Merry Christmas! And what better way to spend it then playing around with facebook!
I’ve now created a facebook group to connect with other Japanese learners.
My facebook group for learning Japanese
Not sure what I’m going to do with it. I’m just playing around with the idea.
Just for curiosity’s sake, I searched “learn Japanese blog” on Google and my old blog which hasn’t been updated in well over a year turned up near the top of the search results. On the other hand, this blog which is what I moved the old blog to is on page 4. I guess all those CS PHDs can’t figure out how to rank two identical blogs where one hasn’t been updated in almost 2 years vs one that still has an author.
Also, Bing seems to be pretty much exactly the same as Yahoo now.
Lame.
I updated my homepage to explain all the stuff I’ve been adding to the site over the years besides the grammar guide which is what it started as. I’m hoping it’ll help newcomers navigate the site and also improve my google ranking. Fingers crossed.
I always have way too many things going on. Right now, I’m working on the following:
1. Working on improving my vocabulary and writing (on lang-8) in Japanese
2. Japanese from scratch youtube videos
3. The Complete Guide to Japanese
4. Adding vocab lists to the Grammar guide to make it ebook friendly
5. Learning Chinese (not really)
6. This blog
I also just started posting WOTD (Word of the Day) on my twitter account.
https://twitter.com/#!/kimchi314
My free time is limited so many of these projects inevitably get neglected sometimes. But I like to jump around and work on different things to keep things interesting for myself. After all, it is my hobby and primarily for my personal enjoyment.
I’d like to figure out why my website ranks so low when you do a search for “learn Japanese” on various search engines. My website is WAY better than many of the sites on the first page of the search results. Anybody have some good SEO tips?
（僕にとって）世界一かわいい赤ちゃんの大冒険：伝説の珍獣に遭遇！
So I was doing something completely unrelated to anything involving Japanese when I ran into one of the words I listed here. I was playing a non-Japanese game (Infamous 2)*, when a new trophy popped up that said: しっぺ返し. Sweet, I just learned that word! What are the odds that a word I just learned popped up so soon in some other completely different place? They must be pretty good, because it happens all the time!
*So if you set your language settings for your PS3 to Japanese, the trophies are translated into Japanese for some games even if the game itself doesn’t have a lick of Japanese in it.
I’ve written before about how I memorize vocabulary such as here and here. To start with the usual disclaimer, everybody has different learning styles so what works for me may not work for you and vice-versa.
To summarize, the way I learn vocab is by sheer volume and in context. Reading, in particular, is how I learned most of the vocabulary I know. And boy is there a lot of vocabulary to learn. I know enough Kanji at this point that I can pretty much guess the reading of words most of the time. So I look up a lot of words and very quickly. Now, can I say that I’ve completely memorized all those words? Not by any means, but they’re definitely in my brain somewhere, one step closer to memorization until the next time they come up.
Here’s what my recent dictionary history looks like. Yes, after 10 years since I started my website for learning Japanese, I’m still learning all these words. Now, should you memorize my words? Absolutely not, you should encounter your own words in context of whatever you’re reading or hearing.
先達
散会
セキセイインコ
実直
硬直
一抹
達観
投擲
剛勇
精進
打診
際どい
儚い
轟く
咀嚼
靡く
求心
やんわり
被る（こうむる）
反芻
追憶
匙を投げる
博愛
修辞
慈しむ
粗悪
慇懃
冬来たりなば春遠からじ
曲解
訓告
しっぺ返し
すっぱ抜く
武勲
ぷっちぎり
驀進
弛緩
嘲弄
暇乞い
闖入
牧歌
寸劇
出鼻
帳（とばり）
うなだれる
真摯
ふてくされる
親睦
戯れ
丁々発止
明晰
憐憫
なまじっか
迸る
山彦
稚拙
おべんちゃら
喧騒
剛健
自負
軋轢
どんぴしゃり
しらばくれる
刹那
うたた寝
etc, etc.
Boy, learning a language is a lot of work. Share some of your dictionary history in the comments!
So if you’ve been learning Japanese for any decent length of time you’ve probably seen this word: 忙しい. I thought I had completely memorized that word 9 years ago. Somehow, I never noticed that word actually had two readings. So imagine my shock when I looked up the word せわしない. The dictionary states that it’s an emphasized version of another word: せわしい. Guess what that word looks like when written in Kanji. Needless to say, that word is usually written in Hiragana. Wow, it’s a really good reminder that learning a language is a never ending process. And that while I love Kanji, yes it does sometimes suck.
Other words I learned recently: いちゃもん、抗生物質、放射線. The last obviously being a word on the minds of everyone in Japan. On an even more personal note, this is my first post written entirely on my phone. Yay!
Last week, I finally caved and got an android phone. I’ve held off mostly because of the monthly expense but the cost turned out to be mostly the same by switching to a family plan. I spend most of my time at home or work so I haven’t really found much use for the device. However, I can now start trying out and reviewing android apps for learning Japanese. I’ve already tried OpenWnn Plus and Simeji for Japanese input. So far, I haven’t use both enough to really have an opinion on which is better.
Any other android apps I should be looking at?
Not me but it seems more and more language sites are converting to a paid subscription model: Smart.fm, RTK, ChinesePod, JapanesePod101, etc. As a user, it kind of bummer since I don’t feel like shelling out the cash meaning that I won’t be using those sites anymore. But I get that running a site costs money. It would suck if I didn’t have ibiblio.org and I had to pay for hosting AND work on the site for free (though I still pay for my domain names, no biggie). I’ve spent a lot of time on this site because I want to, not to make money.
As a language learner, I spend most of my money on learning materials (books, comics, electronic dictionary), not on hosted service subscriptions. What do you think about these paid subscription services or when they do a bait+switch from free to paid?