しあわせ

I’ll be going to Brighton with Frank Chickens on the 2nd August. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with the Chickens and this night sounds like a good gig. It is more dinner and cabaret than a normal theatre evening. Sounds interesting. If you’re near Brighton it’d be good to see you there. It’s at the Komedia Brighton from 7 0′clock on Thursday August 2nd and costs £10 with food and drink extra.
Teriyaki Bento Collectives and A Scandal in Bohemia are also on the bill.

Judging by the title, A Day in the Life — University Student, this could be the first in a series of “Day in the Life” titles from JapanesePod101.
This is a slightly new departure for jPod101. Previously their method of raising revenue has been through subscriptions alone but recently they’ve opened a webstore and are now selling courses for a one off fee.

This 14Mb downloadable course consists of 8 MP3 audio tracks and an e-book of accompaning transcriptions, translations and notes. The audio is 28 minutes in total and is essentially a radio drama in Japanese. There are no explanations on the audio. All Japanese conversations all the time. The audio quality is excellent and the voices are quite clear. The main actor will be familiar to anyone going to JapanesePod101 on a regular basis. It’s Kuze Miki san of Miki’s blog fame. And Miki-san also wrote the script for this program.

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Make your own Karaoke videos for your iPod.

Griffin are giving away a small program which allows you to sync lyrics with a song and then export that as a video. It is available for both Mac OSX and Windows XP. If you provide them with feedback you can be entered into a free draw.

Principally the program is to complement Griffins $50 product iKaraoke. This is a microphone that attaches to an FM transmitter on your iPod allowing you to use your radio as a PA system for improptu Karaoke sessions! The module is also meant to remove the vocal from the tracks on the ipod but I don’t know how successful this is as I haven’t used the iKaraoke. In other software I have it is done by removing the centre part of a stereo recording; where the vocals normally are. However it is rarely successful and at best mutes the vocal.

The software is quite fun. You load in the track. (unfortunatly drm’d tracks won’t load so you may have to burn iTunes purchases to disk and re-import before you can use them in iKaraoke Prompter) Then load in Lyrics. You can search for lyrics using Google automatically using the program.

Then you sync the lyrics by playing the song and pressing the space key at the correct point when a word should be highlighted. Don’t worry if your timing is a bit out. You can go back and fine tune later.
For Japanese songs so far I prefer each word to be highlighted rather than use a sweep effect on playback. I also broke words into slyables using spaces to fine tune things a bit more. The drawback is it becomes slightly harder to read the lyrics. So far I’ve used romaji as being easier to read, but my plan is to try kana. Maybe I’ll try kanji, although I doubt I could get furigana to work in any intelligent way.

But I can now practice songs more easily. Give it a go. You’ll impress Japanese friends and will actually learn some new phrases and words along the way.

JapanesePod101 has interviewed me for the first edition of their newsletter. Interesting that I seem to be enough of a fixture on the forums there that they’re interested in what I have to say! Well another few minutes towards my Andy Warhol 15.

The revised 3rd edition.

AJALT are slowly revising their series of textbooks. The 3rd edition is a major revision.
The revisions are completely modernising the texts that now have a slightly better flow based around practical topics such as shopping, and have a much clearer layout. Another large change is that there will no longer be romaji editions of level 2 and 3. (And I would encourge everyone to start using kana from the beginning; it’s really not that difficult.)
Unfortunatly Biji-san has gone and so has the gentle humour in the workbooks. I wish they could have kept him.

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