Hi From the North

[kwaters]

Hello All,

I am from B.C. in Canada, and I am teaching myself Japanese, with plans of maybe going to Japan to teach English in the near future. I love Japanese culture and values, so that is what I am hear for, to learn more. So far, I have the Hiragana pretty much memorized, just working on basic vocab now, before I get into anything too crazy.

I hope to meet some nice people here that want together to learn more about the Japanese culture and language.

Sayonnara,

K. Waters

[micahcowan]

Welcome to TJP!

[chikara]

TJPへようこそ　

[phreadom]

Sayonnara

Welcome to TJP!

A small note... it should be "sayonara"... and actually has a "long o" sound on the o part... but due to the wonders of romanization, you could see it written a number of different ways in our alphabet... like sayounara, sayoonara, sayōnara, etc. But for many commonly said Japanese words that get sort of "adopted" by English, we tend to drop those long o sounds... like "Tokyo" for instance is actually "Toukyou" (Tōkyō).

Hopefully I didn't make that more complicated than it needed to be.

Anyway... TJPへようこそ！

[micahcowan]

... and actually has a "long o" sound on the o part..

If one wishes to be 100% correct. But Google has twice as many (34 million) hits for "さよなら"(short o) as it does for "さようなら" (long o), and the former is particularly common in casual to semi-casual speech as far as I can tell, so even in Japanese you can choose whether or not to write (or speak) the long o explicitly.

But of course, nobody says sayonara with a long "n".