Two years ago mixi started requiring a Japanese email address in order to sign up to mixi. It seems that what they are doing is filtering for undesirable domains. Hence google mail etc are being barred, Japanese keitai are not.
Koichi at Tofugu has found an apparent crack in mixi’s filters. dot-edu domain addresses are not being blocked. (for the moment). Which is good news if you have a .edu email address. He has even found a way to get a .edu address via an Australian site. Details can be found on Tofugu.
Apparently (I haven’t checked) .ac.uk addresses work as well.
You also don’t need an invite to join mixi anymore according to Tofugu. But play nice please; mixi is different from Facebook et al. and the social conventions around friend requests are different.
I wouldn’t liken it to the Black Ships yet. No one is forcing mixi to open up (and no-one should really). More like some Jesuits being snuck in.

Related posts:

1. Mixi restores Shogunate isolationism
2. Mixi
3. オリエンタリズム – Orientalism Club Night

This is a little FileMaker solution I’ve written.
It takes a piece of pasted Japanese text and analyses the kanji contained in it.

I wrote it as a quick and probably imprecise way of looking at kanji usage in texts. Probably because of the 1998 study of kanji usage in the Asahi Shinbun (Shinbun denshi media no kanji, Senseido, 1998) usually a figure is quoted of 1000 most frequent kanji account for 95% of usage. I have also seen this as 1000 characters allow you to read 95% of articles (a subtle difference) but I think this is a bit of an overstatement, (the thread below suggests 1900 kanji in order to read 95% of compounds). While doing a bit of research on this I came across several other frequency studies and an interesting thread where Jim Breen notes

…a discussion at a language teaching conference in Japan I attended in 1999, where there was general consensus that
the average Japanese adult could read 700-800 kanji…

Although I find this a bit hard to imagine, write by hand maybe…

What interests me is the percentage of kyouiku kanji that are used in texts and which of the remainder of the jyouyou kanji are used most frequently.

My hypothesis is that the kyouiku kanji are a better medium term goal for JSL learners than the complete jyouyou set. The diminishing returns in terms of effort on the 939 kanji beyond the kyouiku kanji might suggest approaching these on a need-to-know basis. The old canard (by Heisigists I suspect) is that leaving out 10% of the alphabet isn’t a good idea. I don’t know. Firstly a more accurate analogy would be around vocabulary and it’s not so much that you completely ignore them but that it is possible to work around the unknown characters. And there’s a world of difference in effort between learning 3 characters and learning 939 characters. But I digress.
The Asahi Shinbun also probably isn’t the most read source by JSL learners either. It might be good to have some statistics on Amazon reviews, mixi blogs, or manga.

Kanji Sieve filters for the six primary school grades and for the remaining jyouyou kanji. It then counts the occurance of each character. This might allow you to see the most frequently occurring characters in the texts you are interested in.
Characters outside the jyouyou set are not considered.
For readability or difficulty other considerations would need to be addressed such as the vocabulary used, the length of compounds and the grammar.

If I continue to play with this I would like to add an export option, maybe allow you to collect a series of articles and see the aggregate statistics.
I would also like to incorporate it into my Kanji Notebook, to allow you to lookup kanji or add them to a study list or set of flash cards.
I would also like to see if I can extract vocabulary in the same way, but I suspect word boundaries would be an issue there although Rikachan manages it though….

Downloads
v0.1 (March 2010)

FileMaker file (right-click link and save to disk. 112 KB).
You’ll need FileMaker 10 to open it.
It might look dreadful in Windows due to font substitution and different font metrics, but it should work.

Mac Runtime and bound file. (right-click link and save to disk. 28 MB zipped)
It needs Mac OS X v10.4.11 and above. It is a runtime version of FileMaker that only works with the bound file.

Windows Runtime and bound file. (right-click link and save to disk. 20 MB zipped)
It needs Windows XP and above. It is a runtime version of FileMaker that only works with the bound file.

I’ve made it on Mac OS X v10.5.7 and Windows XP in emulation.
I’m not happy with the fonts on Windows but that may just be how they usually look.

If or when I develop other little solutions they will be bound to the same runtimes and so I will only distribute the bound FileMaker files.

Related posts:

1. My FileMaker Pro Kanji Project
2. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 1
3. Japanese Childrens Kanji Book

Yamato sank and her giant body lies shattered 200 miles northwest of Tokunoshima. 430 meters down.
Three thousand corpses, still entombed today.
What were their thoughts as they died?

In April 1945, Yoshida Mitsuru was a junior officer stationed on the bridge of the Yamato during her ill-concieved and hopeless 特攻 Special Attack mission that was meant to draw off American aircraft from the attack on Okinawa to allow a better hope of success for the 神風 Kamikaze aircraft attacking the American fleet. But as the Japanese themselves demonstrated in their 1941 attack on the HMS Prince of Wales, a battleship without aircover was no match for a concerted attack by over 400 aircraft. The Aircraft carrier group was the new supreme force on the high seas.

Richard H. Minear’s translation of Mitsuru’s account is a very easy and interesting read. The style is very clipped and terse. The original was written entirely in katakana in a now seldom used style called bungotai 文語体. First written in 1946, It fell foul of the military censor on several occasions during the American occupation. Only in 1952 was a version published, and the original didn’t appear until 1981.

It is patriotic and unashamedly militaristic in terms of sacrifice and duty, yet it is oddly matter of fact and I wouldn’t say it glorifies war. If it were an American writing about America’s military history no-one would find it strange at all. The British envisioned a similar forlorn hope and would have committed it’s fleet to engage a German invasion at all costs. Had that happened the sacrifice would have been deemed heroic.

Regardless of nationalistic sentiments, this speaks of the waste of war, the expenditure of young lives dutifully following orders of old men who wouldn’t bear the consequences. The sailors knew what they were doing. They also knew they couldn’t protest, that should have happened in the thirties with the rise of militarism not in 1945 when it was all falling down around them.

I heartily recommend this book for an insight into the thoughts of the Japanese who pointlessly sacrificed themselves in huge numbers in the closing year of the Pacific War. Not for it’s war story but for the glimpses of universal human life, in the bride left behind, the old sailor who posted all his possessions home before the attack, the captain knowing details about a junior officer, the crew getting slightly drunk together the night before the attack, it could have been almost any navy at any time.

Related posts:

1. Hiroshima – melted people
2. Hiroshima Day
3. Falling Blossom

Or outside of Japan the DSi XL. But a friend has brought me a Japanese DSi LL a month or so ahead of the European launch. Who needs an Apple iPad?
It’s a really nice gadget. It feels much more substantial than a DS lite. There’s a big difference in build quality. The bigger screens make a huge difference, the pixel count is the same but the size matters it makes it more like a computing device rather than a gaming device. On the Japanese version you get a nice DSi Ware built in dictionary,明鏡国語楽引辞典 , if you haven’t already got something similar already as a cartridge for the DS 漢字そのままDS楽引辞典, and two brain training type games, one kanji, one maths.

A partial drawback is that unlike the DS lite, the interface is localised. It has a Japanese system and that’s all. At this stage I feel confident enough to manage but once it would have been very much a click and hope for the best affair.
Another drawback that I didn’t anticipate is that they’ve changed the power plug shape and the AC/DC adapter isn’t universal volyage. I can’t use my existing USB lead or power supply from my DS lite. I have to get a UK adapter or a step down transformer so I can charge the battery. doh!

The advantages of a Japanese model. I have it a month before most people, it’s a little cheaper, I could have gotten a white one (I went with red, it’s fairly smart) but most of all I will have potential access to Japanese region locked software. I won’t miss the region locked European software as almost all the titles I own are Japanese. I don’t see that changing. I bought my original DS lite to use in learning Japanese. The LL is an upgrade for it.
It is by no means as capable as an iPad might be. BUT it is here now, it’s cheaper and for the moment the software available for learning Japanese and the ability to haave written kanji input makes it much more useful to me.
If the iPad ever gets proper pen input and development of good kanji titles that might well change but I think that will take at least a year or two; an ice age in computing terms.
Now to get my transformer, and a little help from my wife to get the Internet and DS shop working!

Related posts:

1. Fingerpainting Kanji in OS X
2. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 1
3. PAdict

Related posts:

1. Japanese Gaffer Tape Signage
2. Haikugirl’s Japan
3. YouTube

A good friend of mine, MiCAさん, has opened her brand new online fashion and accessory store, Regentag.
In Japan it’s customary at a shops opening for people to send large flower arrangements, and for the complex relationships and levels of patronage to kick in in supporting the new enterprise. To be honest I’m not exactly sure how it works.
But I thought I’d write this post and encourage readers at least to go and have a look, maybe give her a moral boosting blip on her site statistics. The merchandise isn’t the usual tech stuff I’d be interested in but is much more girly jewellery and accessories. I do like the colourful slippers/shoes (which I doubt would fit me!), and the bottle holders look very useful too.

So drop in and have a look.
I wish MiCAさん all the best in her new business.
よろしくお願いします。

Related posts:

1. Haikugirl’s Japan

I never learn, so “once more unto the breach..”

I am interested in how people learn and the problems of kanji and language in particular.
The topic rises again and again on forums so I’ve been thinking a bit more about it. Instead of a long post into threads that have strayed and grown too long I thought I’d make it into a post here.
It has stayed in draft form for a long time but between a comment about Heisig on this blog recently and trying to catch up with half finished posts, I’ve revisited it. Hopefully this will put Heisig to rest for me, it becomes a little frustrating to have my kanji studies defined in reaction to a method developed 33 years ago by someone who self-admittedly knew nothing about Kanji or Japanese when he first developed it.

First I think there may be a mismatch with what people are calling having learnt a kanji. For people who have used RTK1 “learnt” seems to be writing a kanji linked to a keyword. Quite an achievement and useful in and of itself. Another group perhaps equate “learnt a kanji” with being able to use it. ie linking it to actual words in Japanese, reading and writing. And yes RTK users will progress onto this at which time they will fully “own” those kanji.

Here may be the difference in style. RTK users are learning a larger chunk at once concentrating on two tasks, writing the kanji and an English meaning. They are deferring putting the kanji to Japanese, with the hope, or certainty, that this will be easier further down the road. Traditionalists, for want of a better term, want to have usage of a kanji all at once for the Japanese they know at a given time. They may have to deal with more at once but they deal with it in smaller chunks at a time, and have more immediate full use of a given kanji. They may concentrate more of kanji they immediately need. I also get the feeling that self-directed learners tend to use the Heisig method and those that attend classes tend towards more traditional methods. I feel it’s a bit swings and roundabouts though.

As far as I am aware, other than anecdotes and opinion there is no evidence or studies one way or another about effectiveness or time taken to be literate using any method for non-natives. (Literacy being able to read and write Japanese to a particular standard; the end of formal schooling before high school, being a reasonable benchmark perhaps.) Also while we seem to be discussing two styles of learning I’m sure there are many more styles of learning a language and many approaches. The problem is finding the approach that will work for you.

This is what I’ve found with Heisigs order. Which I followed for a while. I constantly came across kanji that as yet I have no use for and this inhibits my memorising of them. I have far more success with those I can link to Japanese I already know or see some more immediate use to. Now of course there’s no reason I have to stick to the order, but then I’d lose the advantage of taking something off the shelf rather than having to work it out for myself. Catch22 it seems. But if you take away the strict order and learn components as and when you need them it would be easier to use for kanji you need to learn, for the grade school and JLPT orders, or based on frequency of use. There are diminishing returns in learning kanji. The most frequent 1000 are used 90% of the time.

Another thing I’m noticing is the keywords. I’ve noticed a couple of things here. Ambiguity; I don’t make the same connections as Heisig. For example, Spring can have 4 meanings for me; season, water appearing from the ground, metal coil, the action of jumping. I’ve got to go the usage of the kanji to clarify it. Then I feel fountain gives a better prompt for 泉［いずみ］The other thing I’ve noticed is less common links being made. For instance 頂, “wear on head” an idea which I’d more commonly associate with 冠, made more useful links when I saw it was いただく or ちょうだい. humbly receiving. I suppose in one respect it makes these kanji stand out but it also erodes what confidence and trust I have in the author and I’m back to not being able to use something off the shelf. Nor am I alone in noticing this and I wish Kanjidic would cull the Heisig keywords or at least note them as such rather than having them as the first meaning.

Whatever way you look at it these keywords are giving meaning to a particular kanji. I’d also go further and say the stories are giving meanings to the kanji. Often meanings that don’t exist. It may not be the intention but I feel it is a by-product. This suspicion is one reason I dislike the stories. I’m more interested in the actual derivation of a kanji. That helps me more than making something up. In any case I’m not very good at making up stories like this.

Writing out kanji as the alternative to Heisig is a common misconception. Yes at first it does look like that is the alternative. Especially if you use Japanese classroom like materials with all those practice boxes.
Traditional isn’t write repeatedly and cram readings in (IMHO). Yes on Japanese school books or handouts there is usually space for 12 characters but it’s very important that a child learns neat handwriting. And yes the action of writing helps you learn it. But… The learning of meanings and readings seems more to do with hanging the kanji on example vocabulary the student already knows, combined with a definition and possible etymology of the character. Because of traditional dictionary usage, stroke count and radical are taught although I would guess this might tend to be ability to count and identify rather than rote learning. It’s more based on understanding than on rote. The characters are also broken down into specific elements much the same way as spelling in English. So in explaining 明，it might be described as 日 and 月

That breaking down is one part of the key, yes just as ol’ H does it. I just prefer to use the actual names and not use a story. にちへん、つきへん。If I can I prefer to hang it on a Japanese word. 明るい in this case. The other part is putting it to words rather than trying to remember a complete picture.

A more interesting Japanese approach is in the books by 下村昇, a Japanese teacher whose writings predate Heisig’s. His method uses pictures to explain the etymology of the forms (although he does ignore the difference of phonetic components and semantic components) This at least gives you an understanding of the character. Then having broken down kanji into about 36 basic components and 24 common radicals he can write out in a sentence of about 4 steps how to write any given character.

From an article about EFL I read recently.

Alas, the perfect method is an illusion. A chasing of the wind.

And the problem may be that on the Internet there are very many students and very few teachers. The Internet while of fantastic value is full of amateurs (like me and many blogs and forums) groping for direction in the dark. Often the value of a good teacher isn’t recognised. I think some good kanji teachers are needed.
下村昇 is one, so is隂山英男 (of Kakitorikun fame), and 加納千恵子 the author of the Kanji Book series and a researcher into teaching Japanese to foreigners is another.

Related posts:

1. Adventures in Heisig • day 2
2. Heisig revisited
3. Adventures in Heisig • day 3

These books have the usual unwieldy titles of so many Japanese books.
1行読んでおぼえる小学生必修1006漢字—低学年500漢字 and 1行読んでおぼえる小学生必修1006漢字—高学年506漢字. The idea behind them is quite simple though. You read one line per kanji to memorise if not all, at least most of its important readings. It’s similar to books written for Japanese second language learners like JLPT3 Kanji by Examples and JLPT2 Kanji by Examples.

The difference here is that the author crams all the readings into a single and maybe quirky sentence rather than the rather dry single use sentences of normal texts. The drawback being that this can use more complex or less common vocabulary and grammar, which is fine for natives but is a bit harder for learners. However as it’s aimed at primary school children, overall the language isn’t difficult.

The books also don’t fully stick to the grade school order. Book 1 is mainly Grades 1 to 3 and Book 2 Grades 4 to 6 but they are presented thematically and so are mixed up. I’d say it’s a bit more of a revision and consolidation tool in this respect. However by grouping them thematically I feel you make more connections and so remember more. Connections are the key. It’s easier to remember a sentence than a string of readings or even a single word. At the very least it should be a good resource for those that like to sentence-mine.

As you can see from the example below, there are five kanji to a page. Five sentences with the target kanji highlighted with a variety of readings. All kanji have furigana. 5 sentences per sitting seems reasonable. Only time will tell what my retention will be like. Maybe I need something like Smart.fm to help me, but while I am transcribing sentences for myself into my kanji notebook project, I don’t think it’s ok to make them public. It’s a very nicely designed book and not too expensive at 1260 円. If you want there’s even pictures to colour in to chart your progress!

The books certainly get rave reviews from parents on Amazon.

Related posts:

1. 漢字練習ノート・小学２年生 • Kanji Practice Notebook Grade 2
2. Kanji Power
3. Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who managed to have the bad luck to endure, or good luck to survive, both atomic bombings in Japan, passed away on Monday. He was only recognised officially as a dual survivor in March 2009. He was one of only 9 dual survivors and the only one to be officially recognised.
As these bombings start to pass from living memory it’s important to not forget the terrible effects of nuclear war and press on with global disarmament.

Related posts:

1. Hiroshima – melted people

Firstly it seems not every exam centre will have twice yearly exams. It looks as if only centres in Japan,China and Korea will definitely offer it twice a year. SOAS in London seems to be keeping to December only. It’ll be worth checking with your nearest centre. It may also help them gauge interest and encourage them to offer it biannually. Hopefully the Japan Foundation will update its listings soon.

More interestingly, although official workbooks won’t appear until 2012 according to the official JLPT site, Bonjinsha already has a few textbooks available for the new JLPT specifications. They aren’t part of the full listing on Bonjinsha’s site. However I did find them under their (unweildy) Japanese title 新しい「日本語能力試験」ガイドブック概要版と問題例集 (New Japanese-Language Proficiency Test Guidebook: An Executive Summary, and Sample Questions).

Finally, although this isn’t exactly new, Ireland now has it’s own JLPT exam centre at DCU. Although they have the typically rubbish websites common to a lot of universities.

Related posts:

1. New JLPT specifications
2. JLPT Mock Test Level 3
3. JLPT Changes from 2010