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
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Nov
16
2007
Motoki Log is the blog of a twentysomething gaikokujin mother of a 3 year old who was born prematurely. I feel like I'm invading her privacy by linking to her, but she's a very good writer and her son is absolutely adorable. She also has a photo blog.
I'm still fighting back tears after reading her post about the birth of Motoki.
Tags:
recommendation
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Oct
16
2007
This guy has a good, long, detailed write-up about what a Japanese funeral is like. His description is similar to my own experiences with funerals here.
Tags:
culture,
Japan,
recommendation
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Sep
20
2007
A website called Mango, for some unknown reason, is offering free, high-quality, Flash-based language lessons in nine different languages, including Japanese. I took a quick look and there are 101 lessons for Japanese alone, and they teach you in hiragana from lesson one. Hover your cursor over hiragana words and it shows the phonetic pronunciation in English.
Lord only knows why the site is free and doesn't have any advertising. Maybe from lesson 102 they're going to teach you how to shop for Coca-Cola at Wal-Mart.
Update #1: Ha! I was right! A little Googling turned up this press release:
The site plans to offer free service through revenue generated by paid advertising as site traffic grows. That is planned to include both banner advertising and "product placement" within the actual language lessons. For example, instead of teaching someone to say "I would like to order a soda" in another language, someone would be taught "I would like to order a Coca-Cola."
Update #2: Check out my Japlish Podcast with my son Tony.
Tags:
Japanese,
recommendation
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Sep
03
2007
I just came across a blog called "Hanzi Smatter," which chronicles the butchering of Chinese and Japanese writing in the west.
Oh. My. God.
I can't stop repeating that over and over as I see some of the tattoos people have gotten. They're so horrible they're not funny.
Let's use this one for an example. It's no better or worse than any of the others, and that's what's so horrifying. It's really, really bad.
First we have an old character for "money." One of those big ancient coins, I think. Next, "fugu," "buku" which means "poisonous blowfish." absolutely nothing. Next, "a." (Just the sound "ah." No meaning whatsoever.) After that, "ouch." And finally, "love". Roughly translated, this means, "I'm a complete imbecile."
Not even to mention the font. It looks like it came out of an inkjet printer.
Honestly, I don't know what to say. I mean, I see people all the time here wearing T-shirts with English gibberish on them, but for chrissake, they can take the damn things off at the end of the day and throw them in the wash.
If anyone out there has a kanji tattoo, please, don't ever ask me to translate it. Don't even show it to me. After seeing so many really, really bad ones, I get the feeling that there's probably no such thing as a "good one."
Tags:
funny,
holy shit,
Japanese,
kanji,
recommendation,
stupidity,
tattoos
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