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Hello from Berlin, NJ

Mike McGrane

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My name is Mike, I am a beginning student in aikido. I enjoy art, animation, video editing in addition to history, archeology and anthropology. Working on a few projects to animate aikido exercises. As well as an animated haiku. I will be using Moho, After Effects and Rebelle to create my work. I, will need help to make sure my Romaji grammar and lettering is correct. Is there a forum on here to help me make sure I have my words correct? Such as this .jpeg file I attached. So far I have been using Google Translate
 

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Welcome Mike. Members here are pretty helpful as long as you don't overuse as us a translating service. Sometimes it takes a day or two to get an answer.
 
Hi Mike, welcome to the board. Congratulations for finding yourself on the path of traditional martial arts, I hope your efforts bear fruit.

The phrase you're going for, it looks like, is 名誉と尊厳を持って生きるために, "(for the sake of/in order) to live with honor and dignity." I would romanize this as Meiyo to songen (w)o motte ikiru tame ni

If you are going to write the Japanese yourself, I would recommend you get acquainted with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, and familiarize yourself with the correct stroke order of kanji, as there are several issues with the characters you wrote. Some are aesthetics that just make the kanji look unbalanced or ill-formed--a common issue when someone who hasn't learned the language tries to copy the characters--but some are outright mistakes (missing strokes or strokes not fully intersecting where they should) or writing what looks like the wrong character (ろ→る、your に looks more like ん with an extra line) .

We do have a Learning Japanese board as well as one for translations requests, which you can use in the future.

Learning how to write Japanese may as well be accompanied by an attempt to learn the language, if only on a basic level. We are happy to assist with this to the best of our abilities. I understand if that's not your intention and you don't want to go through all that hassle, in which case I recommend just using a Japanese font and typing it out with the IME (Japanese keyboard), then check your results with jisho.org or google translate (which gives you a romanization of your entered phrase underneath the Japanese), or get your work proofread here. Better yet, if this is part of a dojo-kun or something that is already written somewhere, try to use the original phrasing exactly, to avoid mistakes. For serious artistic endeavors, I would hire an experienced calligrapher to create an original work for you to use.
 
Welcome Mike. Members here are pretty helpful as long as you don't overuse as us a translating service. Sometimes it takes a day or two to get an answer.
Thank you, Ohayoo Gozaimasu . I don't plan on overusing your very interesting website, just trying to learn about the Japanese culture, language and grammar, to supplement my aikido training. I addition I have an old badly abused NCO War Souvenir katana that I am restoring. I have told by a collector that is counterfeit. Which is OK, my goal is to restore it as a display piece for my wall. My purpose is to make sure that an animated haiku I am developing has the correct language, writing and grammar. As a soldier in Nam, I did my R&R in Japan. Absolutely love the people, country, art and culture. Looking forward to learning.
 
I was lucky enough the Navy sent me to Kyushu , Japan for 2 years insread of the Nam(Jan1970-Feb1972). We had a base there(Hakata) that tracked all comunist country traffic and sent it to NSA to decode. I worked in HFDF and we mostly tracked Russian subs and nuke bombers. My birthday came up number 25 on the draft so I figured if I wanted to avoid the jungle , join the Navy and it worked out great. The Navy got even with me for having the good life for 2 years and sent me to Adak for my last year in. I never had the patience to learn any martial arts , so always carried a 1911A1 since I got out in 73.
 
Very very cool. A buddy of mine was Navy, Signal Corp may he Rest in Peace, he worked same kinda job w CIA monitoring communications in Angola and Chile. I was an Army MP Investigator worked 2 Corps South, outta Cam Rahn Bay. Traveled all over. Also, a huge fan of 1911, I carried one in Law Enforcement, switched to the S&W Model 645 for remainder of career. Also trained and certified in use of Nunchakus developed by Joe Hess from the Broward County Police Academy. Have always wanted to learn aikido. Finally found the right Sensei's here in Laurel Springs, NJ both are 7th Don Black Belts. Very nice people. I am more defense oriented than aggressive. So, their Traditional Agatsu Aikido is more to my liking. Personally, I think based on my personal career experiences that every law enforcement officer, definitely corrections or security agent etc should be at least a Blue Belt in a martial art like aikido, judo jujitsu or hapkido. Because, unarmed defense training, in this country is absolutely abysmal.
 
Finally thank you so much. Your comments are greatly appreciated. I used the google translate app. And then tried to copy their lettering in my Rebelle graphic arts app. Which is a very painterly software. Understanding that the proper stroke and placement is indeed extremely important. I will save and follow all of your recommendations. I want to learn the proper use of the language and the calligraphy. I am trying to create the calligraphy into a type of animated version of a haiku. I already found an app to translate my verses on this website. I am an artist and animator. Trying to keep semi-sane in these trying times. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Time for aikido training,,,,,TTYL
 
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Small world. I took 2 years of law enforcement in college and worked for my local PD. After college , I was all set to enter the Maine State Police when my dad's automotive business took off. He begged me to help out just for the summer and then join the police. I didn't escape the family business for the next 20 years , LOL. My duty weapon was a S&W model 19 , 4 inch barrel .357. When I got off the force , I swapped to the Colt 1911A1. Due to old age , I just replaced it with a Dan Wesson ECP in .45 with the Crimson Trace green laser grips. Eye sight isn't what it used to be. I think today's police rely on pepper spray , taser & asp and very little hands on. I guess though if you have 40 pounds of gear on they carry now , getting into a wrestling match would not be easy. Maine is still pretty much violent crime free , but the habit of day to day carry , I can't break. Nice to have someone join here with your background.
 
There are a lot of materials out there for learning Japanese, so I recommend shopping around and seeing which materials suit your learning style. A formal class and textbook can provide a stronger foundation, if only to force you to engage the material more frequently. With increased practice and exposure comes a deeper understanding of the material, which translates to both fluency AND martial arts

This site has a good overview of the syllabary. Japanese deals mostly in sets/lines of the same five syllables (a, i, u, e, o), either by themselves or following a consonant (ka ki ku ke ko, ma mi mu me mo, na ni nu ne no, etc). Some of those lines can pair with additional marks like diacritics (dakuten and handakuten which turn "ha" into "ba" or "pa," "sa" to "za," "ka" to "ga," etc) and palatalization (mya, nya, pya, kya), and then there's the special /N/ phoneme ん. So with less than 50 unique characters, we can represent over 100 different sounds that occur in native Japanese. There are some special combinations used in katakana to express some sounds that come from foreign loan words and names. The beauty of written Japanese is that with the syllabary you can write anything phonetically.

This site shows animated stroke order and direction for hiragana:

You can see how hiragana is written in this video. It gives a little hints for the general balance and proportions of the characters, and you can see why stroke order and direction are important for getting consistent results. Remember these were originally written with a brush, so the thickness of the lines change depending on the way the writing implement is put to paper and picked up. Calligraphy is an art all on its own.

Katakana, which has a parallel character set describing the exact same sounds, but is used for foreign words, sound effects, and other things.

Kanji is a whole other beast but we'll get there.
 
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