Leaving words untranslated

It really helps when some anime fansubs groups leave certain words untranslated. it makes you familiar with the meaning of the word more than translating it.
For example: in 'One Piece' most groups leave the word nakama, which means partner, or something like that. In that particular case, it would probably be crew members. That makes me wonder what that means, and when I get familiar with the word, I can find it on other anime, even if they decide to translate it to something (like friend).
Another case would be the word maryoku (something like demonic energy, maybe) from 'Kyou Kara Maou'. on other anime it would probably translate as mana or magic etc.

Faster, higher, stronger

I thought hayaku meant hurry. But then, if tsuyoku means stronger, and takaku is higher, then it must be that hayaku means faster, and the suffix 'ku' works like 'er' in English.
So, how do you say strong, fast, or high? well, I think tsuyoi means strong. The same thing may apply to the other two, but who knows?

Starting - How to Self-Learn a Language

How do you self-learn a language? And I don't mean by using a "self learning book" that guides you, but simply understanding by yourself how it works.
Well, some people have a talent for it. Just by listening to people speak they can easily learn any language without even trying. But not everybody is like that. Actually, I have really hard time learning to speak any language.

While trying to self-learn English, I started by learning to read. It was easier for me, because I could observe and learn how a sentence is built, and why things are the way they are. When you learn of a rule yourself, you'll understand and remember it better than if you were simply told that rule.
So I worked my way through 5 books of 'Harry Potter' and still couldn't understand spoken English. But then all I had to do was watching some TV series (more specifically, 'Buffy TVS'), And upgrade my "Read Only" English to a spoken one.

All that was really well, but I couldn't do the same with Japanese, because it's much harder to learn to read - Kanji has thousands of symbols, and you can't easily find texts in Romanji, or even Hiragana (which isn't too easy to learn either). Watching Anime didn't work - as expected, I only learned 3 words from my first 50 Anime episodes...
Then I found the Opening/Ending songs. You can easily find romanji lyrics for them, which will be pretty easy to read (it uses Latin letters).

Then I took the lyrics of some songs, mostly ones with translation available, and started to look for similar words, etc. For example, if one line says you are funny and another says I love you, you expect these lines to have a similar word in Japanese too, and then I'd know how to say you. Except, that didn't work as well as i thought. for starters, pronouns are rarely used in Japanese, so you'll say simply suki desu or koishiteru, both ways don't contain the words you or I in them. Even so, I was able to find the word anata to mean you, but missed the fact that there were many ways to say you, so it wasn't until recently that I found kimi or omae to also mean you.

All that was about 2 years ago. Now. the slow learner that I am, I'm still stuck in the middle of the way. In the following posts I'll write more of my thoughts and experiences along the way.

That's it for today. Really tired. (Yay! My first real blog-post ever!)
YSaf ;-)