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Originally Posted by bwhhisc
I think the first character may also translate to "field" .
Translation might be "Field Game"
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I think it's more likely that he cut and pasted a sentence.
Quick primer:
There are 3 types of characters in Japanese: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. The first two are alphabet-like, and the last are more complicated chinese characters.
Hiragana can ALWAYS be used in place of Kanji (the chinese characters). Kids write in Hiragana. As you get older, you learn Kanji and start to use that in place of the much more simple Hiragana characters. It's more efficient while reading and saves space.
Tense and other sentence constructs are given by Hiragana. That's why you'll see something like 行った.
行 is Kanji for the verb 'to go' and った is short form of past tense. The whole thing reads 'itta' or 'went'. The little 'tsu' っ, means the following consonant is doubled and extended when spoken (itta, instead of ita).
That's why you'll often see Hiragana mixed with Kanji and Katakana.
Katakana, on the other hand, is never mixed with Kanji in single words. It's used exclusively for loanwords from English, French, Chinese etc.
In gari's case...
の is Hiragana. ゲーム or 'gamu' is Katakana. The common combination and mixing of alphabet gives me the clue that it's part of a sentence that was cut 'n' pasted.
This is all from memory when I was a kid, so caveat emptor
Edit: Olney/Edwin may be able to expound on this...
Chinese on the other hand is so complicated!