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Hello from the Netherlands

LoudRex

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Hello all,

I wanted to introduce myself, after I just registered here.
I am Rick, 28 y.o. and live in the Netherlands.

I just love Japan, although I never visited that country.
A journey to Japan (mainland) is still on my wishlist.
I would love to go, because I have autism and everything there is so well structured.
It would be so nice to visit, but after the COVID-pandemic, because travelling is so difficult with every countries' restrictions.

Well I am also a Japan-geek and love to watch anime and to eat sushi.
So that is why I registered here, to get to know more about the country and it's culture.
I am more a reader than poster, so that is why I may or may not post as much as others.
After all, I hope on a nice stay here and to discover more of Japan's secrets.

Kind regards from an icy Europe,
Rick a.k.a. Loudrex
 
HI RICK !!!! Glad you found us. Hope the holidays are not stressing you too much. I live in the US in "icy" Maine. There are a lot of nice members here , so if you need help with anything , feel free to ask. You might enjoy our "MEDIA" section here , tons of things to look at. It is sad that the virus is making life so difficult all over the world. Hopefully in the future , you might make it to Japan.

 
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Welcome to the forum. You found the right place for all things Japan. All her secrets are right here to be discovered.
 
Hi, and welcome to the forum.

Just a point that may or may not be relevant to your autism: if you are prone to sensory overload (I am to a small extent), particularly noise, Japan can be very unpleasant at times. You might find yourself in an overlit supermarket with devices playing adverts at you from several directions at once while you try to negotiate people without much spatial awareness. I once watched a British advert made about the stress a neurodivergent kid may encounter in a shopping centre with just too much going on, and my immediate thought was that this kid would be much more stressed in a Japanese shopping centre.

Anyway, I hope you make it over here and you like it.
 
Hi Rick and welcome to the forum.

Have you thought about learning Japanese?
 
Thanks guys for the messages.
I'll have a good look around the Media section for sure, seems so interesting!

@Lothor : I am not very quick sensory overloaded, I can handle a lot with my autism, luckily.
So I think Japan is still "manageable" to me.
But first I want to get over the Covid-19 situation, as that makes me more uncomfortable and more stressed about things I don't want to be with anyway, i.e. closing borders and other restrictions.

@Buntaro : Yes writing kana and learning the language is definitely on my to-do list, also because I watch anime it would come in handy .

Greetings!
 
Rex, let us know when you learn the first five hiragana. Are you familiar with the first five hiragana?
 
Ehm, no to be honest not.
What are the first five, and where can I best / free learn some?
I'm looking on YouTube but don't know which I should use, or which is considered the best...

And why is my profile flag Italian instead of Dutch, yes I use a VPN..... Is that the problem?
 
Your VPN has shown you in Israel & Romania also. There are tons of videos here on JREF and old posts and threads that help with learning Japanese ; they may help you.
 
Japan has three alphabets, basically.
1. Hiragana
2. Katakana
3. Kanji

Japanese kids learn the 46 letters in the hiragana alphabet in their first year of elementary school. These 46 are relatively easy to remember. You can easily find a chart of them (and how to write them) by searching the internet. After that you should learn Katakana, which is another set of 46 letters mainly used for foreign words that have been imported into Japan (words of foods, a lot of technology related words, words related to the metric system, as well as foreign names, etc.). It sounds like a lot, but actually this is the easy bit. The letters all have a single pronunciation, unlike in English where the single letter "a" can have 5 or 6 or 7 different pronounciations.

Hiragana is your springboard to learning the other alphabets. Katakana is a similar, 46-letter alphabet, used mostly for words imported into Japan from overseas.
 
Rick,

Some time ago, I reviewed the videos on YouTube that teach hiragana, and most of them are pretty bad. The best one is posted below. (The music sounds more Chinese than Japanese, which I think is a little goofy.)

The first five hiragana are あ、い、う、え、お, which match the five Japanese vowels, a,i,u,e,o. They are pronounced

'a' as in Kawasaki and sake

'i' as in Kawasaki and Suzuki

'u' as in Suzuki, sushi, and sumo (wrestling)

'e' as in zen (Buddhism) and yen (Japanese money)

'o' as in Toyota and sumo

Watch the video. Write all of the first five hiragana ten times. (Try to write the strokes in the right order and in the right direction.) Then get back to us and let us know how it went. (I think this will be more difficult than you think. I have a lot of experience teaching hiragana to westerners, and learning hiragana can be very frustrating.)

 
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That is some great information about the Japanese language.
I can't wait to get started learning Japanese, now feeling spurred on like never before.

Thanks for all the overwhelming information.
I'm off to bed now, it's 11.30pm here at the moment.
Regards from me.
 
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