しあわせ

In the run-up to JLPT JapanesePod101.com is offering 30% off any 1 month subscription until the end of November. (follow the link above for the coupon code). As they charge in US dollars if your money is UK£ or Euros, and maybe even yen or Canadian Dollars, you get an excellent exchange rate as well.
The offer is doubly good as you’ll also have access to the back catalog of pdfs and exclusive sound files (I think).
I’m constantly amazed at the amount of material these guys generate. They’re a small operation running out of a small office working very long and hard Japanese hours. The output is top quality too. And they give most of it away! They deserve support for their efforts. Try a subscription today!

Today I bought a little shareware program because it was on special offer.

World of Where is a geography quiz program. But the attraction for Japanese learners is that you can run it in Japanese. I bought it to help improve my katakana reading ability. As most places outside Japan have their names in katakana when playing a quiz as well as testing my knowledge of geography I hope it will speed up my sight reading of katakana.

The full program is available for Windows as well as MacOS. It covers the entire globe as political and physical maps although the physical maps could be more detailed I think. There is also a map of the solar system. Besides English and Japanese the program also runs in 10 other languages.

The demo program only allows access to Europe and the full program is a little expensive at $25.
The full program is also a little dissapointing in terms of Japanese as well. Unusually the section on Japan isn’t in Japanese. Also it only covers the main areas like Kantou and Chubu rather than the prefectures. Unfortunatly it can’t be customised or I might have made a more complete Japan map for it.

I don’t regret the $12 I spent, but for a bit of Japanese practice (if you know Europe) is to stick with the demo version.

Not really to do with learning Japanese, but Go is part of Japanese culture. This is an absorbing game with rules simple enough to be grasped in 30 mins but with strategy complex enough to last a lifetime. It is also the only game I’ve come across with a handicapping system that can give an enjoyable and challenging game for both opponents when one is experienced and the other is a novice.

Goban is a mac implementation of GNU Go. It is very elegant and much more convenient sometimes that getting out the board and stones. You can play against the program, or use it to play against opponents locally, on the internet or on your LAN.
If you like chess or strategic games I’d recommend you give Go a try.

This is a small shareware program that allows you to make flashcard sets, organise them and run them on your Mac. It’s based around the concept of cards that have a question on one side and answer on the other that you use to quiz yourself on vocabulary. (Something that I don’t remember from school but it’s better than reading and trying to memorise whole lists.).

One of the advantages of a computer based system is you can have more than two sides to a card and can keep track of the ones you know more easily. You can print out your cards if you want and can also export them to an iPod. (But large text files don’t seem to work well on my first generation iPod and are very slow to load and scroll). Another good feature of iflash is that the author keeps a site where he encourages users to upload and download card sets and there are a number of good Japanese sets.

iFlash only costs $15 and I think it’s well worth it.

Nuku is a small program that quizzes you on Katakana and Hiragana characters. You choose which characters to be tested on, then choose the amount of characters to be used in a test and/or a time limit. The program shows you random characters and you have to select the romaji reading of them.
It is very useful to test your ability to recognise characters.

The only way I found to really learn kana was to write them out again and again until I knew them. It takes about 2 weeks to a month. You should also write them out now and again after you’ve learnt them to keep them fresh in your memory.