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.
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。
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.
If you’ve been following my twitter account, you may have noticed that I’ve been posting a new word along with an example sentence and a link to the source material every day for the past few weeks. I wanted to see if I could keep up with it before I blogged about it. So far, it’s been really easy to take a few minutes out of the day to pick a word, search for something using that word, and post something on twitter every day.
What I haven’t mention yet is that each word I pick is a word I just learned personally. Usually, I pick a word from my dictionary history, which has things I looked up recently while reading books or listening to podcasts and then search around for something online that uses that word. It’s actually more for myself than anything as it allows me to review a word I just learned in a different context. At first, it annoyed me that I couldn’t just add a bunch and schedule them to appear later on twitter. But it’s actually helping me to memorize the word because it may be a few days after I learned it that I actually post it. As fans of SRS know, it’s best to not think about a word for a while before conjuring it up again.
If you’d like to try your own WOTD on twitter, post a link to your account in the comments so I can follow you. Don’t just post the word though (which is same as looking it up in the dictionary). Try to find a sentence that uses the word and post a link to the source.
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?
If you’re new to this series, check out my previous posts under the “Japanese from Scratch” category.
I know I keep saying we’re done with Hiragana only to have another lesson with more sounds in Hiragana. Well, we’re almost done with learning all the sounds in Hiragana. In this lesson, we’re going to learn how to attach a /y/ vowel sound to another consonant and how to make a double consonant sound. Once more lesson after this, and we will be done with Hiragana!
Here’s a list of random vocabulary you should read over for some simple reading practice. Once again, don’t worry about memorizing the definitions.
（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.
If you’re new to this series, check out my previous posts under the “Japanese from Scratch” category.
So actually, while we learned all the Hiragana characters, there’s still more sounds to be learned using the same Hiragana characters we’ve already learned. In this lesson, we’re going to be learning the voiced consonants, which are indicated by two small lines or circle (only for /p/ sounds) in the upper-right of the character. There are five voiced consonant sounds: /g/, /z/, /d/, /b/, and /p/.
On computers or other digital displays, a small font can make it hard to distinguish between the lines and small circle (ex: 「ば／ぱ」) so make sure to increase the font if you’re having trouble seeing the circle. You can easily do this in your browser by using the “Zoom” functionality in the “View” menu.
Learning to read and write these sounds is not very hard since you’ve already learned the characters. The pronunciations are pretty much what you would expect except for: 「じ」 and 「ぢ」. Both are pronounced “ji”. 「ぢ」 is very rarely used and normally only in voiced Kanji readings which we will learn about later so you’ll see 「じ」 more often than not for “ji”. 「づ」 is also usually only used as a voiced Kanji reading of 「つ」. It sounds almost identical to 「ず」 except for a slight press of the tongue to the roof of your mouth for a faint “d” sound at the beginning. It should sound like “dzu”.
Here’s a list of random vocabulary you should read over for some simple reading practice. Once again, don’t worry about memorizing the definitions.
Also check out my page on Hiragana.
My Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/taekimjapanese