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irkenheretic · 4 years

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(How I Learned) How To Read Irken: A Guide

(Pictured: Us....) (From @zimgay ‘s lovely animatic!)

Okay, I’m finally making this post.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might have caught on that I can read Irken. When I started, I was completely confused over wether or not I was teaching myself correctly, how long it’d take, et cetera. But I’ve finally hashed it out for myself, and I thought:

Why not make a guide for anyone else who wants to learn but has no idea where to start?

So that’s what I’m doing. Some disclaimers, though:

- This is what worked for me. It may or may not work for you, I’m not sure. I think it’s a pretty good method, though.

- Reading Irken and Writing Irken are two different skillsets. I’m gonna show you how to do both, but don’t worry if you’re better at one than the other.

- This will probably take a while of daily (or near-daily) practice to learn. It’s not impossible, it’s not super challenging, but it’s not super easy, especially if you have memory problems like I do. (For context: I started in September. But I also have a really shitty memory so, like. It might take less time for you.)

Okay! Let’s do this!

First off, you’d probably do well downloading the Irken font for practice purposes. Messing around with it and typing in it is fun, and can help!

You’ll also need a notebook. It’s not required, but having it all in one place is super convenient. (And, if it’s tiny enough, you can carry it around whenever, and also have it on hand to whip out at cons.)

The first thing I did was write each individual letter over and over and over again. This is what’s at the start of my notebook, and writing the letters over and over helped me remember which were which. I also had to focus pretty hard on what letter this actually was, this is tedious as hell but it’s not something you can do mindlessly.

(Pictured: Normal levels of interest in a show.)

This is what my notebook looks like. Don’t worry about those simplified versions of the letters yet, but you’re gonna wanna leave room for them. Don’t worry about learning simplified/handwritten until later, it helps recognition if you really have to focus on actually drawing the letters, at first.

(And yes, I know my pen is really smudgy. And that my H’s suck.)

After this, three letter words are your friend. Pick just, common three letter words you know, and write them down a lot. I have just, the Irken for “THE” written in the margins of my class notebooks a TON. Once you feel like you can remember that word well, go onto another 3 letter word with a different set of letters. Recognition = good, so pick something you like, use all the time.

While I was doing this, I tried to string together Irken letters I knew into like, coherent phrases. I was very bad at this at first. Acronyms are your friend here, lmao. (I don’t think I can count the number of times I’ve written ‘u r a qt pie’ in my notebooks.) It doesn’t matter what you write, just that it makes coherent sense.

There are gonna be some uncommon letters that are gonna be hard to practice, like W and Z, off the top of my head. For Z, that was easy. I just wrote ZIM over and over and over. For W... I used UWU. You laugh now, but the absurdity of it cements that I will always recognize those two letters.

Four letter words are also good. (Please, absolutely write “FUCK” over and over in order to remember letters. I encourage it.)

There is also the absolute cuntwaffles. Y’know how in English, b, p, d, g, all look kinda the same? Yeah, Irken has that too.

(Pictured: Head hurting juice.)

The I and Z don’t look that similar now, but good luck without a translation guide. By this point, you should have memorized a good chunk of the Irken alphabet, and be able to recognize some others when you see them. If you’ve been writing common three- or four-letter words, it’s likely you’ve been using letters very common in the English language. Which brings us to our next stage, and the actual fun part:

READING!

You’re gonna want a translation guide on hand in these early stages, you will need it. The main goal of this stage is to read anything in Irken you can get your hands on- but start small! Fanart with Irken in it was a godsend to me. It’s not that long, so it’s not overwhelming. I did need to look up some letters at the beginning, and I read really slowly, but that’ll change quickly if you keep up with it! The specific fanarts I used are:

@inimoose ‘s The Last Irken comic, specifically chapter one: part one, and chapter two: part two have a lot of Irken. But I’d recommend reading the whole comic; it’s good!

@paketdimensioncomic ‘s page of lore for their comic! Spoilers, though. Again, I’d recommend reading through the whole comic, because it’s just that good.

@xryn-art ‘s Linguistic Au’s first comic has a good chunk of Irken! The other comics do have some, but it’s all translated. Still good practice, though, if you wanna... read them......... ;) ;) ;)

Yes, this segment was partially a way for me to plug my favorite fan-artists, (or at least the ones that use Irken,) sue me. It’s my guide and I make the rules here.

(I am very sorry if I bothered any of you by @’ing you.)

But just some sources isn’t enough, so I introduce you to browser fonts. And changing yours to Irken.

It will not effect everything in your browser, and it can be toggled on and off, so don’t worry. If you really want, you can download a separate browser to change the font of, and leave your normal one be. It’d be convenient if you could, since having your browser font be Irken is inconvenient if you need to use Wikipedia, like, ever.

Here’s a guide for that, for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer for some reason. You’ll see four options to change, I just changed all of them. Not every page is going to have Irken on it, though. For me, Wikipedia is all in Irken, and so is TV Tropes. And some Tumblr blogs (PAKet Dimension’s is one, just in case you need a reason to go back there ;)) But it might be different for you.

Whatever it is, now you have a nice way to practice. I read Wikipedia articles on stuff I already knew about (so I wasn’t completely lost and could figure out what letters I didn’t know were from context clues,) but not a page I’ve read before in recent memory- you might just be recalling what the page said, instead of actually reading it.

And about the absolute cuntwaffle letters: yes, this will help you in recognizing which are which. Seeing the letters in context is always going to be much more helpful than just, a bunch of meaningless squiggles floating in the void.

At this point, I personally am much better at reading than writing Irken. It’s one thing to know a letter when you see it, and another to recall it and write it down from memory. Right now, I’m trying to write song lyrics and dumb little phrases in Irken, to improve my writing skills. Again, nothing too long, don’t overwhelm yourself. This sounds stupid, but Vines are good. When I don’t remember a letter, I just leave it blank and look it up after I’m done.

Another thing that helps is having a friend to practice with, or someone to just give you Irken phrases for you to translate.

Once you’re around this stage, you can try to learn simplified/handwritten Irken. You can also try to learn it before this, I started it around when I started reading fanart for practice, it’s up to you. This guide is a good starting point, but you don’t have to follow it exactly. This is your handwriting, do what feels natural for you!

(Also, don’t even worry about speedwrite Irken. That has no place in this holy land and frankly I am scared of it.)

And that’s... pretty much it! Most of the process is just... practicing a lot.

If this post does well, I might make a server for people who wanna learn Irken to practice together and stuff. It all depends if anyone even wants to learn Irken.

EDIT: Well, guess what I ended up making just the next day. Here’s the post for the server, and please read the joining rules.

Also, if you wanna learn Irken numbers, here you go. But start with letters first, worry about numbers later. These are never used, aren’t even in the Irken font, and three of them look a lot like those cuntwaffle Irken letters.

Anyway I just really hope this guide helps someone out. If you do use it, tell me! And have fun learning Irken!! It really is just, a blast to do honestly.

#invader zim #invader zim irken #zadr #(for the animatic and one of the comics)#HHHHHUUUUUU IM NERVOUS TO POST THIS #ok. ok ok ok ok ok here goes. h.#live from conventia #if this is a godsend for even one (1) guy with a hyperfixation then i have done my job well

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dramarising-replacement · 6 years

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get madder :^)

hey yall remember that post where i gave a 1-or-2 sentence comment about each fanart that got featured in the community update? many people promptly took their panties and corkscrewed them directly up their very touchy buttholes, so i thought it'd be fun to do a follow-up :^)

>everyone who just said "lol bad post u suck ur opinion SUX"

it's my opinion lol deal w it

>it’s kinda cute how you think we would care about this / nobody cares

clearly u do bc ur mad fam!!! hahaha rekd got u!!1!

>perhaps… perhaps art is subjective and they wanted to make some community members happy by featuring them?

they couldve picked a little better was my only point

>"It’s people like this who give new artists anxiety for posting stuff online" / everything about how mean i am bc it will make newb artists feel nerbous :'(

hey guess what! it's the internet where literally everyone can see and say whatever they want. that's the risk ya fuckin take when u post online :^) waahhh

>"It’s called a personal art style"

its common knowledge by now but "its muh style" is not an excuse and yeah its subjective but also sometimes aspects of a pic are just bad

>"how does desnik only get a 5/10 lmao. Amazing shading, a super unique and difficult perspective that brings life to the whole piece? Ye nah that’s shit, apparently."

i said the shading (painting) was pretty good, and they lose points bc "bringing it to life" with a weird pose only works if the anatomy and perspective (which i specified) isnt so off that it takes away from the entire piece pretty significantly, which imo it does. also that pose isnt unique i can find u 10 pics of furries in that exact pose on like the front page of furaffinity or wherever. also i didnt say it was shit LOL

>"“this is anime uwu garbage” is not criticism OP"

fuck yeah it is, you ever been to the front page of deviantart? i assumed the implied "stop using super stylized shitty anime pics as a reference bc ur overall "style" is severely and obviously suffering for it" was kinda evident but i guess not

>"why the fuck do people get so butthurt when someone says their art is bad"

dude THANK you i mean i was expecting pretty severe backlash but i was as least expecting more creativity than literally just "bad post op" 20 times. tho i DID see enough to make this post i guess? this blog is fun but like in a painful way

> “not to be rude to the featured artists, good on them” pick a tone and stick with it

sorry man i really just do have a rude-sounding speaking (,,typing) voice and i dont mean any bad feelings towards these artists, my literal only point is that that one pic has some problems and maybe staff had some better pics to spotlight instead (and i don't even mean that for all of them. top, middle, and bottom left were all good choices and so was desnik's tbh. but i figured id ""review"" them too cuz they were there) i usually even pointed out something i liked about it? but i gotta move fast here cmon 100 character limit

>"dude… do you even know what a sketch is? because that’s in no way a sketch"

what do YOU define as a sketch? i guess the snapper one could also be lineart but its in 2 midtones (which people do when theyre "sketching" out values) and they used a messy brush so my mind went to sketch. and the coatl one looks like they did it really fast and slapped some flat colors on it. actually my point was literally that it looks like they did it fast, like a sketch rather than a lineart

>"at least put in some effort in writing a couple of sentences on each drawing on what, why, and how to improve the drawings. Seeing that some of the art is clearly from amateur artists, some words of advice would at least be helpful here."

yeah u right they definitely deserve better. but i was going fast cuz i just have an affinity for short snappy reviews i guess. like i tried to do cliffnotes, just "this part is good but this part is bad" and then a meaningless number score cuz i aint even addressing this to them, i posted it to a drama blog to complain about staff basically

>the nocturne guy who wrote a lot

alright cool. you totally have gotten a lot better. i never meant to discourage you for drawing in the first place. incidentally i said u had potential bc u were obviously a new artist, but like u were OBVIOUSLY a new artist with a loose understanding of depth and shading and stuff, and again this is a front page spotlight yadda yadda. ill fuckin hit u with a review right now:

you clearly understand shading and anatomy way better, and that coatl actually looks pretty fuckin good. the lineart is more consistent, it's framed way better, the proportions are WAY better, and it's really clean and stylized. the shading is infinitely more convincingly shiny and reflective. from here, imo you could benefit from going further with shading (darker, more dynamic, leaving little to no flat spaces like the crest fluff and tongue), and maybe polishing the lineart a little more too, like coloring/highlighting it and really pushing/polishing the linewidth (there are tutorials for that). overall that coatl is v cute, keep on pushing poses & shading

>"i bet OPs art sucks ass"

fIT e ME IrL

anyway thanks 4 reading my fucking essay and i'm super high. if you read al lof this then shame on you

#Drama #Praise #Flight Rising #Cursing #Sarcasm #Art #Long post #Petty #submission

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