Genki Japan Blog はじめまして。

This Blog Has Now Moved!

2011-11-28T12:20:00.001-06:00

It's official, Tanoshii Nihongo is officially the new site. This site will probably cease to update now, so please go to the new site.

I'm Back!

2011-11-21T08:38:00.003-06:00

This is just a quick update. Namely, my computer was having dire troubles lately, so I haven't been on. I'm currently working on a number of things, so the updates will be coming like mad. Here's a list of what I'm doing right now.

1. A thorough explanation of sentence mining. I've mentioned it before, and even given you the tools to get going, but then I realized that I didn't do that great a job of explaining it.

2. A review for The Language Hacking Guide, which I think is the best handbook for the output method.

3. More Friday reviews.

4. Removing Wordpress's tag pages from Google's index search, because it's so annoying that you get the tag pages rather than the actual post's from Tanoshii Nihongo, which is where this blog has moved. Remember, updates will eventually cease on this version of the blog.

Tanoshii Nihongo is Up and Running!

2011-11-08T11:36:00.003-06:00

I feel horrible having not written a post worth writing at the moment, but I've been putting all my effort into getting Tanoshii Nihongo up and running. Aside from my normal posts about language learning, Japanese news, and Friday Reviews, you can check out the tools and products pages on Tanoshii Nihongo to get a peek at all the reviews I'm trying to get caught up on - and those are just the recommended ones!

I'm still working to get the site streamlined, and when I get enough money (if you'd like to help, you may buy from one of the affiliate links so that you actually get something in return, or you can donate at the bottom of this post; all money goes towards the site's upkeep and buying more products to review), I plan on buying a premium theme to make things even better.

I also plan on putting a forum in at some point.

The New Genki Japan Blog

2011-11-04T11:27:00.002-05:00

This little website is starting to grow up, and is now a self-hosted WordPress website with a new name: 楽しい日本語 Tanoshii Nihongo - there's only one "i" in the URL. Anyway, right now it doesn't look so great, and it's growing very frustrating, but one day it will be an amazing website.

So, what does this mean for my little blogger site? Nothing right now. Tanoshii Nihongo isn't nearly ready for any real work, so I will continue to post on both blogger and the new the site for the time being. I'm still getting the hang of wordpress, and to be perfectly honest, I still love this little blogger blog enough that I'm not going to simply abandon it, especially at this early stage.

Basically, I'm just letting everyone know that a new and improved site is in the works, but it could take a while.

All About Particles

2011-11-03T09:20:00.005-05:00

Note: Last Monday was Halloween, and I meant to do a horror film review, but didn't get it done in time, so I might still post that up.

Japanese is an extremely interesting language, as anyone learning it can tell you, but it can also be very frustrating at times, especially when it comes to verbs and particles. Now, when it comes to the former, I'm afraid I don't have any neat tips or tricks (at least not yet), but there's an amazing reference book out there that makes learning particles amazingly easy! I already mentioned it in my post about reading in Japanese, and I keep this book by my side as I read, so when I get stumped, I can just look up the particles in question. So, allow me to introduce, All About Particles.

This is a great book that covers every single particle, , adn every last way to use them. For each particle, a description is given for each of its various usages, followed by several example sentences for each usage. It's very brief, but very clear as the thumbnail below shows.

As I've already said, this is a reference book, so trying to study it or memorize it is both unproductive and headache inducing. As you reference it while doing somethat that is productive, like reading, you will eventually learn them through repitition.

I also wouldn't use the example sentences for sentence mining, as they're boring. I tried this and wound up deleting that Anki deck a month later because the sentences got too redundant.

So, here's how I use it. Firstly, I grab a book. Second, I start reading, looking up the particles that trip me up. Thirdly, the particles slowly become like second nature to me. I also reference it as I write journal entires on Lang-8.

I recommend this book to everyone learning Japanese, regardless of your chosen method for learning. In fact, out of every book I've referenced on this site, this is what I recommend the most. It just makes dealing with those frustrating, confusing particles that much easier, and since it's only around $11, it's not like it takes a huge financial commitment, unlike a $40 textbook.

Method Bashing

2011-10-27T11:25:00.003-05:00

When starting off on your language-learning journey, and even long after it's ended, it's easy to get caught up in methods and what methods work the best. Now, on this site I endorse every method, whether you're a university student or a self-learner; whether you eat, drink, and sleep textbooks, immerse yourself into the language, or speak your way to fluency. I don't care because I know that everyone learns differently.

That's why I hate it when people out there try and make it sound like there's only one good way to learn. I've come across people who look at input methods and say, "Whatever happened to hard work! Is this some new age cult of language learning!" and I've come across people who bash on the output method saying, "You know you're still not good at it!" These people are ignorant, and I don't use that word often or take it lightly.

You see, there's a lot of ways to learn a language, and I myself use different methods depending on what my language goals are. There's nothing wrong with wanting to feel like you're working harder than anyone else by using textbooks and taking classes, but there's also nothing wrong by feeling like you're learning naturally. It's not a weird cult, and it's not a fad that will pass, for people are getting results.

Learning is a process that's different for everyone. Some people are hands off, some are hands on. Some people need visual cues, others audio. Are any of these wrong?

Sorry for the short post, but I just had to get this one out there because too many people right now are hating on other methods of learning.

Now Bronies Can Learn Japanese, Too!

2011-10-25T10:59:00.003-05:00

Yesterday and this morning, I found myself helplessly struggling to watch a really odd Japanese movie called パコダテ人, when I got distracted by the Japanese video sharing website, Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画) and typed in "My Little Pony" in English. Why did I do such an odd thing? Someone on the Reviewing the Kanji forums (review coming soon) said that the Japanese were fansubbing the show, which has now become an internet phenomenon. I got myself acquainted with the show and the memes associated with it (be careful, as it's suprisingly addicting) and decided to check it out next time I was bored.

All I can say is that if you're at least an intermediate learner, you should be using Nico Nico Douga, and if you're a brony, this is a great way to indulge your love of the ponies while learning Japanese at the same time. Learning is supposed to be fun, and if it's fun for you, then excellent!

So, how do you learn Japanese from fansubs of My Little Pony? First of all, any sentence you particularly like, you can plug into your Anki deck. You can't copy and paste these, so it'll be a time-consuming task. If I may make a recommendation, Rarity's sentences (I can't believe I'm typing these names) are particularly interesting, seeing as how the fansubbers decided to sprinkle some keigo (very formal Japanese) into her dialogue. In case you're wondering, Applejack didn't fare too well in the translation.

Another fun way that's not as time-consuming is to copy and paste the comments. In Nico Nico, the comments fly across the video as it plays just at the time the comment was made. You can also see the comments in a sidebar next to the video and they can be copied and pasted. Just right click and choose コーピする to copy it.

I should note that the comments consist of a lot of slang and grammar is pretty much thrown out the window (it's the Internet), so it might stump you for a while. At the same time, it'll probably make you laugh a little inside as you see that the Japanese tend to follow the same memes you do, and have even invented a few of their own.

So good luck little bronies who want to learn Japanese and still watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. You'll find there's quite a few episodes already up, so watch to your heart's content.

Keep the Water Boiling!

2011-10-24T07:26:00.000-05:00

Learning anything, let alone a foreign language, is like boiling water. To boil water, you simply set a pot of cold water on something hot and wait until it begins to bubble rapidly. That’s it. It’s not hard at all, and that boiling water can used for cooking a variety of things once it boils, much like how you can use your language acquisition for any number of things once you have it. There’s only one catch: you can’t turn the heat off at any point in time or the water will grow cold and you’ll have to start all over again regardless of how far along you were in the boiling process.

So, if the water is foreign language, then what is the heat? It’s study material and native material you watch, listen to, or read. I’m not going to focus on the study material, as I’ve reviewed all kinds of that on this website, but rather on native material. By native material I mean anything that’s intended for native audiences. Since this particular blog is about Japanese, it means things like anime, manga, Japanese video games, and J-Dorama. That’s what is going to help keep your water from growing cold, because learning a language and never using it is a recipe for disaster.

For example, my grandfather is a native Italian speaker. His parents moved from Italy to America, and neither one of them ever learned to speak English, probably because they thought it was too hard some other myth I’ll touch on in a later post. My grandfather spoke Italian with my great grandparents and English with everyone else while growing up. Now, my great grandparents died and he stopped using Italian completely. Guess what happened? He forgot the whole language! I mean the entire language, and can’t understand anything more than basic phrases. In order to get the hang of Italian again, he’d have to start from scratch.

So, what’s the best way to keep the water boiling? Try and do something for the language every day, as often as you can. Reserve Sundays for an anime marathon, perhaps? Read some manga or a novel every night before you fall asleep, or maybe try playing some Japanese video games. I don’t expect you to abandon English, but I do believe the best advice I can give you is to not let the language grow stale. If you have no one to speak it with, try and write Lang-8 entries ever day, or every other day.

That’s what the Friday Review is for – to keep giving you ideas on how you can keep in touch with Japanese. Native material is always going to trump whatever study tools you use. Study tools teach you the how and why of a language, but they don’t prepare you to actually use it most of the time.

頑張りましょう！

Friday Review: ICO

2011-10-21T15:00:00.005-05:00

ICO will always hold a special place in my heart, and is one of the best games that came out for the PlayStation 2. It’s a beautiful game in every sense of the word, and I dare anyone who says that video games aren’t real art to play this game and its prequel Shadow of the Colossus. These games are really art games, in the same sense that some films are art films. ICO is simplistic, minimalist in nature, and manages to accomplish its goal to make the player feel a real connection to the characters, not in the role-play sense, but in the sense that Yorda is someone you actually care about, the castle really picks at your brain, and you feel the burden of Ico himself.

Unfortunately, the NTSC version of the game leaves much to be desired, seeing as how it’s unfinished. You can beat the game, but the AI isn’t as good as other versions of the game, some of the puzzles are different, and some of the extras are missing. That doesn’t make the game bad, but it certainly isn’t that great.

Luckily, this was corrected for the PS3 HD rerelease of the game in the ICO and Shadow of the Colossus bundle, which is also 3D compatible. So, if you want to play this game as it was meant to be, I’d go pick up that copy if you have a PS3. If you don’t, since I don’t believe anyone should go through life without playing this game and its prequel, then go ahead and get the PS2 version.

Plot Overview: Ico, a pun on the Japanese word “let’s go”, is a young boy with horns like a bull’s growing out the side of his head. The game opens with him being taken to a foreboding castle, shrouded in mist, by a group of people in what appears to be some sort of ritual. They place him in a sarcophagus of sorts and leave him there to rot. Lucky for Ico, he manages to escape his imprisonment, allowing him to search for a way out of the castle. Where he plans to go, your guess is as good as mine.

He comes upon Yorda, an ethereal girl with some sort of power that allows her to open the castle’s enchanted doors and who doesn’t even speak Ico’s language, and together they attempt to escape. Unfortunately, the castle’s queen doesn’t want Yorda to get away, and shadowy creatures are constantly trying to recapture the fleeing girl. Ico must protect her if he wants to escape from the castle and free them both from their unpleasant fates.

Much of the game is unexplained, seeing as how its emphasis is on emotion and atmosphere, not on tying up loose ends. Why does Ico have horns, and why does his village see that as a bad omen? Why does the queen, or whatever she is, of the castle demand that horned boys be sacrificed to her, and what will she do if they aren’t? Why doesn’t she seem to care what Ico does? Was the castle ever used for anything other than sacrifices? Why does Yorda glow? Do you know what? Most people who play this game won’t care if these things aren’t ever answered. I suggest you don’t dwell on them.

Artwork: Absolutely breathtaking! It’s extremely subdued, and while the graphics aren’t spectacular, they’re far from being horrible. This is scenery porn at its finest, with the game’s high point being the atmosphere and the sense of dread and isolation it creates. Everything is detailed, but nothing stands out as being amazingly grand. The castle is in bad shape and disrepair, Yorda is like an angel trapped in Hell, and the shadowy creatures that pursue her are like smoke chasing after the light. It will take your breath away, and at the same time it will trap you inside of the world these characters live in and draw you into the game in a way most games cannot.

The characters themselves aren’t bad looking. Ico looks like a young Japanese boy with horns, and there’s not much to say about him. He’s meant to look exceptionally plain, as this game employs a minimalist design. The one your attention is meant to be on is Yorda, who is little more than a ghost, it would seem. Because she emanates some kind of light from her body, her features are difficult to pinpoint. The idea is that she’s supposed to be a mystery, not an object of lust. She stands out amongst everything else in the game, but that’s only because she’s like a literal light shining in the darkness.

Animation: When this game was first released, the animation was a grand achievement. Ico would run while tightly clasping Yorda’s hand in his own, and her body and arm would jerk behind him as she tried to keep up with his fast pace, and Ico himself moved with lankiness of a boy his age. Even as he would swing his stick about, or later his sword, it looked unprofessional, like a kid doing whatever it would take to drive away the shadows despite a complete lack of training.

Yorda also has a variety of small animations that she’ll do when left to herself. She’ll chase after the doves that frequent the open air places of the castle, pick at her elbow, or just look up at the sky as though she’s never seen it before, and as far as we know, she may have never seen the sky in her life. Her movements are meant to entice the player and convey the naïve and fragile nature of the character, and they do their job well. They aren’t ever overdone, but to the observant eye, you can see that Yorda does more than just wait for Ico to solve the next puzzle.

Unfortunately, with the advent of advanced motion capture techniques, the animation of Ico looks a bit outdated. It’s not an eyesore by any means, but it’s not up to par with today’s technology. The characters look and move in a realistic way, but sometimes I get the impression that when Yorda takes the time to look at her elbow, as she often does when left to her own devices, she’s actually checking to make sure it hasn’t dislocated from its socket!

Think of it as kind being like the Wizard of Oz. The movie looks old and outdated by today’s standards, yet it remains a classic and highly enjoyable despite the fact that is hasn’t aged technically well. That’s like ICO’s animation; it’s a classic, and you won’t complain about it, but it’s still a bit dated.

Sound Effects: Sound effects are top-notch in this game, seeing as how there’s hardly any music, most of the game is just listening to the sound effects. Again, the idea is to make you feel isolated and lonely, and sometimes background music will distract from that, so instead you get to listen to the castle. The wind howls through the corridors and blows about in the open air, carrying on its path the sounds of the sea and the birds that live there. You can hear creaks and moans from things like windmills and whatnot, and every little thing Ico does seems to project the correct sound effect.

The doors seem to sound like a jolt of electricity has just rushed into them when Yorda opens them, which is really the only thing that seems a bit odd to me.

Music: There’s very little music in the game, but the little bit that’s there is timed perfectly to create a different kind of mood for each situation it’s utilized. When the shadowy beings emerge to try and recapture Yorda, a very hushed and subdued music begins. In fact, I’m not sure if you can even call it music, but it effectively does its job and immediately creates a sense of uneasiness and even panic as you try and protect Yorda from being taken. There’s also a great ending song called “You Were There” that summarizes the feelings evoked by the game as the final cut-scene rolls.

The music is good, but I don’t know if I’d ever buy the soundtrack to the game. The music is there to create the mood, not to be listened to over and over again.

Gameplay: ICO is a puzzle game, but it’s done well. Nowadays, puzzle games usually give away the answers to the puzzles before you have to really hurt yourself thinking about them, insulting the intelligence of players, in my opinion. ICO has its fair share of easy and maddening puzzles, and it never just gives away the answer. In versions of the game that aren’t NTSC (this has been corrected for the rerelease), Yorda will point to where you should concentrate your efforts if you really have that hard of a time with the puzzles.

The puzzles consist of navigating from room to room, trying to find a way for the fragile Yorda to cross. She can’t do most of what Ico is capable of, including jumping long distances, climbing chains and ropes, scaling walls, and swimming. You have to find a way to get Yorda from point A to B, and sometimes if you leave an area for too long, the shadow beings will emerge, forcing you to hurry back and protect her, for if she goes it’s game over. As the game progresses, the puzzles get more and more complicated, and eventually you’re not just trying to get from room to room, but you’re also trying to charge up the main gate so Yorda can open it.

Now, I’m pretty sure that the developers’ main aim of this game was to make the bond that exists between Ico and Yorda extend to the player as well. As such, the gameplay really centers a lot around her. You have to do the puzzles to help Yorda navigate, thereby always keeping her at the center of your attention, and sending the shadows after her when you leave her alone for too long. It’s almost as if they realize the coast is clear and attack, especially seeing as how these creatures aren’t that interested in Ico.

No matter what you’re doing or where you are, you have to think of Yorda, asking yourself, “Where is she? If I leave now, will I just have to go running back? How do I get back? How do I get Yorda over on that ledge?” It’s maddening, but at the same time it actually does get you to care about her as a character, even though in reality you should just view her as a liability whose only real use is to open doors.

There’s a few other nuances the game utilizes to further this bond. The controller rumbles when Ico holds Yorda’s hand, since that’s usually the only way to get her to follow you, and having to hold her hand makes things a bit more interesting. You also have to help her get up high ledges and encourage her a lot to go the places you need her to go.

Characters: This game is virtually void of characters, with the main focus being solely on Ico and Yorda and the bond that exists between the two. The only other character with any kind of presence is the castle’s master, but you very seldom even come across her.

Basically, it boils down to Ico being an energetic and intelligent lad who must use his great physical stamina and brain to navigate through the evil castle, Yorda is a frail girl whose only real ability is the power to open the doors within the castle.

Character Development: There’s a bit of character development, although I won’t spoil it, but I think a lot of it exists within the player’s head. The game itself doesn’t present a lot, leaving the player to fill in gaps, and practically encouraging that kind of thing. It’s easy to see things within the game that actually aren’t there, so to speak.

Tone: The game is supposed to make the player feel lonely, trapped within a desolate castle with a companion that you cannot understand. There are moments of panic and concern, but most of it is trying to find an escape from the all but abandoned castle, taking in the environment and feeling like you’re nothing more than a needle inside a haystack.

Dialogue: The characters all speak in made-up languages. Ico’s is subtitled in the player’s native tongue, so to be understood, and the queen-like character speaks both Ico’s tongue and Yorda’s. Yorda’s is subtitled in made-up hieroglyphics (in other versions of the game other than the rerelease, her speech is subtitled properly on the second play through), making the player feel a boundary they can’t quite overcome. It’s very well done.

As such, the dialogue is very minimal, and it doesn’t tell the story. The scenery and animations are the real story-tellers here, and dialogue is used only to basically set-up the story and characters, filling in the story only when it’s absolutely necessary to do so.

Recommended? I think everyone should play this game (and Shadow of the Colossus) at least once. Some people think it’s overrated, others think it’s underrated, and I’m with the latter. This game is absolutely brilliant in concept, design, and execution. It does what it sets out to do and doesn’t try to impress anyone with flashy graphics and a massive, convoluted story. While language-learners might not get much out of it (I wish Yorda’s language was learnable), it’s still a very touching and heart-warming game.

Review for Gakuu!

2011-10-18T09:52:00.003-05:00

When I reviewed TextFugu for a second time, I mentioned Gakuu and how TextFugu members could get 80% off. Well, I decided to give it a go and see what to make of it. What I discovered is a goldmine for sentence mining, and a great way to understand the way the Japanese talk, especially when things aren't nice and clear like they are in textbooks. My first impression was that it was TextFugu for intermediate and advanced students, and what I found was something different, and almost better. It won't overshadow TextFugu, which will continue to grow into its own advanced material, but is excellent as a suppliment for a textbook, or an amazing find if you're an input person. Output people, I'm afraid this might not be your cup of tea.

Apparently the Gakuranman, as he studied Japanese through textbooks, discovered that they just weren't doing it for him the way they were when he was a beginner. Basically, they didn't seem to be teaching "real world" Japanese, and thus most of his learning at this stage took place outside of the classroom. His new website, Gakuu, is dedicated to bringing the odd and bizarre of the Japanese language, and presenting it in a way that even the most incompetent gaijin can understand.

Now, this is a website that's excellent for sentence mining. You can find sentences everywhere, from anime, to pictures of billboards, to websites, but decifering them can be a real pain. Let's face it, the Japanese don't talk like English speakers do. If I have a headache, I say that I'm going to take ibuprofen or something. In Japan, you would say that you're going to drink ibuprofen. They just have different ways of saying things, and sometimes this can be downright confusing.

For example, go to this Japanese wikipedia page in your Firefox browser with Rikaichan enabled. Now, Rikaichan might be able to give you the definition of each word, and you probably know enough grammar to understand things like the various verb forms, etc., but are you still having a hard time understanding exactly what it says sometimes? I even tried to make it easier by directing the link to the wikipedia page for The Legend of Zelda - something you might be familiar with.

Now, I'm going to bet that it was rather difficult to really understand it. You might get the gist of it, but the real understand just isn't there. That's what makes Gakuu so wonderful; the ability to tell you how to put it all together. Sentence mining only works properly if you know how it all comes together, and this site gives you a good headstart towards understanding real Japanese. You can take this knowledge and apply it to other areas of Japanese, or add it to your Anki deck when you collect sentences.

If there's a con to Gakuu, it comes from its non-linear style. This isn't a problem for me, but for people who like plans, charts, and lessons, it'll be a bit daunting. Gakuu isn't a textbook, it's a site striving to bring learners of Japanese the real language, in its raw, uncut form and bridge the gap between the two languages so you can grasp its real meaning.

I also don't recommend Gakuu for early beginners going the textbook route, at least not yet. Sure it has hiragana and katakana charts, but you should have some basic grammar under your belt before diving into this. If you're an inputter, then I'd say go ahead and sign up. The cost really isn't that bad and there's plenty of information here.

All in all, Gakuu defied my first impressions and turned out to be a really great resource that I'll be coming back to a lot. The explanations are clear and concise, it helps make sense of some of those stranger expressions, has slang, and is perfect for sentence mining.

Friday Review: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

2011-10-17T09:13:00.002-05:00

Yes, I know it's Monday, but I was busy Friday working on my second part of Anki. Anyway, Today I'm reviewing The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Plot Overview: Cynical Kyon finds himself going to high school surrounded by aliens, espers, time travelers, and one very, very powerful teenage girl, Haruhi Suzumiya. I'm sure everyone has heard of this anime before, as it seems to have taken the otaku subculture by storm, thanks to it's witty characters, excellent script, and that one dance.

Basically, Kyon meets Haruhi, an eccentric girl who wishes to meet aliens, espers, time travelers, and basically anyone who isn't "normal" since that bores her. Dragging our poor protagonist into making an unofficial club, the SOS Brigade, of which its sole mission is to find these abnormal characters and have fun with them, she then manages to kidnap (I think Koizumi came willingly, and she apparently inherited Yuki along with the room) a few other students to complete the club. Oddly enough, each member secretly reveals themselves to Kyon to actually be the kinds of people Haruhi is interested in, and that Haruhi herself is probably the most powerful being on earth, though she doesn't realize it, apparentlyhaving the ability to change reality to match her own worldview. If they aren't careful, Haruhi might get really bored, and then it's sayonara for everyone and everything in existence!

Artwork: The artwork for this show is very good. You can tell that a lot of time went into it, from the small details of the clubroom to the computers they use. The beauty of this anime is in the details, and there's enough here to make everything look spectacular. Each moment and each mood is captured perfectly, the characters always look good, and the show always manages to stay interesting because of the artwork... even endless eight... maybe...

Animation: The animation is also top-notch. The movements are fluid and seldom ackward, managing to make each character look and feel real. At first I was worried about Haruhi, because energetic characters tend come off as overdone sometimes in animation (thinks of Ouran High School Host Club), but Haruhi's abundant energy seems unique and natural.

On the other hand, Kyon manages to stay subdued, yet interesting, letting his body do most of his talking for him with frequent shoulder shrugs and a deadpan expression. The even more subdued Nagato is animated in a way that keeps her a mystery, yet doesn't steal from her unique character. She's given a few quirks, unlike other "silent girl" anime characters.

Beyond the characters, the animation always stays good, never faltering and always keeping appropriate to the tone set by each scene.

Action: To be perfectly honest, there isn't much action in this show, seeing as how it's more about characters and solving problems in a more interpersonal way than fighting an external conflict. However, this scene is more than enough to make up for the lack of action!

Music: This category also gets high marks from me, and I'm sure it does from a lot of other reviewers as well. The music isn't Escaflowne, but the simple background tunes match perfectly, and the openings and endings of each season are very good. The songs are what really draw people to this anime initially, I think. At least, it's how I found it.

Character Development: Again, very strong in this area. Granted, Koizumi and Mikuru are still a bit of a mystery, but Yuki seems to be developing a lot, as well as Kyon and Haruhi. The other, more background characters seem to get a decent amount as well. If the series continues, I'm certain that we'll be seeing even more in this area.

Granted, Yuki started out as a blank slate of a character, so she really had nowhere to go but up.

Tone: This is a witty, yet light-hearted anime. It manages to be nerdy and full of obscure references that some may not get, yet it remains engaging and almost impossible to hate. At the surface, it seems like just another wacky anime, but it manages to stay exceptionally fresh, and has a large fanbase for a reason.

Pacing: The first season's episodes were deliberately aired out of order, mixing things up considerably, and the second season had a terribly long arc known as Endless Eight. While the pacing is good (except for Endless Eight), it's difficult to judge, seeing as how things are out of order.

Dubbing: I can't really say anything, seeing as how I've never bothered to watch it. If you're learning Japanese (and if you're reading this blog, I assume you are), then you should really kick the dub habbit.

Recommended? Most definitely! Probably moreso than any other anime I've reviewed thus far, in fact. It's really, really hard to dislike this show, seeing as how it has such widespread appeal. There's always something to like in it, even when it doesn't fit your tastes exactly. At the very least, check out the first season. I can see waiting on the second one, but the first is a must-see.

This is the box set I recommend. It's only season 1 (season 2 hasn't been released in America yet), and it's the highest quality DVD I've come across. I didn't like the other "complete" collection. It was just formatted wrong or something.

Ways to Use Anki

2011-10-13T08:06:00.002-05:00

In my last post, I reviewed Anki, a flashcard srs (spaced repition system) program that is almost essential for language learning. Now, I'm going to talk about the most common ways to use this flashcard program, as people have come up with ingenious ways to use this program to help them learn that I for one wouldn't have thought of by myself, but I'm a bit slow I think.

The most obvious way to use flashcards is to memorize facts. When I was in second grade, our teacher was obsessed with using flashcards to teach us math. We would have contests and competitions over these flashcards and who could get the most right or recall the answer fast enough. To share a little secret with you, math and I still don't get along, despite the flashcards.

When learning a language and being told to make flashcards, most people try to make flashcards in the same way that they use them for mathematics or science, or any other subject. You write out the Japanese word on one side and the English translation on the other, allowing you to quiz yourself. This is kind of how Smart.fm used to work, except it would provide example sentences and a few other exercises to show how the word is used, and it was a spaced repition system as well, so the frequency of which you saw each card was dependent on how well the software thought you knew it.

This is all well and good, but Khaztumoto introduced me to another way of using flashcards, and that's what he calls sentence mining. For him, flashcards are the crux of his method of learning, not a suppliment. He believes in doing as much in the language, or for the language, as possible, and a good way to remember it all is to mine interesting sentences, since he also believes that if you're not having fun, then you're not learning properly and will burn out.

This is how it works. First, you read an interesting manga (or watch an anime, movie, jdrama, or read a book) and as you're going through, you find sentences that seem good to learn. If you're a beginner, you start with simple sentences and work your way up to where the whole book or manga seems easy, or at least that's how I interpret this part of the method.

The reasoning behind this is simple - words without any context and grammar points without context (I added the grammar bit) are meaningless. For example, what would be the point of knowing the English word "like" if you don't know how to use it. There's a lot of different ways to use the word, and without example sentences for each of them, such as, "I like to learn languages," or, "Learning a language is like boiling ramen," a textbook explanation of the word will probably be lost on you. Looking through a dictionary, there's a lot of words like this, and you have to see them in a sentence in order to fully grasp how they're used.

As such, finding interesting sentences is a great way to see how everything comes together in a sentence, and using Anki makes sure that you remember them. As you come to understand how sentences are put together, you can make up your own without a textbook to necessarily teach you how. Definitely check out the site, as Khatzumoto explains in much better than I can.

Finally, someone decided that it would be a good idea to program something that would allow a user who has a movie or anime episode with both English and Japanese subtitles to sentence mine the whole thing, complete with audio and even visual if one so desires, without an epic struggle. Introducing Subs2SRS, which has become a bit popular with people who do the sentence mining thing, for it really shortens the process, and it's pretty reliable. There's even pre-made decks on the learn any language wiki!

I really like this software, but it can be very hard to find Japanese closed captions for anime. Finding anime with subtitles in .srt format isn't too bad, but finding Japanese captions for anime is near impossible sometimes. If you want to do that, here's a few sites I recommend.

AnimeTranscripts: This place doesn't actually provide subtitle files, but it does have transcripts, which will help you immensely in your sentence mining mission, regardless of whether you're using Subs2SRS or just looking for interesting sentences. It's a website created for Japanese people learning English through anime dubs (the thought scares me), but they also provide some transcripts in Japanese for English speakers wanting to learn Japanese through anime. It's pretty interesting and even has a forum.

Kitsunekko: This seems to be a popular place for finding subtitles in Japanese, although he has a habit of going down for long periods of time. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a lot of anime that I watch, but I definitely recommend you take a look.

Akusento: This particular page I linked to is in English, although the majority of the site is in Russian. There's some movie subtitles and anime subtitles here, including a few episodes of Rurouni Kenshin.

Project "Modelino": Another Russian page, but you can view it in English or French as well, and I linked to the English verison. There's a number of Japanese movies on this page, so it ranks high in my list of places to find Japanese subtitles. I recommend viewing it in FireFox with Rikaichan turned on if you're unsure of the titles.

D-Addicts: Let's face it, Japanese dramas can be really hard to come by, so downloading from this site is a good thing, and it also provides Japanese subtitles for some of its shows. So, if you can get a show with both English and Japanese subtitles, Subs2SRS takes care of the rest!

When in doubt, if you're Japanese is good enough, I recommend going to Google and typing in the name of your anime in Japanese plus "字幕", or　"じまく", which means "subtitles". Sometimes that yields results, too.

So, happy hunting, and have fun sentence mining!

The Best Flashcard Program Ever: Anki

2011-10-12T10:20:00.002-05:00

Okay, so today's topic is a bit different than I originally intended. I was going to do a post about how studying is supposed to be fun, not taxing, and then I realized that I have a ton of reviews to do for anime, games, movies, learning tools, etc. As such, today's review is for Anki, my favorite flash card program.

Back in the day when I was first thinking of reviewing flashcard programs, it was going to be iKnow/Smart.fm vs. Anki, but since iKnow is no longer free, it therefore is no longer worth my time to use and Anki wins the day just for being free.

Flashcards can make life much, much easier for anyone learning Japanese, regardless of what method you go about using. If you study via the academic method, vocab lists are king, and flashcards can be pain to buy or make and quiz yourself on. The input method usually has the most flashcard users, as they rely on repition rather than instruction to give them the bulk of their knowledge, and even output people use them often.

Now, most flashcard software utilizes what is called a space repition system, or SRS. What this does, is it measures how well you know a card and then determines from that when it should show you this card again. For example, let's say I take this sentence I found for a book review of ICO.

囚われの少女を救うため、過酷な運命を変えるため、少年は霧の城に立ち向かう！！

I have a plug-in for Japanese (there's a ton of plug-ins for this software), so just in case I don't know the reading for the kanji, the program will automatically insert furigana (kana above the kanji), and it's usually correct. This next example isn't a good idea of how it actually looks when you see the flashcard, but you can still see the readings, just not on top.

囚[とら]われの少女[しょうじょ]を救[すく]うため、過酷[かこく]な運命[うんめい]を変[か]えるため、少年[しょうねん]は霧[きり]の城[しろ]に立ち向[たちむ]かう！！

Now, let's pretend that I don't know most of the words. I'll just manually type the words into the "meaning" box and it'll be good to go!

囚われ - Imprisonment; captive 救う - To help out; to rescue; to save 過酷な - cruel; harsh; rigorous; severe 変える - To change; to alter; to tranform; to amend; to vary 霧 = Mist 城 - Castle 立ち向かう - To fight against; to oppose; to face

I can even put a translation into it! This is also done manually, though.

In order to rescue a captive girl, to change a cruel fate, a young boy must have a showdown at the Castle in the Mist!!

Your flashcard will look like this as you make it, just in case I wasn't clear. The "expression" box is the only thing you see when you review a card. Clicking "show answer" will reveal the rest.

So why is Anki so amazing? First of all, it's free. I really have no idea why people want to charge a fee for their flashcard programs, but they do. Supermemo, iKnow, and plenty of others are good programs in and of themselves, but they charge you to use them, and since learning a new language already requires you to buy textbooks, or other media, why would you pay for a flashcard system? You could just make your own for the price of a few pieces of paper and scissors!

I don't do the whole smart phone thing, but it's available for that as well, and according to the site, you can even use it on your Nintendo DS and PSP if you want.

I also like the amount of customizing you can do for this program. It's very efficient, and it's open source. There's already a ton of pre-made Anki decks out there, too.

So, yes, I definately recommend this program. Go download it and see for yourself just how amazing it is. I'll be following this post up with various ways you can use Anki to learn languages within the next few days.

Success is a Mindset

2011-10-11T07:02:00.003-05:00

When most people think of success, they tend to think of the past and present tense; what they have accomplished and what benefits are they reaping right now. For me, success isn't something tangible, nor is an accomplishment I've already made or a reward I'm enjoying at this very moment. For me, success is a mindset, and it's taken a lot of hard failures for me to realize this. Success in a language, or in anything for that matter, starts with your mind. You can't get anything accomplished if you don't put your all into it, and you won't put your all into it if you don't think it'll be worth it. It's more important than your method you use (as you can see, on this site I advocate them all, so long as they work for you), and it's more important than what book you use, what blog you read, or what website you're engrossed in.

Growing up, the people around me and my own experiences taught me the greatest false lesson ever: never get your hopes up. I've always been a staunch pessimist, and I my infrequent ventures into optimism typically resulted in sorrow. Looking back, this was probably the result of that little downer voice inside telling me not to get my hopes too high. Well, I think now that we should, because nothing will get accomplished if we don't.

Your mindset has a huge impact on everything in your life, from your health to your wealth, and if you want to learn a language, you have to first believe you can. Everything else comes second, regardless of what those pesky linguists think. You see, they think that language success is dependent on a certain age, and more and more research is showing that it isn't. Your first language is largely influenced by age, but second language acquisition isn't. The only way you won't learn is if you don't think you will, kind of like my mom.

You know those people who are millionaires or billionaires and they insist that it's possible for anyone to do that kind of thing if they want? Yeah, most of us just roll our eyes. If someone came to me today and told me that he was going to go make $1 million, I'd probably laugh at him, and maybe even tell him he's crazy, just like how sometimes people tell me that Japanese is impossible to learn for such and such bogus reasons. Still, people do go out and make that kind of money. How? Well, they get that kind of mindset, and before you know it, you can't deter them from that path. They really want it, they research what they need to know, avoid the scams (probably only after being scammed a lot), and rise triumphant, having never let failure stop them. Some of them even pretend they have that kind of money before they do, which leads me to a post by Khatzumoto about pretending to be Japanese even though you aren't. It's the same thing, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, to borrow his words exactly.

Now, I wouldn't know what to do with that kind of money, but I'm a language learner, and I can say that the same thing applies to us. If you want to learn a language, avoid the nay-sayers and set out to do it. You might fall down flat, get scammed by bogus software, and hit that intermediate stage where you think to yourself, "When will I get good?" but if you keep at it, I promise you won't fail.

Japanese isn't hard, if you don't let yourself think it is. Really, it's just different, and thinking that different = hard will make sure you don't ever achieve success. You won't ever put that kind of effort into something that you feel is too hard for you, and some people, like me, run from those kinds of challenges. I like different things, but difficult things?

For example, when I was in fifth grade, my teacher required us to spend a week on foreign language. I'm not sure what this was supposed to accomplish, but that was idea. We had to speak an hour a week sitting in front of Rosetta Stone (ugh!) and learn either French or Spanish. Now, my teacher, though well-meaning, decided to let us know that French is much harder than Spanish. I immediately got it in my head that French is hard, and since I don't like hard, I should stick to Spanish. Guess what? I still can't learn French. I'm 25 and French seems difficult to me, and it's all because of that teacher. I enjoyed that teacher, but for any teachers out there, do not tell your students that something is hard, because the ones who think like me will never get it.

Getting your mindset to think successfully isn't a recipee for disaster. In fact, it's the only reason anyone has ever accomplished anything in this world. If we all thought, "I shouldn't get my hopes up," or, "That'll never happen," then it won't. Granted, there are plenty of times when I thought like that and good things still managed to come of it, but so many more things didn't happen because I wouldn't allow myself to consider being successful.

Don't let bogus research, teachers, or nay-sayers get you down. If you want to learn Japanese, you can and you will. You just have to believe you will. I know this was a sappy post, but this is seriously the very best piece of advice I can give you before I go continue on my way of reviewing different language learning tools.

Good luck!

Rocket Japanese Reviews?

2011-10-10T11:35:00.004-05:00

I'll be doing my Friday review at some point, since I was too busy last Friday talking about the poopcycle. Anyway, today I wanted to make a brief point about language-learning software, specifically, products like Rocket Japanese that have affiliate marketers clinging to them and putting up false "reviews". I'd been considering trying this software and reviewing it myself, but I decided to Google "Rocket Japanese review" first, as I like to get a gist of what the software does before delving in, and the company's website, while looking promising, yet overpriced and hyped up, isn't exactly unbiased. Unfortunately, every single review I clicked on was basically the same thing!

Here's my problem with language-learning software: it's so easy to get scammed. Most of the good reviews that come from an independent website are made by people who either didn't use the software themselves or who are relatively unknowledgable about language learning. Every single site I visited had affiliate links to the software after a "review" that was basically just more crap from the official page.

There's nothing wrong with affiliate links. I use them myself occassionally, and it's a great way to support your website; and I don't want it to sound like you can't trust anyone's review ever, but spewing crap that you don't understand just because you want to make a buck is just plain wrong and dishonest, and it makes it easy to scam people. Most of these sites I visited also touted Rosetta Stone as being the best thing since sliced bread. Why? Because they get a big commission from getting people to buy expensive products that shouldn't cost half as much.

Here's my beef with language learning software. Most of it is very basic and can be learned elsewhere in a more effective way and for a cheaper price. If you're an inputter or immersion person, then occassionally these products look good, but you can't get immersion from a piece of software. You have to modify your surroundings yourself, otherwise the only "immersion" you get is when you sit at your computer, and that doesn't count.

It also sounds good, such as being able to watch videos of the hiragana/katakana/kanji being drawn, but you can find such videos for free on youtube, and Remembering the Kanji and Remembering the Kana are much, much better than anything you'll find in software. In fact, you can learn the kana for free on the Internet, and it's easy to teach it to yourself. I used Power Japanese, which is a language learning software, but the kana was the only thing it did right, so I actually recommended people torrent it.

Why am I ranting like this? I know what you're thinking. You're thinking to yourself, "What an incoherent blog post! What's the point?" Yes, it's incoherent, but the point is that you should always think twice before accepting someone's advice to buy software, especially if you're not sure the person is the real deal. Seriously, I doubt most of these people actually speak the language, and I'm tempted to leave comments in Japanese on their websites and blogs just to see if they can read it and respond.

So, how can you pick out if a review is genuine?

1. Does the review sound biased? This is always your first tell-tale sign. Some reviews just sound terribly biased, and they usually back up their claims with either regurgitated information from the official site, or by "facts" that have no real source or are common knowledge and have no bearing on how well the products performs in relation to these "facts".

2. Are there any other product reviews? This is an easy one to spot. Check out the whole site and see what else is being reviewed. If the site is dedicated solely to Rocket Japanese, Rosetta Stone, etc., then that person only has one thing in mind: to make money off you. If all they review are various expensive products (even inexpensive ones; so long as it costs money), and then give out a few "tips" and nothing else, then that person probably doesn't even speak the language well and just wants to get your money. When you have people recommended both JapanesePod101.com and Rosetta Stone, you know something's fishy.

3. Does the person reviewing the software tell you a tale that's hard to believe? I found a blogger blog while looking for a review, actually, and it told a bizarre tale of how Rocket Japanese worked for him. First off, he goes on and on about how amazing the product is, followed by a statement to back up his claims in which he basically says he knows what he's talking about because he once almost hired a private tutor to teach him Japanese. It was horribly expensive and she (the tutor) said it would take (gasp) 4 months to learn!

Firstly, you shouldn't come to the conclusion that private tutors, classes, schools, etc. are the only way to learn Japanese! And secondly, what was supposed to be accomplished in 4 months? Conversational fluency? Total fluency? If you want conversational fluency in under 4 months, check out Benny the Irish Polyglot's site first, then check out everything else.

Now, that's not to say that I dismiss all software. As I said, I slowly get around to checking it out, and I will eventually get to check out Rocket Japanese and give a review of it, but most websites make me not want to. You really have to be careful of some of these "reviews" because they aren't honest. Please, please, please be careful!

If you want an idea of what these kinds of websites look like, click here. Or here's that blog "review" that didn't make much sense. I'm not trying to pick on these people, but I want people to see what sticks out in my mind as a biased review. Heck, I saw one website where the reviewer, after allegedly learning Japanese with Rocket Japanese, thought fortune cookies were Japanese, not Chinese. FAIL!

Fluent in 4 months through a few hours a week with a private tutor? Give me a break! That doesn't even come close to making sense!

On that note, this blog may be switching hosting soon and moving over to wordpress! I'm working on a way to get everything over so subscribers and such aren't lost, and I have to set up a payment plan as well. I'll be able to be both a blog and a website, so my recommendations and warnings will be much easier to find!

The Poopcycle

2011-10-07T10:50:00.004-05:00

I have no intention stealing Tofugu's content, but I'm going to redirect you to this blog entry on there. All I have to ask is, "Why?" Whenever I tell people I speak Japanese, or whenever they see me "studying", they ask me why I would want to learn a language like that. "Japan is a messed up place," they sometimes say, and I usually just shrug my shoulders and assume that they were either veterans of WWII, or had relatives who were. Otherwise I just assume their a bit ignorant.

And then Japan comes and does something like this and everyone else's suspicions are affirmed! Why would they do that? I mean, energy conservation is a good thing, but a motorcycle powered by poop? That's pretty gross, and it's from the company Toto that makes those funny little toilets that spray water at your rear to help clean you off after you've done your business.

This isn't a long entry; I just wanted to draw everyone's attention to this monstrosity. Kids will laugh at it, but everyone else is just going to shake their heads. I mean, I like toilet humor, fart jokes, etc., but there's a limit. This almost sounds like something out of South Park - it's just plain wrong.

Oh well. It's more efficient than fossil fuels, and probably better than electricity or solar power, but it seems a bit wrong somehow. At least we aren't eating poop yet...oh wait...

Learn Japanese With Audio Online for Almost Free!

2011-10-06T09:31:00.005-05:00

I have officially found the solution to Pimsleur's price tag! It's called JapanesePod101.com, and it's full of audio files, .pdfs, and all kinds of stuff that makes Pimsleur look really outdated. Let's face it, the Internet never fails to amaze me, even after all this time. It makes it possible to do so much, and, combined with an iPod, CD Player, or some other portable audio device, it's possible to learn Japanese online and even while on-the-go, and not necessarily in your car, either. It's fun, interesting, and provides a lot more information with just the audio portions alone than anything else I've come across, etiher online or the old-fashioned CD player or cassett tape.

Now, I've known about this site for quite a while now, and I actually signed up for it a couple months ago. It took me a while because I would see their ads over all these sites, and seeing ads makes me think, "Another Rosetta Stone! Yikes!" However, I'm happy to report that this isn't the case. JapanesePod101.com, really is a very good way to learn if you don't want to invest in textbooks and just want something you can listen to in the background, complete with study materials, and all for practically nothing at all.

So, since I already reviewed Pimsleur, what exactly does JapanesePod101.com do that Pimsleur doesn't? For starters, it actually provides study materials. When you download a lesson, you may also download the lesson notes and even study material for kanji, which is excellent. The lesson notes aren't long, but rather brief and to the point, as the real meat comes from the audio lesson. Also, anything that includes lessons in writing is good in my book, whereas Pimsleur was pretty much audio only.

I also like that the dialogues in JapanesePod101.com are a lot more interesting than any other audio tape, CD, or even podcast I've found yet. Most of them, especially tapes made for being listened to in your car, are very boring. It's a good way to get in a traffic accident because you'll almost assuredly fall asleep.

JapanesePod101.com has its lessons set up as a sort of radio program. There's the English host, named Peter (he's from New York, so he has a bit of an accent), and then a variety of native speakers who act out the scene and provide valuable insight. There's a lot of banter and such that goes on so you don't usually feel like you're studying.

At the start of each lesson, either Peter will welcome the listeners and introduce the native speakers joining him in the studio and then start the dialogue, or the dialogue will start first and the lesson pick up afterwards. Usually it's the former, and it isn't long before you feel like you're really getting to know everyone there.

The lessons run between 15 and 25 minutes, so while they're not too long, they're not too short, either. In fact, there have been times in my listening where I don't really want the lesson to end! To have used this program for 2 months now and still feel this energized about it, it must be doing something right.

It also takes you a lot farther than I've seen virtually anything else. It's got newbie lessons, beginner lessons, and three different levels of intermediate lessons. Some people complain that there are no advanced lessons, and JapansePod101.com responds by saying that they believe you should learn primarily from native Japanese media (books and movies) than through lessons at that stage. I agree wholeheartedly with this philosophy. It's possible to learn through media earlier than that, but some people like to get the grammar and such down really well before diving into the real media. And, to be perfectly honest, I'm an advanced learner, and I still enjoy these lessons!

They also do a lot more than teach you words, phrases, and grammar (not to mention written Japanese), but they also teach you how to get through customs, provide cultural insight, and go the extra mile in general so that you feel confident about going to Japan.

It's also very affordable - moreso than any other program I've come across. The basic membership is $4/month, which is practically free. You get access to all the audio lessons and notes, not to mention the kanji lessons, which worth a lot more than the $4 they ask of you, and I doubt you'll find a deal like that anywhere else.

The premium membership is only $10/month, which is still very affordable, and it's what I use. You get everything in the basic, obviously, but you also get to use their dictionaries, grammar checker, take quizzes, see the dialogue translations side-by-side, get the bonus tracks, and a ton of other stuff. I recommend this membership the most, just because there's so much content it's mind-blowing.

The last type is premium plus, which is $26/month and contains a lot of one-on-one stuff, which I won't slam by any means, but I haven't upgraded to this membership type.

Like all sites, there's some bad about this one, too. In a lot of their ads, you'll see, "Learn Japanese - Free" or something similar. This is a bit misleading. You get a 7-day premium trial after which you have to pick a membership type, so to use phrases like "free lifetime account" is gross misrepresentation, and due to that, many people who could greatly benefit from this website believe it's a scam. Heck, even I had to do further research on it first, because when my trial ended, I was all like, "What the heck?" So be careful of that little snag.

Also, it bombards you with emails. I had to send the stuff to the junk mail and spam folder, as it was just horribly annoying. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's massive amounts of emails sent by a single company. I even set up a seperate email account just for when I register to sites, because I don't trust them a lick.

It can also be hard to figure out where to start once you sign up. I think if you're completely new to the language, you're supposed to start at Newbie Season 2, then go through Newbie Season 3, then Beginner Season 4, as those all build on each other. The other seasons are stand alone seasons, and while they all seem to be very good, the sheer amount of them is overwhelming, and they don't all use the same characters and stories. I highly recommend you browse the seasons when you first start and find the one you like the most and are learning the most from.

The only other thing I can think of is that the forums are a bit slow, but there are so many good forums for learning Japanese that I can forgive this one.

All in all, it's an excellent website and I highly recommend you check it out. If you're an academic type of person, you might want to use a suppliment with the site, but for inputters, a lot of this site is good as-is.

Reading in Japanese

2011-10-05T10:33:00.003-05:00

Regardless of how you choose to do the bulk of your learning, whether through speaking and using the language, Japanizing (my new word) your environment, or by memorizing textbooks, you're going to have to delve into some native literature. Why? Because it'll get you ready for how the Japanese actually speak and write, and it can be quite a bit different from your sanitized textbook. Granted, you'll have to watch actual Japanese shows, too, in order to familiarize yourself with how the Japanese speak, namely, with how fast they speak, but that's for the next post.

No, this one concerns reading, which is easily the most difficult thing to do in Japanese. Now, I recommend you use Heisig for learning the kanji, so how do you learn the readings? Memorizing them from your textbook, dictionary, or any other reference tool just won't work. Been there, tried that, failed hard. You want to learn the kanji in context, and since the Kanji in Context book is boring for a lot of people, things like manga are much more appealing.

It's entirely up to you what you read, and you shouldn't worry about levels, or at least I don't. I've never been fond of graded readers, as they remind me of elementary school where you had to read the level your teacher wanted you to, even if all of those books were boring. If you like the books that are easy, then read them! It's not a reflection of your intelligence if you don't like the books at you're level, nor are you smarter than everyone else if you're reading books at a higher level. Read what you want, period. Even if it takes forever to get through a book, so long as you enjoy it, keep on trucking.

Now that that's out of the way, I do have some recommendations in case you're struggling, have no idea how to find kanji words in a dictionary (you know, in case you don't know the readings for a lot of them), or are just looking for good reading material where you won't have to put in tons of hours to get through just a couple pages.

First of all, this one might a bit boring for some of you, but I recommend Breaking into Japanese Literature if you're just getting your feet wet. I like classical fiction, or anything for that matter, myself, so I had no problem with this book. Some people will hate it, others will love it. Here's a quick review.

Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Texts (long enough title) is pretty much what it says. It's seven stories, arranged by difficulty, that has the Japanese text on one page and the English translation on the next, kind of like that Read Real Japanese Fiction book, except that this one is much better in that it kind of has a dictionary at the bottom under the main text. Here's a brief example of how this works.

Japanese English
猫が可愛いです。The cat is cute.

猫 [ねこ] Cat
可愛い[かわいい] Cute

So that gives you an idea of how it looks. This is very, very good for vocab building, although it does assume that you have a basic idea of grammar. If you're familiar with basic Japanese grammar and particles, you should have no problem with the first few stories. Otherwise, it really isn't hard to look up particles. J-Gram is a great, free website for this (review coming soon), although a bit of a pain to navigate; and if you want to have a handy book with you as you read, then I would recommend All About Particles (review coming soon), which served me immensely as I read at night without a computer nearby. If you don't know much about verbs, then I recommend you read the website Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese. It pretty much stays in the beginner levels, only occasionally dabbling into more advanced territory, but it'll be a big help in understanding this book.

Now, if this is way too easy for you, or too boring, but you still can't figure out what to read and you're still afraid of delving into kanji-filled material, then I recommend you read some manga published by Shounen Jump. Manga published by this group involves titles such as Rurouni Kenshin and is chock full of furigana, which is hiragana readings above the kanji. In fact, it's used over every single kanji! If you can read hiragana, then you can plug the word into a dictionary and find out what that word is. This is the best way to get used to reading kanji, in my opinion.

Don't know how to find it? Here's a good way to do it. There are plenty of places to buy raw manga online, but I prefer to do it from Amazon Japan (Sasuga is down, so there goes my #1 site). Assuming you don't know how to read kanji, download the FireFox browser and install the Rikaichan plug-in, which acts as a built-in dictionary, making it much easier to navigate the site. Then, search for the manga you want and buy it. It may seem like a lot of work, but once you get it set up, you won't regret it!

You can also check eBay, but I don't usually have much luck finding things there, except for the ICO novelization, but that was a pretty lucky search.

All Japanese All the Time

2011-10-04T14:04:00.003-05:00

This site is Tofugu/TextFugu's biggest rival, yet it promotes an entirely different school of thought. AJATT is like the bible of input language learning, which is also promoted heavily by the creator of LingQ, Steve Kauffman. It's creator, Khatzumoto, discovered that language learning doesn't have to be a time-consuming task required hundreds of hours of homework (he hates classes), and that it's a process, not a science. I really admire this website and recommend it to everyone.

AJATT started out as a blog in which Khatzumoto chronicled the methods he used for learning Japanese while he was still a busy college student and not taking classes in the language. He realized that all one really has to do is to try and do as much as you can in the language. Instead of memorizing grammar rules, reading books, and "studying", you just grow familiar with the language naturally.

Here's what I mean by that. When you're busy working, cleaning, doing homework, or anything that allows you to listen to something, listen to Japanese in the background. If you're jogging or bicycling, have some Japanese music or podcasts playing on your iPod; install Rikaichan into your Firefox browser and try to conduct as many searches in Japanese as you can. Go through a textbook only to get a feel for the language and to use as a reference when things stump you. As AJATT tells its readers, you get used to the language, not learn it.

The number one motto is to be doing something fun in the language as often as you can. Watch movies, play games, read books - it doesn't matter what you're doing, so long as you're doing it in Japanese. This makes things a lot more interesting than going through a textbook and comitting it to memory, and it's much faster and cheaper than taking a class.

He also recommends a flash card program, such as Anki, so that you can collect interesting sentences and put them into your flash cards for study. For example, say I'm watching Galaxy Angel and Vanilla says, 『豚より牛大好き。』, or, "I like cows more than pigs." That sentence isn't 100% grammatically correct, but you learn that when you go to figure out how "yori" works in this sentence. Anyway, that's kind of an interesting sentence, so you put it Anki and reviewing at set intervals. You learn the words for "pig" and "cow", and you also get used to saying that you like one thing more than another. Make sure to insert grammar notes as well.

Khatzumoto also offers a number of products on his site, such as premade sentence packs for Anki and a new community of AJATT+, which I've never tried. There's also a reference guide available, as his site is really hard to navigate sometimes. The information is worthy of gold, yet it can be hard to find, so I definitely recommend the reference guide.

He's also started something called the Silver Spoon Project, in which he will personally work with you through email to learn Japanese, keeping you using the language, etc. Again, I've never tried this and just stick to his sentence packs and reference guide. He's got a lot of interesting stuff, and I'm sure his other products are really good, but when he tells you, "You don't need this," you really don't.

All in all, I guarantee that you'll become addicted to his website. Just take a look at it and apply the wisdom to your study habbits. Even if you're not a primarily input person, you'll benefit greatly from it. And since it's Japanese you're learning (his method works for any language), it's really not hard to find media to use as input.

His website speaks for itself, and no review can come close to covering it all, so please visit it.

TextFugu: A Second Look

2011-10-03T07:01:00.007-05:00

Disclaimer: I still stand by what I said in my post about TextFugu vs. AJATT, that these two things cannot be compared, and this second look doesn't change that. TextFugu is a product of the academic method; namely, it is more step-by-step and focused than anything from the other methods. That said, if you're doing things the AJATT way and are looking for a good textbook to supplement or solidify your learnings, please look elsewhere are TextFugu is too large a commitment financially speaking to use as a suppliment for AJATT or any other input or output method.

So, some time has gone by and TextFugu has grown bigger and better, and I think it warrants a second look. Last time I reviewed it, TextFugu was a smaller site with infrequent and, seemingly, inconsistent updates; now it is a sprawling site full of good information and I can fully endorse it. Anyone who wishes to learn primarily by textbook (input and output people, this is probably not for you), TextFugu is a great product that will grow with you.

TextFugu has a completely new look, and the site is much more streamlined than it previously was. It continues to deal in seasons, but each season selection up into a new page where you can pick your lesson, rather than the lengthy rollover the buttons used to be. The only downside to the site's looks that I can think of is that the font is a bit large, and the pages aren't long enough before you click to go to the next page, but that's just purely cosmetic and has no reflection on the content within TextFugu.

Now, let's take a look at exactly what TextFugu does, now that it's large enough that I can actually fathom paying the monthly fee for it. For starters, it's greatly expanded the lessons, sometimes making them 10+ pages long! This is an excellent source of information, as each lesson is focused on one aspect of the Japanese language, whether it's i-adjectives or expressing a purpose for an action.

Secondly, TextFugu is now offering a lot more lessons! Back when I last reviewed it, if you look in the comments section, I answered someone's question by making a list of all the topics TextFugu covered back then. For this review, I'll list the title of every chapter TextFugu currently has.

Season 1
1. Japanese the Hard Way (Don't worry, as this is just explaining why self-teachers often quit)
2. The Japanese "Alphabets"
3. Japanese Pronunciation with Hiragana
4. Reading and Writing Hiragana
5. Studying Your Passion
6. Japanese Grammar with Yoda
7. An Intro to Kanji
8. An Into to Kanji Radicals
9. Season 1 Review

Season 2
1. How to Ask Questions in Japanese
2. Negative Tense Nouns
3. Past Tense Nouns
4. Combining the Past and the Negative
5. Your First Japanese Particle, Ha ha ha!
6. Developing a Sense of Identity
7. This, That, & That Over There
8. Counting & Numbers
9. Why So Possessive?
10. Season 2 Review

Season 3
1. Making Time to Study
2. Learning Katakana
3. Particle Wars: は vs.　が
4. The Things that You Love
5. The Things that You Hate
6. Have You Reached the Dip?
7. Doing Something (Verbs pt. 1)
8. Doing Something (Verbs pt. 2)
9. Japanese Sentence Enders
10. Keeping Up With Everything

Season 4
1. な Adjectives
2. い Adjectives
3. い Adjective Conjugation
4. What Do You Want?
5. Adjectives + Nouns = Adverbs
6. When the Going Gets Tough
7. Colorful Adjectives
8. What You'll Go Do
9. Social Learning
10. Season 4 Review

Season 5
1. Being Casual Part 1 (Nouns)
2. Being Casual Part 2 (Adjectives)
3. How to Be Casual, Part 3 (Verbs)
4. The Purpose
5. What You Expect
6. Past Tense Dictionary Form
7. If
8. Too Much
9. Negative & Past Negative Casual Verbs
10. Experts and Amateurs
11. Plans & Conviction
12. What You Will Become

Season 6
1. The Particle と
2. What Do You Think?
3. The Particle で
4. This Lesson is Coming Soon

Yes, this is all still at the beginner's level, but as you can see, it covers an awful lot of it right now, and that's not even including the kanji, just the grammar lessons! TextFugu also has a deal going with the Gakuranman, giving you up to 80% off his Japanese learning site, Gakuu, if you're a TextFugu member. Now, I can't vouch for Gakuu, although I'm very, very tempted to take up this offer, but it's allegedly kind of like TextFugu, but for intermediate and advanced learners. Now, I'm going to assume that TextFugu eventually plans on including intermediate and advanced material (that's why I bought it to begin with), but if you're like me and TextFugu is little more than a reference guide for you (part of that is because I'm primarily an input person), then Gakuu might be worth checking out. One day I'll buy it and review it, but for right now, I'm only saying this as an outsider looking in and giving my first impression.

Another good thing about TextFugu is that the flashcards are now based on Anki rather than the late, great Smart.fm. It recently changed back to its former name, iKnow, and now charges a monthly fee to use it. Anki is my new favorite flash card system, so I'm glad that TextFugu is implementing it.

Also, TextFugu has two different pricing systems set up now. $20/month or a one-time fee of $120. I definately recommend the latter if you can afford it.

So, I'd say that TextFugu is definately on the right track. It's written in a smart, stylish way to keep you engaged and to feel like you're actually listening to Koichi, not reading a textbook, which always scores points in my book. I definitely recommend it for beginners, and I'm sure that one day I'll be taking yet another look at it and recommending it for intermediate learners, too. Koichi sure has filled a void for a lot of people who don't want to invest in one textbook after another, and he's done it in an interesting way.

P.S.

Someone left a comment on my other review, and unfortunately blogger won't allow comments right now because of some internal error with the system. Basically, the person didn't know whether to sign up for TextFugu or a class, and my response is this:

"Sorry it took me so long to get to your comment. It really depends on the person whether or not you'd rather sign up for an online book or take a class. If you're the kind of person who needs the motivation that you can get from having an encouraging teacher or from being surrounded by peers, then a class is good for you. However, if you're self-motivated and want to work at your own pace, then I'd definately recommend TextFugu over a class. Koichi is an excellent teacher, and he's always willing to help.

'If you do decide to take a class, research the teacher a bit. If he/she (it's usually a she for some reason) is a native speaker, try and get a good feel for her and her style first. I don't want to sound generalizing, but I'm aware that some native teachers have the idea of Nihonjinron (a school of philosophy characterizing what makes Japanese "unique" and why everyone non-Japanese is basically...well... inferior - although it doesn't state that directly), so they teach assuming that the students will basically not get the language anyway.

'Best of luck to you!"

Should I Watch with Subtitles?

2011-09-30T12:09:00.003-05:00

Many people feel uncomfortable with watching their favorite movies or TV shows without subtitles, afraid that they won't understand what's going on. However, they're also afraid that they won't be practicing listening if the subtitles are on. So, when you're learning Japanese, do you or don't you watch with the subtitles on.

My answer might not be very popular on this one, but I think it's okay to go ahead and watch with subtitles if you're really not far into the language. Now, once you're getting better, I'd rather you watch with the Japanese closed captions if you can find them, or at least try watching a bit without subtitles.

Here's how I first did it when I decided to wean myself off of subs:

a.) Watch an episode of Tenchi Universe (I already knew the whole series inside and out, so following it wasn't a problem) and try to understand it.

b.) Find scenes I had trouble with and turn the subs on.

c.) Rewatch episode with subs if it really threw me for a loop.

It's an easy process and shouldn't discourage you from giving it a go. It can actually really jump-start things, too, depending on the kind of show you're watching. For example, you might get more out of an episode of Azumanga Daioh than an episode from any of the Tenchi series, but oh well.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of this.

Oh, and I got a new review up, but on my other blog. I might consider adding it to this blog, though, since it involves Japanese stuff. Basically, I found a way to mod the Wii for relatively cheap, without risking your system, and without that pesky mod chip.

There's No Wrong Way to Eat a Reece's (Or Learn a Language, for that Matter)

2011-09-29T10:00:00.002-05:00

Long enough title for you? Okay, so after a bit of research, I noticed that there's a lot of keywords out there for "Textfugu vs. AJATT" and the very fact that those two are together in a search query makes me want to facepalm (I also made the mistake of mentioning AJATT in my review post), so I'm going to explain the various ways to learn a langauge, as they're all different, so maybe you'll have an idea as to how you'd like to try learning. This stuff will all be compiled in a lengthier, much more detailed book I'm writing, but for now let's just get a few things straight.

Firstly, there's many different methods out there for learning a language, but they all basically can be simplified down to four categories: academic, input, output, or a mix of those three. That's it, and while everyone can claim that their method is different or better than all the others out there, you can always guarantee it will fall predominately into one of the first three categories, even if it's a mix. Now, TextFugu and AJATT come from two different camps: TextFugu is predominately academic, and AJATT is almost exclusively input. So, let's take a look at how these methods break down.

Academic

This method involved enrolling in a school and taking classes to learn a language, hiring a private tutor, or self-teaching using text books or other material that would normally be found in a classroom. The textbook or instructor are going to be at the center of your journey towards whatever your goal is (it's not always fluency, you know), and grammar and vocabulary are king. It's very structured and takes everything step-by-step. Basically, if you did well in school, you'll do well in this.

Unfortunately, it's very expensive, even if you're doing things the self-taught way, as textbooks can be pricey, and, yes, TextFugu is pricey as well. It also takes a long time to learn the language (in one video, Koichi even exclaimes, "Several years of work!"), as you usually don't spend every day studying, especially if you're entrolled in a college or university. Perfection in the language is stressed, making little room for mistakes, although that's not to say it's totally unforgiving.

All in all, if you like structure or did well in school, TextFugu is great for that, as it provides that nice, step-by-step feel that a classroom will give you, and Koichi is a great guy who spends a lot of time helping people acheive their goals.

Input

This is a much less structured method, involving reading, watching, and listening to a lot of your target language. If you take this to the extreme, as Khatzumoto does, you should try and do something - anything - in Japanese or whatever your target language is as often as you can. The principle is to have fun, as that's the biggest motivator you can have. The general idea is that you don't have to study grammar that hard, but rather just a bit and reference it a lot as you build your vocabulary and general knowledge with an overdose of books, movies, games, etc. As you go, you grow accustomed to how the language works in real life rather than a sanitized text book, which doesn't provide real life speech, and your own speech will sound much more natural.

Now, that description doesn't do it justice, so I suggest you head on over to AJATT yourself.

Doing things this way is usually cheaper and much, much faster in the long run, but starting out can be a pain. Why? Because the complete lack of structure can leave one feeling overwhelmed. Once you get the hang of it, you'll love it, but starting out, trying to peice together small sentences even, can be difficult. There's a lot of websites that are good at helping people out in this regard, though, so this is becoming a slightly less daunting issue.

You'll enjoy doing things this way if you didn't care for school much, feel that a textbook or instructor is slowing you down, get bored easily with that kind of stuff, or want to be able to do the things you enjoy (like watch anime) as a form of learning.

Output

This method advocates speaking from day one, and is great if your primary goal is to be able to visit a foreign country and still be able to speak with the natives. It's largely advocated by the site Fluent in 3 Months, and it's focus in on speaking and understanding. The idea is to learn often used words, phrases, etc. and by speaking with natives you get feedback and a chance to perfect your language skills. Perfection isn't stressed, and while it typically has some structure, it also allows for a lot of freedom. To be perfectly honest, though, you're better off visiting the site, as it explains it much better than I can, especially seeing that this isn't my preferred method.

Now, there's a few ways to go about this method, but it's usually the most inexpensive of the three methods, and it's also the fastest. You won't be able to work in the country, or do anything formal, such as education, but it's a great way to interact, especially if you're an outgoing person who would rather be talking with people than curled up with a book by the fireplace.

So there you have it; great ways to learn languages, but also hopefully an eye-opener that you can never compare TextFugu and AJATT, as they both go about doing things in a very different way. Now you can compare TextFugu to Genki Japanese or AJATT's design to Steve Kauffman's (I probably spelled that wrong). Basically, you need to first figure out what your language goals are, and how you learn best, then you figure out which is right for you.

Best Places to Buy Japanese Stuff

2011-09-28T12:22:00.002-05:00

Buying foreign stuff tends to be a bit difficult sometimes, but luckily it can be pretty easy to find a whole plethora of Japanese goods if you only know where to look. I'm currently working on a book called Language Learning Roadmap which basically sets about to preparing a language learner for his/her journey by debunking popular myths, helping the person to understand his/her goals and their own style of learning, and then outlining the various methods of learning a language, whether it be the academic method (either classroom or self-taught), the input method, or the output method, followed by an outline of the method I use as an example of how you can mix and match methods to create something unique for yourself.

Well, if you're predominately an inputter (think AJATT) it can be a real pain sometimes trying to find stuff in Japanese, so I've created this list of various places to go shopping for Japanese items.

I'm an affiliate for some of these website, and they will be marked with a *. Remember, being an affiliate for web sites doesn't influence which products I choose to review or influence my opinion of them; it's just a nice way to get a little money with which to buy more products to review.

1. Amazon.com* - This is a good place to find stuff from just about anywhere in the world. The nice thing about Amazon.com is that you can read consumer reviews at the product's page to help in your decision making, and if the list price is out of your range, you can look for one used right from the site itself instead of having to get into a bidding war on eBay.

2. eBay - On that note, let's move on to eBay. It can either be super easy to find stuff here or really frustrating. It depends on the demand for the item and how many people are willing to part with it, basically. It's great for DVDs and music, but it can be a little harder to find things like raw manga.

3. Play Asia* - This is a really good site for finding material in Japanese, or for just finding Japanese stuff in English if you want a break from "studying". They have books, movies, games, etc. It's really easy to find what you're looking for, and it's usually reasonably priced. If Amazon.com doesn't have it, I link to this place, although it's usually a bit more expensive. Play Asia is a great place to go browsing for stuff.

4. Yes Asia - This is another excellent way to find stuff in Japanese, although like Play Asia it's a bit expensive. I suggest you look through both sites when shopping for something specific just to compare.

5. The Japan Shop - Powered by Amazon.com, this is a great little site for finding language learning materials for Japanese, including old JLPT tests.

6. JBOX/J-List - Last, but certainly not least, are the sister sites, JBOX and J-List. The only real difference between them is that JBOX doesn't sell adult products, so if that's what you're looking for, enter J-List at your own risk. Basically, these sites sell all kinds of weird stuff, from Japanese snacks to magazines to figurines. It's like a cesspool of all things from Japan.

It's really fun to look around there, although their search feature needs a bit fine-tuning, in my opinion. Also, beware of shipping prices. All international shipping is going to seem outrageous, but it seems to be exceptionally high for a few items on these sites.

Wii U?

2011-06-20T08:41:00.003-05:00

So that's the Wii U, Nintendo's latest "console" and I hesitate to use that word. Is there a console to do with the control? Yes, but, right now at least, it seems like it's just a souped-up Wii. If Wii went HD and decided to add another controler, then that would be Wii U. Now, here's what's odd about Wii U's controler. I'm not going to comment on how comfortable it is or is not, but rather what I think about this.

Basically, my thoughts right now are, "Is this going to make gameplay better, or is it just something else I don't want to have to mess with?" Will it be like motion controls, which are insanely fun (don't get me wrong, I love Wii Sports as much as the next gamer), but are tacked on for other games? Despite Nintendo promising better third-party support, will this control actually allow for it?

So you can use it as a handheld, yet you can't take it places because the game is actually coming from the console and not the controler, correct? Won't that produce lag? What is someone walks between your controler and the console. Since they're communicating wirelessly, and probably soaking away your battery life while they're at it, won't that disrupt the signal?

Also, the controler is trying to do two things at once: produce a more "normal" controler for the third-party people while at the same time trying to be extremely unique to make Wii U stand out from the competition, which already seems to be doing similar to what Nintendo is. Vita anyone?

It'll be nice to see more third-party games, but you can bet that they won't be taking advantage of the controls. In a way this reserves the unique gameplay exclusively for Nintendo's first-party games, but at the same time, I'm afraid this will mean that Nintendo's key franchises will just become new gameplay experiments rather than amazing games. Look at the hand-held Zelda games. They would be much better if Nintendo wasn't trying to work them around the controls and rather focused on creating an great game first. Remember, modern gameplay is about more than game mechanics. While game mechanics can make or break a game (touch-screen Zelda sucks), atmosphere, characters, story and other aspects that have traditionally been credited only to literature and film are now becoming a huge part of the gaming industry, putting it on par with these things. Nintendo seems to forget that every once in a while and butchers a perfectly good game because they want to see how cute they can make it or how they can implement their gimmicks into every aspect of the game.

So, what's my final verdict in this rushed little essay? On the one hand, I'm glad to be here watching the evolution of video games. I was born in 1986 and my first console was a NES, complete with the first Zelda game and Dragon Quest game, called Dragon Warrior back then. I've been watching it all happen, and it's been interesting to see how Nintendo has pushed for something more than a console with better graphics. However, on the other hand I'm skeptical of this new console. I'm glad that casual gamers are coming back onto the scene and that I can share my love of gaming with my mom, but at the same time, I miss being able to just sit back and enjoy a good RPG (Wii majorly lacked these) with traditional controls. Right now, I feel that Nintendo is building games around the controls, which is a recipee for a boring game with no spirit.

Easiest Way to Help Quake Victims Ever!

2011-03-18T11:59:00.004-05:00

Akira Toriyama (who did not die in the quake) has created a video in hopes of raising funds! This is a really easy way to get money to quake victims, even if you're wallet is thin. Why? Because all advertising revenue (created when you watch) will be donated. Easy, right? So click on the video and watch it!

Don't forget to comment!