I have a big announcement to make today. As of today, we will no longer be accepting requests for song translations. I know that Mognet continues to have many regular requesters, and to all of you I apologize. I do feel as though I owe you an explanation as to why we decided to stop doing this, so here it is.
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We feel as though recently Mognet's content has been suffering greatly. Music updates have been incredibly thin, and we've hardly has any new PVs, music/variety shows, etc. A lot of this is due to the increasingly busy nature of the Mognet staff members lives. However, some of it has been due to requests as well. As the head translator (and basically the only translator at the moment) of Mognet, I started out translating songs largely for educational purposes. Mognet has been around for many years now, and for the most part they've long since ceased to become educational for me. None the less though, I feel that cutting song requests is going to help open up a lot more time for other content that has been sorely lacking these past couple of years.

I am not saying that I am going to cease translating songs. I will still continue to post song translations, but not necessarily at regular intervals, and the songs themselves will be chosen by myself and the rest of the staff. If they happen to coincide with songs that you wanted to see translations for, that's wonderful and I am truly happy that we could help. Otherwise, I'm sorry. If there is a song that you absolutely must see a translation of, I suggest going about it the way I did: Start studying and asking questions to get yourself to the point where you can at least understand what's going on in this song. There is still a Japanese language board on this site's forum that I am more than willing to help people along with their own translations in. This does not mean that I will translate the song for you if you post it on this board.

Also, I will finish up those requests that are currently in the request queue. I can't necessarily stand by the dates that are in them any longer, but I am going to try and get as many of them as I can done BEFORE the marked dates, so that it won't actually take into February at this point. I hope to have them completed sometime in January, but we'll see how that goes.

Finally, please don't be afraid to write in and let us know what you think of the site. We still welcome your comments and feedback, and do enjoy hearing from you. Suggestions will certainly be noted, though there will no longer be a queue system in place, and I can't make any promises that we'll take on any of your suggestions.

Thanks to everyone for their support, and hopefully we'll continue to receive it!

Oh no! Kuma smote Kyuu!

Now it will be stuck on some awful island full of rabid crossplayers. Well, let's hope they have grapes there.

To reiterate: this doesn't mean that song translations are going away by any means. We just want to keep our focus on the site a little more balanced, and that meant that something had to give. We still welcome everyone's feedback and emails, and we really hope you enjoy the song translations and other content on Mognet in the future.

Oh NOooo! I'm so sad!!! TT^TT

yeah, that's really sad, even for me. But, maybe that way, we actually get some stuff done again :D

you go, Stiltz!

Fair enough. I know I've done the same thing at my own website.
I've been sort of studying Japanese on my own for at least a year. Just a few questions... Did you have a good grasp on particles before you started translating? Did you learn kanji first, or did you just look them up/learn them as you went along? Do you feel this was an effective way to learn/improve? Did you have any other good ways of practising/learning?

Over the time I've been visiting this place, I've mostly come here only for the song requests. I did check out the MogNOT and other cosplays, I've seen a Mognet translation or two at YouTube, and I found Arashi had some interesting songs after seeing the "We Can Make It!" PV you guys released, which I've been seeding since then. I can't really say I know a whole lot about the other content on this site, but good luck with it.

Good post! Hopefully you can take the time to discover some of the rest of the content, because there really are quite a few things on here that may or may not be of interest. Let me go ahead and answer your questions now.

I would like to think that I had a pretty good grasp on particles before I started translating, yes. But of course, as with most things, I learned quite a bit that I didn't even know I had to learn as I was translating. I can comfortably say that I learned a lot of what I know about particles (and many other things) from translating songs and the process of trying to figure out whether what I thought the translation was was right or wrong.

I certainly knew some kanji before I started translating songs, yeah. Certainly not many though, we're talking maybe about 200-300 at best. Definitely translating songs taught me a LOT of kanji. There are many words/phrases that are used and reused throughout songs, and you tend to become familiar with those the more you translate. I definitely wouldn't recommend translating songs in place of good old fashioned study in terms of learning kanji, but it certainly is a great supplement.

Looking back on it, there's no doubt that the song translation work has helped me learn. However, I wish I would have done a little bit more practical study throughout the years to supplement it (I really just picked up the practical study again as of the last few years). Translating songs teaches you a lot of things, but not all of them are useful in the "real world".

As for improving, it just depends on what your goals are. If your goals all involve watching/reading things in Japanese, and you have absolutely no desire whatsoever to speak to a soul in Japanese in your life, then you obviously need not practice speaking at all, and some of that obscure vocabulary you get from songs, etc. will definitely help you. If your goal is mainly conversation/real world stuff, translating songs may not be something that you want to sink a lot of time into at this point. You can probably spend your time studying in more effective ways.

Hopefully that answered your questions, thanks for the post!

I'm pretty bad with particles right now, only having a somewhat decent grasp on "de", "ni", and "no", and some basic grasp on "wa", "ga", and "wo" (though I probably use them in place of each other a lot of the time). And I have some basic grasp on some other miscellaneous particles... I guess I should work on that more first.

So far I know around 190 kanji, and I try to learn 5-10 new ones per week, so I'm guessing that's around acceptable if it worked out well for you.

Interesting point about some of the stuff in the songs not really being practical. I didn't really think of that before, but songs often do have stuff like that in them.

I want to be able to read (untranslated) manga, watched anime without subs, understand J-music, check out Japanese websites, understand jokes and stuff in Japanese YouTube videos (like stuff by Hyadain), and maybe hang around some Japanese forums to practise and stuff... Some jokes and stuff just can't be translated and require some Japanese knowledge... I'm just sorta casually learning with no real hurry.

And thanks for answering my questions.

edit/doublepost: Oh, and Japanese video games. I wanna be able to play/understand those, too. "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan" is a hilarious game, and I can only imagine how much funnier it would be if I could understand it more.

That sounds quite familiar, as that was pretty much my laundry list of things that I wanted to be able to accomplish as well. Fortunately and unfortunately, you have to pursue several different courses of study in order to achieve all of them. Concentrating on just one thing isn't going to help you in all necessarily. Let me show you what I mean:

Manga - Obviously reading practice is your friend here, particularly learning kanji (depending on whether the manga you're reading has furigana or not). Grammar and slang will play pretty important roles as well, though that goes along with reading.

Anime - General knowledge is important, but here you have to be a good listener.

Japanese music - Either a good listener, reader or both. It depends whether you want to try it out by ear (this can be very easy or very hard, depending on the singer), or if you're just happy listening to it and reading along with the lyrics.

Websites - Obviously this is reading. This is one of your easier goals, since if you have a good knowledge of vocab. and grammar you can do a lot of this with the help of JWP (or any Japanese word processing program that has a dictionary). Even raikaichan probably.

Comedy - This will probably be the very last goal that you achieve. You have to be VERY good at listening, and be able to parse Japanese in your brain very quickly. To give you an idea I've been studying for quite a long time now, and a lot of full comedy routines are still lost on me upon first listen at this point. My brain just can't parse everything fast enough...yet.

Video games - This is sort of the same thing as with manga really. Depending on what you're playing, generally if you can read manga without many problems then you can tackle video games too.

So really it's about prioritization. That being said, I wouldn't focus completely on one thing, try to do plenty of reading and listening practice, but no matter what you'll probably lean toward one over the other. And that's fine. Just exposing yourself to as much as you can as often as you can, but still having a structured study plan, I think is your key to getting good as quickly as possible.

I didn't know you also used JWPce, haha.
Wikipedia has a huge list of particles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_p ... _particles ), which is a lot more than a certain misleading site implied ( http://japanese.about.com/library/blparticles.htm )... Which particles would you consider the most essential? Like, the ones I'd need to know before I could even really practise anything involving sentences.

Stuff like anime would certainly be a much later goal, unless I were to be constantly going back and listening again. I'll have to get the more basic things (and the bare basics themselves) covered before I can even think about goals like that.

I have a hard time saying that some particles are essential where others aren't: you really should be familiar with them all.

However, if I were pressed to say "get familiar with these before the others", I'd probably pick:

wa, ga, ni, wo, de, e, kara, made, mo, no, to, and any combinations thereof.

Coming from someone who lives in japan and has to use japanese everyday at work,
i'd def. recommend concentrating on particles. Specifically because you can change the meaning of a sentence by changing ha to mo for instance. It's a pain and i'm really weak in particles. But as a result my japanese sounds like i'm a child cause i am not fluent with them yet.

It's quite big that you've chosen to stop doing song requests but at the same time I have a great respect for you that you've done what you have with this site and look forward to continuing to view your new additions to it, you're a dedicated person who has contributed greatly to the English speakers out there who haven't yet been able to learn Japanese yet but still enjoy their music and other aspects of their culture, all the best to you :P

Thanks, I appreciate that! It's certainly also possible that another translator out there somewhere will rise up to take my place (if they haven't already) as far as the requests thing goes. After all, Mognet did that with another site way back when.

Stilzkin...

I am sorry to hear that you are discontinuing the translation portion of the website. You allowed me to discover the lyrics in the music of Moritaka Chisato, Kishitani Kaori, Kitade Nana and Princess Princess. I first learned to like their music and you helped me like their minds.

People like you who are willing to pass on your knowledge are hard to find. May you have continued success with Mognet in the future. Your site will remain in my bookmarks column.

Your non-Japanese speaking friend,

Dennis