The noisy gaijin phenomenon. I suppose it happened. Where instead of following the social norms of Mixi they used the MySpace get-as-many-”friends”-as-possible model and caused minor nuisances and disrupted social harmony through ignorance. I would have thought the language barrier and need for an invite would exclude the majority of non-Japanese ignorant of Japanese customs anyhow.

It may still be possible to register without a keitai email but I think you then need an email account with pay Japanese providers instead. However I haven’t seen any details in English about this.

It’s a shame that Mixi wants to be it’s own little walled enclave rather than engaging with the wider world of the Internet. So far existing accounts are unaffected but it’d be fairly trivial to require everyone to re-validate their accounts with a keitai email address. Hopefully this won’t happen. I’m glad I found mixi and was invited in (through JapanesePod101). It improved my Japanese. I made several friends there, including some very important friendships. I can actually wonder what my life would have been like without mixi….

I have wondered why I don’t just blog in Japanese outside of mixi and contact my friends on their normal emails. I guess I could. I considered it when mixi adopted an all-your-content-are belong-to-us policy. But posting outside of mixi doesn’t make what I post any safer from being stolen or re-used. The walled nature of mixi and writing in Japanese maybe has the effect that I’d be a little more candid there than I would on the wild wild web. And it’s very unlikely I’d have made the friends I did through a self-hosted blog, the mix of mixi gave me those friends.

Maybe it’s just the nature of the web. Services change, get worse, jump the shark, and people move on to newer better things.

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漢字学習ステップ８級 published by: 日本漢宇能力検定協会

Another book to prepare for the kanken test. This time it is an official book published by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation. It is a textbook for Japanese people, completely in Japanese and requiring a vocabulary beyond that which the kanji might suggest. Maybe it’s for grade school children but I’m certain parts of it are intended for their parents.

It follows the familiar formula of presenting the kanji with a stroke count, radical, onyomi and kunyomi. The readings that are learnt at middle school are marked. There are comprehensive guides to writing the kanji properly. Much more so than would be usual with texts for non-Japanese I think. It’s important to get good habits early on and develop well balanced well written kanji.
There aren’t example sentences but compounds are given for each kanji. I presume these would be the words that would appear on the Kanken test.

The main attractions of the book are the Kanken style tests that are included. In these you give fill in blanks by writing the kanji or it’s reading in short sentences. There are also exercises were you count strokes, or make a kanji from given components. There are also some interesting game like tests that I wouldn’t think would appear on the test. Looking at the pictures accompanying the test scores only a perfect 100 seems acceptable, the rabbit next to the acceptable 80 looks really annoyed and next to 50 positively upset.

Finally you can chart your progress by filling in the date you complete sections and should you feel the need colouring in the wall chart that comes with the book. My schooldays were never like this.

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Now when I type an extra character or omit one, Kotoeri will also suggest words near to the one I typed. You can recognise these words because they have their correct reading in brackets beside them. This furigana will also be inserted. By doing it this way I think you are more likely to remember the correction and not become over-reliant on the spellcheck.
Japanese obviously don’t have these problems. Usually if you can say it properly you can spell it properly (in kana). Japanese is a wonderful language in this respect. This is a helpful idea for learners of the language.

As yet I am in two minds. Do I just use the normal dictionary and retype when I can’t get the correct kanji because I misspelled? Or do I open the extra dictionaries when this probably overpopulates the menus and I have to edit the furigana out?

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Late News (again!)
Tonight until the 10th of May Rouge28 Theatre is presenting a performance of Urashima Taro at Shunt Lounge in London. This is part of the celebrations of 150 years of relations between Japan and the UK, Japan-UK 150. (we’ll forget about the original circumstances though.)
There’s a video clip on Rouge28’s website and the life-size bunraku style puppetry looks very exciting.

I haven’t seen this play yet but Shunt is an amazing club. I’ve played there with Frank Chickens. It’s underneath London Bridge Train station and has the sort of ambience where you’d expect modern day vampires to congregate in it’s crypts!

I believe day membership covers you for the performance and any other events that may be on and there’s a late bar and usually DJ’s so you can make a night of it.

If you miss this at Shunt you can also catch them at the Sprint Festival at the Camden’s People Theatre from Monday 9th to Wednesday 11th of June at 8pm or the Buxton Puppet Festival on Thursday 31st of July at 9pm

You can read the story of Urashima Taro in English and Japanese here.

–update 07May08–
I went along to Shunt last night and I can’t recommend it enough. You really have to go there. (I don’t like crowds so midweek suits me, but even when I’ve been there at a weekend it’s still the sort of place you could talk and doesn’t feel packed.)
It’s London’s most romantic club in an underground/ arty/ grunge/ flickering candles in beer mugs sort of way. You are in for a big surprise when you go through the small door next to the Tube station and down the seemingly endless dark tunnel towards the club. It’s gotten even bigger now they’ve opened up more of the “catacombs” underneath London Bridge.

Urashima Taro
It’s being performed in The Arena off the main bar. It’ll cost £5 on Thursday and £10 Friday and Saturday including entry to Shunt. Get a ticket with your day membership as seats are limited. The venue has a rough fringe feel to it but it works. There are few theatre experiences like this in London.

The play itself…
Unfortunately I feel it’s still in development. I hate to criticise it because I know how difficult theatre is, especially if you are a small operation on a tight budget. Here you have one actor and one stage crew carrying off an hour long show. I wanted to be amazed and excited.

I felt it was a bit monochrome. I think if I didn’t know a little about the Urashima Taro story I might not have been able to follow it. There are four characters, the Narrator, the Mother, Urashima Taro and the Woman under the sea (I presume the Dragon King’s daughter). But Taro is silent and the narrator and Princess meld into one character I feel. There should be more distinction between the characters. I also need to feel empathy or dislike or something for them. There could be more than a re-telling of Taro. I could be left thinking about the nature of seduction, or the changing world, or the duty of a son to his mother. But instead I just felt “is that it ?”
The audience needs to be entertained and challenged.

I feel it needs a bit more theatricality, a bit of spectacle, some colour.
The set’s main element of a fishing net worked well. I feel more could be made of the projections. Especially to add some colour or added layers to what’s going on.
I’d add some backlight, but theatre seems not to use backlight so much. I wonder how much power and lantern stocks were available, or rigging time.

A major element is a small traditional kamishibai puppet show. Even in the intimate space of the Arena this is a bit lost. I’d use projection, maybe live projection, or maybe use flash animation or video to give a technological twist to a traditional form. If there was a bigger budget I’d hire some stage crew and scale it up to life size. But things like this are so much easier as an idea, than trying to make them reality.

What was very successful was the life size Taro. He was operated with skill so despite only being a head and two arms you could sense a full bodies presence. There was also a lovely moment where he refused a drink, the movement was so apt. I would run with this element of the production. It’s what they promote on their website. It was the beginning of the piece I think and probably what people came to see.

I really wish them well.
I will certainly look out for other productions by Nakamura Aya -san. I’m interested in where this puppetry and these traditional forms can go. (I think she also did puppetry in the recent The Twin Stars, which unfortunately I couldn’t get to )

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LingQ is another site that is based around learning through flashcards. It takes a slightly different approach to WordChamp however. The underlying philospophy here is the natural acquisition of language through reading and listening.
The idea is that you become receptive to a language before you can become active in it. You learn from examples rather than studying the specifics of grammar. Vocabulary is seen as the most important tool for communication and understanding. Oh, and having fun.

The basic premise is that there are lot’s of resources in your target language available on the Internet. By reading sites you’re interested in and learning vocabulary for the topics in context you can improve your language skills. They might go as far as to say you can learn a language this way.

On LingQ instead of just having vocabulary lists of words as flashcards, you have lists attached to an written article. You make your flashcards while reading articles in the target language. Your flashcards will also have example usage from that story. So you are learning words in context.

It works like this. First set up your free account. Then from the “Store” choose an article to read. This will appear on your “Work Desk”. Most articles have audio to accompany them. Listen to the audio and read along. Then try extensive reading if you can, hopefully the piece will be at a level where you can do this. Then do intensive reading where you use the built-in dictionary while making LingQ flashcards.

This is the core of LingQ. When you go through an article you can highlight a word and click the LingQ button. This looks up the word in a dictionary and starts a flashcard for you. A major component of this flashcard is that it copies the phrase around your target word so you have an example in context. You can also tag your flashcard to organise your vocabulary lists later.

You review these flashcards in the traditional manner to memorise the words. The flashcard system has a simple interval learning system marking the cards as New, Can’t Remember, Not Sure, or Known depending on your answers. It can also help you to manage your own interval system if you want as you can set the levels manually. Based, I think, on the frequency of words in the articles you’re reading, LingQ lists the 25 most important words for you to learn. This is such a simple but effective idea. The words that occur the most are the ones you need to know.

On your overview page the system also sets you targets for the amount of words to learn or read etc. It’s an external incentive for you go for that high score and Level Up.

If you can’t find anything in the store there is also an option to import text files into LinQ’s system. These can be shared with other users. There are certainly copyright and I think ethical implications here however. Tae Kim also voiced this in his review on 3 Yen. I would prefer to read a site in situ than go through the process of exporting, cleaning up, and re-importing to LingQ.

There is also a forum. It seems friendly and reasonably active. The post I made got quick replies from the moderator and other users. It’s a fairly basic forum though. They might have been better off using one of the more familiar off the shelf solutions. I do like that when you opt-in to a thread it emails you the full text of follow-ups. However that also means I’m less likely to visit their forum or site.

This is a business. Beyond the free account you have the option of subscriptions and buying points to spend on having writing corrected or having one to one conversations. In the future they intend to charge for articles in the “Store” (the reason they went with that label) in a sort of iTunes like manner I expect.
The one on one conversations are charged in 15 min blocks for 500 points. Up to four people can share an hour paying for 15 minutes each. The conversation is on a pre arranged topic and led by a native speaker. It’s reasonable value perhaps, it might depend on the skill of the tutor and in a group situation having the proper share of a conversation.

There is also the option to have your writing corrected. at a cost of 1 point per character. (kanji is cheaper!) You receive a comprehensive correction for this fee. The Japanese LingQ is still in beta so the charges may change. Points cost $20 for 1000 if you don’t have a subscription or $10 for 1000 if you subscribe. Higher levels of subscription have points included. Points unlike money expire after 90 days though.

I don’t think I would go the paid route. I feel that with a good tandem partner you could have a similar experience for conversations and corrections to writing. However if you are in an area where you cannot find a tutor, it seems reasonable value. I pay £15 ($30) an hour for one to one tutoring, but have seen much more expensive rates.

Overall this site has potential. It still feels a little rough around the edges however.
The content needs better level classifications. What might be worth paying for would be a graded series of articles or stories.
I prefer flashcards that have more sides. As always exporting the content you’ve made isn’t as easy as importing it.
The LingQ button and audio only seems to work properly in Internet Explorer or Firefox. (On the Mac I only really had success using Firefox) It’d be nicer if web apps like this could be browser agnostic and standards compliant.

The LingQ system of making a flashcard with a words context is the most attractive part of this system. Unfortunately it is only available within LingQ’s site. This is a slight problem I think.
It’s fine for material LingQ has produced themselves. But it’s not so good when working with material from elsewhere. I’m uneasy about this. LingQ isn’t sitting on top of other sites. The articles are republished albeit with atribution but I wonder about permission sometimes. I see a lot of Miki’s blog from JapanesePod101 with a transcript. They are “free to air” so to speak from jPod’s site but it feels wrong. Maybe it’s just I feel a part of jPod’s zoku and feel protective of what they do. I noticed work from another couple of sites as well. This is different than linking, which would drive traffic to these sites. It’s different than having a toolbar solution like WordChamp which sits on top of a site, because at least you are using the primary site. I am certain LingQ will take down material when asked. But in the end content is king, user posted content can be very difficult to police (just look at Internet video sites), and LingQ will need to produce quality content themselves and that is expensive and time consuming.

I think ultimately what I would like, and would pay for, is a stand alone desktop solution. I would like a flashcard program that could copy a word from a browser or e-mail as well as the surrounding text and put it in a flashcard looking up the meaning for me on a single mouse click. If it can be done on a web page it should be possible to do it on the desktop.
I could do it by hand of course but the 1-button approach is seductive.

Overall this is a site that’s worth watching and the method of making flashcards is a good one.

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Since MacOS X was first released the built-in support for Japanese has been excellent. Everything you need for Japanese is in the standard installation. It’s there when you want it. It just works; no searching around for install disks. I recently installed Windows XP using Parallels on my Mac. Boy it’s clunky. Mac is the way to go for Japanese. Doubly so because, if you want, with an Intel Mac you can get Windows too.

Japanese support was a big reason for me to go OS X several years ago. It was a deciding factor on Leopard as well.

I’m a bit wary of upgrading my system when everything is working because invariably something I like stops working and all the furniture is moved yet again. So while I have had Leopard since it was released I have only recently installed it, the new Japanese features were part of the decision.

First and foremost for Japanese support is the Kotoeri input system (known on other systems as the IME). On the Mac this is activated in the International System Preference. I choose romaji, hiragana and katakana; and I turn off the national keyboard to tidy up the input menu. I don’t like those flags really.

By choosing hiragana input when you type in Latin characters hiragana will appear. ha, hi, fu, he, ho becomes は、ひ、ふ、へ、ほ. nihonngo becomes にほんご, and when you press the space bar this converts to kanji, 日本語. Simple. Just be careful the kanji you choose are the right ones. You may also be presented with a choice by the system in the form of a pop-up menu.

This is all as before. The huge, fantastic, change is that now Kotoeri is in English! Both the help files and the preferences. You are no longer guessing or laboriously translating in order to get the best from the input system. Finally I can understand how to add custom readings of words I use a lot like friends names so the system doesn’t mangle them.

Another way to input kanji is by using the character palette. This is organised like a traditional dictionary. If you don’t know a character’s reading and you can recognise its radical you can look it up by radical and stroke count using the character palette. It’s a bit laborious but might be useful if you need to look up a printed kanji. Once it’s a digital character it is then easy to do a dictionary search or reverse convert it to hiragana.

Lastly you could use a Japanese keyboard. Although it may be difficult to source one outside Japan. I bought a nice little Apple wireless keyboard the last time I was in Japan. However it’s not as easy as I thought. It’s very slow to relearn a keyboard layout, even when I just do two finger hunt and peck typing. The pluses are having hard wired keys to jump between romaji and kana input. I’ve also found it useful when using Maniackers kana fonts.

The next big item in Leopard is the inclusion of Japanese dictionaries. This is big. As far as I am aware there are no other foreign dictionaries included with OS X. Although “translate” is a very misleading term for Apple to use in relation to using a dictionary.

There are 3 dictionaries from Shogakukan. A Japanese dictionary, a Japanese to English dictionary and a Japanese synonyms dictionary. These are primarily for Japanese speakers but they are very useful for learners as well.
Once you are at the Intermediate stage it is a good idea to try to use an all Japanese dictionary if you can. It is better to understand a word in reference to its own language rather than to rely on English headwords.
However a word will be searched across all the dictionaries so you can quickly jump over to the Japanese - English dictionary to get an English meaning. To go from English to Japanese is a little harder. You can search an English word in this dictionary but the results will be all kanji. To get a reading you may need to click on a kanji word which will give you a reading for it in its own separate entry. The synonym dictionary has a similar function to a thesaurus.

Indexing means lookups are superfast. All dictionaries can be searched at once and everything is cross linked so it’s also fast to browse topics in the dictionaries.
I still need JEDict. JEDict’s searches are slow by comparison but the dictionary files in JEDict are much simpler. Maybe someday someone will compile Edict and the ALC dictionaries for Mac’s dictionaries. Even enabling Dictionary to send a search to Denshi Jisho and ALC’s websites in the same way wikipedia can be searched from the Dictionary would be very useful. (as yet I can’t find a way to implement this functionality)

Lastly there is expanded character support for JIS2004 and Hyogaiji.
This all beyond me but must be a good thing. Hyogaiji are characters beyond the official sets taught in schools that are often used in newspapers. JIS2004 appears to be the standard for the glyph shapes of printed kanji. From what I can see 168 characters from the previous standard have been slightly changed. It’s interesting to see this evolution but they don’t seem to be common characters.

What’s missing?
Handwriting recognition. I’d really like to be able to use a tablet to input kanji. Windows can do it to a limited extent in the IME why not Mac? In fact Nintendo DS can do it. They licensed a really good handwriting recognition software from Decuma. (It also used to be included with Sony Clies) I wish Apple or a third party would license it for the Mac.

Voices. Again Windows wins out here. There are some supurb and inexpensive 16bit voices available for Windows. If only Mac could implement the SAPI5 standard, which seems to be where voice technology has gone leaving MacInTalk behind.

But regardless of these missing features, I find Leopard a really good place to work in Japanese.

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There’s always some Japanese films at this festival.

This year it’s running from the 30th of April until the 4th of May, and these films are showing:
Dai Nipponjin
Vexille and an
Anime All Nighter (9 hours, 4 films, including Tekkonkinkreet and The Girl who Leapt Through Time)

All films are showing at the Apollo Cinema Regent Street.
Films are £10, the all-nighter is £25, booking details are here

There are goody bags with the Anime All Nighter, and before every screening T-shirts and DVDs are usually thrown into (at?) the audience.

I’d really like to see The Girl who Leapt Through Time but I don’t think I can do an all-nighter anymore. Maybe it’ll get a DVD release. . .

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PolarC (aka BigHeadedMan, aka Chika-san) is dj at a club night in Life, Old Street on the 11 May. Interesting music is guaranteed. Chika-san had this to say in her flyer –

『Dear all

Ogenki desuka?

I would like to inform you of our club night “Orientalism” hosted by Howard William from Honest Jon’s.

It will be all about Japanese rare tracks (mainly from 50’s-70’s) and aiming to have an chic but pop night!!
I will play my favourite 60’s to early 70’s Japanese pop tunes from J-bossa to Baby Brothers! Wow! ( I can play longer this time, no disappointment, I hope )

When: 11th May (Sun)
Time: 9pm-2am
Venue: Life 2-4 Old street EC1V 9AA
Map
There is a really nice modern Japanese restaurant on the ground floor and the downstairs bar has Japanese beer and spirits.
(The restaurant and ground floor bar are separated, so you don’t have to eat)

Why don’t you spend your Sunday evening, eating good Japanese food and drink, then listening to lovely tunes with us?
You can bring your friends of course!

Chika / Polar C』

–update 28Apr08–
I was in the area and checked out Life. the bar downstairs is quite nice. Maybe a bit small; it’ll be interesting to see it full as we were the only people there on Saturday evening. The restaurant. Not my thing really. I’d prefer izakaya value to modern and artful. But reasonable value for a London restaurant I guess.
Life did have a website but I’m getting an error page now so I swapped the links to the very interesting Japanese restaurant and food review site OishiOishi.

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An Internet flashcard web2.0 application.

Flashcards are a good way to learn new vocabulary. However there is always the task of making the cards and deciding what cards to make. Computers make the process easier, and I’m a great fan of iFlash, but it would be nice to be able to find sets of ready to use flashcards.

Enter WordChamp as a solution.

Building Flashcard Decks

The core of the system is sets of flashcards that are shared between users.
These are built using WordChamp’s dictionaries. To make a flashcard from scratch you type a word in your chosen language; if it is defined within WordChamps dictionaries, you can just copy the definition into the other side of the card. If it isn’t in the official dictionary there are also user contributed definitions that plug the gaps; although these should maybe be used with caution. The user contributions are a huge resource. It plugs the gaps and it makes a larger amount of audio files available. Your sets can be organised however you want and contain as many or as few cards as you want. I would suggest thematic sets are the most useful and about 20 or 30 cards the most manageable. If you have larger sets maybe they should be broken down.

Importing Decks

It is also possible to upload text files and these will be parsed to make your flashcards. I was able to export my cards from iFlash into a UTF8 formatted textfile, and after cleaning them up a little import them into WordChamp. Compared to recreating them by hand I saved myself a lot of work. The basic syntax is one card per line (the line feed or return character delimits a card) in the format “English = kanji | hiragana” you can have multiple English words if you separate them with a semicolon ; It may be possible to have multiple kanji but I found it interfered with the hiragana readings.

Audio and Pictures

You can also assign audio and pictures and example sentences to your cards. This will help in expanding the type of drills you can do. Pictures are a better stimulus for remembering a word; you may be more likely to connect the Japanese to an idea rather than an English word. Being able to hear audio on your cards reinforces the word. After all speaking is the end goal usually.
If both sides of your card has audio you can download vocabulary lists as MP3 files to listen to on your iPod.

Drills

There are up to nine types of drill depending on your flashcard decks. Usually however you will be doing some sort of practice recognition.
A typical drill will show you a card in either English or Japanese, and you type an answer in the target language. exact matchs are marked as correct. You can over-ride an answer if you used something similar and you think it’s correct. You can choose whether or not you see kana readings or example sentences, or whether you hear audio or not. It is useful to have to type an answer rather than just say it in your head. It keeps you honest! Also it’s another reinforcing behaviour.

User Stats

The system keeps track of how long you study. How many cards you study, how many you get right, how many you over-ride how many times it takes you to know a card. It saves all these stats and makes graphs from them. And displays them in your profile. This is an incentive to study. You don’t want to seem to be a slacker! Unfortunately there isn’t an interval learning algorithm nor a way of marking cards as learnt, almost learnt etc. The stacks are more an all or nothing affair. It is very like paper flashcards in this respect. If WordChamp would allow a user to tag a card with a value of from 1 to 5 this could be used to sort cards according to how well a user knows them.

Web Reading Assistant

Another feature is a webpage reader. This works in a very similar way to rikachan except if you are logged in you can save the words you are looking up and make a flashcard set from them. But the WordChamp system is much more powerful. It can go from any language to any language. So if English isn’t your first language you could go from Spanish to Japanese for instance. Or you could use it to look up English words that you’d like to use in Japanese.

Community

In web2.0 fashion it is possible to contact other users and find a study partner or tandem partner. This way you can get help in your studies. A possible use might be adding example sentences to each others card stacks or recording native audio for each other. And everything like this that you do benefits the whole community as we build a ginormous picture-audio-example dictionary. Unfortunately there isn’t a user forum. The site feels a bit solitary because of this I feel. Unother feature that is missing is the ability to rate a flashcard deck. This would encourage people to make good stacks and help sort out quality from chaff.

Tutors

It is also possible to find a tutor here. WordChamp takes a brokerage fee for every lesson you do and after that payment is between you and your tutor. I’m not sure how this would actually work out. A tutor would need to have a planned instruction program and have teaching skills to be anything other than a paid tandem partner.

Drawbacks

There is the possibility that WordChamp may charge for it’s services in the future. However at the moment it’s getting quite a good deal with users contributing to building their dictionaries. You loose control over everything you upload to WordChamp. It’s hard to see where they can start changing and still keep a large userbase. Another issue is all your flashcard decks are on their website and while not impossible it is cumbersome to export them to another system. Sometimes you want to be able to use flashcards offline.
However after playing with an iPod touch in the Apple Store, I can say it works on the Touch reasonably well. With the exception of sound which doesn’t work unfortunately and you still need some sort of Internet connection. I’m waiting on iFlash for the Touch iPod before making any big and expensive decisions.

Good Points

• Many pre-made flashcard decks.
• Audio dictionary.
• Many languages available.
• English to Japanese pop-up dictionaries for web browsing.
• User stats and graphs.
• MP3 download of stacks

Bad Points

• No interval learning systems
• No user forums
• No ratings system
• Export difficult
• Needs Internet access

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