しあわせ

NoteBook 2.1 from Circus Ponies Software

I use my MacBook a lot to learn Japanese. I’ve got so many clippings from websites, stray urls, little notes I’ve written scattered all over my harddrive. I’ve also got loads of barely organised pieces of paper with notes. The solution? NoteBook!

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Skim 0.7

I came across this useful little program for the Mac today. It’s a pdf reader that allows you to add notes and marks to a pdf file.

I carry my laptop much more often than I carry my class notes. So what I do is scan in the handouts I get in class and annotate them so I have a ready reference without carrying large amounts of paper around. (It might be possible to OCR the handouts but I’ve never needed this step.) It’s also possible to make them searchable if you annotate them properly.

The drawbacks (or maybe it’s just a feature) are that the notes and marks are not part of the pdf so other readers won’t be able to display them. So if you want to share a marked up document the other person will need to use Skim as well. I’ve found that notes added in another program won’t open and as yet I’ve had no success with the line/arrow tool.

What I particulary like about this program is it’s layout of panes and the ability to set what font and size you want the notes in. I always found the fixed size in other programs too small to read kanji notes. Best of all it’s free

Alex Chapin (MacGraw-Hill)

While waiting on a friend in a bookshop I wandered towards the languages section as usual. I found this reasonably priced little title from MacGraw-Hill. It effectively turns your iPod into a talking phrasebook. One less book to carry if you’re taking your iPod to Japan anyhow. (Although books don’t run out of power or break when you drop them).

The package consists of a CD with 1621 files on it, that’s 5.4 hours and 314.2MB of content, and a booklet of all the phrases and also some suggestions on using it. All the files are clearly recorded by a native speaker. They are broken down into sections using Artist and Album to make finding a phrase quite easy. The text of the phrase is in English and Romaji in it’s title and the Lyrics feature contains the entire section in English, romaji and kanji.

The way I tend to use a phrasebook is to check on something and refresh my memory before piling in to a language transaction like reserving tickets. I think this product would be as good as any print phrasebook for most uses.
For language learning I think it’ll help me expand my vocabulary a little and help give me phrases to instantly insert into my conversation attempts.

Well worth the £10 it costs.

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.

Make your own Karaoke videos for your iPod.

Griffin are giving away a small program which allows you to sync lyrics with a song and then export that as a video. It is available for both Mac OSX and Windows XP. If you provide them with feedback you can be entered into a free draw.

Principally the program is to complement Griffins $50 product iKaraoke. This is a microphone that attaches to an FM transmitter on your iPod allowing you to use your radio as a PA system for improptu Karaoke sessions! The module is also meant to remove the vocal from the tracks on the ipod but I don’t know how successful this is as I haven’t used the iKaraoke. In other software I have it is done by removing the centre part of a stereo recording; where the vocals normally are. However it is rarely successful and at best mutes the vocal.

The software is quite fun. You load in the track. (unfortunatly drm’d tracks won’t load so you may have to burn iTunes purchases to disk and re-import before you can use them in iKaraoke Prompter) Then load in Lyrics. You can search for lyrics using Google automatically using the program.

Then you sync the lyrics by playing the song and pressing the space key at the correct point when a word should be highlighted. Don’t worry if your timing is a bit out. You can go back and fine tune later.
For Japanese songs so far I prefer each word to be highlighted rather than use a sweep effect on playback. I also broke words into slyables using spaces to fine tune things a bit more. The drawback is it becomes slightly harder to read the lyrics. So far I’ve used romaji as being easier to read, but my plan is to try kana. Maybe I’ll try kanji, although I doubt I could get furigana to work in any intelligent way.

But I can now practice songs more easily. Give it a go. You’ll impress Japanese friends and will actually learn some new phrases and words along the way.