Registered for Ameba

A friend of mine from Japan, Tatsu, sent me an invitation to a Japanese social networking website called Ameba. I thought this might be a fun opportunity to practice my Japanese. So.. it turns out: it’s fun AND confusing! I guess social networking websites can be confusing at first glance, but throw in the Japaneseniness© and your only guide line are pictures. Well, I’m exaggerating here but imagine the shock I got when I saw this:

ameba user page

If you’re used to using social networking sites, the interface designs are usually quite similar so it’s possible to guess what each link on there says. So yeah so far I’ve entered some personal information a la favourite food, hobbies, etc. and skipped questions like “what is your fetish” and “are you S or M?” (pretty sure fetish in this case means passion, and S/M means strong/mild personality, but you know.. just in case..)

Once you’ve registered with ameba you can make your own little avatar that looks like you (if you desire so, see picture above), and make it run around in a world full of beaches and shit. Of course there are other avatars running around as well, so you get to interact in more ways than just sending messages on a website or blogging. Oh yeah, blogging. My first entry is about a line long and says something along the lines of “Japanese is hard, I won’t blog..”

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  By Fernanda Gomez, 18.09.2009 @ 14:25

  Ameba is totally cool, very nice site

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