What does this screenshot say?

[GoldCoinLover]

And is the kanji common? I have such a hard time memorzing romaji, I doubt I could ever grasp kanji, unless I live in japan of course :cool:
It's of a video game. Oh cool, 2 kanji!

I can't look them up in a dictionary because I don't know how many strokes they have! How can I do this? I have JWPce

[sl0815]

hi,

could it be 空の様子が（そらのようすが）? Then it would be something like "The appearance of the sky is ...".


Cheers,
Jan

[jt_]

sl0815's reading of the kanji and interpretation of the meaning of this phrase/sentence fragment is correct. To know exactly what's going on here, you'd need more context.

Just a little tip that may be helpful:

I can't look them up in a dictionary because I don't know how many strokes they have! How can I do this? I have JWPceTo count strokes you need to know something about how kanji are written. I'd suggest getting a textbook, as there's too much to explain here.

But if you have JWPCE, it has some features that can help you look up kanji without counting all the strokes. Try this: go into JWPCE and hit CTRL-L (or F5). This should bring up a list of various kanji "radicals." Try to find "pieces" of the character and click on them. (They are sorted by the number of strokes, so you can learn something about stroke-counting here too.)

For example, with 空, the "roof" part on the top, and the part on the bottom. If you click/highlight those two radicals, then the search box at the top will give you a list of all characters containing them. You can find the character you're looking for, and then click "get info". If you have a two-character compound (like 様子), then you can "insert" both characters into the text file, then highlight them together and hit F6 to look up the compound in the dictionary.

And is the kanji common? I have such a hard time memorzing romaji, I doubt I could ever grasp kanji, unless I live in japan of courseYes, both 空 and 様子 are rather common characters (as well as being common words).

And you really don't have to live in Japan to learn how to read Japanese. I had a functional command of maybe 1000 or so kanji and was reading short stories in Japanese with relative proficiency (of course, this requires internalizing quite a bit of Japanese sentence structure, not just kanji) before I went to Japan to study abroad. (Well, I had visited Japan once many years before that, but I was 12 years old at the time and knew absolutely nothing about the language.)

There comes a time in your studies when going to Japan is the best thing you can do to improve your proficiency, but building a basic foundation in the language can be done just as easily outside of Japan. In other words, going to Japan is not in-and-of-itself some magical path to otherwise-unattainable fluency.

This is just my two cents from personal experience, since you seem to be genuinely interested in learning Japanese. You'd do best to get over the "Wow... Japanese is so different and so difficult!" phase quickly if you really want to learn. You're younger (by a year) than I was when I started learning the language, but time is still against you. Good luck.