しあわせ » internet

Japanese Courses in Sheffield

ロバート — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 19:34:02 +0000

I read some comments made by Amelia Cook of Chocochip Languages on a (ill concieved) campaign against romaji web site today. Based solely on the level-headedness of her comments, she comes across as an enthusiastic, thoughtful and caring teacher who can convey her enthusiasm. Following her links to Facebook, I found a page about her courses in Sheffield. If you are in the Sheffield area and want to learn Japanese I suggest you check it out.
Chocochip Languages Japanese courses in Sheffield
They seem to have many options for courses and an interesting approach. While you can learn a lot by yourself if you are disciplined, a class; classmates; a teacher and a regular time for Japanese can be incredibly useful.

(unfortunately since it seemed to insist on a Facebook account I couldn’t comment on the no-romaji site. But in the spirit of fixing the Internet I’m working on a post in rebuttal.)

さよなら Smart.fm

ロバート — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 11:07:49 +0000

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.I can understand the anger of users. Smart / iKnow set itself up as a free collaborative social space, with the hint of possible future premium features. It’s to become a subscription based online srs program. (with the possibility of mobile apps, not sure how this will work but based on their prior efforts not so good would be my guess). A very different proposition. They have also taken the user compiled lists and locked the compiler out. At the very least it’s very poor etiquette on Cerego’s behalf not to credit people. From a users perspective the inability to search for a compilers work makes for a poorer experience.

They’ve squandered a lot of goodwill and are now engaged in some damage limitation. (They have since deleted their blog, not that they read many comments judging by the spam they allowed to accrue.) Despite what Cerego say a substantial amount of content on the site was user generated, according to their own statistics yesterday over 1000 items were created and 120 lists (goals) compiled, and this during the swan song. Individuals have added thousands of words, sentences and translations, and hundreds of lists. Quality aside, just going by the index generated on custom lists I would guess there are circa 674,000 custom goals compared to under 100 of Cerego’s official goals.
I’m tempted to delete the lists I made but it’d be a bit churlish perhaps. I more or less knew I was providing free labour for Cerego, but saw it as part of the give and take of a sharing community. I certainly won’t be making any transition to the paid site.

Smart was good for a while. Eventually though, I became fed up with how laborious it was to create lists and how difficult it was to extract your content from the site. When I got an iPod touch I no longer wanted to study online and moved to using a flashcard application. I think that’s where the majority of iKnow / Smart’s users will go. I reckon under $30 would buy a desktop app of equal power or about $6 on an iPod.
I understand their need to charge fees. It can’t be cheap to run a site like that and as yet there wasn’t much evidence of a revenue stream from the site itself although they have raised $23million plus in funding to date. I wonder if the investors will be seeking a return. That’s about 160,000 user years of subscriptions. Unfortunately for Cerego the dominant pricing on the Internet is free. The pricing of apps on the Apple App Store is under $5 (as a one off payment) They are facing an uphill battle. I would have thought a freemium model would have worked better. Although maybe they hope the core market in japan is less likely to complain and more likely to pay. I’m not so sure. The Japanese I’ve met expect top quality service and products.

If you want an alternative to smart.fm online try wordchamp.com. It may not be as graphically stylish but it has some more features. It’s free but also has a premium rate at a very reasonable $10 a year. Or there’s quizlet. On the iPod I recommend flashcards deluxe ($4) Or for a dedicated (but less customisable) program with multiple tests and games and high quality material to study including audio by native speakers and example sentences I highly recommend Japanese Sensei ($16)
Actually I recommend an iPod over any online system or desktop system mainly because it’s so portable; you can find many spare moments to go through your flashcards.
Anki seems very popular. It’s free for pc and mac but relatively expensive on the iPod (mainly the developers idea is for the iPhone app to subsidise the work on the free desktop app). I don’t really like it. It requires a lot of initial effort to learn the program and it always seemed windows clunky in it’s interface and documentation.

(This is a cross-post from my microblog, I wonder what that does to my google juice)

Kanji Clinic

ロバート — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 09:45:14 +0000

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.

Frank Chickens, Comedy Gods, Ride Again!

ロバート — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 07:37:50 +0000

My friends Frank Chickens have become the obscure outsider candidate in a Rage Against The Machine style attempt to subvert the Fosters Edinburgh Comedy God Award public vote. It all started with a rant by Stewart Lee at the organisers where he mentioned the Chickens as possibly the most obscure act of the past 30 years. (They were nominated for a Perrier Fringe Award in 1984). Now it seems to have gained traction, via twitter and elsewhere, and the Chickens are currently number one in the online poll! Let’s keep them there. They are nice guys and would quite like to win an award.
In the spirit of Mr Splashypants –
Vote now – Vote often – Spread the word!

––update 01Sep10––
They won!
Yay for the skewed results of Internet voting!
I could hear the clenching of teeth in the Foster’s PR’s statements about the win.

Crack appears in Mixi’s exclusion method

ロバート — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:29:23 +0000

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.

Japanese Blog in German

ロバート — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:41:41 +0000

I got a nice email from the author of futurefire, a blog about Japanese study written in German, so I went to check out her site.
I can’t read German but I’m sure it would be useful if you can. As you might expect from someone studying design the graphics are interesting. Check out the article on a re-design of the Tokyo subway map and one on furoshiki.
Also have a look at thephotographs on Wanda’s main site.

Regentag store grand opening

ロバート — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:11:30 +0000

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。

Haikugirl’s Japan

Firefox – The Japanese learners browser.

ロバート — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:41:18 +0000

The browser of choice for learners of Japanese has to be Firefox. Maybe because it’s logo is inspired by Godzilla! I resisted it for a long while because I quite liked Omniweb. Since Omniweb ~~stopped development~~ was in a period of slow development/on the back burner and caused my system to go to a crawl I looked at Firefox again. The only complaint I have is Firefox doesn’t support the Mac systemwide contextual menu.

The enormous plus of Firefox is the add-ons.

Rikaichan
The most popular for Japanese learners is probably Rikaichan. This took the feature available at Rikai.com of inserting pop-up translations of words and freed it of Rikai.com. Hence the name. It makes reading Japanese webpages easier or even text files by inserting this modern English pop-up furigana. The only drawback is it can make you lazy and be a bit of a crutch.

Furigana-Injector
For those more adventurous (or studious) Furigana-injector provides help without using pop-ups or English. It inserts furigana into Japanese pages. Making it much easier to read kanji. You can also set it only to inject furigana when you want it on a page. As you learn kanji readings you can add your known kanji to a list so only unknown kanji will have furigana. Very clever.
My only worry is that it might get the readings wrong, but I’d guess this would be rare.
On mixi it changes this

into this

Ruby support
To make Furiganainject work you will need HTML Ruby or HTML Ruby Support. My preference is HTMLRuby. It is simple and seems to render ruby consistently. HTML Ruby Support allows much more customisation but for me it sometimes disrupted the rendering of a page.

AdBlock Plus
Using AdBlock Plus and AdBlock Plus: Element Hiding Helper means I can kill ads but more importantly cleanup some of the more annoying aspects on my favorite sites and BBSes in an out-of-sight out-of-mind sort of way. I can kill the huge pictures some people like as signatures on BBSes. I can transform JapanesePod101 from this

to this

and keep my sanity in the face of ads about Jpods features I’m already aware of. (I love these guys but they should really look at usability studies)

Characterizer
More esoteric add-ons ~~are~~ were Characterizer. This replaces the first letter of an English word with a Kanji. I believe the original idea was by the author of The Kanji Handbook. (Although this now seems to have disappeared from the add-ons repository. June 2010)
It’s interesting but I prefer straightforward Japanese myself.

Do you have any recommendations for Firefox and Japanese?

Children Full of Life – 涙と笑いのハッピークラス

ロバート — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:33:02 +0000

I came across this film today on Japan Probe. It reminds me a bit of “The Queen’s Classroom” except this is a real look inside a classroom in Japan’s primary school system.
The original 涙と笑いのハッピークラス―4年1組命の授業 was made by NHK in 2003. It follows a year in Mr. Kanamori’s 4th grade class. It is very different from the western classes I know of. Not least because of the teacher’s relationship to the children, the discussion of matters such as death, the group solidarity, and the willingness of children to write.
The video on YouTube, Children Full of Life, is CBC’s version that is subtitled and has an English commentary. It’s well worth watching before it inevitably gets taken down.

(But for the gold standard in fly-on-the-classroom-wall documentaries search out Etre et Avoir)

BBC Four Japan season

ロバート — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:51:22 +0000

BBC Four has a season of Japan related programs at the moment called Hidden Japan. Also on their web site there is an amusing series of Japanese word of the day to watch. If you miss any you can catchup using iPlayer. Unfortunately online versions via the BBC are most likely restricted to the UK (or those with the knowhow to have their IP appear in the UK) so I’ve changed the embedded video to a YouTube video that should work for everyone.