This is the first time I've ever really tried to write something in Japanese, so I'm sure I've made a lot of mistakes, and there was quite a bit I wasn't really sure how to say, as I'm just a beginner. Really kind of nervous, actually...

Bit of context: One of my hobbies is collecting figures (yeah, オタク-ish,　I know XD), especially of characters from the Tales of series of videogames.
Months ago I preordered this one:
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g148/A...001591.jpg
and now the prototype has suddenly changed (can happen, but really doesn't usually to any great extent) so all her hair is translucent:
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g148/A...573781.jpg

So, since neither me nor my fellow figure collectors who've also preordered her were very happy with the sudden change, I thought, I could stop chickening out of actually using any Japanese, and attempt to email the company (Alter) to at least let them know. I also tried to ask about this one of a character from the same game (the two figures kind of make a pair):
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g148/A...581027.jpg
as the paint, which was also just recently shown for the first time, looks very glossy (a lot of figure collectors really hate glossy paint, heh).

So, my probably very bad attempt is below. >_<

I'm sure many of you here could phrase it to make it sound much better than I can, but I kind of just want to keep it at my own (very basic) level if possible, apart from changing it as necessary to make sure it's polite and comprehensible.

Here's the message (ワンフェス = WonFes, a figure expo):

こにちは。

私は、イギリス人、イングランドでいきます。日本語はうまくできませんが、ゆるしてください。Alterの「テイルズオブ」フィギュアは、とても好きです。先週は、リタ・モルディオとユーリ・ローウェルをうけました。すごいです！(^_^)

ワンフェスで、レイヴンのプロトタイプ見ました。かっこいいです。でも、フィギュアのミラ・マクスウェルは、透明な髪の毛とても好きじゃないです。ちょっとしんぱいしました。ジュード・マティスもマットじゃないですか。

新しい「テイルズオブ」フィギュアが楽しみです！ちなみに、一番好きなキャラがジェイド・カーティスです‥‥‥ www

このメールを読んで下さってどうもありがとうございます！

ブリオニ
(Briony)

Thank you for any help fixing it, and for enduring my horrible Japanese. : ) And my nerdiness...

Isn't hello written as こんにちは? My Japanese is too shabby to pick up anything else, but somebody with more experience with the language will surely come by soon enough. xP

That said though, for future reference this kind of thing might be better suited for lang-8. If you aren't already familiar with it, it is a site where you write entries in the language you are trying to learn and then natives correct it. So unless you feel too embarrassed posting your オタク letters there I think it might be a better place to go. =)
Here's a link to the site: http://lang-8.com/

It written こんにちは, I'm pretty sure...

Just to mention, although it doesn't matter much, the picture links don't work. Unfortunately beyond greeting, I have no other Japanese knowledge.

The most important thing is that, unlike English email,
you should break lines at appropriate points.
I will format this English post the way
a native Japanese speaker would in Japanese so you can get the idea.
Roughly speaking, you hit your enter key even in the middle of a sentence
so that each line of text is reasonably short.
Typically you move to a new line at some grammatical and semantic boundary.
If you carefully read English emails, forum posts etc. by Japanese people
who are not familiar with English writing,
you will notice they almost always format their English text this way.
Writing a whole paragraph without line breaks is a dead giveaway
that you're not Japanese.

Also, often it's better to let the reader know who you are
before going to the actual content.
So, in a sense, you sign off first and then write your email.
If you have email from a Japanese stranger whose English is not spectacular,
chances are the sentence right after the usual "Dear XXX" is
"My name is YYY," "I am YYY" or something along those lines.

An often neglected but important point is that
the way you express your thought is completely different
between English and Japanese, and if you do sentence-by-sentence translation,
often the order of sentences must be changed to get across your idea.
You may have to reorder your paragraphs too.
So, just like you reorder words to make sense in Japanese when translating English,
you reorder sentences and paragraphs as well.

Anyway, here's my attempt to make it smoother and more comprehensible
while keeping it simple and as close to the original as possible:

こんにちは。

私はイギリスに住んでいる、イギリス人のブリオニ（Briony）です。
Alterの「テイルズオブ」フィギュアがとても好きなのでメールしました。
つたない日本語ですが、読んでくれると嬉しいです。

先週、リタ・モルディオとユーリ・ローウェルが届きました。すごいです！(^_^)

それからワンフェスで、レイヴンのプロトタイプを見ました。かっこいいです。
でも、フィギュアのミラ・マクスウェルが、透明な髪の毛に変わってしまって残念です。
ジュード・マティスの彩色もツヤ消しじゃないようですし、ちょっと心配です。

新しい「テイルズオブ」フィギュアが楽しみです！
ちなみに、一番好きなキャラクターはジェイド・カーティスですwww

このメールを読んで下さってどうもありがとうございます！

I'm assuming the figurines of "リタ・モルディオ" and "ユーリ・ローウェル"
just arrived last week and the glossy one is "ジュード・マティス."
Let me know if I got these wrong.

Thank you all! ^_^

How did I manage to mess up こんにちは? Oops. XD
I'll definitely try using Lang-8 when I'm more ready to write in Japanese (I should probably finish Tae Kim first), should be useful. Not that it matters, but I put the pics. on my Photobucket so they should work now.


Oh, I see, come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen an email in Japanese. Definitely learnt something about how to write one from that explanation, thanks.

Think that looks a lot better now (and I can indeed still understand it, as well as seeing what I got wrong/where it needed to be clearer), nice job, thank you magamo. : )

magamo Wrote:I'm assuming the figurines of "リタ・モルディオ" and "ユーリ・ローウェル"
just arrived last week and the glossy one is "ジュード・マティス."
Let me know if I got these wrong.

Yup, that's right (I should probably have put an English version to make sure it was easy to follow what I was trying to say...).

Considering how awful the Norwegian lang-8 entries sometimes are, they will help you regardless of level. So you seem more than ready to post stuff on lang-8.

I wouldn't worry about whether your writing is good enough for Lang-8 because the really badly written stuff is usually the easiest to correct. It's when people are writing unnatural sounding sentences which are mostly grammatically correct that things start to get difficult, since you have to give more stylistic feedback.

Splatted Wrote:I wouldn't worry about whether your writing is good enough for Lang-8 because the really badly written stuff is usually the easiest to correct. It's when people are writing unnatural sounding sentences which are mostly grammatically correct that things start to get difficult, since you have to give more stylistic feedback.

I've noticed that too. It's pretty tricky to explain when their L2+ entry is affected by a choice of words that might sound natural in the L1; it feels unnatural, but it's still grammatically correct.

Ampharos64 Wrote:Thank you all! ^_^

How did I manage to mess up こんにちは? Oops. XD
I'll definitely try using Lang-8 when I'm more ready to write in Japanese (I should probably finish Tae Kim first), should be useful. Not that it matters, but I put the pics. on my Photobucket so they should work now.

I have terrible grammar and I'm using Lang-8. Although it's much harder to write something as a beginner, you still learn something from the native corrections (including grammar).

Here is a correction I received from 1 of my Lang-8 entries.

Quote:Original: 私は欲する（ほっする）日本の新聞記事はに訳すです。

Correction by a Native Lang-8 friend: 私は 日本の新聞記事を 訳したい(やくしたい）です。 ＞ The order should be >>>I(subject) ＋ Japanese newspaper articles (object) + translate + want

Because of that specific sentence in my entry, I learned about Desire and Suggestions. As a result, I looked it up on Tae Kim for more info on how to use 「verb～たい」

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/desire

[EDIT] P.S. Even though making mistakes might seem embarrassing, it's better to correct mistakes early on rather than later.

Doesn't 透明 mean transparent as in almost invisible? 国語辞書 says that it's when you're able to see through something very well. I don't how you could describe that hair though, 艶々 maybe?

Edit: That may or may not be a slightly sexually charged word...

Yes, 透明　＝　Transparent as in see-through. The opposite of course would be 不透明.

艶々と Is glossy. It can go with hair. つやつや（と）した髪。

RawrPk Wrote:[EDIT] P.S. Even though making mistakes might seem embarrassing, it's better to correct mistakes early on rather than later.

Truth. Plus, the people who are on there learning English (i.e., the people correcting your Japanese) are making similar mistakes, and struggling with English as much as we feel we're struggling with Japanese. I bet they feel just as exposed and nervous as we do.

I still find it hard to post on Lang-8, but am forcing myself to in order to get some more production exercise and correct my mistakes. It gets easier as you go. The people giving you corrections are there to help you, not tear you down.

Ampharos64, we all make dumb mistakes. Like writing 待つ instead of 持つ (*sheepishly raises hand*). Definitely put your stuff on lang-8. At the very least, you'll get really good at saying 添削くれたのはありがとうございます!

Stian Wrote:Considering how awful the Norwegian lang-8 entries sometimes are, they will help you regardless of level. So you seem more than ready to post stuff on lang-8.

Splatted Wrote:I wouldn't worry about whether your writing is good enough for Lang-8 because the really badly written stuff is usually the easiest to correct.

Haha, somehow that's not entirely encouraging! XD
Thanks all, though. : ) I think I'll try to at least get through the section on verbs in Tae Kim, then brave Lang-8. It's true about mistakes, yup.

I know what you mean about things being grammatically correct, but not quite 'right', Splatted. It's almost similar to the problem native speakers can have, if they're not familiar with certain styles of writing, I've often had to correct essays my dad has written because he just isn't used to writing for an academic context.


Yes, her hair is translucent rather than transparent, I think it's made of a clear-ish material, then painted, the initial prototype was the same but had a different type of paint used or something, so only the tips showed the translucency.

Hmm, searching for '半透明 髪の毛 フィギュア' in Google Image search brings up images of figures with translucent hair, including Milla herself. So maybe:
でも、フィギュアのミラ・マクスウェルが、半透明な髪の毛に変わってしまって残念です。
Looking at the other figures makes me think it's the paint rather than the transparency effect in itself that is looking a bit odd to us フィギュアオタク, though. Still, I'm sure they can figure out what is meant.

透明 simply refers to a clear, see-through property of an object. It can be completely transparent like air, pure water, eye glasses, and so on. It can mean translucent too. If you want to emphasize complete transparency with no apparent color, you can say 無色透明. This is not just a combination of two words. They appear together this way so commonly that it's kind of regarded as a single word just like "see-through" is more of a single word than a phrase.

半透明 is also a pseudo-single-word that means being half-transparent and half-opaque, i.e., translucent. This word does not directly mean that an object has a visible color, though it should imply it because without color the object can't be half-opaque in principle. It simply refers to the degree of opacity/transparency. 透明 covers this meaning too. 半透明 is a handy word when you want to be clear and leave no ambiguity. You might want to use 半透明 if it's only kind of translucent, e.g., the object you're referring to is thick and has color and its opacity is rather high so technically the background is visible but looks distorted to a degree.

The distinction between the two isn't a big deal here. Either works unless it's only barely see-through. Anyway, you can just shoot the message to them. If they get confused, you learn that the hair of the figuring definitely falls into the 半透明 category. If they get what you mean, that means your word choice was fine.

About lang-8, the effect of feedback in the form of correction in second language acquisition is not firmly established. Some research shows it is effective, and other research demonstrates it negatively affects students. From my experience, correction itself seems to have only a marginal positive effect to your language learning if at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if its negative side outweighs the positive side. Spot corrections are good, especially when you want to revise your own writing so it flows like a native speaker's writing. But from the viewpoint of language learning in general, it seems to me that in the long run feedback works well only when you get corrected in your target language; it's another form of practice in a sense, i.e., you learn not from errors getting corrected but from having communication with native speakers. If Japanese guys on lang-8 respond to you in Japanese, I can see how it works. But if you only get spot corrections and/or instructions in English, you might want to be a bit careful because some research says such feedback may slow you down if provided carelessly.

@magamo

I agree on that Lang8-thing with you. Often, I really lose motivation to keep up writing entries, because I can't really process the native feedback effectively for myself and the effords one has to bring up to get good/effective results seems just to be too ridiculuous to me, personally..

I've used Lang8 for more than a year now and the biggest problem probably was: "Is that, what you mark, wrong? Or is it just, that you understand and want to give me alternative expressions?" Most Japanese Lang8er -- from my experience -- have only a weak or no understanding of what is correct/wrong Japanese grammar. Often you would get 不自然に聞こえる comments. That's no complaint or anything, but for the learner it's naturally difficult to learn from one's own mistakes..

Just my 2 cents.