さよなら Smart.fm
Smart.fm, formally know as iKnow, is going back to its original name and going behind a paywall. Quite a steep paywall as well at 1000円 or $12 a month. And in the process finally abandoning the last of the community/social aspect of their business.
They have a lot of disgruntled users. (also complaints at koohii and tofugu) But I expect them to disappear as their user base shrinks by about 95% if newspaper paywalls are anything to go by.The (ex)users may well delete their vocab lists before they go which will lead to patchy results in the community lists search feature of iKnow. I’ve had a look at the new site. It feels very much a cut down version of the free community based site. Any subscription money you have would be better spent on a couple of good textbooks. Continue Reading →
美砂子さん featured in Japan Update Weekly
A former teacher of mine, Okuyama Misako san, is featured in this weeks Japan Update. A free paper you can get from most Japanese shops etc. in London. You can also read it online. All in Japanese of course, it can be useful for reading practice.
http://www.japanupdate.co.uk/?option=com_content&view=section&layout=…
If you want to learn Shodo in London I can recommend Misako-san. Her contact details are at the end of the article. If you’re feeling adventurous you can also have your lessons through Japanese!
Kanji Clinic
Kanji Clinic 漢字クリニック is a bi-monthly column in the Japan Times. It covers (as the name might suggest) Kanji. All previous columns are archived at the site as well as articles on kanji learning and links to kanji related sites. If you are interested in kanji you are sure to find something of interest here.
At the moment you can request a pdf reprint of a very interesting series of articles, Kanji Breakthrough by Mary Sisk Noguchi, from the now sadly defunct Nihongo Journal.
Japanese in 30 hours
When Eiichi Kiyooka, a young Japanese
academic in New York published a thin
textbook in 1938, he titled it “Japanese
in Thirty Hours.” Legend has it that
Kiyooka was confronted some years later by
a foreign student who complained that 30
hours was not enough to master Japanese.
The good-humored Kiyooka replied, “You
don’t understand. That is how long I took
to write the book.
microblog
I’ve started a microblog on posterous for briefer posts and interesting pages that don’t seem to be appropriate for this site. There will probably be posts about FileMaker as I continue with the Kanji Sieve project. Eventually I’ll sort out the RSS feed display and there will be a listing in the sidebar.
Kanji Sieve 0.5 released
Now with added Kanji Notebook.
New features in this iteration
- option to turn off tooltips
- click to display kanji information in statistics view
- shift-click for options on some buttons
- October 2010 standard Jyouyou kanji
- User defined keywords
- preferred language preference
- Spanish keywords
- French keywords
- Spanish, French and German automatic lookup on wwwjdic
- added Hispadic and Wadoku to list of online dictionaries
- Chuta.jp queried for English and preferred language
- sieve for custom list of kanji
- searched word in waeijiten is highlighted (verbs and adjectives decline)
- minor interface improvements
- improved character count for more accurate overall statistics
- Kanji Notebook (2010 Jyouyou, KKLD kanji, Kanji Oddysey)
- phonetic data (work in progress – 75 groups at present)
- Import images
- Images and Audio copied to media folder
- Image Editor from pixlr.com