Jarvik7 Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:May I ask how you find your mentor you helped you out? The only thing I can think of is: there is a Japanese program at my school that due have fully bilingual Japanese Natives. I could ask them but I'm not in that program at the moment. I have a strong feeling I should wait till I can call myself fluent in all skills before I go and ask them to be my translation mentor. I think the best thing I can do now is, improve my japanese, improve my english and improve my translation skills (over 2-3 years).

My mentor was my former translation professor after I graduated. Other places to find mentors are translation forums like proz.com

There is also a Japanese translation mailing list on google groups somewhere.

(I don't participate in either.)

I'll keep both of them in mind. I have a good feeling I should wait till I'm confident enough to call myself completely fluent (maybe not native-level but fluent is definitely possible). I should work on improving my English writing and Japanese translation skills first.

KMDES Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:Ah, right. (To me "account earning interest" means "(cash) savings account" rather than some kind of fund or stock investment.)

And that's also a good reason why so many people are broke. They get a job, pay huge chunks of their money to taxes, bury themselves in high interest debt, leave what they do have in a savings account that actually devalues it's self over time and then they start occupying wall street because "SHIT IS bucked UP AND BULLSHIT".

A savings account shouldn't devalue itself over time though, if the governments aren't destroying the currency. So it's a legitimate complaint. The target of complaints is definitely wrong though and people are idiots for getting into debt. I'm glad I'm not an American.

nadiatims Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:Ah, right. (To me "account earning interest" means "(cash) savings account" rather than some kind of fund or stock investment.)

And that's also a good reason why so many people are broke. They get a job, pay huge chunks of their money to taxes, bury themselves in high interest debt, leave what they do have in a savings account that actually devalues it's self over time and then they start occupying wall street because "SHIT IS bucked UP AND BULLSHIT".

A savings account shouldn't devalue itself over time though, if the governments aren't destroying the currency. So it's a legitimate complaint. The target of complaints is definitely wrong though and people are idiots for getting into debt. I'm glad I'm not an American.

Yeah, but find an economy that has a currency that deflates instead of inflates. I don't know of any country that does. So a savings account will devalue unless it's like 2.5% and a really good year for non-inflation. Then it just stays the same value, which still isn't great as it could be earning money.

KMDES Wrote:Yeah, but find an economy that has a currency that deflates instead of inflates. I don't know of any country that does. So a savings account will devalue unless it's like 2.5% and a really good year for non-inflation. Then it just stays the same value, which still isn't great as it could be earning money.

While it fluctuates, Japan is usually either deflating or stagnant. Currently it has deflated by .4% from last year. It's almost like earning interest on your money even if it's sitting in your wallet!

Also, I've seen some normal savings accounts with interest as high as 7% with no limitations on access to the money. Not in Japan of course, as even investment accounts here typically pay like .02% interest.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:Yeah, but find an economy that has a currency that deflates instead of inflates. I don't know of any country that does. So a savings account will devalue unless it's like 2.5% and a really good year for non-inflation. Then it just stays the same value, which still isn't great as it could be earning money.

While it fluctuates, Japan is usually either deflating or stagnant. Currently it has deflated by .4% from last year. It's almost like earning interest on your money even if it's sitting in your wallet!

Also, I've seen some normal savings accounts with interest as high as 7% with no limitations on access to the money. Not in Japan of course, as even investment accounts here typically pay like .02% interest.

I remember reading an article that compared inflation indexed bonds to normal bonds in order to derive an implicit market prediction of japan's inflation/deflation and it came out to be something like 0.5% pa deflation average... over the next 30 *years*.

KMDES Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:And that's also a good reason why so many people are broke. They get a job, pay huge chunks of their money to taxes, bury themselves in high interest debt, leave what they do have in a savings account that actually devalues it's self over time and then they start occupying wall street because "SHIT IS bucked UP AND BULLSHIT".

A savings account shouldn't devalue itself over time though, if the governments aren't destroying the currency. So it's a legitimate complaint. The target of complaints is definitely wrong though and people are idiots for getting into debt. I'm glad I'm not an American.

Yeah, but find an economy that has a currency that deflates instead of inflates. I don't know of any country that does. So a savings account will devalue unless it's like 2.5% and a really good year for non-inflation. Then it just stays the same value, which still isn't great as it could be earning money.

Savings accounts in australia are pretty much always well ahead of inflation. By the time you factor in the tax on the interest earned it comes out to be about flat though.

Coincidentally I've been looking at Japanese savings accounts today. I don't know why anyone bothers. If I move $60,000 of my money into a bank whose page I'm looking at now, I will make a total of $18 in interest per year at their highest rate, before tax is deducted from it. That is significantly less than what I would make at work in the same amount of time required just to open the account.

There are some foreign currency accounts that have rates up to 3% (for South African money), but that is extremely high risk since you have to lock in for 1 year and it's not clear if the principal is guaranteed. I guess this is why it seems a lot more Japanese people dabble in the stock market etc than in Canada. Even my air-head gyaru ex-gf owned some stocks.

Savings accounts in the UK are 3+% at the moment, a bit higher for 1-5 bonds. I'm getting 3.05 or something with the Post office now, no lock in, no risk.

KMDES Wrote:Another thing is, you can be the best at what you do, and still end up making no money. If you want to make money off a site, off a business, or a hobby or whatever, the main thing people completely disregard that when you want to make money, you are now in the business of making money. Which basically means you have to learn to make money to succeed. Steve Pavlina mentions this when he said he was making games and he was making the games as best as he could and put all his extra efforts into it, yet he wasn't any more money. When he'd make a good game and instead of trying to make it better, he's spend his time publicizing which made him much more money. What he used to think that buy making the game even better, the sales would automatically go up, but by changing his focus he ended up succeeding far more than if he was just game focused. It's the analogy of the best selling author vs the best writing author. The best selling author may not be the best writer, and the best writing author may not be the best selling.

one thing to consider here though is short-term vs long-term. using the games example, short-term, it's better to market your own games better and sell more copies vs improving the games. but long-term, you can't just keep marketing the same game forever -- you do need to create something that's better or at least comparable to the the alternatives / competition. a lot of the "best-selling" games recently are also "best-written" -- in indie games, there's minecraft, super meat boy, the binding of isaac, etc., which are all both "best-selling" and "best-written". i think it's never a good idea to neglect the marketing/promotion aspect, but if you neglected the craft/quality aspect for too long you would eventually have nothing good to sell. they're multiplicative; if either is 0 the outcome is also 0

dizmox Wrote:Savings accounts in the UK are 3+% at the moment, a bit higher for 1-5 bonds. I'm getting 3.05 or something with the Post office now, no lock in, no risk.

Inflation in the UK is currently 5.2%. That means your money is devaluing at a rate of 2.45% per year.

Not much we can do TBH, the whole European economy is FUBARed. I'm seriously considering moving all my savings to Asia, as if Italy goes under (looking likely), the Euro will die and then all bets are off..

Though the inflation rate in Japan seems stagnant, the value of the currency's buying power versus the american dollar has dropped significantly over the last year, so you could put your money into Yen based accounts, but that's still going to cost you unless you live in Japan.

Rinku, some companies do make sure a game pretty much never dies. Capcom, Nintendo Square-Enix. The original Legend of Zelda has not seen an upgrade, except for the one one the BS satellite which is not quite a remake, yet they're coming out with yet another re-release of the game on the 3DS.

As for "best-selling" SMB and BoI are great sellers when it comes to indie games, but if you compare them to games like Call of Duty, or Fallout:New Vegas or heck, let's throw in a bad game like RAGE or Duke Nukem Forever, they just don't stand up to the best-selling stature. MineCraft would be the only one I would consider "best-selling" really, and it's "best-selling" due to rampant viral marketing. Add the addictive nature of the game, which is addictive bad, like how the brain's reward system gets triggered in gambling/drugs/etc, and you have "best-selling" + "best-written" game. It is really scary though when you look at the success path of MineCraft that you see the same paths used in high selling games that aren't indie like CoD, WoW, and TF2.

It really matters what you really want out of the game, high sales, or a great game. Aquaria will never be as big a seller as a lot of mainstream games out there, but it definitely is a better game than most of them. Unfortunately, the way the world works is everyone will go gah-gah goo-goo over Call of Duty but neglect treasures like Aquaria. Everyone wants repetitive and shallow instead of deep and meaningful.

KMDES Wrote:Steve Pavlina mentions this when he said he was making games and he was making the games as best as he could and put all his extra efforts into it, yet he wasn't any more money. When he'd make a good game and instead of trying to make it better, he's spend his time publicizing which made him much more money. ... It's the analogy of the best selling author vs the best writing author. The best selling author may not be the best writer, and the best writing author may not be the best selling.

Yes, but people should remember that Steve doesn't say people should make bad products, advertise them like hell, and then everything would be fine (actually, most fail trying to do that); his position is more against perfectionism, people who can make a good/great product relatively fast but, instead of using the remaining resources they have (time and money above all, but not only*) to publish it as soon as possible and advertise it well, waste them all, additional years for example, trying to make the product "perfect" and hoping that later it will sell loads of it by itself just because it's "so good", which doesn't happen, or only seldom.

* Other things, such as willingness to succeed and interest in the product one's developing, can also be seen as resources, and they end when the person gives up.

It's a matter of balance. Using a rough abstraction, someone who allocates 95–100% of their resources to marketing and 0–5% to quality (offerings which can usually be called 'scams' — promising a lot and delivering nothing) in the long-term tend to do worse than someone who has only allocated 50% of the resources to marketing and the other 50% to attain a certain level of quality. Also, at the other end of the spectrum, someone who allocates 100% of the resources to attain the highest level of quality possible and 0% to marketing will, more likely than not, sell anything and be disappointed for "working so much and gaining so little / people don't care about quality" kind of thing.

KMDES Wrote:It really matters what you really want out of the game, high sales, or a great game. Aquaria will never be as big a seller as a lot of mainstream games out there, but it definitely is a better game than most of them. Unfortunately, the way the world works is everyone will go gah-gah goo-goo over Call of Duty but neglect treasures like Aquaria. Everyone wants repetitive and shallow instead of deep and meaningful.

If that's what everyone wants, that's what 'best' is, in the business sense. If something is 'better' but it's not what customers want, it's not actually better. The problem is that different standards of measure are being used by the two groups, one dependent on the product per se (with reviews done by "experts") and other on normal people's reactions towards it (the mass voting with their money.)

In this case we can see that it's not also a matter of marketing and promotion — for instance, it probably wouldn't be much better if Aquaria were developed (or bought) by Activision and promoted by them as much as Call of Duty, because there are no "hooks" that could be used to do it well and attract people's attention. Also, big companies sometimes develop 'deep and meaningful' games, highly praised by the critics and by game lovers, and they don't sell as expected, no matter what they do to promote it.

KMDES Wrote:As for "best-selling" SMB and BoI are great sellers when it comes to indie games, but if you compare them to games like Call of Duty, or Fallout:New Vegas or heck, let's throw in a bad game like RAGE or Duke Nukem Forever, they just don't stand up to the best-selling stature. MineCraft would be the only one I would consider "best-selling" really, and it's "best-selling" due to rampant viral marketing. Add the addictive nature of the game, which is addictive bad, like how the brain's reward system gets triggered in gambling/drugs/etc, and you have "best-selling" + "best-written" game. It is really scary though when you look at the success path of MineCraft that you see the same paths used in high selling games that aren't indie like CoD, WoW, and TF2.

It really matters what you really want out of the game, high sales, or a great game. Aquaria will never be as big a seller as a lot of mainstream games out there, but it definitely is a better game than most of them. Unfortunately, the way the world works is everyone will go gah-gah goo-goo over Call of Duty but neglect treasures like Aquaria. Everyone wants repetitive and shallow instead of deep and meaningful.

i meant best-selling with respect to a game's marketing budget, team size, etc. -- e.g. aquaria isn't best-selling but it was made by two people, and has made an estimated $300k-$500k in sales, which is pretty good for two people to split; most people would be happy with that, and it's still a lot more than the average indie game makes. even if an indie wanted to, they couldn't market their game as well as a call of duty game is marketed, since the marketing budget isn't there

but i agree that there comes a point at which further quality is superfluous and a matter of good craft rather than good business-sense; a game only has to be "above average" to be a best-seller, it doesn't have to be in the top 1% in terms of quality. i saw a study relating game sales and game ratings on metacritic once, and the correlation was like this: up until a score of 70 (out of 100) average, scores were correlated to sales, but after about 70, score had no correlation to sales. so if your game is the type of game that would get a 60 or 50 on metacritic, it'd hurt the sales, but if you can at least reach the average of 70, after that quality doesn't influence sales much

aphasiac Wrote:

dizmox Wrote:Savings accounts in the UK are 3+% at the moment, a bit higher for 1-5 bonds. I'm getting 3.05 or something with the Post office now, no lock in, no risk.

Inflation in the UK is currently 5.2%. That means your money is devaluing at a rate of 2.45% per year.

That's not so bad. What can you expect from a high street savings account?

I don't remember them ever being as high as inflation...

I've been researching a lot and given a lot of thought towards making money online. I've been also looking into how people have created successful companies too. They all had common goals in what they wanted but what made them succeed was one important thing: innovation. They either made something better from existing systems or designed their own and marketed it really well. They also stayed with what interests them, some were electronics/computers, while others were online game sites/businesses.

So when I look at what I'm interested in, it comes down to the following(right off the top of my mind):

Computers,electronics,social networks,internet,websites,games,language learning,japanese.

Now when I think about what most people my age are focused on is: education,learninng,making money, girls or boys,making a living,etc.

The key things that I'm interested in focusing are: learning,education,social(community-based sites),languages. This right here tells me I should aim on making a site that helps people learn, provides a key service that would make people keep coming back. Make it user-based, as that's pretty much key in any business.

Here's something I stumbled upon that might interest you

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/201...#more-6223

ta12121 Wrote:This right here tells me I should aim on making a site that helps people learn, provides a key service that would make people keep coming back. Make it user-based, as that's pretty much key in any business.

To keep people coming back, you have to give them a reason to do so.
Make your idea a small world for something.
You know, when you go over to Khatz's website, it's like a small world of studying methods( and not only) for Japanese. And it's not a closed world, but a rather open and custom one.

Make the product interact with clients, make it not a passive thing but a form of communication between you and the clients.

And you will periodically have to improve, innovate and change your idea or outcome corresponding to the change of times for people to still keep being interested in what you're doing.

jettyke Wrote:Here's something I stumbled upon that might interest you

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/201...#more-6223

Had a quick look at it and bookmarked it. I love how he says that he did what he enjoyed and made money from it. He also knew nothing when he began and that it took him 2 years to make 50,000 a year.

For me I have to make it enjoyable to do, something that will drive to start it. I know Japanese learning sites are out there so much but I should do something in terms of education wise. Maybe I should help anki get out there(help the author but through affiliation). I still have time until I start it, so no rushing but still need to keep coming up with more good ideas.s

ta12121 Wrote:I still have time until I start it, so no rushing but still need to keep coming up with more good ideas.s

What my management teacher said in answer to my question about how to come up with good ideas was something that Steve Jobs said, that "Don't settle down, keep searching and keep searching". etc Until you find it... Don't be satisfied.

jettyke Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:I still have time until I start it, so no rushing but still need to keep coming up with more good ideas.s

What my management teacher said in answer to my question about how to come up with good ideas was something that Steve Jobs said, that "Don't settle down, keep searching and keep searching". etc Until you find it... Don't be satisfied.

Have to agree with that. It's just like learning a language, you should never stop learning but rather, you should keep going even if you've reached your goal. There will always be a chance to improve, a chance to learn more and a chance to succeed.

Found an interesting site:
http://www.retireat21.com/top-young-entrepreneurs

KMDES Wrote:Yeah, but find an economy that has a currency that deflates instead of inflates. I don't know of any country that does. So a savings account will devalue unless it's like 2.5% and a really good year for non-inflation. Then it just stays the same value, which still isn't great as it could be earning money.

Deflation is bad. People hold onto their money instead of lending or spending it and the economy grinds to a halt. A small amount of inflation is healthy and the people rich enough to complain about their wealth diminishing because of it are the lucky ones.

I can't help but be bothered all these get rich quick sites. Is it really a great message to send out to young people?

Wait, isn't people holding onto their money and not spending/lending it willy nilly a good thing? Isn't that just rational self interest in action? The economy is never helped in the long run, when people spend money on things they don't need and banks lend money carelessly. That's why much of the world is in the mess it's in. Steadily pumping extra dollars into the economy doesn't actually make people any wealthier so encouraging them to spend money contrary to their own rationality (tricking consumers/companies into thinking the economy is healthier than it really is) while simultaneously devaluing each dollar they own is not helping anyone.

nadiatims Wrote:Wait, isn't people holding onto their money and not spending/lending it willy nilly a good thing? Isn't that just rational self interest in action? The economy is never helped in the long run, when people spend money on things they don't need and banks lend money carelessly. That's why much of the world is in the mess it's in.

Spending money you have and racking up debt you can never repay are not the same things. Anyone who spends money they don't have and then pays interest on it isn't too terribly smart (this includes getting a loan to buy a car, though I would make exceptions for student loans and buying a house).

Banks offering massive amounts of credit to people who can never repay the loan is why the world economy is in the dumps, not people spending their entire paycheck.