しあわせ

漢字学習ステップ８級 published by: 日本漢宇能力検定協会

Another book to prepare for the kanken test. This time it is an official book published by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation. It is a textbook for Japanese people, completely in Japanese and requiring a vocabulary beyond that which the kanji might suggest. Maybe it’s for grade school children but I’m certain parts of it are intended for their parents.
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Do you miss out small tsu?
Forget when to lengthen a vowel?
Use the wrong voicing?
Help may be at hand from Purdue University. It is an old project (the last update was 2002) but they have available custom dictionaries for Japanese IME systems. I downloaded the extra dictionaries for Kotoeri. They also have files for Windows XP.
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Late News (again!)
Tonight until the 10th of May Rouge28 Theatre is presenting a performance of Urashima Taro at Shunt Lounge in London. This is part of the celebrations of 150 years of relations between Japan and the UK, Japan-UK 150. (we’ll forget about the original circumstances though.)
There’s a video clip on Rouge28’s website and the life-size bunraku style puppetry looks very exciting.

I haven’t seen this play yet but Shunt is an amazing club. I’ve played there with Frank Chickens. It’s underneath London Bridge Train station and has the sort of ambience where you’d expect modern day vampires to congregate in it’s crypts!

I believe day membership covers you for the performance and any other events that may be on and there’s a late bar and usually DJ’s so you can make a night of it.

If you miss this at Shunt you can also catch them at the Sprint Festival at the Camden’s People Theatre from Monday 9th to Wednesday 11th of June at 8pm or the Buxton Puppet Festival on Thursday 31st of July at 9pm

You can read the story of Urashima Taro in English and Japanese here.
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LingQ is another site that is based around learning through flashcards. It takes a slightly different approach to WordChamp however. The underlying philospophy here is the natural acquisition of language through reading and listening.
The idea is that you become receptive to a language before you can become active in it. You learn from examples rather than studying the specifics of grammar. Vocabulary is seen as the most important tool for communication and understanding. Oh, and having fun.
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Since MacOS X was first released the built-in support for Japanese has been excellent. Everything you need for Japanese is in the standard installation. It’s there when you want it. It just works; no searching around for install disks. I recently installed Windows XP using Parallels on my Mac. Boy it’s clunky. Mac is the way to go for Japanese. Doubly so because, if you want, with an Intel Mac you can get Windows too.

Japanese support was a big reason for me to go OS X several years ago. It was a deciding factor on Leopard as well.
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