…

座談会
ざだんかい

Thing is, talking about the weather is a usual way to start a conversation in Japanese. It creates rapport. Don’t sell yourself short in that regard.

On the other hand, though, unlike English, you won’t typically ask “how are you?” – in English, it’s kinda become part of the greeting ritual: “Hi, how are you?” “I’m fine, thanks” regardless of whether you’re actually fine or not. In Japanese, you’ll only ask the question if you know the other person pretty well, and are genuinely interested in hearing the response.

Perhaps I am just missing something, but will someone please spell the pronunciation of 七人 phonetically in English?

七人 = しちにん = shi chi nin. It’s mostly recording artefacts that’s obscuring things, there.

Personally, I’d think learning katakana first makes more sense, especially considering Koichi’s kanji-by-radicals method – so many of the simpler radicals are identical to katakana characters.

I was thinking the same, Elenkis. If you teach people “this is what 八 looks like, and if you’re not seeing that then you need to adjust your computer settings” then you’re either going to wind up with a lot of threads like this, or a lot of confused people.

I said the default font for Anki was Arial. At least it is for me, and I’m on Windows 7. Meiryo is included in Vista and 7 as the new default Japanese font (it replaces MS Gothic as the default). Though, why Arial is set as the default font in Anki, I’m unsure of.

Sorry, I was a little unclear in my previous post – let me clarify. Arial is the default font for Anki because it’s the default font for Windows – Anki, like most other
programs, uses the Windows default fonts by default (or whichever font the user has chosen to use). However, it’s only the default for English characters – it doesn’t have any Japanese characters, be it kanji or kana. For Japanese, the Asian default font is used – be it Mincho or Gothic or Meiryo. (That said, my Windows 7 laptop uses MS Mincho by default, though I haven’t checked to see if it has Meiryo at all. I tried to install a new kanji font a while back, but I couldn’t seem to work out how – I installed it by the normal way that I’ve done a hundred times before, but it didn’t show up in the font list afterwards…)

トイレ =D

月見
つきみ