しあわせ

Falling Blossom– A British officer’s enduring love for a Japanese woman.
by Peter Pagnamenta & Momoko Williams published by Century

I found a very interesting book in a second hand bookshop at the weekend. (I buy almost any book about Japan! even the ones written in Japanese I can’t read that appear in this shop from time to time)
It reminded me of the old curse “may you live in interesting times”.

It is about the love affair between an British Army Officer (Arthur Hart-Synott) from Ireland and a Japanese woman (Suzuki Masa-san) in the early days of the 20th century. It is based on his letters that were found in Japan when Masa-san’s daughter-in-law was clearing the house. A unique record I think. Unfortunately Masa-san’s side of the correspondence is lost but it is a very interesting, albeit sad, story indeed.
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I first came across this idea in a thread by Mikuji-san on JapanesePod101’s forums.
The idea is to use kanji instead of numbers and therefore become used to reading the kanji shapes and distinguishing between them. At a basic level you could print out sudoku grids and copy the puzzles from the daily newspaper substituting kanji for the numbers. You’d also get good writing practice this way.
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This is amazing. Paste or type some Japanese text into the box above. It will take you to Smartlink, a company that makes translation software, and will speak your text in a very natural voice.

Amazing.

Here is a pre-loaded text if you can’t think of anything to write.
But notice that it can’t read 二羽［にわ］in this tongue twister. It reads it as にはね instead.

I think this might even be good enough for listening practice, and shadowing.

Compare the voice to these older voices using MacInTalk.

I’m guessing that this voice is Miyu - 16khz Japanese Female from NeoSpeech. Unfortunately not available on the Macintosh but it will work on Windows.

Adanami Shobo Brewer Street

There’s no signage, in fact it still has the signs from the dry cleaners who once owned the shop. And it’s not a temporary thing as they’ve been there well over 2 years now. This small shop is crammed with Japanese books and manga.
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I was asked this question by a classmate a while ago.

It’s something I’ve wondered about myself. There are essentially two main strands to any language; Vocabulary and Grammar. Grammar is the structure and Vocabulary the specifics. You need both. You can only get so far by knowing the words and pointing. Or trying to slot the Japanese words into English grammar structures (which would lead to very weird and unintelligible sentences.) But knowing the grammar structures but not having the right words to slot in is equally frustrating. So let’s assume you can learn grammar structures, how can you learn words to express what you want.
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