しあわせ

I’ve transferred my site onto a WordPress blog system.

Hopefully this will make everything easier to maintain and update. Although I have a feeling a lot of links will stop working. (even more when I delete the old site. )

All the old content is still here under the same headings, except now to find it select it from the categories list.

Over the coming weeks the look may change but the structure and content will stay the same. (mostly) I hope to go back and expand or edit some of the older entries.

よろしくお願いします〜♪

I’ve found I like writing in Japanese. If I have to learn vocabulary I may as well (try to) learn the kanji that goes with it. Certainly if I’m writing I’ll use kanji if I can. I might not remember them to write afterwards but I can usually recognise them again if I’m reading.

Some really good writing surfaces are bananas and wet sand.

For advanced credit you can write on people!
(see “The Pillow Book” directed by Peter Greenaway, 1991)

But anything as permanent as a tattoo is a very bad and stupid idea.
For reasons why having something permanently written on your body in a language you probably don’t understand, these pranks about Chinese tattoos are good illustrations.

I think this means Aoyagi mountain font. Its a full kanji font in a fluid dry brushed style. (Well maybe not every kanji but a large amount of them.) Not an everyday font but in the right circumstances would look good. No idea what the terms of use are; again its a completely Japanese site. But from what I can make out its free 無料 and presented to the public 公開. Available in OpenType and Windows TrueType.

A design group that makes many fonts for free download, mainly katakana display faces but there is one kanji font albeit without the full range of glyphs. The display fonts show just how difficult a language can be to read in unfamiliar fonts.

–update 29Apr08–

The kana display fonts are directly mapped to keys; therefore you type the characters directly rather than using Kotoeri input (or the IME in Windows). Leaving your keyboard in romaji input, select the font as AL (Roman characters) HA (Hiragana glyphs) or KT (Katakana glyphs) then type away.

This is one time a Japanese keyboard is really useful as the kana glyphs are printed on the keys.

This is the layout of the keyboard I have.
An Apple Japanese wireless keyboard.

The underlying keyboard layout is the US keyboard.

Unfortunately the voiced characters using ゛and ゜are found using the shift key so a bit of guesswork is needed to find them especially for あいうえお and the ま row.

Mikachan, a Japanese woman, has produced this font of thousands of handwritten characters and posted it for anyone to use. And you thought the 100 or so characters in a roman font was hard work.
The site is in Japanese, so the link to downloads is the fourth button from the top on the left, marked だうんるーど（downloads)

Not really to do with learning Japanese, but Go is part of Japanese culture. This is an absorbing game with rules simple enough to be grasped in 30 mins but with strategy complex enough to last a lifetime. It is also the only game I’ve come across with a handicapping system that can give an enjoyable and challenging game for both opponents when one is experienced and the other is a novice.

Goban is a mac implementation of GNU Go. It is very elegant and much more convenient sometimes that getting out the board and stones. You can play against the program, or use it to play against opponents locally, on the internet or on your LAN.
If you like chess or strategic games I’d recommend you give Go a try.