The transforming mecha of Izzo

One of the things I love about Izzo is the building phases he goes through. Lately, he’s been on a bit of a transforming kick.

For several of his transformers (lowercase T), Izzo has included a diagram illustrating the stages of their transformation:

Izzo’s diagrams include a handy chart showing precisely how transformable each mecha is, ranging from “Fully Transforms” at the top to “Does Not Transform” down at the bottom. I suspect Izzo is being hard on himself with his low transformability rating. ;-)

Be sure to check out all six of Izzo’s transforming mecha on Brickshelf. Izzo also has a great roundup post of recent transforming mecha by other Japanese builders. You don’t need to read Japanese — just click the links!

10 comments on “The transforming mecha of Izzo

  1. Andrew Post author

    ^ I understand it’s one of the most difficult languages to learn, though. My dad spent our first three years in Japan going to language school full time. :shock:

  2. Ramone

    Jacob, did you mean reading/writing Japanese rather than speaking? I suspect while there are definite barriers to learning the spoken version, learning an entirely new type of script (non-latin characters) is a MUCH bigger challenge.

    On a side note, my sister has taken 3 years of Japanese and she’s ready to try something less intensive.

  3. Nannan

    If you speak Chinese, Japanese shouldn’t be hard to learn. There’s many characters derived from the Chinese language.

  4. Andrew Post author

    Nannan is correct. The kanji characters in Japanese are mostly a subset of the full range of characters inherited from written Chinese. (Chinese was the language of the educated classes for hundreds of years in ancient Japan.)

    It works the other way around, too. I spent a year or so trying to learn Chinese a while back, and found the written portion surprisingly easy. Many of the most common or basic characters are the same in both languages.

  5. Jacob

    Yeah, Ramone, I’ve figured that it might be difficult to learn a new character set and grammar system. I’d be happy to just to be able to read and write the language.

    Oh, that’s right, I forgot I know Chinese!… wait, no. But thanks for the heads-up, Nannan. ;)

    This essay is a fun read.

  6. Jacob

    BTW, I only spelt transformers with a capital T on YSAB because I was in a “capitalize every important word in the post title” mood. I can never figure out which way is better.

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