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Japanese Study Aids

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:10:00 +0900

Today I'll share a few goodies, kindly sent over from J-List.

First up is Hiragana Times, a magazine all about Japan, with English and Japanese (including furigana). What I've read so far was quite interesting, and I think these will be useful for picking up and reading when I'm not studying from a textbook.

The next item is Catchy Japanese Phrases. Whether you're visiting Japan or living in Japan these phrases will be helpful. I've already picked up a few to use in daily life. Each phrase can be cut out to carry with you.

This is something I've seen before and always wondered why we didn't use these in French class, or any other class for that matter, back in the UK.

The idea behind Check Set and Check Age is that you write or highlight answers in red or green pen. Then you take a red or green plastic card and put it over the top of the page, hiding the text you've just written or highlighted. It makes it very helpful for quick question and answer study.

Lastly we have 2 sets of study cards; Basic Nouns and Opposite Words. The idea of these cards is to ask a question or have a sentence containing a mystery word. You have to guess the answer and check the correct answer on the other side of the card. The big pictures make it fun and it's great for playing with between actual study.

Thanks again to J-List for letting me try these study aids.

Japanese Study: Day 19 - 25

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:40:00 +0900

At the end of this week I received a package from our friends at J-List! It contains all sorts of things to help study Japanese and I will be posting reviews/highlights of each item soon.

At Mirai Inc we're working on a very exciting new project and I spent most of my time working on it. I think it's going to be great, but it took up most of my time this week, so study was put to one side.

I'm now carrying my "Japanese For Everyone" book with me everywhere I go so I can pick it up and study whenever I get a spare moment. I'm also writing all over the thing. Before that I was writing on a small pad which became a real pain, especially on a cramped train.

I never got around to turning my smart.fm vocab list all into kana. The reason is it's already becoming quite a burden to maintain. So I'm now making smaller sets on certain topics. I'm also keeping the kanji and adding related sentences. I think this will work much better for studying and will keep everything manageable.

I hope to get more time to add some cool features to this site. I'm slowly working towards opening it up for everyone to keep their own notes. I hope we can build a thriving community here to help each other learn and keep it fun!

Photo Notes: Set 1 - Food in Japan

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:55:00 +0900

I thought this might be fun to try. Basically the idea of "Photo Notes" is to use the annotation feature and make notes on the photos in kanji/kana. The aim is to label as many things as you can. That doesn't mean just the food, you can label the items on the table or whatever else is in the picture.

I'll make other sets on different topics in the future if people find this fun and useful.

To add a note first you must hover over the image to load notes and then you will see an "Add Note" option in the top right of the image. Clicking it will reveal a white box which you can drag and resize. Attached to the box is a comment field. Enter your kanji/kana description here and hit OK!

You must be registered and logged in to add notes.

Buffet lunch for the anniversary of our engagement. This is my completely unbalanced pile of food ^^

My wife's well-balanced selection.

Ice-cream with sprinkles! Woohooo!

Work-day lunch with Danny

My mother-in-law's home-made dinner. Can you name all of the ingredients?

My attempt at making dinner and writing my name in katakana in ketchup, which failed ^^ Turned out better than I expected but I left the egg cooking too long.

My wife's delicious steak and chunky mashed potato

Doraemon Movie 2010: Nobita's Great Battle of the Mermaid King

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:56:00 +0900

Unusual vending machine in Japan

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:10:00 +0900

Spotted this skin care vending machine, with accompanying video in my local mall.

Japanese Study: Day 13 - 18

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:43:00 +0900

I had to combine these study notes into one post because I got so far behind. It's been a very busy week of work and with other things to do at home I hadn't found a spare moment to write up my study notes. Unless I have something interesting to write up I may continue combining these study notes into one post to save time.

We had snow this week. Apparently it doesn't usually snow this much, so everyone was very excited. Had a few snowball fights :)

I've been listening to some children's songs, since they easily get stuck in my head and the lyrics are simple. My favorite song is バナナのおやこ which is incredibly catchy.

I'm going to change my vocab list and drop the kanji for now. On the smart.fm iPhone app it doesn't show the kana readings as answers, so I have to start guessing the kanji. Learning the kanji will happen, but not right now. Right now I need to speak and listen, so I'm going to make the answers kana only.

I really felt like I needed an extra few hours a day last week, and last weekend. I didn't get as much study done as I would have liked. I achieved other goals, but not related to learning Japanese, so I just need to keep going.

I'm getting up early again this week, and things are getting very exciting at work which requires a bit of extra time. It's tiring but worth it.

Words of the Week

ゆき "snow"
ねむい "sleepy"
おやすみなさい "goodnight"
むずかしい "difficult"
いそがしい "busy"

I leave you with this very cute dog. One of the many residents at the local pet store.

Spicy tuna bowl おいしい〜

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:24:00 +0900

まぐろ、たまご、ごはん、わさび、ねぎ、ごま

Japan vs China PR

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:45:00 +0900

The football season here in Japan is beginning soon. I am a big fan of Liverpool FC back in the UK, where it's known as football, but have been missing most of the games.

So decided to get into soccer here this year, supporting Japan and a local team called Urawa Red Diamonds (a.k.a. Urawa Reds).

Do you support any soccer teams?

UFO Catcher Win!

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0900

A few hundred-yen coins later Rilakkuma is mine!
First time winning at a UFO Catcher (Claw/crane machine)

All credit goes to my wife for two spectacular plays.

Have you won anything in the arcades before?

Japanese Study: Day 12

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:10:00 +0900

Finally managed to update my smart.fm list with all the vocab from the last few days.
Haven't used it a great deal yet, since I haven't had much downtime, but now including it in my morning study.

I have been looking for some kids websites I could browse and maybe learn some new vocab. Some simple games with vocab would be great. Came across http://kids.goo.ne.jp/ which I'm having a look through.

Japanese Study: Day 11

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:52:00 +0900

I spent most of the day translating and tweaking the site ready to launch the Japanese language site. I have all of my study notes translated and will continue to post Japanese translations.

I've also added Puchi Notes to both the Japanese and English home page. If you've signed up you can join in the discussions. About 500 Puchi notes are stored and then they drop off into the void never to be seen again. Think of it as a chat room without logging.

Words of the Day

プチ "small (fre: petit)"
やった "hooray (lit: I or we did it)"

Nihongo Notes in 2009

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:27:00 +0900

My 2009 review is a little late, but better late than never!

A year? Feels more like 5 years!

It's been an amazing year this year. I came to Japan on Nov 2008 on a 1 year working holiday visa. I already knew I wanted to stay here long term, so I started looking for full-time work.

The first big news of the year was I proposed to my girlfriend, and she said yes! It all happened quite quickly, but we decided to get married on paper first whilst family were visiting and have a small celebration. We're planning the wedding ceremony right now for the middle of 2010.

In early 2008 I never thought I would live in Japan, neither did I think I would be married, but it just shows how quickly life can change.

The other big thing was finding work here in Japan. At the start I interviewed mostly for IT jobs, but the world was suffering from the financial crisis and many people were losing their jobs. Nobody was hiring, so I started interviewing for English teaching jobs, most of which I had no luck with. I was willing to do anything, even if it was completely the opposite of what I wanted to be doing.

After speaking with a few more recruitment agencies with no luck, I decided to find small IT companies in Japan and email them directly, asking if they had any positions open. I had some promising interviews but most of the responses were "If only you knew Japanese" or "If only the economy would improve, we could hire you".

I often read the Japan articles at Danny's site, and knew he was working on Mirai Gaia, so I thought I'd send him an email.

I met up with him at the Tokyo CGM Night, and to cut a long story short, a while later he offered me a job. After a year of very hard work, some ups, and some downs, things are looking great for 2010!

Nihongo Notes

Unfortunately I didn't keep many screenshots of my old designs. The only ones I could find were small thumbnails.

This was a Wordpress theme I built using parts of other themes and a bit of my own style.

I eventually made my own theme from scratch with a lot of custom code. The blue color continued to be used in further designs and is now the official Nihongo Notes color scheme.

This was back when I had big plans of turning the site into an educational resource, with lessons and resources for learning Japanese. I got way ahead of myself. I had to learn Japanese first! Writing lessons would be helpful to my study but slow me down immensely.

I eventually migrated most of the articles to Mirai Gaia. I went through a few different ideas on how the site would work. I had some big ideas, which are still planned, but I recently made some decisions about blogging.

I realized I had lost all enthusiasm to post. The reason became obvious, it felt like a job, and one I didn't like. I had plans on writing tons of content about learning Japanese, whilst still learning Japanese. This was not practical, since most of that time would be spent writing in English.

So I threw those plans out, and got back to the real reason I started blogging. I wanted to help myself learn Japanese by keeping a journal in both English and Japanese. I also wanted to talk about the things I enjoy about life in Japan.

So that's what I'm now doing. The Japanese side of this site will open within a few hours. I'm now writing an article once a day about my study, sometimes I may post it a day or two late because the Japanese translation takes a while, but I plan to keep a log for each day. I will also keep posting about life in Japan and Japanese culture.

I've removed most of the advertising because I want to avoid being swayed by referral fees or Adsense clicks. If I do put any advertising up it will be direct paid advertising which is relevant to learning Japanese, and the product being highlighted is good quality. Any money goes to paying for the server costs anyway ^^

Flying to the UK

Over Christmas the wife and I flew to the UK to spend it with my family. We also had my brother's wife's family over from Australia. It was a great time!

Bye-bye Japan. My last Japanese meal of the year, a Virgin Atlantic bento box.

The flight was good, but we had a very bumpy landing. It was starting to snow and the wind was up. It looked like a tough job for the pilot.

We woke up to snow on our first morning!

We were lucky we landed the day before, because there was traffic chaos everywhere and flights were delayed.

Cambridge

We spent a day in Cambridge. It was bloody cold!

This was amazing! The choir was practicing and they were really good. The atmosphere made it all the more impressive.

We spotted a lot of Japanese signs in Cambridge. Some made sense, others were totally wrong ^^

It was a great day, even if I could no longer feel my hands *brrr* ^^

London

Compared to Tokyo the London underground is really dirty and dark. The trains are a lot smaller too, but they got us from A to B.

Daylight!

This is the Japanese Embassy in London, where I got my Working Holiday visa for Japan. It seems strange that it was only just over a year ago I was there. Feels like it was much longer ago.

Big Ben, not as big as we were expecting.

We got on this tour boat and traveled down the Thames. The announcer was quite funny. It was good to get out of the cold with a warm cup of tea.

The girls dragged us all the way to this Cath Kidston store. They left with arms full and big smiles.

I think this was the skeleton of a polar bear. It was encased in ice!

A lovely big portion of fish & chips!

It was my Dad's birthday, so we stopped at a steak house for dinner.

We finished the evening off with chocolate cake.

When we arrived at St Pancreas station it was chaos. Trains were stopped due to snow and it was starting to get very crowded.

We eventually had to go to another area to catch a different train, along with many other people. We queued up, sure we were at the right train. Turns out we were right, but as soon as other people realized which platform it was departing from they rushed past the other side of the barrier. It was incredibly rude, but to be expected in the UK where it's every man for himself ^^

One of my jobs on Christmas day was to peel the Brussels sprouts. Most people seem to hate them, but I love them. They give you super powers, like the ability to clear a room of people within seconds *frrrrp* ^^

When we flew out the snow had eventually cleared and flight schedules were back to normal. A few days after that there was another downpour of snow, worse that before. Our timing was quite good ^^

It was sad to leave family again, but we had a great time and we will get to see everyone again in 2010.

Japanese Study: Day 10

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:45:00 +0900

Today I finished my last English book "Space Wolf: The Second Omnibus", a mammoth 768 page 3-in-1 collection of books. I read the first omnibus over Christmas. It's full aliens, demon worshipers, mutants and wolf-like warriors shooting and cutting their way to glory in the name of the Allfather. Now I'm switching to a Japanese manga, and, well, the story is a little different ^^

Now I need to start reading Japanese, even if it's slow and painful at first, the only way to improve is to practice. So I've started with よつばと!, a story of a young girl moving home and the fun/trouble she gets up to. A very different change from what I was reading in English, but it's quite a simple story using every-day vocabulary, so it's perfect for studying.

Words of the Day

いっぱい "full"
ひっこし "moving (dwelling, office, etc.); changing residence"
すごい "amazing; great; wonderful; terrific;"
すげえ〜 "amazing; great; wonderful; terrific; (male/casual)"
人 (ひと) "person"
学校 (がっこう) "school"

Space Wolf: The Second Omnibus

Fighting against the horrors from the Eye of Terror!!

よつばと! 1

Uh... Sunflowers?...

Japanese Study: Day 9

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:56:00 +0900

Not much happened today, so here's a photo of my mother-in-law's dinner. This is 寄せ鍋 (よせなべ). Full of delicious goodies!

Words of the Day

ご確認下さい (ごかくにんください) "please confirm (polite)"
どうぞよろしくお願いします (どうぞよろしくおねがいします) "thank you very much (polite)"
以上です (いじょう) "this is all; that is the end; the end"
寄せ鍋 (よせなべ) "pot of chicken, seafood, and vegetables"
海老 (えび) "prawn; shrimp; lobster; crayfish;"
豆腐 (とうふ) "tofu; bean-curd;"
白菜 (はくさい) "chinese white cabbage;"
牡蛎 (かき) "oyster"

Japanese Study: Day 8

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:44:00 +0900

Busy with work and also translating Nihongo Notes ready to open the Japanese site. Taking longer than I thought to get the UI translations done. There will still be some things needing translation, but nothing major.

First I need to get these articles translated so the site isn't empty ^^

Words of the Day

These are words or phrases I see every day using the computer or came across whilst translating this site.

ウィンドウ "window"
ブログ "blog"
メール "email"
ドキュメント "document"
もっと見る (もっとみる) "view more"
返信 (へんしん) "reply"
画像 (がぞう) "image; picture; portrait;"
単語 (たんご) "word; vocabulary;"
もうすぐ "very soon"
版 (ばん) "edition; version"