Well, I understood what you said, but 活躍 is the kind of word you use to describe children playing rather than a website. I couldn't really think of a better word, so I just said "isn't dead". Also:
lol, well, I hear "I understood you but.." all the time... 日本語 has way too many words that mean essentially the same thing, but each have their own use... Too bad the dictionary function in
JWPce doesn't tell me what ones are what. I've got Kodansha's Furigana Dictionary at home, as well as another (kinda) J-E-J one, but I never use them (actually, they're at my girlfriend's).
How far along are you? Can you read 2/3 of the writing systems? Can you understand basic sentences? etc.
I'm more or less able to read 平仮名 and 片仮名, but I use
JWPce for all my writing, which makes things much easier than they should be. I kinda really hate using the IME. (And I use lots of kanji that I don't actually know, because I use JWPce. Basically, I can usually figure out where the kanji should be, hit the "convert to kanji" button, and if there's a kanji for what I want to say, it puts it in. I normally would have just typed ひらがな and かたかな otherwise.)
Actually, no matter what stage you're at, I recommend this add-on, if you don't have it already.
I also saw this but I haven't tried it out.
I LIKE EDITING
Well, I had the first one for a while when I used FF, but I'm using google chrome, and the addons stuff is still heavily under development.
My biggest problems are complex sentence structure, and vocabulary. I use the built in dictionary function in JWPce way too often, and still don't always know what the sentence means because either I don't know the particles being used (another weak point) or just can't figure out the relation of each word. I should be a lot farther along, considering I've been at this for years, but I find it really difficult... I don't really see anything that replaces an actual class on the language, but my college program makes it REALLY hard to take a course outside the program itself, thanks to the timing of the classes and such.
Japanese is definitely not one of those languages that you can just pick up on the internet without a lot of work. Something like, say, Italian, or even German, you can more or less pick up online, but Japanese has so many unique aspects to it that it really is a lot more difficult than other languages.
I guess it doesn't really help that I've also been interested in learning Korean at the same time, lol. I really like 한글.
FAKE EDIT: I spend a long time typing one large post, rather than editing it.... I use the preview function more than necessary, lol.
