LinovaA

Hi everyone, this is my first blog post but hopefully not my last. I wanted to show off my most recent cover, as I feel immensely proud of it. Plus, I've started playing Steins;Gate and it's SO COOL. I can't wait to get into the meat of the story! I'm sure there's some Steins;Gate fanatics here, heheh. Enjoy!

In this post I'll attempt to introduce JWPce (for those who don't know what it is)
(* = refer to JWPce User Manual)

JWPce

JWPce (Japanese Word Processor for Windows) by Glenn Rosenthal is a program designed for English speakers who are studying Japanese.



Now, JWPce has BUNCH of functions (13 others) but I'm only going to talk about the DICTIONARY FUNCTION.


Upon searching a word, the dictionary will give you the word in Kanji, the word in Hiragana and the meaning of the word.




The dictionary is not limited to Japanese to English.
Press Ctrl A to search from English to Japanese. (To return to Japanese to English, Ctrl K)






How to use the Dictionary for Learning Japanese through Visual Novels

Rains told me about this program. lol
This is what I'm using to read Raw VNs. (I'm not an expert yet)

After opening the program, press F6.



On the left side, you'll see buttons such as Search, Sort... Click Options.




A window will appear. Look on the left side and check Track Clipboard. Then OK.



Say you have a hooked Japanese sentence on the ITH.





Upon highlighting a word (in the ITH) that you do not know, the dictionary will automatically search that word.



This is the result of the procedure I described above.



If you look at the upper right side of the dictionary, you'll see four stuff you can check or uncheck.



These things are used to limit the search. A matter of one's preference.

Personally, I check them all so that only the needed meanings are shown and the search is fast (but there are disadvantages too).



Basically, you will be reading the text on the ITH which means that parsing (identifying words, particles, etc.) is done by you.

In case no matches are found, a warning is triggered and the default warning sound is annoying. Sound can be made tolerable by changing your Windows theme.

JWPce uses EDICT, ENAMDICT, and other dictionaries (you can add others) at the same time.*

It also has a USER DICTIONARY - a personalized dictionary you can make.*


Note:

☆ JWPce is free under the terms of GNU General Public License Link to download
☆ No romaji in this program. Go learn Kana first.
☆ Radical Look-up (F5) is useful for Kanjis you can't hook
☆ Again, to make the warning sound quite acceptable in the ears, I suggest changing your theme.
☆ There are times when the program crashes. This is because of certain words (it can't search). I suggest moving to the next line of the game and open the program again.

☆ To recognize the kanji more (make it bigger) or for more details about a certain kanji, point the mouse to the kanji (on the dictionary), right click then click Get info.




☆ I suggest reading the User Manual (atleast the section about dictionary)
☆ Some things I said are based only on my observations. Stuff may vary.
☆ credit to rainsismyfav for introducing me to JWPce / ITH method


I will answer questions I can / am willing to answer.
Also please correct me for false information I might have stated.

See you around.

The following list only contains threads made from March 28 to April 04, any older thread will be placed under the "Updated" banner if new relevant content is added to it



If you don't know how the list works, please check the project
thread.






Announcement
Bunny Black 1 translation patch released! (Link)

Discussion
How Global is Fuwa (What country do you actually reside in?) (Link)
Interest in a Fuwa Gaming Club (Link)
How did you discover Fuwanovel? (Link)
Spring 2015 Anime Discussion (Link)
Weekly VN/Route Appreciation Thread (Link)

Games
Fuwanovel's Fantasy Quest! (Link)

Blog Post
VN Review: Dies Irae (Link)

Updated
Blue* TL Project [Demo/Prologue Released] (Link)

The picture is entirely unrelated to most of this post.

So, as many of you who play UnTl'd VNs may know, JParser is a lifesaver. It is both love and life, bae, and every other romantic term you can possibly apply to a normal human. In other words, for someone who is a JLP (Japanese Language Plebian), it is a god send. I've been using it up until now, which is about a month (I can't believe I've been reading AkaGoei for like a month..) and it has really been working for me.

But the other day... something happened. Something that changed everything for me

So I was talking to a certain SubaHibi fan the other day, and he informed me of a different way for me to understand moon runes. While my grasp of grammar has definitely improved, I still rely heavily on dictionaries to understand the other words, so I was all ears.

As he spoke the name... it was like heaven itself had opened up and rained down it's infinite glory of kamige on to me.
.... Rikaisama.

What is rikaisama? It is basically JParser, only it actually gets updated. That and it is used in your browser. Problem is rikaisama is only for an inferior internet browser Firefox.

Here is an image of what my setup looks like now:



Looks a lot cleaner in my opinion.
So let me break this down for you. Like JParser, mousing over words brings up defintions and different words for what it might possibly be. Making sure that ITH is set to automatically copy to clipboard, I have a site open that has a resizeable text box so I can paste what is on the sceen and check it out in my browser by mousing over stuff. Ironic that the page I am using is Translation Party, but it doesn't really matter what you use as long as there is a textbox. I am using Translation Party because a certain SubaHibi fan showed me to that site first.

There ARE alternatives to rikaisama, such rikaikun for Chrome.. but rikaisama is more customizable. So yeah, sure you will have to switch over to Firefox if you aren't already using it. Honestly the switch isn't so bad.

After all... Rikaisama has an optional name dictionary.. and if that isn't enough to convince you.. then I don't know what will.

All credit for this goes to a certain SubaHibi fan. Thanks for showing me this method, as it is definitely more convienent. Or at the very least... it makes my screen look nicer.


On an unrelated note, seems I haven't updated this in a little bit. I have been busy over the last few weeks, but I certainly have not forgotten about it (not that many people read this thing at all xD).
I finished Aya's route and am on Tsuki's now, but I am taking a break from AkaGoei in order to play some Totono, if you couldn't tell from the above picture. Totono is kind of like a break for me, as it is easier to read than AkaGoei in my opinion.

Anyway, thanks for stopping in guys. Hopefully I'll get something else up again soon.

I Did It






So anybody who interacts with me on a regular basis probably has heard me be really hyped about the fact that I have finished my first route. Another indicator of my happiness over this would be the fact that... you know:




So I am writing this up, because I want to mark this as a milestone in my learning process. While sure, it may not seem like a big deal... but for me it is pretty huge for me. For the longest time before I got the chance to start learning Japanese, I always saw it as an uncrackable code. Something I could never even hope to read. This was mostly due to the fact that the only other language I had ever learnt was French, which uses my native character set. Also, whenever my friends and I talked about languages, we had decided that the seemingly hardest languages to learn were Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese.

So there was this sort of barrier for me, that basically always told me that I would never be able to understand Japanese. I still have those barriers in place for Arabic and Chinese, although that is loosening as I learn kanji in the case of Chinese.

So needless to say. I am pretty happy right now.
After finishing Tae's route and wiping the tears away, I was filled with this strange sense of euphoria.
'Cause after like... 3 weeks of improvement.
I had finally done it.
I had cracked this so called uncrackable code. So to speak.

Sure I had to rely a lot on ITH and JParser, but you know what... I learnt quite a bit in this one route. My understanding of sentence structure, and the size of my Japanese lexicon have both improved significantly. And that was only over the course of one route! I still have four more to go in AkaGoei!

It was really hard at first. I could not wrap my head around what I was reading, and there were times in the beginning where I was just clicking to see if I could figure out the next line. I don't do that now, but that is how it was when I first opened up the VN.

The key to improving, when you want to be able to read VNs, is to just stop making excuses as to why you can't. Maybe I am still too much of a noob to be saying such things, but I really think that this is the case. I mean yes, if you haven't studied JP at all yet, you probably shouldn't jump in, but if you have been studying for a while and aren't sure if you are ready, stop thinking you aren't ready. I made excuses for half a year when my knowledge of grammar was sitting at an agreeable level for reading VNs that are not written by Masada~

Sure you will hit snags. You will find grammar you are unfamiliar with and lots of words and phrases that will make no sense when you translate them into English no matter what you do. That is all part of the learning process. I decided that my best bet was to take my failings in Japanese in stride and just charge straight in.

So yeah, finishing this route is a huge moment for me. The next one will be when I finish the entire VN. After that, we'll see.
I'll remember the date for sure: March 14th 2015




Thanks for listening to me ramble on this one guys. As I said, it isn't really THAT big of a deal... but it means a lot to me. So I needed to put my ramblings somewhere!~

Into the Fray!



First Foray into Untranslated VNs







Man does that title make this seem important. Hate to disappoint, but it is not important at all.

So recently I decided it would be a good idea to finally stop procrastinating on something I have been really meaning to do. I finally got off my butt and got my hands on Akatsuki no Goei and installed it on my computer. With my current Japanese level, I felt it would be a good one to try and work my way through. Not too difficult and not too easy.

I just felt like a moege wouldn't really help me as much as trying to struggle my way through something with a higher level of linguistic complexity. That kinda makes it seem like I am talking about the difference between a moege and things done by the developers Light, but believe me, I make no such mistakes. I am no pleb...

... I just really wanted to say the word pleb. Its like.. my favorite 'word' right now.


I have enjoyed it thus far, that is for sure. Kaito is a freaking AWESOME protagonist. I love him, in the manly not homosexual way.

I think I have spent a total of ten hours reading, but I would be really surprised if I made it even an hour in as far as 100% fluent in Japanese person is concerned. However, I have definitely felt my vocab improving, even if it has only been three days. I have picked up a few new words and phrases, which made me pretty happy.


Incoming Digression:






So yeah, its pretty good. Maybe I will do day by day entries about my experiences with it. You can see in post time how bad my Japanese failings are. We'll see how I feel after today's playthrough.

The picture is entirely unrelated to most of this post.

So, as many of you who play UnTl'd VNs may know, JParser is a lifesaver. It is both love and life, bae, and every other romantic term you can possibly apply to a normal human. In other words, for someone who is a JLP (Japanese Language Plebian), it is a god send. I've been using it up until now, which is about a month (I can't believe I've been reading AkaGoei for like a month..) and it has really been working for me.

But the other day... something happened. Something that changed everything for me

So I was talking to a certain SubaHibi fan the other day, and he informed me of a different way for me to understand moon runes. While my grasp of grammar has definitely improved, I still rely heavily on dictionaries to understand the other words, so I was all ears.

As he spoke the name... it was like heaven itself had opened up and rained down it's infinite glory of kamige on to me.
.... Rikaisama.

What is rikaisama? It is basically JParser, only it actually gets updated. That and it is used in your browser. Problem is rikaisama is only for an inferior internet browser Firefox.

Here is an image of what my setup looks like now:



Looks a lot cleaner in my opinion.
So let me break this down for you. Like JParser, mousing over words brings up defintions and different words for what it might possibly be. Making sure that ITH is set to automatically copy to clipboard, I have a site open that has a resizeable text box so I can paste what is on the sceen and check it out in my browser by mousing over stuff. Ironic that the page I am using is Translation Party, but it doesn't really matter what you use as long as there is a textbox. I am using Translation Party because a certain SubaHibi fan showed me to that site first.

There ARE alternatives to rikaisama, such rikaikun for Chrome.. but rikaisama is more customizable. So yeah, sure you will have to switch over to Firefox if you aren't already using it. Honestly the switch isn't so bad.

After all... Rikaisama has an optional name dictionary.. and if that isn't enough to convince you.. then I don't know what will.

All credit for this goes to a certain SubaHibi fan. Thanks for showing me this method, as it is definitely more convienent. Or at the very least... it makes my screen look nicer.


On an unrelated note, seems I haven't updated this in a little bit. I have been busy over the last few weeks, but I certainly have not forgotten about it (not that many people read this thing at all xD).
I finished Aya's route and am on Tsuki's now, but I am taking a break from AkaGoei in order to play some Totono, if you couldn't tell from the above picture. Totono is kind of like a break for me, as it is easier to read than AkaGoei in my opinion.

Anyway, thanks for stopping in guys. Hopefully I'll get something else up again soon.

And so we begin...really really late. Sorry bout that but RL got hectic for a few weeks. PS: I cut this blog post down from 3,000 words, to less than 1,500. You're welcome

Welcome to the start of my blog series. The way I’ll organise this critique is to go through different writing techniques first, and then showcase how they were badly used by Winged Cloud. Unfortunately due to very strict time-constraints I’ll have to split this first entry into 2 components, so in this blog post I’ll discuss the first writing technique, in the next blog post I’ll analyse how that technique was used in the game. Then in the blog post after I’ll introduce the next writing technique and so forth.

Eventually I may even get to story, character, and the purpose of scenes. Bear in mind the following are my thought processes about writing techniques, which I assembled myself.

A necessary Beginning

What is “good writing?” “Good writing” is the flimsy excuse people on the internet use to give their criticisms weight. If you don’t like a book because the book isn’t for you, then the reason you didn’t like the book would lie on your shoulders. That sounds an awful lot like being your fault. People never want things to be their fault, it’s right up there with taking responsibility for their actions. Ew, who wants to do that? But if you said you didn’t like it because it was badly written, well, then the fault is the book’s and not yours. This is a much better feeling to have.

But seriously, what is “good writing?” Well, "good writing" is what happens when you take on-board every piece of writing advice given to you over the years and produce a novel which is completely unsellable. That book could be said to have been written in a “good style.”

AHHH! WHAT IS “GOOD WRITING?!” Okay, okay, the concept is ludicrously straight forward. A story-teller has a story they wish to tell, and in a novel the writing is the method with which that story is conveyed to the reader. If the storyteller can convey vivid and engaging images of the scenes to the reader, then they have succeeded. If the images are not so well conveyed, they could still have succeeded. If the imagery and pacing have been completely screwed, then we can say the writing is not good. A writer’s goal will always be to maximise the impact of their writing so the image is conveyed in an impactful way. Language techniques will be the tools the writer will use, and this goal will consumer their lives.

In a visual novel the concept is much the same, but less involved. The writer must still convey the bit that are not shown by visuals and sound to the audience.

Simple, no? So now on to the first technique.

Technique #1 - Show vs Tell, and when to use each

Ugh, what a clichéd piece of advice to begin with. Well, there’s a very good reason I started here, and it involves a hat and some small pieces of paper. But let us delve into this "oft-dished-out" piece of advice.

Everybody always tells budding writers to “show” and don’t “tell,” but the truth is if writers always followed this advice their work would be bloated, it would be boring, and it would be so weighty that nobody would be able to lift the damn thing. A writer will “show” some bits, and they’ll “tell” some bits. What technique they use at each point is a decision only the writer themselves can answer (this is part of a writer’s “style.”)

So, what does it mean when a writer “tells” something. Well, what generally happens is the narrator observes the circumstances happening around them, but instead of funnelling these observations to the reader, the narrator funnels the conclusions they draw instead. These conclusions will tend to be short, categorical statements (like he was tall, or he was miffed) because that is what we humans tend to do, make a bunch of observations, condense these observations into a conclusion which fits nicely into a category, and file that information away. When this method is overused the problems it can cause are many - not enough information to produce a decent image (you’ve reduced the information so it fits into a bite-size statement,) each person categorises things differently (leading to incorrect images being formed,) and pacing issues (galore.)

For example, if a reader is told a man is angry, this not only limits information and leads to a less detailed image, but people associate "anger" with different behaviours depending on their own experience and the environment they grew up in. So where the character actually clenched their fists and glared, the reader could have imagined him dropping to his knees, repeatedly whacking himself on the head with a tea kettle, and screeching to the heavens. This affects character development.

But we humans tend to have very few stock images for each category, so what happens if more than one person in the story is “angry?” What happens if 4 people got “angry”? 6 people got “angry?” Then the reader will be imagining multiple people whacking themselves on the head with a tea kettle. And if everybody gets angry at once? Well, let's just hope there’s a hell of a lot of tea kettles.

But it doesn’t stop there, every “chair” would be the same, every “2 story brick house” would be the same, every “table”, every “hand”. All “approaching footsteps” would sound the same, even if one of the characters had a peg-leg, and another was a fat, slobby, 4-legged centaur who cried great, soppy tears whenever he had to climb a set of stairs.

And we’re still not done, because that’s not the only thing an overuse of “tell” does. An overuse of “tell” takes away the manipulation of pacing a writer wields at his disposal. By it’s very nature, the lack of description in “tell” automatically speeds up the pace of events, but during those periods where you want to denote a passing of time or during those periods where you want to slow down the story, more description is added to give the reader an actual and innate feeling that time has passed.

When a writer “tells” a reader that "half an hour has passed," it doesn’t give the reader a visceral sense that time has, actually, passed. However, wondering about the significance of a man’s hitched up trousers for 5 or 6 very long paragraphs will impart a VERY visceral sense of time passing to the reader.

So, does a writer need to "show" everything with their prose? No. Often you may not want much detail, sometimes you’ll want to speed up the pace of the scene. Maybe you want to employ default reader images somewhere in your story (here a writer can use “tell” to their considerable advantage.) Flip to any page of any published book and it will always contain a mixture of “show” and “tell.” What mixture you choose will depend on what style you want to employ. But the reason this piece of advice is so clichéd is because many people don’t put enough detail into their writing to impart a decent image to the reader.

How this applies to Visual Novels

Visual Novels are a different medium to novels, and with their inclusion of visuals and sound the prose doesn't need to be as dense. But unless the visuals and sounds paint a complete picture, like in The Walking Dead, some prose will still be necessary and standard writing techniques apply.

Next Post: How Sakura Spirit handled this technique
Next Next Post: Redundancy, bloat, and the value of precision.

The following list only contains threads made from March 28 to April 04, any older thread will be placed under the "Updated" banner if new relevant content is added to it



If you don't know how the list works, please check the project
thread.






Announcement
Bunny Black 1 translation patch released! (Link)

Discussion
How Global is Fuwa (What country do you actually reside in?) (Link)
Interest in a Fuwa Gaming Club (Link)
How did you discover Fuwanovel? (Link)
Spring 2015 Anime Discussion (Link)
Weekly VN/Route Appreciation Thread (Link)

Games
Fuwanovel's Fantasy Quest! (Link)

Blog Post
VN Review: Dies Irae (Link)

Updated
Blue* TL Project [Demo/Prologue Released] (Link)

Hey guys, Lino here. So today, I think we need to take a moment and appreciate perhaps the most valuable member of the community. Scottsune Miku.

If you don't already know Scott, then you need to hurry and get good, for Scott is all that makes the world live and breathe. Once the holder of the highest stat in every stat here on Fuwa, Scott is our idol and leader and we must all aspire to be like him. Leader of the greatest company in the world, he brings us songs sung by the character, Hatsune Miku.

But don't take my word for it, here is an introductory video to everything that is Scottsune.




And remember fellow Fuwans... have some fun with Miku~


There also seems to be a religion surrounding Scott 'round here, not that a pleb like me knows anything.

The picture is entirely unrelated to most of this post.

So, as many of you who play UnTl'd VNs may know, JParser is a lifesaver. It is both love and life, bae, and every other romantic term you can possibly apply to a normal human. In other words, for someone who is a JLP (Japanese Language Plebian), it is a god send. I've been using it up until now, which is about a month (I can't believe I've been reading AkaGoei for like a month..) and it has really been working for me.

But the other day... something happened. Something that changed everything for me

So I was talking to a certain SubaHibi fan the other day, and he informed me of a different way for me to understand moon runes. While my grasp of grammar has definitely improved, I still rely heavily on dictionaries to understand the other words, so I was all ears.

As he spoke the name... it was like heaven itself had opened up and rained down it's infinite glory of kamige on to me.
.... Rikaisama.

What is rikaisama? It is basically JParser, only it actually gets updated. That and it is used in your browser. Problem is rikaisama is only for an inferior internet browser Firefox.

Here is an image of what my setup looks like now:



Looks a lot cleaner in my opinion.
So let me break this down for you. Like JParser, mousing over words brings up defintions and different words for what it might possibly be. Making sure that ITH is set to automatically copy to clipboard, I have a site open that has a resizeable text box so I can paste what is on the sceen and check it out in my browser by mousing over stuff. Ironic that the page I am using is Translation Party, but it doesn't really matter what you use as long as there is a textbox. I am using Translation Party because a certain SubaHibi fan showed me to that site first.

There ARE alternatives to rikaisama, such rikaikun for Chrome.. but rikaisama is more customizable. So yeah, sure you will have to switch over to Firefox if you aren't already using it. Honestly the switch isn't so bad.

After all... Rikaisama has an optional name dictionary.. and if that isn't enough to convince you.. then I don't know what will.

All credit for this goes to a certain SubaHibi fan. Thanks for showing me this method, as it is definitely more convienent. Or at the very least... it makes my screen look nicer.


On an unrelated note, seems I haven't updated this in a little bit. I have been busy over the last few weeks, but I certainly have not forgotten about it (not that many people read this thing at all xD).
I finished Aya's route and am on Tsuki's now, but I am taking a break from AkaGoei in order to play some Totono, if you couldn't tell from the above picture. Totono is kind of like a break for me, as it is easier to read than AkaGoei in my opinion.

Anyway, thanks for stopping in guys. Hopefully I'll get something else up again soon.

The following list only contains threads made from March 28 to April 04, any older thread will be placed under the "Updated" banner if new relevant content is added to it



If you don't know how the list works, please check the project
thread.






Announcement
Bunny Black 1 translation patch released! (Link)

Discussion
How Global is Fuwa (What country do you actually reside in?) (Link)
Interest in a Fuwa Gaming Club (Link)
How did you discover Fuwanovel? (Link)
Spring 2015 Anime Discussion (Link)
Weekly VN/Route Appreciation Thread (Link)

Games
Fuwanovel's Fantasy Quest! (Link)

Blog Post
VN Review: Dies Irae (Link)

Updated
Blue* TL Project [Demo/Prologue Released] (Link)

The following list only contains threads made from March 28 to April 04, any older thread will be placed under the "Updated" banner if new relevant content is added to it



If you don't know how the list works, please check the project
thread.






Announcement
Bunny Black 1 translation patch released! (Link)

Discussion
How Global is Fuwa (What country do you actually reside in?) (Link)
Interest in a Fuwa Gaming Club (Link)
How did you discover Fuwanovel? (Link)
Spring 2015 Anime Discussion (Link)
Weekly VN/Route Appreciation Thread (Link)

Games
Fuwanovel's Fantasy Quest! (Link)

Blog Post
VN Review: Dies Irae (Link)

Updated
Blue* TL Project [Demo/Prologue Released] (Link)

The following list only contains threads made from March 28 to April 04, any older thread will be placed under the "Updated" banner if new relevant content is added to it



If you don't know how the list works, please check the project
thread.






Announcement
Bunny Black 1 translation patch released! (Link)

Discussion
How Global is Fuwa (What country do you actually reside in?) (Link)
Interest in a Fuwa Gaming Club (Link)
How did you discover Fuwanovel? (Link)
Spring 2015 Anime Discussion (Link)
Weekly VN/Route Appreciation Thread (Link)

Games
Fuwanovel's Fantasy Quest! (Link)

Blog Post
VN Review: Dies Irae (Link)

Updated
Blue* TL Project [Demo/Prologue Released] (Link)

Hey guys, Lino here. So today, I think we need to take a moment and appreciate perhaps the most valuable member of the community. Scottsune Miku.

If you don't already know Scott, then you need to hurry and get good, for Scott is all that makes the world live and breathe. Once the holder of the highest stat in every stat here on Fuwa, Scott is our idol and leader and we must all aspire to be like him. Leader of the greatest company in the world, he brings us songs sung by the character, Hatsune Miku.

But don't take my word for it, here is an introductory video to everything that is Scottsune.




And remember fellow Fuwans... have some fun with Miku~


There also seems to be a religion surrounding Scott 'round here, not that a pleb like me knows anything.

Hey guys, Lino here. So today, I think we need to take a moment and appreciate perhaps the most valuable member of the community. Scottsune Miku.

If you don't already know Scott, then you need to hurry and get good, for Scott is all that makes the world live and breathe. Once the holder of the highest stat in every stat here on Fuwa, Scott is our idol and leader and we must all aspire to be like him. Leader of the greatest company in the world, he brings us songs sung by the character, Hatsune Miku.

But don't take my word for it, here is an introductory video to everything that is Scottsune.




And remember fellow Fuwans... have some fun with Miku~


There also seems to be a religion surrounding Scott 'round here, not that a pleb like me knows anything.

Hey guys, Lino here. So today, I think we need to take a moment and appreciate perhaps the most valuable member of the community. Scottsune Miku.

If you don't already know Scott, then you need to hurry and get good, for Scott is all that makes the world live and breathe. Once the holder of the highest stat in every stat here on Fuwa, Scott is our idol and leader and we must all aspire to be like him. Leader of the greatest company in the world, he brings us songs sung by the character, Hatsune Miku.

But don't take my word for it, here is an introductory video to everything that is Scottsune.




And remember fellow Fuwans... have some fun with Miku~


There also seems to be a religion surrounding Scott 'round here, not that a pleb like me knows anything.

Hey guys, Lino here. So today, I think we need to take a moment and appreciate perhaps the most valuable member of the community. Scottsune Miku.

If you don't already know Scott, then you need to hurry and get good, for Scott is all that makes the world live and breathe. Once the holder of the highest stat in every stat here on Fuwa, Scott is our idol and leader and we must all aspire to be like him. Leader of the greatest company in the world, he brings us songs sung by the character, Hatsune Miku.

But don't take my word for it, here is an introductory video to everything that is Scottsune.




And remember fellow Fuwans... have some fun with Miku~


There also seems to be a religion surrounding Scott 'round here, not that a pleb like me knows anything.

Hey Fuwans! Lino here again bringing some more fabulous happenings around Fuwa proper. This post is going to be a tad beefier than normal, so bare with me here. In this case, it isn't as much a 'happening' is a thing that persistently exists. So without further ado, we'll be taking a look at the Fuwa-Skype Group and its offshoot; Fuwa-Skype Karaoke.

For those of you who don't know, Fuwa actually has its own skype group, the Fuwa-Skype Group (F.S.G). It's one of the places where a bunch of members here often frequent and give each other raburabu hangout outside of the forum. You can check out the thread dedicated to joining it over here. If the idea of getting into that is off-putting, perhaps take a look through the "unforgettable skype quotes" thread. We are also housing the next Nasu (a la Fate series and Tsukihime), so that right there is all the more reason to check it out.

Aside from that, as mentioned in the first part of this post, there is also an offshoot group of F.S.G; Fuwa-Skype Karaoke (F.S.K). As the name suggests, members get together and jam out and sing together every Saturday. It has been going on for a while now and everyone who ends up participating enjoys it a lot.


So we, the Recognition Team, have asked a few members of the Skype groups for a bit of their time for interviews, and they oh so kindly obliged. We would very much like to thank Kurisu-Chan, arakura, Jptje, and Joris914 for taking the time to deal with our questions and letting us interview them. Half of the interviews are in text form while the other two are available for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!

Interviews:

arakura (interviewed by Ezeefreak)

Kurisu-Chan (interviewed by your's truly)




Jptje (interviewed by Rose)




Joris (interviewed by Rose)

Hello y’all! Ezeefreak from the Recognition Team is here this time. Today we’ll highlight another one of our precious members. If you’re able to read a VN in Japanese or even in ordinary English, then the probability is really high (near 100 %) that the member, we are introducing to you, already read that one you’re reading now or plan to read. Maybe you even found it on his suggestion, in one of his fabulous reviews or on a list he made. Well, I think y’all figured it already out that we talking about Clephas.

Clephas is real pro and expert when it comes to VN’s. He has read more than 500 (in words FIVEHUNDRED) VNs by now. So he knows a lot about this media and also shares his knowledge with us. If you ask for a recommendation he is always one of the first who contribute. If you want to read something about a VN it is mostly enough to search for a review from him. In his VN of the month topic he shows us all different kinds of VNs, some that the most of us never even heard about. Also he is one of our most active bloggers on the site and showers us with incredibly detailed and interesting posts there. He is also a Moderator of the FuwaChat and probably already ate the most of the people from there.

Well, let me show you a little overview over all the awesome work he does on Fuwanovel:

- Clephas' VN of the month
- There are also lot of other informative posts like VN Companies, their nature and habits or Why Japanese is easier to learn than you think
- Clephas made a lot of helpful Lists and recommendations, see yourselff here, here, here , ... and so on It would really take to long to liste every single one .
- A must see for every lover of VN's is definitely his blog.

He contributed a lot to this community and like I said at the beginning, is a real expert when it comes to VNs. It would be too much to list every helpful and excellent post here.

We from the RecTeam, the Staff of Fuwa and all the other people of Fuwa thank him for the work he does and hope the he will us show more from the world of VNs in the future.

Thank you!

Hey Fuwans! Lino here again bringing some more fabulous happenings around Fuwa proper. This post is going to be a tad beefier than normal, so bare with me here. In this case, it isn't as much a 'happening' is a thing that persistently exists. So without further ado, we'll be taking a look at the Fuwa-Skype Group and its offshoot; Fuwa-Skype Karaoke.

For those of you who don't know, Fuwa actually has its own skype group, the Fuwa-Skype Group (F.S.G). It's one of the places where a bunch of members here often frequent and give each other raburabu hangout outside of the forum. You can check out the thread dedicated to joining it over here. If the idea of getting into that is off-putting, perhaps take a look through the "unforgettable skype quotes" thread. We are also housing the next Nasu (a la Fate series and Tsukihime), so that right there is all the more reason to check it out.

Aside from that, as mentioned in the first part of this post, there is also an offshoot group of F.S.G; Fuwa-Skype Karaoke (F.S.K). As the name suggests, members get together and jam out and sing together every Saturday. It has been going on for a while now and everyone who ends up participating enjoys it a lot.


So we, the Recognition Team, have asked a few members of the Skype groups for a bit of their time for interviews, and they oh so kindly obliged. We would very much like to thank Kurisu-Chan, arakura, Jptje, and Joris914 for taking the time to deal with our questions and letting us interview them. Half of the interviews are in text form while the other two are available for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!

Interviews:

arakura (interviewed by Ezeefreak)

Kurisu-Chan (interviewed by your's truly)




Jptje (interviewed by Rose)




Joris (interviewed by Rose)

Hey Fuwans! Lino here again bringing some more fabulous happenings around Fuwa proper. This post is going to be a tad beefier than normal, so bare with me here. In this case, it isn't as much a 'happening' is a thing that persistently exists. So without further ado, we'll be taking a look at the Fuwa-Skype Group and its offshoot; Fuwa-Skype Karaoke.

For those of you who don't know, Fuwa actually has its own skype group, the Fuwa-Skype Group (F.S.G). It's one of the places where a bunch of members here often frequent and give each other raburabu hangout outside of the forum. You can check out the thread dedicated to joining it over here. If the idea of getting into that is off-putting, perhaps take a look through the "unforgettable skype quotes" thread. We are also housing the next Nasu (a la Fate series and Tsukihime), so that right there is all the more reason to check it out.

Aside from that, as mentioned in the first part of this post, there is also an offshoot group of F.S.G; Fuwa-Skype Karaoke (F.S.K). As the name suggests, members get together and jam out and sing together every Saturday. It has been going on for a while now and everyone who ends up participating enjoys it a lot.


So we, the Recognition Team, have asked a few members of the Skype groups for a bit of their time for interviews, and they oh so kindly obliged. We would very much like to thank Kurisu-Chan, arakura, Jptje, and Joris914 for taking the time to deal with our questions and letting us interview them. Half of the interviews are in text form while the other two are available for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!

Interviews:

arakura (interviewed by Ezeefreak)

Kurisu-Chan (interviewed by your's truly)




Jptje (interviewed by Rose)




Joris (interviewed by Rose)

Hey Fuwans! Lino here again bringing some more fabulous happenings around Fuwa proper. This post is going to be a tad beefier than normal, so bare with me here. In this case, it isn't as much a 'happening' is a thing that persistently exists. So without further ado, we'll be taking a look at the Fuwa-Skype Group and its offshoot; Fuwa-Skype Karaoke.

For those of you who don't know, Fuwa actually has its own skype group, the Fuwa-Skype Group (F.S.G). It's one of the places where a bunch of members here often frequent and give each other raburabu hangout outside of the forum. You can check out the thread dedicated to joining it over here. If the idea of getting into that is off-putting, perhaps take a look through the "unforgettable skype quotes" thread. We are also housing the next Nasu (a la Fate series and Tsukihime), so that right there is all the more reason to check it out.

Aside from that, as mentioned in the first part of this post, there is also an offshoot group of F.S.G; Fuwa-Skype Karaoke (F.S.K). As the name suggests, members get together and jam out and sing together every Saturday. It has been going on for a while now and everyone who ends up participating enjoys it a lot.


So we, the Recognition Team, have asked a few members of the Skype groups for a bit of their time for interviews, and they oh so kindly obliged. We would very much like to thank Kurisu-Chan, arakura, Jptje, and Joris914 for taking the time to deal with our questions and letting us interview them. Half of the interviews are in text form while the other two are available for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!

Interviews:

arakura (interviewed by Ezeefreak)

Kurisu-Chan (interviewed by your's truly)




Jptje (interviewed by Rose)




Joris (interviewed by Rose)

This is a response to a comment from Tay (which I suspect has ulterior motives).
 
Eroge, as told through the visual novel medium, fill a void in my life. I'm well past college age, yet I've never touched a girl romantically, much less kissed or dated. You might say I'm starved for romance, yet I have little interest in dating. I could go into detail, but I'm not that interested in discussing my personal life publicly or privately. I'm going through changes in my life that might very well change my outlook, but this is how I've lived my adult life until now.
 
Suffice to say, I find anime-style heroines attractive, and I crave sexual and romantic fulfillment. Nukige don't typically do it for me because I want to be emotionally moved. I need drama. I need context. I need to immerse myself in a fictional world. Non-ero VNs don't do it for me because they lack sexual content, which is a large part of the draw for me, even if it's a small part of the overall package. Before I was into eroge I was into RPGs, fantasy novels, and anime, so story-driven eroge were a natural evolution of my interests.
 
I suspect this isn't the response Tay was looking for. "Join Fuwanovel and enjoy sexual fulfillment!" doesn't make a great tagline, after all. It might also invite unwanted attention from authorities.
 
I'm interested in the eroge industry (eroge account for ~90% of PC VNs originating in Japan), especially the English side, because it's such a fascinating niche. The market dynamics are completely unique. The stigma of porn hamstrings the market, preventing exposure through traditional channels. Cheap low-budget games often turn the most volume and yield the most profit: mediocrity reigns supreme. Most Japanese eroge publishers simply refuse to deal with English licensors, for a variety of business and cultural reasons. The fanbase is small but extremely vocal; it's possible to keep up with all major developments and voices in the community simply by following a few forums. Despite the tiny size of the English market, piracy is rampant and has threatened to completely annihilate the industry at several points. For every eroge customer there's probably 9 "fans" who've never bought an eroge, or who buy only when they can't get what they want for free. The market is so exquisitely fucked up that watching it inspires the sort of morbid fascination of observing a train wreck in progress. And then there's all the *unique* personalities that such a niche invariably draws.
 
Shameless plug: Those interested in seeing the world through my eyes might want to give my novella in progress Memory's Wounds a try.

I Did It






So anybody who interacts with me on a regular basis probably has heard me be really hyped about the fact that I have finished my first route. Another indicator of my happiness over this would be the fact that... you know:




So I am writing this up, because I want to mark this as a milestone in my learning process. While sure, it may not seem like a big deal... but for me it is pretty huge for me. For the longest time before I got the chance to start learning Japanese, I always saw it as an uncrackable code. Something I could never even hope to read. This was mostly due to the fact that the only other language I had ever learnt was French, which uses my native character set. Also, whenever my friends and I talked about languages, we had decided that the seemingly hardest languages to learn were Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese.

So there was this sort of barrier for me, that basically always told me that I would never be able to understand Japanese. I still have those barriers in place for Arabic and Chinese, although that is loosening as I learn kanji in the case of Chinese.

So needless to say. I am pretty happy right now.
After finishing Tae's route and wiping the tears away, I was filled with this strange sense of euphoria.
'Cause after like... 3 weeks of improvement.
I had finally done it.
I had cracked this so called uncrackable code. So to speak.

Sure I had to rely a lot on ITH and JParser, but you know what... I learnt quite a bit in this one route. My understanding of sentence structure, and the size of my Japanese lexicon have both improved significantly. And that was only over the course of one route! I still have four more to go in AkaGoei!

It was really hard at first. I could not wrap my head around what I was reading, and there were times in the beginning where I was just clicking to see if I could figure out the next line. I don't do that now, but that is how it was when I first opened up the VN.

The key to improving, when you want to be able to read VNs, is to just stop making excuses as to why you can't. Maybe I am still too much of a noob to be saying such things, but I really think that this is the case. I mean yes, if you haven't studied JP at all yet, you probably shouldn't jump in, but if you have been studying for a while and aren't sure if you are ready, stop thinking you aren't ready. I made excuses for half a year when my knowledge of grammar was sitting at an agreeable level for reading VNs that are not written by Masada~

Sure you will hit snags. You will find grammar you are unfamiliar with and lots of words and phrases that will make no sense when you translate them into English no matter what you do. That is all part of the learning process. I decided that my best bet was to take my failings in Japanese in stride and just charge straight in.

So yeah, finishing this route is a huge moment for me. The next one will be when I finish the entire VN. After that, we'll see.
I'll remember the date for sure: March 14th 2015




Thanks for listening to me ramble on this one guys. As I said, it isn't really THAT big of a deal... but it means a lot to me. So I needed to put my ramblings somewhere!~