しあわせ

After 3 years I finally know enough to start being able to read books. The problem has always been finding graded readers in Japanese.

I started with a set of graded readers called 「レベル別日本語多読ラブリー」

These are very slim books that come in sets of five with a CD. Levels 1 and 2 I had no difficulty with. Level 3 is probably around my reading level and is a bit of a challenge. All the kanji have furigana so their readings aren’t a problem.
The idea is to read books in the same way you read books in English. without a dictionary and guessing the meaning of unknown words by their context. The system is based on The Extensive Reading Method. And this is where I got my idea to try to read 1,000,000 characters this year. (slightly easier than the 1 million English words target, as I’ll count each character, kanji or kana, rather than each word. Actually I’ll estimate the numbers of characters in any given book)

There are four rules

多読４つルールがあります。

1. Start reading from the lowest possible level.
2. Don’t use a dictionary.
3. Skip over unknown words and phrases.
4. If a book becomes too difficult or boring, start another.

So with the confidence given to me by being able to read this readers, I’ve bought some childrens books at Adami Shobo in Soho and hope to document my progress here.

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.