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Gothic Lolita Bible Vols 4 & 5 online
Scanned in by me, patterns will be/are there too. Only a few pages are there so far, I'll do more on weekends when I'm home. (the link was hard to find before).

About Gothic Lolita
This page was created August 2002. Gothic Lolita was a fairly new term for me at that time, though the style itself I'm familiar with. It was one of my favorite style for going out. Basically it is combining gothic with poofy little girly lacy frilly skirts, victorian, alice in wonderland, fairy tale themes. It comes from Japan, though it's not based around goth music but rather pop and metal music... though I don't think it's really based around them either, it just happens that musicians in those genres started wearing these clothes. Read the Morbid Outlook article below in the links because I could be a bit wrong.

My Gothic & Lolita Bibles and translating
The Gothic & Lolita bible books (magazines?) are so pretty. Full of eye candy, beautiful colors, spooky treats, hair, makeup, shopping, decorating tips, clothing ideas, and there are clothing catalogs in it. This is all guessing since it's all in Japanese and I don't read a word. But I need too read it or I will explode!

First I was going to attempt to learn japaense using some free learn japanese websites and a book on it. The book I bought turned out to be useless, only how to speak words, it has the alphabet in it but it only shows phonetic sounds.

Then I was going to then try to match up letters/words with ones in this cool magazine Mangajin which was published (1990-1997) to teach one to speak & read japanese using pop culture. It's really cool, there's calvin & hobbes comics and things like that in the ones I have (which are 1995ish), it shows the english, japanese, and english pronunciation of the japanese all together for every sentance.

Then I decided, crap, this is not working. What I need is one of those $200 little gadgets (conviently there was a little flyer for one that came from fujisan with my GLB) to translate the Romaji which I would get from going letter by letter with a copy of the japanese characters & their sounds (which I found and printed off the web - shows each letter with it's english sound). There is no way I am buying a $200 gadget (even if it's cool as hell) just to translate one book. I searched some more on the web, I found that there are programs which are free or as cheap as $8 for palm pilots, I have been planning to buy a palm for over a year and finally just decided which one I am getting and will do so soon, that would be cool if those programs worked well, but reviews weren't promising.

Also, once I learned that Romaji to English was what I needed, I searched that on google. I came up with this site that does it totally free. http://linear.mv.com/cgi-bin/j-e/dict . I tested it with some words from Mangajin and it seems accurate.

I'm very curious to know what they make the adorable spooky treats out of, though I know I could just make them out of anything I want that is the same color. It would probably taste better.. japanese and chinese cakes and sweets look so pretty but often are tasteless I've found.

Resources on the web

Buy Gothic & Lolita Bibles here - at funjisan.com. There server is very slow sometimes, if it is go back later or it will take you 2 hours to place an order. They ship to the USA, each GL bible is about $20 with shipping and you will get it very fast if it's in stock, they have a base in CA they send things from. Look on eBay for the older ones. Don't pay more than $20 each. Well, if you really want to, go wild.

Buy Gothic Lolita Bible from Sasuga books

Gothic Lolita Bible Vols 2 & 3 online - This nice girl (site down now) had scanned and put up the entire magazines of these 2 issues but her whole site is gone now. I saved them all and maybe I will put them up on my server one day. I tested them out and these print nicely. They are minus the patterns, but I really think from the instruction pages in the magazines if you really wanted to make it you could either have it blown up at kinkos, or use the shapes and guess on the measurements to make your own patterns.

Gothic Lolita Bible Vols 4, 5, 6, 7online - These will be coming one day from myself, I purchased these 4. I will one day when I have the time, I have a few scanned so far from vol 4 you can view, they are hi res. I will also put translations when I get them for any pages. Patterns are/will be there too.

Elegant Gothic Lolita - from Morbid Outlook goth zine, this will tell you what it is.

There are at least a few communities on Live Journal, just search gothic lolita & egl.

Mangajin Magazine online - learn to read and speak Japanese with comics and pop culture. It would be difficult but you could try to match up characters here.

Japanese Letters - This is what I'm using to get my romaji, most of the book seems to be in the Katakana set of characters, a few are HIragana, this great page will tell you about the different Japanese character sets used. I keep a printout of this with me, write romaji sounds as I go along, then I will put them into the next link.

Japanese Romaji to English dictionary - enter in the phonetic japanese word in english letters and it gives you the translation.

Japanese-Online - learn to speak japanese

Japanese Writing Tutor - the best thing about this site is that it not only shows you the romaji for each letter, but it has an animation for every character showing you how it is drawn.