しあわせ

There is a recurring theme on a lot of blogs and forums that Japanese can only be written intelligibly using kanji. They have the idea that Japanese written only in kana (or romaji) cannot hold enough information and becomes difficult to read if not unintelligible. These ideas are mistaken. Kana is perfectly suitable to represent the sounds of Japanese, and that is all writing is, a representation of spoken language.

There are two examples of kana usage in Japan that demonstrate this; braille and morse code. Read the rest of this entry »

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.)

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I never learn, so “once more unto the breach..”

I am interested in how people learn and the problems of kanji and language in particular.
The topic rises again and again on forums so I’ve been thinking a bit more about it. Instead of a long post into threads that have strayed and grown too long I thought I’d make it into a post here.
It has stayed in draft form for a long time but between a comment about Heisig on this blog recently and trying to catch up with half finished posts, I’ve revisited it. Hopefully this will put Heisig to rest for me, it becomes a little frustrating to have my kanji studies defined in reaction to a method developed 33 years ago by someone who self-admittedly knew nothing about Kanji or Japanese when he first developed it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I had my closest encounter with the bombing of Hiroshima.
Closer than having been in Hiroshima and seen the remains and memorials.
Closer than seeing documentaries, and reading contemporary accounts.
Closer than touching a stunted tree that survived the blast.

A friend of mine on mixi wrote about how her grandfather died in Hiroshima that day.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post is prompted by an article on Doug’s blog Japan: Life and Religion. It made me think again of the issue of pitch accent in Japanese; a recurring topic on BBSes and Blogs but rarely covered in textbooks or classrooms. Rather than highjack his comments (as I tend to write lo~ng comments) I ‘ll post my thoughts here. Read the rest of this entry »