All I can say is... one of us has to learn Japanese. ;p Or at least we wait until Sarah becomes fluent enough that we can bother her non-stop.
Unless I get that teaching job in Japan, I'm not learning much more than I already know for a while... no reason to... ;...Aside from translating random pages from mangas...I doubt I'll be doing much with it for a while... :p (Unless I get said job... which isn't looking too good right now...)
And I hate to sound like a sub recruiter, but you dub people could stand to watch a little more subtitled anime! It will improve your basic understanding of japanese at the least! ^_^;
The dub is better than the Japanese, on the whole. Some characters are voiced better in Japanese, but many characters are far more entertaining in English. Mr. Fujisawa and Jinnai will go down as two of the greatest anime voices of all time....Thou speakest blasphemy, dub-lover! :-) :-) :-)How can you even consider that the dub could *improve* upon the script! But, yeah, that's what *made* the El-Hazard dub. (And the You're Under Arrest dub for that matter...)
Try looking at the Saturn game. Loads of Japanese, no translation. We picked up a few words... ogi-san (if that is the correct phonetic spelling) is princess and jingi (also, if that is correct phonetic spelling) is "holy object".
Easy Rob ol' pal, I'm just offering a suggestion. You guys were talking about needing somebody to pump for information about japanese right?
On the other hand, I am promising myself to pick up a copy of "Japanese for busy people" from the library one of these days (maybe during my week off) just because I never seem to get around to making an effort to improve my Japanese!
If I had actually taken a course in Japanese (or if my little brother Joseph hadn't hidden the "Learn basic Japanese" book and tape on me), I would recognize the words better.
Heh I have that book... is ok... they spend a lot of time on counting in the first few chapters... which is frustrating, complicated and uninteresting (and I don't mean basic counting I mean all the counters like mai (for flat things), hon (for stick things), ko (for round things), nin (for people), fun (for counting minutes) etc.) ... :p I KNOW it's essential but they should have waited to do that a little later in the book IMHO. I got to maybe the 8th chapter... we were using it in my non-credit Japanese class that I took. I probably should get back into it... but I don't see any point in pushing myself unless I AM getting that job overseas... 9_9 Right now I'm content in "translating" random pages of manga (as best I can which isn't too good-- but I get the idea)...