Elmer's Q&A with Japanese players

[Feenicks]

I'm not sure if people have seen this yet, but I thought I would post it because it's quite an interesting read and gives a good level of insight into some of the perceptions that JP players have about some common issues in FFXI.

ElmerThePointy of Gilgamesh server recently conducted a little social experiment where he asked both the JP and NA communities which questions they would most like to ask the other, but can't due to the language/culture gap. Elmer is a fluent Japanese speaker as well as a native English speaker and was able to post on Japanese sites as well as NA sites. He tallied the most popular questions that NA would like to ask JP, and that JP would like to ask NA, and posted them on NA and JP forums. Incidentally from the NA perspective, this all is happening on BG.

The answers from the Japanese players have come through and Elmer recently posted them on his blog:

Click here

The questions that were asked of the Japanese players were:

• Are there any famous (or infamous) foreign players for the Japanese?
• How do you feel about English-speaking players attempting to speak Japanese. (i.e. Using limited Japanese phrases, saying “w” etc.)
• Why is using /check considered rude? For English-speaking players it is a fairly innocuous action.
• Square Enix has mentioned many times that they are proud of their servers being unique, in the sense that many people from around the world are on the same server, instead of split up by region, and can communicate with the Auto-Translate feature.
• Do you feel that this was a success or a failure? Do you think that mixing regions on each server was a failure? If you could choose, would you choose a JP only server?
• Have you learned anything about the NA culture that you didn’t know before? Perhaps a polite/impolite gesture/phrase that seemed innocent to you? (e.g. we see /check as innocent, and JP find it rude)
• Do you ever utilize English websites such as BlueGartr, FFXIAH, etc for foreigner research and opinions? Do the Japanese have a large end-game community forum, similar to foreign players using BlueGartr?
• Is the Adaman Hauberk blue or purple? This debate has raged across NA forums since the dawn of time.
• What is your main reason behind having “JP Only” or “English No Thanks” in your search comment? Is it because you prefer to speak in Japanese, or is it a problem with the way foreigners act?
• Do JP players still use Skillchain+Magic Burst in their parties or do they TP burn like most NA/EU players do? Do you miss the SC/MB days?Do you wear certain earrings or rings in certain slots? For example, Suppanomimi on ear 1, CoP ring on ring 2. (this was a joke question to see how seriously people were taking this experiment)

There are some additional comments as well that make interesting reading for anyone who has an interest in the whole NA perspectives VS JP perspectives thing (as I do )

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Elmer's Q&A with Japanese players

I thought that was fairly interesting. Its kinda odd that SE would leave the /check message phrased as something undesireable to thier native users. I guess when its just worded poorly I could take a dislike to being checked as well.

Still, there's a filter for it, I'm amazed people don't use it.

[Grizzlebeard]

Re: Elmer's Q&A with Japanese players

Interesting reading the responses to the regional servers question. Hopefully S-E will learn from the mistake they made in FFXI and at least provide the option to choose a particular regional server in their next MMO.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Elmer's Q&A with Japanese players

I've been watching all of the threads since Elmer came up with this idea, it's freaking great. I wish SE would have done something like this, but as usual, we've compensated for it. XD

[Feba]

Re: Elmer's Q&A with Japanese players

Hopefully S-E will learn from the mistake they made in FFXI and not shard things at all next time

Fixed.

[Effedup]

Re: Elmer's Q&A with Japanese players

Thank you for posting this...I found it very enjoyable and informative. The community as a whole really needs something like this, some way to communicate outside of the broken auto translate function. Due to the hours I typically play (NA prime time), I don't have a lot of interaction with JPs, but the few times I've partied with JPs were very positive experiences. I do prefer the JP mindset to parties over the NA one...I'd rather the whole party disband and reform then replace single members over and over. In a perfect world people would call on an appropriate job/level to replace them when they need to leave, but I'm sure most people would agree that that's pretty much a crap shoot most of the time...also, the answers about SC/MB surprised me; all the JP parties I've been in worked some SC/MB into the party strategy (compared to very few NA parties I'm in, at least, until I bring it up lol), so I just assumed that lack of SC/MB was a NA thing. I never understood it, myself, considering how much a good SC/MB can speed up a fight and increase EXP chains...

And S-E, fix the /check comment! If someone "stared at me fixedly" I'd be a little put off, too. Why would S-E use that phrase, considering the game was launched there? I typically do a /sea all <name> if I'm curious about a person's level and knowing that, I'm glad I do.

Anyways, I look forward to reading more!

[Malacite]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

That was an awesome read, thanks. ^^

[Telera]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

I was actually expecting to see them somewhat annoyed by 'foreigners' using little Japanese phrases that they likely only picked up through anime. XD

Along the lines of 'Oh good lord, another one of those.'

I know a smattering of Japanese, from a foreign exchange student I had in my Speech 101 class in college, and a basic Japanese/English dictionary I bought around the same time. But I've always felt it'd look retarded both to them and to the English speakers to basically write it out romanized, as I don't have the ability to use Kanji/hiregana/katakana.

Now that I know otherwise, I could make an effort at that.

I came away from that feeling rather hated, though. Ah well. I always try to be nice and polite to everyone, unless they piss me off first. Like some of them said, with racist/sexist talk. That gets on everyone's nerves. Aside from being an elitist asshat, that's the fastest way to end up on my Blacklist and have me leave the party if it's 2-3 members involved.

[DakAttack]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

The day service began for foreigners, Sarutabaruta was just littered with corpses. I would throw a Cure and say something nice, like, “You can do it!” and they would respond with foul language like <[ "You JAP?!" ]> or <[ fuck ]> or <[ monkey ]> and such. After that, I just stopped giving out Cures and sort of avoided foreigners. I always wanted to know why North American players would act it such a way. Honestly, people who study a little Japanese to speak with us are the most popular.

This is a good one.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

I found the very first answer in the /check question interesting:

"In Japan, being stared at by other people is rude and ill-mannered, so it must be a cultural difference."

Yet if you are foreign over there, they stare at you like crazy. I have a JP buddy and some mutual friends of ours visit him quite often. They always say that you never forget you are an outsider in Japan because of all the stares as you walk down the street.

"The message that displays for /check is unpleasant. It’s Square Enix’s fault."

Win!

[Aksannyi]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

"The message that displays for /check is unpleasant. It’s Square Enix’s fault."

See, even the JPs get it. SE is out of touch with its playerbase.

[Juiced]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

Extremely good read. Thank you for the post. I was always under the impression that JP players went all JP ONLY on eveyone because they just completely hated NA players. Now I and alot of others will have a better understanding. I've been using Rossetta Stone for Japanese Level 1 and 2 as well as reading up on JP Grammar, pretty much just for this game. Hopefully I can put it to good use.

[Omniblast]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

Ugh some of the formatting was off at the end for me. I couldn't finish reading it. Words kept getting cut off in the beginning so it was hard to tell what the conversation was saying.

Interesting read, if only for the first half of the conversation. Thanks a lot.

[Lunaryn]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

Glad to see an effort like this being undertaken by someone with the language skills to pull it off. I personally liked the mixed-language nature of the game coming into it. I took 3 semesters of Japanese to satisfy my foreign language requirement at UofI, though my interest in the language goes back further than that (in fact, playing FFV untranslated in an emulator long before there was any thinking Square would ever consider releasing a version here was a large part of the original interest). When I first came into the game, I hadn't had a chance to really converse at all in Japanese for about 9 months, so I was excited about the prospect (and annoyed at the lack of IME support in the NA client). I spoke to JP in romaji whenever I had the chance, and impressed some JP players enough to be invited to their linkshell. I like to be able to help translate in mixed parties as well.

That said, I feel the same frustration many have expressed in their responses. It is an incredibly frustrating feeling to simply not know how to express yourself, and in some cases even worse to think you know how to, but not be sure you're not getting mixed up and saying the wrong thing. I hate being asked to convey something to a JP player and having to say "I'm really not sure how to say/ask that." Even though I skim JP party chat as best as I'm able (to the point of picking up on a pop warning delivered as ゴブ見えた in one dunes party), I miss probably between 80-95% of what's being said, depending on the level of complexity. I have little choice but not respond to much of what people say. If something is clearly directed at me, and I don't understand it, I will say so, but if it's unclear whether it was directed at me or not, I just have to stay silent and wait for something I know how to deal with.

If there was one key thing I'd want to point out to the JP community as a whole about the differences, it is that for the most part there isn't an NA or America-jin community in the same sense. The U.S. alone is much more vast than many people who haven't been there tend to realize. I recall in particular encountering confusion and amazement at explaining the fact that the U.S. has more than one time zone. While not as vast as the cultural differences from the JP community, we're encountering cultural differences of varying degrees all the time whenever we interact with people from different parts of the country or who have traveled, and it tends to affect the way we interact in a lot of ways.

If anything, the NA community in FFXI has tended to be far more cohesive than American society, though that is fading for a number of reasons. But even then, there are still a lot of frustrations with people who don't take what they or others do seriously or who do not try to communicate. Many of the complaints I've seen leveled at the NA community here are complaints much of the NA community shares in their dealings with each other. Even when we can be relatively sure of expressing ourselves clearly, there are still those who don't want to cooperate or who have conflicting goals, and when one does not feel like part of a community one tends to have little else to concern themselves besides personal goals.

As something of a side note, I will say that many NAs are underappreciative of attempts to communicate to them in English. There are a lot of factors in this based on how the cultures in various parts of the US function. Many people who have never tried to learn a second language are unsympathetic to what it requires. Even those who are tend to be wary of those who do not speak well, because among native speakers it often seems to speak to a sense of laziness or low investment in the area where they are speaking. However, most people I know are quite sympathetic when they realize that someone is trying and having difficulty rather than simply not trying.

Edit: In retrospect, that comes off sounding like I don't know cultural differences exist within Japan. What I'm trying to express, though, is a sense of not really strongly belonging to groups, or a more fluid sense of it. We have groupings we strongly identify with, and groupings we weakly identify with, and the level of that varies a lot between individuals. It can be harder for some of us to really feel part of a group, or for that sense to be permanent. We come and go, we associate and disassociate, and we're given a lot of reasons to be distrusting and cynical about many that we associate with.

Also, italicized portion added for clarification

[Feenicks]

Re: Elmer's Q&amp;A with Japanese players

I was actually expecting to see them somewhat annoyed by 'foreigners' using little Japanese phrases that they likely only picked up through anime. XD

Along the lines of 'Oh good lord, another one of those.'

That's what I thought as well, but then I realised that the Japanese don't think that, it's us who think that about those people.