Category Archives: Learning & Resources

What’s the stroke order of 【龜】? Who cares?

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This is yet another post that’s been picking up cruft in my draft folder for over three years.

Stroke order is one of those things that might seem difficult at first but actually comes quite naturally with a bit of practice. You just have to make sure you learn the the correct order of the most important radicals such as 口 and 田. You should also pay careful attention to radicals like 厂 that have more stroke orders than you would think. (Hint: it’s more than 1.)

Once you learn the stroke order for the most common radicals, you can figure out the rest for most kanji by yourself with general principles like the following.

  1. Stroke orders generally go from top to bottom and left to right (from the top-left corner to bottom-right corner).
  2. Vertical lines that go straight through are written last as opposed to those that connect (十 vs 土）.
  3. Stuff that encloses something else gets drawn first but closed last （回 and 団）.

When in doubt or for weird kanji like 必, you can always check the stroke order on the WWWJDIC by looking up the kanji and clicking on the SOD link. You’ll get a nice animated gif like this one.

However, the problem with these animations is that it only gives you the order and not the direction of each stroke. If you’re confused about stroke direction, another site you might want to try is gahoh, which has animated .mov files with the direction and order. Here’s one for 必.

Their collection isn’t as complete as the WWWJDIC but it is useful for odd or crazy and complicated kanji like 龜. The request page in particular has some of the odder and trickier kanji like 凸、凹、飛、 and 卵 so you might want to check it out and double-check your stroke order.

So how useful is it to learn the proper stroke order of 龜? Not very but hey it’s fun times for everybody, right? Right? Hello? ………anybody?

Bah, humbug to methods!

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I recently received this question via email from Shiki.

To: taekim.japanese AT gmail.com
Date: Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 11:39 AM

Subject: Some questions about your method…

You said that when you were learning Japanese you didn’t study kanji, but the words made of them. So when you encountered a new word, what did you do to “drill” it into your memory? I’m just wondering what steps to take when I encounter a new word.

Also, how often did you find yourself reviewing? When I say reviewing, I mean like SRS/flashcard reviewing. I ask this because the method you described yourself using for learning Japanese is very appealing to me, as I think it’s in line with what will help me learn Japanese successfully. It’s not that I don’t have the time to review, but I just find reviewing for long periods of time very boring. I’m not really interested in coming home and having to do 4 hours of reviewing that my SRS scheduled for me today. I’d rather just jump straight into reading manga, looking for new words and kanji, having fun while learning.

Thanks.

I do not have a method, I do not play monopoly

I did not do any review, I did not use an SRS, I did not pass Go, I did not collect $200, and I definitely did not use flashcards. Or more accurately, I did try to use flashcards early on but all my efforts at making and reviewing flashcards soon petered out due to boredom.

Here are some of the things I did do depending on my mood and how much interest I had for any given vocabulary.

  1. I skipped the word if I was lazy or too absorbed into the story to stop reading. (Usually when it didn’t hinder my comprehension too much)
  2. I looked up the word, found the definition, and moved on.
  3. I remembered other words that used the same Kanji, and looked those up as well.
  4. For new Kanji, I looked up the meaning for the individual Kanji and practiced writing the odder ones like 「飛」.
  5. For fairly abstract concepts such as 「関して」 or 「かつて」, I looked up other example sentences similar to the steps described in this post.
  6. In conversation practice, I asked my partner to write down words I didn’t recognize and reviewed my notes later (or not depending on how lazy I was).

The only thing that could be considered review was going back and reading something over again for the fun of it. On reading it over, I might look up words I skipped previously or have forgotten since then.

Here, let me put words in your mouth

While that’s what I did to study Japanese, I’m going to read a bit between the lines here and answer what I think the question is really asking, “How should you study Japanese?”

Here’s the short answer:

Do what works for you.

Similar to diet fads, people seem to want to gravitate toward some magical method for mastering Japanese. Various books and software try to reel these people in with claims like, “Learn Japanese the Easy Way!” or “The Fastest Way to Learn Japanese!”. In my opinion, 99.9% of these products are complete crap. I won’t say which ones because I rather not say anything rather than being overly negative.

Regardless of whether you think Japanese is more or less difficult than learning other languages, the bottom line is that mastering any foreign language is a large task. So do yourself a favor and take an approach that makes learning Japanese enjoyable and interesting for you.

Are you having trouble writing the Kanji? Try the Heisig method. Are you having trouble recalling vocabulary? Try an SRS. Are you getting bored with the study material? Try new kinds of material such as dramas, movies, books, comics. Or here’s a crazy idea. How about making some Japanese friends to practice with? The important thing to realize is that no single method is going to cover everything.

The point is, I can’t advocate a single method or steps to learning Japanese because we all learn in different ways and have different goals. Here are some questions that might affect how you want to approach Japanese.

  1. What is your desired pace and average study time?
  2. What are your areas of interest?
  3. How best do you learn: visual, audio, or mechanical? You need to incorporate all three but you can use your natural disposition to your advantage.
  4. Do you like to learn in an organized or unorganized fashion?

I also suggest you read my post on studying tips. Practice makes perfect, so you should not forget that eventually you’ll have to use Japanese in the real world to get better at it. Feed Me Japanese also has some good posts about learning methods.

Finally, my last piece of advice is this.

If it’s painful, boring, or frustrating, stop doing it and try something else.

And if everything starts to feel that way, try taking a little break. But don’t let it last too long otherwise it might became a hiatus and you start forgetting what you’ve worked so hard to learn. Remember, like proper dieting and exercise, the importance is in consistency and not speed.

Conclusion

So Shiki, it sounds like you answered your own question. If you don’t like reviewing for long periods of time and prefer to jump straight into reading manga, then go do that! It worked for me! (In addition to having Japanese friends to converse with.)

Using 「とは」 to look up strange words

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The edict dictionary is one of best online dictionaries available, better than any print E->J dictionaries I know of. It is also continuously being expanded from user submissions. Even in the rare instance that it doesn’t have what you’re looking for, you’re covered with the monster huge 大辞泉 and 大辞林 J->J dictionaries available for free at Yahoo!辞書. If you have the patience to work through the Japanese definition, you should be able to find a definition for every word in any print dictionary available to native speakers. However, with new words and slang being invented all the time, you might run into words that are not in any traditional dictionary. The good news is that a lot of Japanese people won’t be familiar with them either. Here’s a quick tip from me to easily find Japanese sites that explain and define words of this nature. In the process, I’ll also discuss a very special double particle.

The 「とは」 double particle

While you can guess the meaning of most double particles from the sum of it’s parts such as 「には」 (a target that’s also a topic), 「とは」 really has a meaning of its own. Simply put, it is a somewhat formal and concise way to define something. For example, try searching on Google for 「とは」 and you’ll get pages with titles like 「ITとは」 and 「WWWとは」. If you go to the site itself, it’ll give you a short definition of the relevant term.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. When I run into a term that’s not in the dictionary (which in my case is usually new expressions or slang too stupid to put in a real dictionary), I search the term in Google with 「とは」.

For example, when I was listening to 眞鍋かをり’s podcast titled あなたの周りのＫＹな人, I had forgotten what “KY” meant. Now, looking up a term like “KY” is usually very difficult because there isn’t a lick of Japanese in the “word” (and I use that term loosely). But all I had to do was attach 「とは」 and soon found this neat and in-depth definition in no time.

From http://zokugo-dict.com/09ke/ky.htm

その場の雰囲気や状況などを察する（感じる・掴む）ことを「空気を読む」とも表現する。KYはこの「空気」と「読む」の頭文字で、主に空気が読めない人を意味する。また、逆にそういった人に「空気を読め」と提言する際にも「KY」と耳元で囁くなどして使われる。女子高生がメールのやりとりで使い、普及した。

若者の間では以前から使われているが、2007年、こういった頭文字略語の存在が話題となり、広く知られる。

In fact, thanks to this search, I found the 「日本語俗語辞書」 with all sorts of stupid slang that I’ll probably end up wishing I’d kept to myself. Please don’t send me an email along the lines of, “Hey, after reading your blog, I called my boss an AY for fun and he actually knew what it meant! He totally MMed on me and now I’m out of a job. What should I do?”

Anyway, in addition to the regular KY語 (God, it’s turning into its own language now?), this tactic was also useful for looking up Internet slang when I wrote about 電車男. For instance, the first search result for 「ROMとは」 turned up this nice little definition.

From http://d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword/ROM

書き込みをしない人のこと。あるいは書き込みをせずにいること。（「ROMる」、「ロムる」などと表現する）

ネット上のコミュニティでその場の雰囲気をつかむために「ROMったり」、「ROMになったり」する。

他人に対して「ROMってろよ」と発言するのは「黙ってろよ」と発言するのと同義。

So there you have it, a simple neat tip from me to you. I just wish I had better examples that won’t turn your cute little 「ます／です」 classroom Japanese to the dark side. Just don’t be using this stuff when you’re talking to me. You’ll totally get the hand and I mean that.

LOL! KTNXBYE

Dict.cn’s daily classroom

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My current favorite online Chinese dictionary, Dict.cn has recently been upgraded with lots of new features. For instance, while Chinese Perapera-kun already takes care of this for me, non-Firefox users will appreciate the automatic look-up of highlighted words.

Personally, my favorite feature is the 每日课堂, which will allow you to learn a little bit of Chinese every day with a little story or even just a simple sentence. While this site and most of its features are obviously geared for Chinese speakers learning English, the fact that 每日课堂 has both English and Chinese makes it a valuable resource for us learning Chinese as well.

[2008-08-01] 每日学口语

I have been putting on weight.
我开始发胖了。

I have in fact, been putting on some weight lately so the sentence above is nice to know. 我要少吃多运动。

Finally, this might have been there already, but they also have a 繁体字 dictionary. Technologically, there should be no reason why it would need to be split up but I guess I shouldn’t complain since the site is already free and useful.

Figuring out Chinese: Finding out about “何”

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I ran into this sentence while trying to read a little bit from a Chinese blog.

何为感觉？

The sentence intrigued me because it was using 「何」, a character I’m sure most of you learning Japanese are already familiar with. I was curious to see how it was used in Chinese and decided to do some digging. In the process, I thought it would be a neat idea to outline some of the steps I take when trying to figure this kind of thing out for any language including Japanese.

Breaking down “何”

I first looked it up in Dict.CN and came up with the following.

1. why
2. which
3. what
4. carry
5. how

Wow, it looks like ”何” can mean just about every question word there is. How is it that I don’t see it more often? As usual, the English definitions are pretty much useless for clarifying anything. Unless I’m looking up very simple concepts or objects such as “friend” or “car”, I don’t even bother with the English definitions. Instead, the real value is in the example sentences. Here are a few samples.

1. 你这次考试的结果如何？
How did you do on your test?

2. 你跟你的新上司处得如何？
How are you doing with your new boss?

Ok, in this case, all the examples seem to be referring to another word “如何”. Looking at the sentence, it seems pretty clear that it means something like “how is”. My first thought is, how is that different from “怎么样”? But since this is a whole other direction, I decided to drop it and go back to finding more information about “何” by itself.

So this time, the example sentences from Dict.CN didn’t turn up much. Ah well, time to whip out my trusty Wordtank G90. The definition and example sentences given by the G90 were a lot more useful and seemed closer to what I was looking for.

①疑問を表す

That explanation was further broken up into １．何、２．どこ、and ３．どうして with examples for each. Here are just a few samples.

1. 他为何不来？
彼はなぜこないのか。

2. 你有何高见
あなたにはどんなお考えがおありでしょうか？

I interpreted these examples to mean that “何” is a general question word to increase the level of questioning similar to but probably not as strong as 「一体」 in Japanese.

Now, example sentences are great but I like to have a little more context. So I tried searching “何” in ChinesePod. It turned up a bunch of Media and Advanced lessons which I was too lazy to dig through, one Elementary lesson that had no mention of “何” at all (maybe a bug?), and finally a promising Upper Intermediate lesson called Drinking Ability. And sure enough the dialogue had the following line, referring to a manager out-drinking the whole company.

何止一桌，是一个公司！
Way more than one table. It was the whole company!

Ok, so this usage didn’t seem to fit with my initial interpretation. In Chinese, because what constitutes a “word” is so flexible, you have to always be careful to consider whether you’re looking at a combination of characters or a set phrase. So I looked up “何止” in my Wordtank to make sure it wasn’t a set phrase. And sure enough:

【何止】 ・・・にとどまらない。ただ・・・だけではない。
例文）
他的作品何止这些
彼の作品はこれだけにとどまらない。

So this was different from just “何” and my original interpretation was safe. By the way, Dict.CN returned no results for “何止” so you definitely want to get the best dictionary you can with the most comprehensive coverage. (My G90 C->J dictionary has about 150,000 entries.)

Breaking down “何为”

Now that I had a general idea of how “何” works, I took a closer look at “何为” from the original sentence that started this whole thing. I noticed an interesting, and as it turns out, deceptive similarity between my original sentence and one of the example sentences for “何” in my dictionary.

他为何不来？
何为感觉？

Since the first example came with a Japanese translation, I concluded that it was roughly equivalent to “他为什么不来？” but with a more questioning tone like, “Why in the world isn’t he coming?” But “为什么感觉？” doesn’t really make much sense by itself or in the context of the original text.

I guessed that the key was in the difference of order between “为何” and “何为”. My hunch was that the first, “为” is an abbreviation of “为什么” while the second “为” is an abbreviation of “为了”. The translation “What is the feeling for?” seems to fit the context of the original text better.

I searched Google and Baidu for “何为” to verify my hunch and found this page. It looks like “何为” can be a person’s name as well? I don’t really know. At this point, I’m was starting to get frustrated. Who said Chinese was easier than Japanese?? (Oh right, that was me.)

A little more digging up turned up an article titled 何为Hibernate. Alright, I know about Hibernate (it’s a Java O/R mapping framework) and the title “What is Hibernate for?” seems to make sense. I found another article 小泉三次参拜靖国神社意欲何为？. Again the title, “What is Koizumi’s intention for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine?” makes sense. I was too lazy to actually read the articles to verify so in the end I just went and asked a Chinese coworker to confirm my hunch. I seemed to be right though he did mention that the use of “何为” was very high-level and not common.

[Correction]
According to your comments, 何为 is another way to say “what”. so “何为感觉” means “What is feeling?” And “意欲何为” comes from Classical Chinese meaning “干什么”. I admit, I still don’t get it really but I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Conclusion

This is pretty much the approach I take when I run into anything new that can’t be easily learned from a dictionary and when I’m too lazy or impatient to just ask a native speaker. It gets a lot easier to go through all the example sentences and search results as you get better in the language. But the difficulty just means that you’re learning more since you know less.

Today, I learned some useful and perhaps not so useful stuff about “何” in Chinese. Spending so much time digging around for information really helps me remember it better than any flashcard and presents opportunities to learn about other stuff such as “如何”， “何止”， and “为何”. All this extra work will also ensure that I won’t forget that the reading for “何” is “hé” for a long time. While I still don’t completely understand all the nuances yet, I’ll be able to recognize it in the future until I can eventually get a feel for how and when to use it.

And hey, what do you know. I just ran into “何” again for today’s 每日学口语 (8月2日).

上大学有何用？
What’s the point of going to college?

In conclusion, I’d like to say that Chinese is a um… interesting… to put it politely. Sigh… Again, please feel free to make any corrections if I’m getting any of this wrong.

The Internet Chinese Text Archive

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Here’s a Chinese resource that looks pretty cool: The Internet Chinese Text Archive.

The biggest problem with the site is it doesn’t set the proper encoding information!! So you have to manually set the encoding to “Chinese Simplified” very time. It’s really, really annoying. I’ve tried everything on the browser such as setting my preferred language to Chinese with no luck. Ugh… One trick I came up with is to mouse over each link and just read the url on the bottom bar of the browser. It’ll tell you what you’re looking at (in English no less) without having to reset the encoding every time. Then you can finally set the encoding when you get to the text you want.

Anyway, while this site looks cool, the material is far too advanced for me to make any recommendations. I thought I’d try to tackle some short stories first but it’s slow going.

Ooh la la, the 色情性爱 category looks interesting. Could be a good motivator to study Chinese.

Any good suggestions for people like me learning Chinese? Preferably something interesting, not too difficult, and as modern as possible.

大家有什么好建议吗？

KTNXBYE

It started with a language requirement

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I have this bad tendency of never looking back in the past. As a result, I often have an extremely spotty memory of past events and the order in which they occurred. I also have another bad habit of never keeping anything around. Looking back, I really wished I had kept a journal of my Japanese studies so that I can better remember how I personally learned Japanese. Instead of crying over split milk, I decided to dig into my crusty memories and document what I remember before I forget it any further.

I hope I don’t sound like I’m trying to show off or anything. My intent was to write an interesting account of my personal experiences with Japanese. Feel free to share your own experiences with learning the language. You also might want to think about starting a journal and keeping all your old material together so you don’t end up in my position now.

Holy crap, class every day??

I started learning Japanese in my sophomore year in the fall of 2000. I had considered taking Japanese or Chinese during my freshman year but balked at the fact that unlike every other class, language classes met every weekday and often as early as 9 IN THE MORNING.

I had thought I could squeak by the language requirement by taking a proficiency exam in Korean. Then I spoke with a fellow student whose Korean was 10x better than me. I was freaked when she told me how hard the test was involving reading articles, writing essays, and other crazy activities in Korean. Unluckily for me, the college recently hired a Harvard grad from Korea to teach East-Asian History and he took over the role of conducting the test. So in my sophomore year, I bit the bullet and prepared myself to take Japanese class every weekday and IN THE MORNING so that I could graduate.

I sucked most of the first year

Don't use this

Don't use this texbook, trust me

We spent about 2 weeks learning Hiragana and I remember how difficult it was to memorize all the characters. I spend hours practicing on the whiteboard and would still space out on certain characters like 「ぬ」. I also remember lamenting the fact that 「学生」 sounded like “gaksei” instead of “gakusei” on an audio quiz.

I personally went through all the stuff I complain about in this blog. The Japanese curriculum recently switched to Nakama, which is not a very good textbook (though there are worse textbooks out there). It was weeks before we even learned any verbs and we started out with the freaking masu-form. I was also very confused by the “emphasis” explanation of 「んです」 and completely baffled when the teacher wrote 「Aさんは、何が好きですか。」 since it used both 「は」 AND 「が」. My poor knowledge of Korean certainly didn’t give me much of an advantage. Finally, casual form and slang wasn’t taught in that class nor in any of the more advanced classes.

Anyway, I was a pretty big slacker in Japanese 101. The only time I went to the Japanese club activities was at the end when “tea night” became “sake night”. The second and third year students spoke some stuff to me in Japanese and I was like, “Oh god, where’s the booze?”

I think it was somewhere between Japanese 102 and 103 (we were on trimesters) that I really started to pick up the pace. I really wish I could say what got me started putting so much extra time and effort on Japanese but I think it was for a number of reasons that came about gradually. I started hanging out with the Language Assistant and still remember our conversations about Japanese while walking around campus. It was from her that I learned casual speech and that you can do amazing things like modify a word more than once, for instance 「みたくなる」. I also asked her to coach me to make sure I was pronouncing every sound correctly, in particular 「つ」 and 「ふ」. (I have to admit Korean did help me with the 「ら、り、る、れ、ろ」 sounds.)

Even though we did end up going out for a while, I’d like to stress that it was my insistence on constantly asking questions and trying to speak in Japanese as much as possible that really improved it. I also asked her to correct my mistakes every time and took her corrections with the utmost appreciation and followup questions unlike other students who just got annoyed and brushed it off.

I think it was so easy to talk to her in Japanese because she knew exactly what I knew and how much I could understand. She was also very good at “dumbing down” or simplifying her Japanese for me. So I was very lucky to have such a tailored teacher and conversation partner. The only drawback was my girly Japanese since everything I knew about Japanese was from a girl.

そうよ！その時は本当にひどかったよ！

In the summer, I stayed on campus to do an internship for an internet startup in Minneapolis. I didn’t do much at my internship (it was during the bubble) but I picked up what meager Japanese material I could find at the library and studied with Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC. I quickly went through all of Nakama 2, which we started in Japanese 103 (you can imagine how boring 204 and 205 became after that) and waded through “An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese“, which was pretty challenging. By the way, I don’t recommend either book though the latter wasn’t that bad as self-study material. However, the grammar explanations for patterns such as 「にとって」 and 「として」 are confusing and didn’t really help me much. My housemate also kindly lent me some comics to study, specifically 烈火の炎. I never got too far with that however because it was still too advanced for me at the time.

I think this was also the time I really started learning Kanji not by themselves but along with the vocabulary. I remember going to the school library and spending hours on the blackboard writing out the words I encountered in Kanji.

Also, for about a month, a bunch of students from 中央大学 came over to do an English summer program at my school. Hanging out with them after work was one of the best times of my life and really motivated me to improve my Japanese. The fact that I couldn’t understand any of their conversations was also another factor. They once tried to explain 「やばい」 to me because I kept hearing it all the time and I never really did get it until much later. (Hint: It means “dangerous”!)

At the end of the first year, I would say I was at a low intermediate level. I could speak Japanese but my vocabulary was limited and I still couldn’t understand many conversations in Japanese at all. The sad thing is, in terms of college courses, the fact that I could even speak at all put me past Japanese 204, 205, and 206. Needless to say, I had no trouble getting straight A’s in all those classes except 206, which I skipped for an advanced elective since 206 wasn’t part of the language requirement. (I got an “A” in that too by the way.)

Fluency in 2 years before setting foot in Japan

My second year was pretty much a continuation of my studies using what I could get my hands on and the WWWJDIC. When I had no internet, I used JWPce on my laptop instead. The fact that I had absolutely nothing else to do and was bored out of my mind during most of my breaks really helped

I really don’t remember what I studied but I think it was just random stuff of no particular interest. I didn’t have access to a lot of Japanese works to study from and didn’t know where to find them. I think it was mostly anything I could find in Japanese at libraries and a 「きまぐれオレンジ☆ロード」 light novel I picked up somewhere, which I never even came close to finishing anyway. I’m sure I looked at some random stuff online too though I didn’t have the skill or dedication to read any Japanese news. I also installed Windows 2000 on my laptop so that I could install a Japanese version of IE/Explorer and other Japanese programs. I think every little bit of Japanese studied here and there really added up, even if it was just a paragraph or even a sentence.

I also spent a lot of time with the International students from Japan and the Language Assistant (which changes every year). Though we were just friends, I even unofficially helped her grade the workbooks from time to time.

At this point, after having met some really great people from Japan, I was determined to do study abroad in the fall of my senior year. I applied to the Waseda program as part of the ACM (finally, a good thing about going to a Midwest college!) and was soon on my way to go to Japan for the very first time.

After the end of the second year, I would say I was at a high intermediate level. My vocabulary (with Kanji of course) was greatly increased and while I didn’t understand everything, I could speak pretty fluently and understand the gist of most conversations.

Studying abroad and getting a job

Taken during study abroad

Taken during study abroad

I arrived in Japan for the first time in my life in the fall of 2002. This was after staying a month in Korea with my Aunt and a full 5-10 lbs heavier from pigging out on the amazing food. I was nervous and excited but also pretty confident in my Japanese. So I was shocked when I couldn’t understand a word when I went to stores and restaurants. It took a little time before I could adjust to the unique language such as 「店内でお召し上がりでしょうか？」 and the speed in which they spoke.

One of the first things I did in Japan was buy an electronic dictionary. Due to my student budget, I selected a cheaper, low-end Casio EX-word. Though the WWWJDIC and edict dictionary were long time pals, I could finally do some studying without having to use a computer or laptop. I really wish I know how many words I’ve looked up in those tools. I would guess somewhere in the thousands or even tens of thousands of words.

Anyway, all that studying must have payed off because when it came time to take our Japanese placement exam, I managed to finish the entire test while most gave up early as the test got progressively harder. Our Japanese language classes were divided into a total of 13 levels and I passed into level 13 for both Japanese and the Kanji classes. We didn’t even get any textbooks like the other students because most of the material were articles and documentaries such as プロジェクトX 挑戦者たち. The only other person to make it through level 13 in our ACM group had actually gone to High School in Japan! In total, there were 5 or so additional students from the GLCA and other schools and all of them had lived in Japan at some time before.

Needless to say, the class was insanely hard but I still managed to get through 3 months with a B+. After another month in Korea during Winter break, I returned to Minnesota to finish up my Computer Science degree. I also continued taking advanced Japanese electives, which seemed like a breeze after my ordeal at Waseda and continued to boost my overall GPA. I’m pretty sure this is also when I started writing my guide to Japanese grammar.

While I was preparing for my senior CS presentation and exam, I realized I needed a job. I thought, “What a great idea it would be to advance both my CS career and Japanese by working at a Japanese tech company!” My great idea brought on some stressful times as I had to fly twice to Japan (the first time at my expense), and stay with friends and host family to interview in Japan. This is all the while I was still taking classes. I actually did my paper midterm exam (take-home obviously) from my friend’s computer in Japan. Fortunately, it was all worth it as I finally got the job after anxiously waiting a month after graduation for all the paperwork and whatnot to go through the monster that is Hitachi.

At the end of my third year, I was at a very Advanced level having close to an adult vocabulary and able to successfully interview (multiple times) in Japanese to land a job with a Japanese company. I could also live comfortably in Japan and do day-to-day activities. However, I still didn’t have those native ears and had trouble understanding people in very noisy environments or middle-aged men who mumbled. I also had little experience in business Japanese. Obviously, this wouldn’t be a problem for long.

The death of a salaryman

Though the next three years working as a salaryman in Japan were very stressful times, it certainly did improve my Japanese. At first, it was embarrassing that I still couldn’t understand a lot of what my bosses were saying because they spoke so quickly and with almost no enunciation. But after a couple years, I got used to it and even started sounding like a middle-aged salaryman myself. And what do you know, I got some good job skills at the same time. I even mastered the dreaded phone!

はい、日立製作所でございます。・・・はい。・・・恐れ入りますが、鈴木は只今会議中で不在ですけれども・・・。・・・ええ。では、戻りましたら折り返しをさせていただきます。もう一度、お名前をお伺いしてもよろしいでしょうか。はい、わかりました。では、失礼します。

I finished up the remainder of most of the grammar guide during this time. I also took the JLPT level 1 just to have something to prove I knew Japanese. Thanks to company policy, I also took the TOEIC every year and got a perfect score but I don’t think that’s going to help me with anything…

Also, my trusty Casio EX-word finally died and I replaced it with a Korean-equipped EX-word XD-H7600 just in case I wanted to study Korean ever. Unfortunately, this never happened. Around my 5th or 6th year, I also began to take an interest in Chinese and bought a Canon wordtank G90 to study Chinese. I do still use that one for my Chinese studies but not as often as I’d like.

After 4 or 5 years of studying Japanese, I’m at a near-native or 帰国子女 level. I can follow all conversations even with the most hard to understand people even with dialects and in crowded situations such as the cafeteria or 居酒屋. The only part I’m still missing is a lot of cultural information such as famous actors, locations, history, etc.

Not much going on now

Now that I’m back in the States and after almost 8 years, I really don’t do much in terms of learning Japanese. Sure, I read the occasional novel and buy One Piece every 3 months, but my Japanese has been pretty much the same for the last 2 or 3 years even while I was living in Japan. The major difference is that I’m missing out on recent and popular culture that I was finally starting to accumulate.

Lately, I’ve mostly been thinking about effective ways to teach Japanese and why the success rate for mastering it is so low. Of course, I also spend a lot of time on this blog and increasingly more time on the textbook.

I’d also like to improve my Chinese but I’m leisurely taking my time (started several years ago and still not at my first-year Japanese level). Maybe that will change if an opportunity involving China turns up.

Did my experiences shed any light on mastering Japanese? I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to start studying Japanese today with all this new stuff such as podcasts and social networks. In particular, I wonder how much my own grammar guide would have helped me if someone else had wrote it 8 years ago. What do you think?

Yahoo! ポッドキャスト

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I was recently informed about Yahoo! ポッドキャスト and added it to the links page. I just started listening to various podcasts there during work and am having a gay old time. I thought I’d share some of my favorites so you can too.

What I’m listening to

In particular, I’ve been enjoying 眞鍋かをり’s podcast, which is talk radio about random topics such as 「こんなものに、はまっていました。」 I like 眞鍋さん’s voice as it’s bright and clear without being too girly. If you visit the show’s blog, you can also read an intro to each show, participate on various アンケート, and send messages that might even be read on the show. You may want to skip the first 3 or 4 minutes which is the Proactive promotion section of the show.

In addition, I’m also enjoying humor shows, in particular the aptly named JUNK podcasts and their 下ネタ（しもねた） about sex and what-not. There are even some semi-sexy shows that are pretty interesting. Who says the Japanese are conservative?

Now that I’m living in the States, I find these podcasts great for maintaining my listening comprehension and vocabulary. I’ve also been learning new vocabulary here and there by looking up words that I didn’t recognize.

Too hard? Try the reverse approach

If you find that the all-Japanese podcasts are too difficult to understand at your current level, you might want to try a reverse learning approach by listening to Japanese shows for learning English. It’s still a bit advanced but at least you’ll have some English to give you some clues and you’ll still get the learning benefit of listening and getting accustomed to real spoken Japanese. For the less advanced, I recommend ECC 英会話 because there’s quite a bit of English in the show itself, most of which is interpreted by the Japanese speaker. In addition, there’s 毎日ちょこっとリスニング特訓~podcast~ and melody.の『Oh！カンチガイ ENGLISH』 was also interesting for learning strange カタカナ usages (unfortunately, that show is already over). In any case, I suggest you browse through the list of popular podcasts and find what looks interesting to you. Here’s also a list of podcasts related to English.

Oh, and here’s a tip for navigating through the Japanese interface. Click the button that say 「聴く」 next to each podcast to listen. That’s it!

Does anybody know a similar site for Mandarin?

Run Forr^H^H^H^H メロス！

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I’ve known about 青空文庫 for quite a while but never really had the time to look over it. It’s a large collection of free Japanese text online. The only problem is most of these writings are quite old (old enough for the copyright to expire) and to put it politely, a bit… dry.

However, I finally took some time to read a story called 「走れメロス」 by the famous author: 太宰治. You can find the version updated to modern Japanese （新字新仮名） here and also read it directly online here.

I don’t want to give too much away but 「走れメロス」 is a rather touching story about loyalty and trust. It is required reading for most Japanese students (in middle school I believe) so it’s certainly good stuff to know for cultural reasons as well. Here’s the first few lines to get you started.

メロスは激怒した。必ず、かの邪智暴虐（じゃちぼうぎゃく）の王を除かなければならぬと決意した。メロスには政治がわからぬ。メロスは、村の牧人である。笛を吹き、羊と遊んで暮して来た。けれども邪悪に対しては、人一倍に敏感であった。

かの: I haven’t run into this word before but it is apparently used to refer to something or someone else similar to 「その」. See here for more details.

邪智暴虐: While not a phrase with much practical use, examining the Kanji for the two words 邪智 and 暴虐 gives you a very good idea of its meaning: Evil+Knowledge and Violent+Tyrannize. The kanji itself are useful to know for words like 「風邪」、「邪悪」 (used in the same paragraph)、「暴力」、and 「残虐」. 「智」、 another version of 「知」 is also a great character to know for many names.

王を除かなければならぬ: The 「ならぬ」 is an old-fashioned version of 「ならない」. You’ll see a lot of 「ぬ」 instead of 「ない」 in this story since the text IS old. 「除く」 is a creative use of the word “remove” here. I leave it to the reader to interpret exactly what is meant by “removing the king”.

人一倍（ひといちばい）: This is an interesting expression to me because it means “more than others” but the math doesn’t seem to add up. If 二倍 is double, shouldn’t 一倍 be exactly the same as the original amount? Well if you consider that 一倍 is one share and 人一倍 as an extra person’s share, I guess it makes sense. It’s an expression anyway so who cares right?

Have fun with the rest of the story because it is quite long. If anybody knows of other good literature in the free 青空文庫 collection, please let me know in the coments with links!!!

Lang-8+Twitter=Awesome!

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What are you doing?
何してんの？
你在做什么？
뭘 하고 있어?

No matter what language you’re speaking in, this is a question you’re answering all the time. So naturally, your conversation skills should improve if you learn how to answer this question in your studies. And what better way to practice than by using Twitter, a service built entirely for this purpose? As they describe it, “Twitter is a service… to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” It seems to be exactly the thing for some quick language practice. You can even set it to bug you if you don’t update it for 24 hours.

So I decided to give it a try by signing up and posting some stuff in Chinese. So far, the experience has been very positive and I even put the latest status on my blog sidebar under “Quick Update”. Answering the simple question, “What are you doing?” motivated me to look up lots of new and useful grammar and vocabulary while helping me apply the stuff I already knew. In addition, the 140 character limit helps keep me focused and motivated. I find it much easier to write a quick sentence or two in Twitter compared to journals (Lang-8) or blogs where there is more pressure to write something more significant.

One thing I did before I started was to make sure I had ready access to update whenever I felt like. Unfortunately, updating from my phone was not an option since my phone can only send English messages. (I’ll try not to rant here on the poor state of mobile technology in the US where you don’t even get a freaking email address for your phone let alone multilingual messaging!!!!!) Since I check all my stuff on iGoogle all the time anyway, I added BeTwittered, a Twitter gadget for the iGoogle homepage. There are lots of other options that might make more sense depending on your habits but you’ll definitely want to set it somewhere where you’ll see it all the time.

This is all fine and dandy but the major problem I have is that nobody reads my Twitter updates. Granted, they’re not all that interesting but it would sure be nice to have native Chinese speakers read them and reply with their comments. In turn, I can do the same for them if they’re learning English or Japanese. Hmm… does this sound familiar? Yes in fact, I have a whole list of friends that fit that criteria in my Lang-8 account. Wouldn’t it be cool if Lang-8 had Twitter integration?! What if you and your friend entered your Twitter account information into your profile and Lang-8 automatically set the appropriate followers based on you and your friend’s native and target languages? It certainly seems possible based on the Twitter API.

Until Lang-8 decides to introduce such a feature, if you speak Chinese, please follow my Twitter account! In exchange, I promise to follow yours. (I wish I could write this in Chinese but it’s too hard and I’m too lazy right now.)

In any case, if you are a Twitter user and you’re using it for language practice, leave a comment with your Twitter link! I write Japanese updates as well so feel free to follow me if it sounds interesting to you.

Update
I didn’t know this but to reply to somebody, you have to start your Twitter message with @[username]. You can tell this is an organic feature and not fully designed as it will reply only to the user’s latest Twitter update. If you want to reply to an older message, you’re out of luck.

Link: My Twitter account