最近、孵るという単語を習った。子供の絵本をたくさん読んでいると、意外に知らなかった単語が多々あるものだな。「そらまめくんのベッド」という絵本だけど、結構かわいくて、娘が気に入ったようだ。お勧めします。
Category Archives: プチポスト
Saturday morning
It’s allergy season and my nose has been acting up.
This morning, my almost 2-year old daughter pointed at my nose and said, “hana”.
I replied, “Yeah, hana.”
She replied, “One, two.”
プチ嬉しい
No way to respond, though. Maybe I’ll respond in my next submission. It’s getting really hard to find words not already in edict though nowadays.
Jim, I hope you live forever, man. You’re awesome!
Pocoyo Japan
My daughter (now 1.5 years old) is obsessed with Pocoyo. She has watched Pocoyo on Netflix like 20 million times. Recently, I wondered, “Hey, since she likes it so much, I wonder if it’s available in Japanese?” The Great Internet has answered and here it is.
Interesting phrase I noticed in this episode at 5:15: 「ポコヨを慰めてあげてくれる？」
Can one raise a quadrilingual child?
Can one raise a quadrilingual child in a predominantly English environment? I’d like my daughter to learn Japanese because I like it, Korean because she’s 3/4 Korean, and Mandarin because I just found out that it may help her attain perfect pitch. Maybe we can study Korean and Mandarin together. We’ll see, she’s not even 1 year old. 🙂
My facebook page
I was bored so I created a Facebook account (talk about being late to the party!). I have no idea what I’m going to do with it so it’s blank right now.
http://www.facebook.com/taekimjapanese
いまさらですけど、暇つぶしにFacebookのアカウントを作りました。何に使うかさっぱりですので、今のところ、なんにもないですよ。
New home page
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.
Podcasts I’m listening to now
Ever since I rediscovered all those Japanese podcasts in iTunes, I’ve been trying to find some interesting ones. So far, I’m really enjoying ゆうのテキトーお悩み相談室 (itunes link). It’s really funny! It’s also pretty risque so don’t ask some Japanese kid to help you with understanding it!
There’s also a bunch of audio dramas (such as this one) that seem like it might be worth a listen. At least, the format is different from the usual talk radio.
I’m also listening to this Korean podcast.
Any other podcasts that you would recommend?
Me, myself, and I
Does anybody else find there’s no good male word for “I”? 「私」 is too formal except for work (which I no longer do in Japanese). I was comfortable with 「俺」 for a while but now I’m too old and Mr. Rogers-ish. And I never liked 「僕」 as it feels a bit too much boy scout-ish. I wish there was something not as rough as 「俺」 but not so boyish as 「僕」. Maybe something new in that crazy slang young people are coming up with all the time?
2010 and audio still sucks
I finally got around to adding sounds to the Hiragana chart. Check it out. More needs to be done but it was hell getting it all working. I didn’t feel like using flash (not supported by iPhone and iPad) and instead opted for the html 5 audio tag. Only problem is that there is no single audio format that works for more than 2 browsers. So I wrote a script that changes the audio file based on your browser. The volume control is buggy in Firefox and of course, none of this works for IE (until IE 9). Anyway, long story short, setting up audio on a webpage is still a LONG way away from being something a non-techie can do. Isn’t that kind of sad?