with my dad (also a software developer) harping on about it to me all the time! I reckon I’d say C# is my favourite language though, purely due to how much experience I have in it!
What about yourself? :)
I’d have to say my favorite language is Ruby, which coincidentally is the invention of a Japanese programmer. Sadly, Ruby isn’t designed for game development. I’ve used C, C++ and Java, but have the same problem with all of them- the available game libraries are poorly documented and difficult to use. I’ve been meaning to check out Unity, which has a strong community and is supposedly well-maintained, but I don’t know C# yet :\
Not from the desk of Eihiko. Eihiko's boss took his desk away from him.Ah, I’ve heard of Ruby but never used it, however if you’ve used Java before then C# isn’t a far cry from that. Unity is an absolutely ace tool, free to use whilst you’re learning and because it’s so popular at the moment the support is really solid. If you were to give it a go I’d recommend getting into Javascript though, it’s a really transferable skill these days, what with all the web development going on!
So what do you do with Ruby? The wikipedia page called it ‘general purpose’, so I suppose that could extend to anything! Also, how long have you been studying Japanese? I’ve just been going through the very first set of Kanji and Kanji Vocab stuff in season 2, and really enjoying it!
Hm maybe I’ll give Unity and C# a try, then! I already know Javascript fairly well, so I have a headstart on that ^_^
I am 21 and still a student, but I’m currently taking a semester off for an internship at a company called CoverMyMeds. We offer services related to the American healthcare system (which is probably nonsensical to other countries), and a lot of our websites/services are written in ruby on the backend. The job is actually a lot more exciting than it sounds c;
I’ve been trying to study Japanese for years now. But it wasn’t until a few months ago that I buckled down and really studied with any consistency. I’m about to start season 5 and also use WaniKani for vocab (which I swear by).
Not from the desk of Eihiko. Eihiko's boss took his desk away from him.You definitely should, if game dev’s something you’d like to get into!
That does sound cool, though I’ll admit to knowing little to nothing about the American healthcare system! I’ve tried a little bit of server side development for web services in PHP and ASP.NET, thought it was pretty interesting, and I’m currently teaching myself HTML5/CSS and Javascript in attempt to stay relevant :P
Also it’s awesome that you got an internship, I chose my course based mostly on the (supposedly) fantastic prospects for a years paid placement in industry, but that turned out to be rather less of an option than I’d hoped, so I’m trying to make up for that by working hard through my summer break.
I had a very similar experience attempting to start studying TextFugu this time last year, was feeling like a bit of a flake, but I’m glad I’m keeping up my study a bit better this time around (and congrats to you, similarly, for sticking with it!) Wow, season 5 seems rather far away right now :P I signed up for the WaniKani beta and got an invite yesterday, I’ll have to give it a good look!
So what got you interested in studying Japanese? Any past/planned trips to Japan? :)
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