しあわせ » nihongo de

Fridge Haiku – Desktop Poet

ロバート — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:29:01 +0000

Desktop Poet is a fun little program from Mariner Software. It replicates those little packs of magnetic words you find in bookshops that allow you to compose poetry on your fridge. This program allows you to do the same on your computer. And as such is much more convenient.

As words can be imported from simple text files I thought it might be interesting to use it to play at making sentences to improve my Japanese grammar and reading. Haiku or any poetry might be a bit advanced.

Another feature is that a single tile can contain multiple words. For instance in English you can chose between “run”, “runs”, “running”, “ran” and “runner” on a single tile. In my Japanese version this allows me to have the kanji, furigana, and a verbs root on a tile. I decided to split out the inflections so I didn’t have to write so much mainly but it’s also good for playing with grammar. It could allow for English meanings but I decided to leave them out and try to work with words I know already.

On the word lists I’m working on, you can automatically look up a word on Denshi Jisho if you have an Internet connection.
I hope to be able to figure out how to easily change the colour of groups of words depending on their function. At the moment when you merge a set of words into the program you can set the colour of the tiles.

Desktop Poet is available for both Mac and Windows and the download version is a mere $15 (about £8)

Hopefully I’ll soon have some word lists here for you to download.

Originaily this software was published by Stick Software where it was called Issa after the Haiku poet Kobayashi Issa. So maybe it’s fitting to use it to learn Japanese.

It’s not yet the perfect program so I had these few thoughts which I shared with Mariner in the hopes that 1.1 will be better

Desktop Poet 1.0.1 Mac — feedback & feature requests

I recently bought Desktop poet and have been playing with it.
I have a couple of thoughts.

The option to run it in a normal window would be extremely useful. The “virtual fridge” is cumbersome to move around and resize. Also a normal window could have a toolbar which would be useful. Multiple instances of the window would be good. A workspace could be saved like a standard document. with different backgrounds and type settings for different types of project.

A workspace / container space(s) separation would also be useful.
The containers could be for different wordlists.
A drawer metaphor might work. Allowing words from separate lists to be accessed separately.

An ability to show/hide tiles or groups of tiles while working could also be useful.

In the new tile dialog It would be good to be able to input a complete list rather than just a single word or phrase. Maybe if it accepted the same strings as when writing a wordlist in a texteditor.

The ability to define the colour of tiles for a wordlist in the metadata of the wordlist for example:
@tilecolor red.
@tilecolor #3300FF
I’m quite interested in Desktop poet as a learning tool and the ability to colour code parts of speech would be useful. (It can be done after the fact in the program but I’d like it on import)

A wider range of colours through a colour picker would be good.

Changing the background via a contextual menu would be nice too.

The HTML export is very crude. integrate some style sheets. This could also be user expandable like wordlists.

An iTouch version of Desktop Poet might work as well don’t you think?

Thank you for reading. I appreciate how hard it can be to program. If I had the skill I’d give it a go myself to get the sort of program I’d like.

にほんごをまなぼう　Lets Study Japanese

ロバート — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:15:23 +0000

にほんごをまなぼう　Lets Study Japanese is an interactive site based around school activities made by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

It is almost completely in Japanese. There are some English explanations of what to do, but otherwise it’s an immersive program. You click on pictures and you get a dialogue or a description written in kana and spoken to you in Japanese at the same time.

Both polite Japanese, the masu desu form, and casual plain Japanese is provided. The children mainly speaking plain form and adults polite form.

It sems to be mainly a teachers resource but I’m sure most students would be able to navigate it by themselves and learn new things. You might need to know your kana, but even then you could read along with the audio to improve your kana and there are learning kana screens as well.

sections include
15. じかんわり（jikanwari – timetable) for telling the time and dates
4. からだのなまえ（parts of the body)
3. トイレ (toilet)
10. きゅうしょく (school lunch)
11. そうじ (cleaning)

There’s a lot of vocabulary here presented in an interesting manner, it’s worth a look. I’ve learnt some new words already.

It needs shockwave and java I think. On my setup some of the voicerecording modules don’t seem to load, but you might have more luck. Also some directories seem to be missing. It also uses frames as well as shockwave which makes it hard to bookmark sections unfortunately. The last update was Heisei13 which I think is 2002 so it’s a bit dormant perhaps.

Yotsuba＆! • よつばと！

ロバート — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:57:35 +0000

よつばと！ 著:あずまきよひこ

More “Feel Good”-ness from しあわせ！

Yotsubato is a manga from the creator of my favorite anime “Azumanga Daioh“, Kiyohiko Azuma. It is about the day to day existence of a pre-schooler living in Japan with her adoptive father. (Yotsuba may not be Japanese herself). The manga’s subtitle is “Enjoy Everything”; which Yotsuba-chan surely does as only a five year old can. And so the look of delight on her face as she laughs ははは！never fails to cheer me up.

There are 7 volumes available. (I got mine while in Japan and via Amazon.jp In London you can get them at JP Books in Mitsukoshi.) Yotsuba always speaks in kana, sometimes mispronouncing words too. The adults speak in Kanji, but it all has furigana so it’s good for learners. The artwork is very clean and detailed line drawing that gives a good sense of Japanese life. — check out 第9話「よつばと復讐」[Yotsuba and revenge] here.

Bonsai Maple Syrup

ロバート — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:57:53 +0000

Tomoko-san, another friend of mine from the “Chickens”, is one of the directors and performers in this play at the Pleasance Theatre Islington
June 21, 22, 23 at 19:45, Sunday 24 June at 18:00
Tickets £10 (£7 concessions)

Hiroshima, 1947. Canadian journalist Henri
Corbeil is sent on a six-week assignment.
He does not return home for almost a year.

Montreal, 1971. 24-year-old Hélène Corbeil
retraces her father’s journey through Japan.
Armed only with his journals and interviews,
she hopes to find the mother she never knew.

This bout of visual theatre explores hand in
hand melodrama and satire, tragedy and
parody, as the international cast concieve a
poignant, sensitive, albeit sometimes silly epic,
in their native English, Japanese and French.

I saw the dress rehearsal last night and it’s quite a performance.
The company has put a lot of work into it and it deserves an audience.
I was pleased to be able to understand the Japanese except for one long speech, but that is given a translation by another cast member anyhow.
As a bonus the venue is really good– There’s a great courtyard and pub/restuarant below the theatre.

–update 14Sept–
The company has a promotional video on YouTube showing their work on this show.

––old event––
links in this post are that are no longer active have been removed

My Father 父上

ロバート — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:27:50 +0000

Another comic-like page. This was inspired by a small manga that 千賀さん made about her father and her time as a child in Yokosuka. Essentially it is a piece of guided writing made by answering the questions in a handout.

子供(こども)のころ、毎土曜日の朝(まいどうようびのあさ))ボーイスカウト会((ボーイスカトかい))に行っていました。そして図書館(としょかん)に本を借り(かり)に行って、家に昼ご飯(ひろごはん)を食べに帰りました。

父は海(うみ)のスカウトの艇長(ていちょう)でした。皆さん(みんなさん)は父を「スキッパー」と言いました。父は親切(しんせつ)で甘い(あまい)です。この頃(このころ)仕事(しごと)に行きません。八十年才(はちじゅうさい)です。父が大好き(だいすき)ですよ。

故郷(こきょう)はHowthと言います。ダブリンの近くて(ちかくて)小さい(ちいさい)漁村(ぎょそん)です。港(みなと)にたくさん漁船(ぎょせん)にありました。いつも忙しかった(いそがしかった)です。今時(いまどき)漁船よりヨットがたくさんあります。故郷に帰ると嬉しい(うれしい)学生時代(がくせいじだい)の事を思い出します(おもいだします)。

Google Earth location file

Right click or ctrl click to save the file to your disk. Then if you load it into Google Earth you can see where I was writing about.

No related posts.

Summer Holiday Slides

ロバート — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:24:41 +0000

Summer 05

Another presentation I did. This time of my trip to Japan, 僕の夏休み。 A fair amount has furigana but you might need to get out a dictionary.

Easter Holiday Manga

Easter Holiday Manga

ロバート — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:21:07 +0000

Easter 05

This isn’t handwritten, (and I didn’t add furigana) but here is a manga I made for homework. 僕の春休みの日記。Remember it reads right to left.

Ninongo Juku

ロバート — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 18:04:12 +0000

This site is reasonably advanced. (Juku is the name for what most westerners would know as cram schools.) The sites owner writes blog entries and also records them as audio. So you get reading and listening practice and also a vocabulary list.

NHK

ロバート — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:58:51 +0000

Japan’s national broadcaster has a weekly radio broadcast of Japanese for Beginners and Brush Up your Japanese. The episodes are available on their website.

They have recently redesigned their site and as well as looking so much better now more of the lessons are available online at one time. The previous 14 weeks are available as audio and all the transcripts are available. You still may have to wait a year for the audio to loop around to the episode you want.

Another problem is that the recordings are in real audio format. If you want to save them you will need to record them somehow. On a Mac I can recommend Audio Hijack.

On the plus side NHK will send you a free booklet of transcripts of the Brush Up your Japanese conversations if you fill in a form on the website. The Japanese for Beginners programs are available in many languages not just English.

JapanesePod 101

ロバート — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:56:49 +0000

This is a fantastic resource. Every week JapanesePod101.com podcast a survival lesson, 3 basic lessons, an intermediate lesson and on alternate weeks a culture lesson and a news podcast. Like a lot of audio language classes the programs are based around a conversation that is then broken down and analysed. Usually a single topic or grammar point is covered.

The host is an American, Peter-san and there is a team of Japanese, including Yoshi-san, Sakura-san, Takase-san, Chigusa-san, Take-san and others that I can’t keep up with. The tone is light and fun. It took a little while for me to get used to it but it grew on me. The lessons are at a level that’s easy to understand. There is a fair amount of repetition and key words are broken down syllable by syllable. There is perhaps a bit too much padding for repeated listening and I often feel like editing them down to just the core conversation. The biggest problem for newcomers is to catch up on the large back catalogue of podcasts. As of October 2006 they have over 140 lessons and it’s growing each week.

The audio content is free but there is also backup material that they charge for as a subscription service.
There are two levels. Basic which gives you transcripts and notes in pdf format. Advanced that adds a learning centre where there are quizzes and vocabulary lists. Also there is a fairly neat feature which puts a line by line transcript with audio onto your iPod which makes for a very compact way of reviewing episodes
There is a fee trial subscription so you can check it out before you get out your credit card.

Finally there is a bulletin board that has a friendly core of users. As yet it’s not as busy as some boards out there but because of that, overall it seems friendlier. If you need any help about things Japanese I’m sure you could find it here.

Check it out.