Hi I am new, just practising...

[tanuki]

flammable hippo wrote:

At least you're not being called like a dumb raccoon dog with big balls.

Would you like us to call you Jorge-san instead? (I remember you said that was your name on another thread)

You can call me Jorge if you want. The "-san" is obviously not needed.

[AJBryant]

Jorge-kun? :p

Tony

[RpgN]

Hi Azure!

Welcome to this forum. It seems you're making the same mistake that I did, when I first learned Japanese わ It's gonna be a long journey to understand Japanese better, but for me it's so worth it and I hope for you too

Chris, I think Yudansan is so cute and more funny. So I use that more as well :p

[tanuki]

AJBryant wrote:
Jorge-kun? :p

Tony

Sure, why not?

[sei]

Yudan Taiteki wrote:
Are you sure it's not えいこくじん? えいごじん is something that I've only heard used by preschoolers.

えいこくじん and イギリスじん are the same thing.

No, it's definitly えいごじん. Though i noticed my book (Genki... unfortunatly) uses イギリス.
But in pimsleur i'm sure that's it. 'Cause i even remember being confused because i thought 'go' meant language and so england would be only 'ei' which is weird (i'm still confused by that...).

[richvh]

In the Meiji era and before, foreign country names were spelled out phonetically with kanji rather than katakana like they are now. So, for instance, the US (America) was 亜米利加 and Britain was 英吉利. One of those characters, usually but not always the first, would be chosen as an abbreviation. Thus, America was 米国 and Britain was 英国.

[Yudan Taiteki]

えいごじん is not a standard word, so it's unfortunate if a course has that. Like I said, you *might* hear that used by a young child who doesn't fully understand the concept of languages and nationalities, and it appears to be a somewhat slang term for "native English speaker".

(To add to what richv said, the reason 米 was chosen for US instead of 亜 is that 亜 was already taken for Asia.)