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Japanese Blogging with Ameba — 7 Comments

  1. I tried Pigg Life once. Not really knowing what to do, I stopped and haven’t tried again since. However, I tried the Pigg garden thing and found it funny and have been playing it regularly since then! So here I am planting my begonias and tomatoes everyday ;)
    I must say I’m not usually interested in these kinds of games, I don’t play games on Facebook or anything, but there is something about being in this cute universe with everything in Japanese and with many many other Japanese persons doing the same thing as you. Some have crazy gardens that I can’t even imagine the time it took them to create. The leveling up is pretty slow (it’s a social game…) so it takes a while to unlock everything and have a cool looking garden.
    I haven’t been able to engage in a conversation with anyone because for some reason Japanese IME won’t work inside Ameba so I can only type letters… does anyone know why that is? Basically, I can switch the keyboard to Japanese as usual but then it won’t switch to kana mode if I ALT+² or if I select it in the language bar.

    So yeah, it’s a pretty funny game and good for immersion although the Japanese is not crazy at all in there, but I can’t wait to try and talk to someone about tulips and potatoes once I figure out how to type in Japanese :D

  2. Do you have Windows or Mac?

    Sometimes I find that happens to me randomly in any program. Maybe if you try again, it’ll work the next time. The only other thing I can think of is to type in Japanese in your google search bar and to quickly copy and paste it to the chatbox on ameba. It’s slower, but better than nothing. Hope you find a solution!

    I know what you mean… I stopped playing facebook games a long time ago. They were repetitive and too demanding (needed billions of friends and requiring logging in every day to get anywhere in the game). I think part of the excitement about Ameba Pigg is that it’s real time interaction, unlike most facebook games. You don’t feel like you’re alone. It’s more like Graal Online (a downloadable PC mmorpg) than Sims Social (a facebook app).

    While you’re waiting to fix your typing problem, try exploring the places in the main game. You may stumble on some conversations others are having. Especially in the lower populated rooms. Great immersion for learning internet chat.

    • I’m using Windows 7. It works with everything else and I never had any problem like that before. It must simply be because Ameba is done in Flash, although I’m not sure what Japanese people have more or different than me that allows them to type in Japanese in it :/

      I can’t say for Facebook games since I never played any of them, but Ameba sure is lively! There are always tons of people and sometimes it takes a few attempts to connect to a room, so you’re never alone.

      The only time I tried the main game, there were many people talking to each other. It’s not as much the case in the Garden game though so I really will have to try the main game again for that. I found it quite hard to follow the conversations though, especially when you arrived mid-conversation and because the text you can say at once is very limited in length. But it’s good practice for sure!

  3. I might not be ready to blog yet. . .but um.
    I still want to create an account now for future use.
    It said in one of your previous posts that a japanese e-mail was required. Is that still so in this case? I can’t read the webiste well enough to know where to sign up.

  4. I’m not quite ready to do a proper Japanese blog yet (I have done a couple of awful lang-8 entries in the past though), however I discovered the wonders of ameba when I started reading Scandal’s very regular ameba blog. It’s really engaging because they’re quite short but also have loads of pictures unlike on twitter when your lucky if you get 1. This means they’re really easy to read because of the context of the pictures and fun again because of the pictures and the fandom. So I really enjoy reading them and they’re short and interesting enough to me to read entirely intensively.

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