Apr
14
2008
Finally a new "game" has come out for the Nintendo DS that will make me start using it again. Last night I was surfing the Nintendo channel of our Wii while putting off going to bed and came across an advertisement for 美文字トレーニング, a program that helps you improve your handwriting in Japanese. I downloaded the trial version from our Wii to my DS and was instantly hooked.
Penmanship means a lot to Japanese. From kindergarten through high school, children spend countless hours in class learning and practicing how to write properly, and even as adults people still take courses in penmanship and calligraphy. Although I'm not Japanese and never will be, I still compare myself to those around me, and everyone–including my kids–have better handwriting than I do, and it bugs me. Every time I have to put pen to paper, I'm ashamed of my chicken scratch that looks like that of a four year old stroke victim with cerebral palsy.
Here's how it works. The program shows you a character on one of the DS's two screens and prompts you to trace it on the other screen in the correct stroke order. When you're done it gives you grades for balance, detail and stroke width along with praise or advice on how to improve, just like a calligraphy instructor. It covers 3,119 characters including kanji, hiragana and katakana and up to six people can keep track of their progress on one DS.
For 3,800 yen it seems well worth the price and I'm going to stop off and buy it on the way home tonight.
Tags:
geek stuff,
Japanese,
kanji,
Nintendo DS,
recommendation
Supposedly similar posts:
Feb
18
2008
There are a number of official lists of kanji. I'm not an expert by any means, I'm just going by information gleamed off the net.
- 教育漢字(kyouiku kanji): The 1oo6 characters students must learn by grade 6. Essentially, knowing these characters is a good start, but you're far from finished.
- 当用漢字(touyou kanji): A list of 1850 characters published first in 1946 approved for use in public documents and the media. Many characters that were in use until then were simplified; for example, 學 became 学.
- 常用漢字(jouyou kanji): Last updated in 1981 and the successor of touyou kanji, 1945 characters that basically you ought to know as a literate adult. Used in legal and public documents, newspapers, magazines and broadcast media.
- 新聞漢字表(shimbun kanji hyou): A standard agreed upon among newspapers based on jouyou kanji, but removing some characters and adding others. The link is to a Japanese Wikipedia article, but the explanation and outline that appears there is possibly under copyright and could be deleted from the site in the future.
- 人名用漢字(jin meiyou kanji): Characters approved for use in people's names. As of 2004, when the government had a heck of a time trying to update the list, there are 983 extra characters than can be used in addition to what's already in the jouyou kanji list, or that are variants of jouyou characters, and most of them are really, really hard to read. The only way I'll ever learn them is if I get a chip implanted in my brain someday.
Incidentally, mainland China also simplified their characters sometime after WWII but for obvious reasons they didn't give a rat's ass about how Japan went about doing the same thing, so in many cases the two countries simplified the same characters but in different ways.
Summing up, if you're pretty smart, my guess is that you know around 3,000 characters or more. Multiply that number by a few factors to approximate how many readings you'd need to know for all those characters.
As for me, when reading a novel in Japanese I have to look up an average of five characters per page, and I can get through around 15 pages in 2-3 hours when I'm reading to learn. It's tedious, frustrating, labor intensive, tiring, and makes me feel learning disabled, which is why I avoided serious studying for far too many years.
Tags:
Japanese,
kanji,
trivia
Supposedly similar posts:
Feb
16
2008
If you're a Facebook user and are learning Japanese, give the Kanji Box app a whirl. And no cheating by using Perapera-kun or Rikai-chan at the same time.
Tags:
Facebook,
geek stuff,
Japanese,
kanji
Supposedly similar posts:
Nov
11
2007
Visit http://www.japlishpodcast.com
The Japlish Podcast: Audio Promo [1:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1491)
Tags:
Japanese,
Podcast
Supposedly similar posts:
Oct
07
2007
Well, I've put up the website with the first episode, and I think it looks really nice. All that's left to do is convince Tony to help me create the content on a regular basis.
Here's the concept and the reasoning behind it. Learning phrases is an important part of learning to speak a language. I find that in my mind I have a library of set phrases that I permutate into whatever I want to say. So that's why we're going to do phrases.
Why do silly, useless phrases? Because they're fun, and language learning is too often the exact opposite of fun. But even if you're learning to say something like "Please whack me in the head with a baseball bat," you're still learning grammar and vocabulary you'll be able to use for real. Just not in the way we teach it.
To get started, we need your help in the form of suggestions for phrases we can teach. You can either write them here or go to the contact page at www.japlishpodcast.com and upload an MP3 we'll play on the show.
I don't know if this will succeed or not because it all depends on out willingness to stick with it, and unfortunately Tony inherited from me the tendency to not finish what he starts. But if it does, the idea is to offer the first two month's worth of lessons for free, then maybe start charging (to support our video game habit).
Other phrases I've thought of:
- Stop picking my nose.
- I'd like to drink your bath water. (sure-fire pickup line)
- My favorite food is monkey brains.
- Oops, I pooped my pants again.
- Excuse me, I found this eyeball. Is it yours?
- I learned many magic tricks while I was in prison.
- When I grow up, I want to be a serial killer/garbage man/gas station attendant
- I made you a bracelet from my leg hairs. I hope you like it.
- I ate a rat for lunch.
- I haven't showered in three months. Don't I smell nice?
- Please stop licking my armpit. It tickles.
Tags:
Japanese,
japlish,
podcasting
Supposedly similar posts:
