[Skuld-chan]

Not much has changed around here, only a couple of things:

1.  I've created a new board for Japanese speech.  The main purpose of this board is to strengthen my (and anybody else's) Japanese grammer and writing skills.  The first post has detailed information about the board.  I only ask that if you post in there, please try to limit it to Japanese.  You may ask questions, but don't be surprised if you get a response written in Japanese!  I also hope to attract some Japanese people as penpals to the community to help all of us newbies out  !

2.  I've added the capability to display and input Japanese fonts on the message board.  To successfully read Japanese, you will need the following font, which you may download here.  (Sometimes your computer may prompt you to download the Japanese character font for you.  You may get the font here.  To write in Japanese, you will need to install the Japanese IME, which may be found here for XP.  Or if you have Windows XP, you can simply goto Control Panel -> Language and Regional Settings -> Add other languages -> Details -> select Japanese - Japanese Input System 2002, make sure you enable (check) Install East Asian Fonts as well.  Make sure you have your Windows XP CD-ROM near by, it may prompt you for it.  I would highly recommend that you try this second option first.

I plan on updating my Japanese webpage to be more for a learning process.  It will display the hiragana, katakana, and eventually kanji (the Japanese alphabets) along with simple grammer, and simple phrases.  I also plan to make a full scale dictionary too.

If for what ever reason after installing the Japanese fonts and you still see garbage instead of japanese characters, go to  Internet Explorer -> View -> Encoding and select UTF-8  You may need to restart IE, but I didn't have to when I did that.

Well, that's about it, have fun!