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Like the title says: Post any and all Language Questions, and hopefully it will be answered . . .

Kana and Kanji Usage
You may have noticed in a lot of the threads, kana and kanji are being used exclusively. If you read any threads and intead of japanese you see a bunch of boxes or ????? or 3467&56& then either your encoding isn't right or you don't have East Asian language packs installed on your computer.

If you think it's your encoding, go to "View" at the top of you browser window Selected "Encoding" if you're in Internet Explorer, or "Character Encoding" if you're in Firefox, then select either Unicode or a Japanese encoding.

If you need to install the language pack on your computer and you have Windows 2000 or later edition, check out these links.
Setting Up Japanese Characters Sticky <---this also provides a link to a guide to typing characters on your computer.
Declan's Guide to Installing and Using Microsoft Japanese IME
East Asian Language Support

Any Future "How do I see/type in japanese" threads will be deleted! Refer to the Sticky

When you can't read Kanji
Sadly you can't post furigana (the hiragana above kanji) on these posts online, so there might be some kanji you don't know. If you can't read the kanji, copy the sentance, and paste it in the box at this site then hit "begin translation" *note you need to know your kana
Jim Breen Text Translation

When you can't read Kana
If you don't know Kana yet, learn it now! The sooner you're not dependent on romaji, the better. There are a lot of Website out there to teach you kana, but if you want a book or cards, check out these products.
Beginner's Kana workbook This is a good book, I got this when I first learned kana
Kana a Day Practice Pad
Tuttle Kana Card Flash cards for you
White Rabbit Press Kana Flashcards This author made the best Kanji flashcards I've encountered, and I assume their kana cards are useful too.

can you possible tell us the context? "Shite" is the "te" form of "suru" which is a verb meaning "to do", and the te form is used for all sorts of things. "Shite" can also be a noun that means something like the hero/protagonist/lead character of a story.

　In general the longer a japanese word it the more polite it is, so gomennasai is a more polite way of saying "gomen," you would use gomennsai with people who are "above" you, teachers and such, or people you don't know well.

What does "tatsu no itarou" mean? I've been looking it up from my dictionary but all it says is "tatsu no otoshigo" and that's a seahorse.

tatsu no itarou is the name of this book that I got for christmas from my friend. I believe it tells a story about a dragon and something... The book luckily has almost all the kanji also written with small hiragana so I can read it. But I would really be happy if someone could translate that to me. I can't write it here in kanji as it is written since my computer doesn't write japanese. if it is absolutely necessay I might be able to scan the text. I can't tell which kanji they are since I don't know those kanji.

ah thanks. I shall try to scan the covers of the book either this week or then next week at school.

Tha back cover says something about Ryuu(which is dragon right?), about yama(=mountain, I recognised the kanji for it), and... koete? is it a somekind of a form from verb kaeru?(to return)(and to let you know I translate these things first into finnish and then to english... so the translation you might prefer if english is your mother tongue is different than mine I presume...

ah! *read the text more carefully.* I somehow read wrong. itarou was meant to be kotarou. biggrin sorry. xD I don't know what I was thinking of...

No, you put this in the right spot. Let me take a shot.
I'm not sure how I would make the first sentance. first off

murasaki shikibu wa genji monogatari o kakimashita. (Lady Murasaki wrote the tale of genji)

As for the "1st novel" part, I'm not sure. I suppose you could say
genji monogatari wa sekai no saisho no shosetsu sou desu
(the tale of genji is said to be the worlds first novel)

not sure how to combine that into a cohesive sentance.

as for the second sentance, you could say
genji monogatari wa mada insatsu ni natte ite, hiroku yonde imasu.
(the tale of genji is still in print, and is widely read)

I hope that helps . . .

目を逸らすことすらできず

me wo sorasu koto sura dekizu

What does 'sura' mean? I'm pretty sure the sentence as a whole means 'without being able to look away', but that 'sura' is bugging me to no end... *_*

Thanks! ^^

Thank you. XD Gods, Japanese is a confusing language. 3nodding