h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Never fear, I do that to myself all the time in Latin. Boni laeti sunt... (roughly translates to 'It's good fun.')

Oh wretched, real life got a tad hectic as of late!

It's exam season so lots of bits of h2g2 are a bit quiet. However! No matter how quiet The Language Thing gets we're still here

There ARE people in the Portugese Department who will talk to you, I'm pretty certain of it. I think they just got tired of talking to themselves, so have a snoop around and see what happens

Just a quick reminder, please remember to post a translation in English in the same reply.
EG

iay amay atkay, leasedpay otay eetmay ouyay!
***
i am kat, pleased to meet you!

Enjoy your stay and if you have any questions or problems then feel free to get hold of me or Joe C and give us a rattle.

Kat

I'm paul, thanks i will look around (my pig latin isn't very good) lol

U-number:
WLTL: portuguese
WLTP: spanish
WLTT: spanish
Anything else we need to know: spent 5 months in argentina ... learnt spanish there, just completed a-level spanish and am about to study spanish and portuguese in uni.

U-number: 1567318
WLTL: German
WLTP: German
WLTT:
Anything else we need to know: not really

U-number: U1567318
WLTL: German
WLTP: German
WLTT:
Anything else we need to know: not really

Hello! Excellent, a German speaker Kat will be dealing with you, since she is in charge of all thing Germa... wait, no she isn't! When did that happen??

Oh well The German Department is at A2718001 - feel free to go and introduce yourself, join in a game... German seems to be our most active language, so jump in and enjoy!

Joe

will do i do speak german btw but very badly!

U-number:
WLTL: Latin, Mandarin
WLTP:
WLTT: English, Russian, Hebrew
Anything else we need to know:

Hi Tiger Lily

I'm not the official welcomer, but I am nominally in charge of the Latin department, which is at A3235628 - so hop in and start learning! You also might want to check out the only-partially-begun Latin tutorials at A4103010, since I'm lazy and suck at active teaching. Kat will be along to welcome you for real at some point.

U-number: U1563650
WLTL: lain
WLTP: spanish
WLTT: spanish
Anything else we need to know:

To both of you, hello! Pinkwrath, you've already found the Spanish Dept, and as you can see above, EMR is in charge of Latin, so she'll be able to help you on that front. Tiger_lily, the same goes: we don't have any Russian or Hebrew speakers, possibly due partly to the fact that it's often incredibly complicated to type in a different character set. We're always open to suggestions for new languages, though, so if anyone else would also like to see provision for these, let us know!

Joe C
(Kat's minion)

Really I keep Joe in a wardrobe and only let him out to do these things.

I hope you're keeping the lists up to date Joe! I certainly haven't been doing it...ill don't you know?!

Welcome to all our new people! Good to see you here. I hope you enjoy your stay.

Kat (the Boss-thingy)

Well... I've been doing the Spanish ones

U-number:
WLTL: Japanese
WLTP:
WLTT:
Anything else we need to know: I have learnt some Japanese before, so I'm pretty ok already at pronuciation and the alphabets.

One thing that might be a major obstacle for me is that I've tried watching anime and reading manga and it's really not to my taste, so I was wondering if there was any more traditional Japanese literature that I could try to read once I'm good enough?

I'm not the official welcomer, and I know nothing about Japanese, but I think I can tell you pretty definitely that we don't have an official Japanese department as the characters are impossible to render with our current level of technological development. But don't give up hope! I'm sure Kat or Joe will find somewhere for you to go! Perhaps there's a Japanese thread communicating in the Roman alphabet.

Don't the Japanese publish normal, non-graphic novels? Like we have, only in Japanese? I'm not really sure about the Japanese canon of high literature, but they must have some books. I'm sure you can find some somewhere on the Internet. You could also try reading books originally written in English translated into Japanese. I know the Japanese are very fond of our classic literature.

Hi Roadkill and EMR

Just as you were writing that, EMR, I was sending an email to Kat with a suggestion about a new feature that may make it easier to encourage people to start speaking in new languages I won't say anything yet, in case we decide not to do anything, but it was this that gave me the idea, since (as far as I know) no-one's ever asked to do Japanese here before.

I'll also confess to knowing very little about Japanese. Is there a transliteration method, like pinyin for Mandarin Chinese? If so, then that might be a possibility.

Any thoughts from anyone else?

"Is there a transliteration method, like pinyin for Mandarin Chinese? If so, then that might be a possibility."

Yes -- I'm no expert on Chinese, but I believe that it's more based around characters signifying a word. As in Japanese, characters signify a vowel or consonnant/vowel combination (a, i, e, o, u all have characters, as do ka, shi, so etc) it's fairly easy to transliterate into roman characters (romaji). The only problem is the rendering of longer characters, which require a macron. Is it possible to do that in GuideML?

EMR -- thanks for the literature tip