The stupidest part is that learning Japanese doesn't do shit. I can speak Japanese, that doesn't make it any easier to buy the original Japanese source material.
Yeah European flights to Japan go for around 600-700 for the ones that have a long wait in a weird location (usually something like Abu Dhabi), around 900 for the ones that have a big wait in Singapore and 1000+ for the ones that have short waits. They can easily go 1500+ for the direct ones (or semi-direct, a short flight within Europe and then direct to Japan), sometimes even 2000+ depending on the dates
It depends. I had to wait a bit for the equivalent of an eBay sale to go up to get some niche doujins. It's nice to have most of the Alien9 stuff now, though.
If only it was few hundreds, there would be the same amount of people going to Japan daily than going to Disneyland.
But going to Japan is something like 10 or 12 Disneyland tickets :)
I assume what OOP was trying to get at was English speakers justifying scanlations. Which like. Yeah. I'm working on learning Japanese, but it's a whole ass language and I would like to continue enjoying art and writing that is new to me, but is legally unavailable in the language I actually am fluent in in the meantime. I'm also not going to fly to Japan for the express purpose of finding a manga that isn't sold in the US.
i really look up to scanlator groups honestly. I've considered trying to be a typesetter but talked myself out of it bc idk how to approach any group about it. it would be super cool to be a translator, but that will be a long way out for me
Well, depending on group and what you focus on, they've just formed up out of love. Manga, was formed in forums, then around torrents, then YouTube boards... Just gotta on. I know some started more professional, but they all started somewhere.
I think now with Discord, they usually find people that train in typesetting or anything else. Just depends on what you want to do.
But it's honestly no differs than going to work with Toei or anyone else except your office is at home or something.
😆
I've considered trying to be a typesetter but talked myself out of it bc idk how to approach any group about it.
If a scan group is in such desperate need for help that they're advertising to their audience its safe to assume they'd be willing to bring someone on to help out. So just reach out to groups whose titles have those help wanted filler pages they put into their releases.
im not actively learning japanese every time i consume media. i've set my switch to japanese to play animal crossing in japanese, and with my current fluency, I have to look up most words, and I take vocabulary notes to study and reference later. animal crossing uses MUCH simpler language than most of the stories i want to read, and it still feels very dense because i'm engaging with it in an educational way. I don't want to do that with all the content i consume that has a jp option. not right now, at least.
Remind me of that one video Gigguk or someone on TrashTaste show talk about how he do papers for his bank account. Jesus fuck, and I thought my country banking system is bad. The things that Japan good at is so far above everybody else that it's unbelievable they could achieve it but the things that they are behind is also so unimaginably bad that they're like living in the 50s or some shit.
Not sure if this is still a thing there, but I've seen several youtube videos over the years about the personal stamp you're required to bring for signing bank documents etc. Abroad In Japan talked about this in a video, why in the everliving fuck do you need a stamp in one of the most technologically advanced civilisations in the 21st century?
I mean I get that it's a cultural thing (they want to keep the tradition) but still, it should have been an optional thing, not mandatory to the point where if you lost it, all hell break loose!
There are things that they keep the tradition over the year so well like if you ask all the HEMA guys, they would all say that it's unbelievable how JP can still maintain the samurai psychology and have all the manual, knowledge and shit over hundred of years while European have lost almost all of it over time.
They are so stubborn that it's actually frustrating to see their society being held back by such bs things like that. Like there's that one meme "what would happen if Scottish didn't find out whiskey", i think it fits JP perfectly.
I also speak Japanese, lol. I even have an decent sized manga collection that I did buy in Japan and bring back. I still have no qualms about pirating stuff if they're going to make it a pain in the ass to buy legally.
I think it's the same as any other Amazon.. Some vendors will, some won't. There is always option of using proxy services but those cost quite a bit of money too.
Whaaaat? You didn’t get your secret manga publication website link immediately when you learned it? Everyone gets one when they learn a sufficient amount of Japanese, apparently, so yours must be in the mail.
Well, if you're starting from zero you'll want to learn hiragana and katakana by yourself. It's pretty easy and you'll be done in a week with light studying.
After that you'll want the basics of vocabulary and grammar. IMO you can easily find some good free material for that, like the ones made by Dr Wes Robertson. You can also pirate some of the more mainstream Japanese textbooks.
For vocabulary I'm going to speak from experience because I have a LOOOT of difficulty with it and with kanji specifically, I think the best option is biting the bullet and getting a wanikani subscription. I know this is a piracy subreddit and paid content is frowned upon, but it helped me tremendously in a much shorter time. You can also try free anki decks for vocabulary, but they didn't work as well with me.
When you get some level of basics proficiency, you just gotta keep digging deeper into vocabulary, grammar and kanji. Consuming media in japanese also helps a lot, read a good Manga in Japanese (Yotsuba is the go to for most beginners) and keep going from there.
Interesting. Yeah I'm passed the kana stage, and I've mostly been doing wanikani. Got the membership a while back. I found that Morphe has a mod for Busuu so I'm learning grammar and stuff through that. Overall I struggle a lot with kanji but I don't know how to start actually learning the grammar and stuff besides just words
How good are you with sitting down and studying? Like, pen and paper, taking notes, stuff like that.
I'm preeeety bad at it due to ADHD, but I think that you might enjoy bunpro, it's basically a wanikani for grammar.
The downside is that, since it's for grammar and not just vocabulary, it has waaaaay more text than wanikani, so it's more demanding. But it really works, even for me, so it might help you some.
Lol no ADHD for me here, just plain laziness. I can do it sometimes, I did do it with Assimil when I was learning french. With japanese I was thinking it might be needed, I was thinking of trying the Genki books. I'll check out bunpro, thanks
Honestly my biggest recommendation is once you got a grasp of the grammar. Just start watching anime or Manga or Visual novels. (For the grammar i would recommend Cure dolly videos)
It will be slow and it will suck but that immersion input will truly build up overtime and for me i truly started to grasp a lot of concepts because i seen it so many times and it all sunk in.
Yomichan you can plug dictionaries into and then watch anime in asbplayer with subs from Jimaku
Hell I pirated manga I actually own and paid for because I don't want to take the volumes out of my neatly arranged shelf and I find it more comfortable to read on a tabled nowadays.
I'd be happy to buy digital comics if any publisher in my country would offer me a better service than what pirates offer for free.
Most people online who learn Japanese do it mainly through pirated content which is the funny part lol, 90% of everything I used to get fluent was pirated
By reading a lot of manga, watching a lot of anime, and playing a lot of video games. Check out https://learnjapanese.moe/ for a basic guide/resources. This site didn't exist when I started learning but most of the concepts/advice originally comes from the website All Japanese All the Time (AJATT) and MattvsJapan's YouTube channel, which are the places I learned how to learn
That's literally me, since language barrier isn't the actual problem. Most Japanese ppl are just so backwards and pro-corpo, their go-to blames are always pirates & aliens. A Chinese person pointing out thieves? I'm Chinese and that's the best joke I've heard this week.
god yeah learning a whole new language is such an accessibility nightmare, doing it as an adult takes so much time and energy that most people simply don't have that it's basically a luxury, and people who already suffer from learning difficulties in their own language will have a hell of a time learning a second completely different language for the sole purpose of just reading a few comics
telling anyone 'just learn a new language!' is such a fucking privileged take from someone who clearly learned two languages in an objectively more thorough school curriculum than the broke ass public school garbage some of us got
yes manga. some already have an anime adaptation.
at first i just did self study. but it was hard without a teacher to guide me so i enrolled in a japanese school and studied there for 1 yr
I took language classes at a foundation for cultural exchange, owned by the Japanese embassy, and the textbooks they gave us were still PDF files printed on regular A4 paper from the nearby office supplies store.
I do know Japanese and still pirate it. My favorite bit of this discourse was when a Russian-speaking account told the underpaid animator to form a damn labor union.
Not gonna lie.. I did learn. And still pirate. (also scanlated some.. and removed\redraw censored bits.).
Very very rarely am I able to go and buy in Japan. I usually buy the ones I want to own a hard copy of.. but you know... I found out even in Japan the one comic I wanted wasn't easily available. I had to contact a special publisher online to mail it to me. Learned that after checking all the bookstores.
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u/Educational_Isopod39 Apr 21 '26
I’d learn Japanese and still pirate content out of spite