Learn Japanese Today

So I’ve been watching a lot of Eyeshield 21 lately, an anime about American football, and I’ve been using it to find new sentences to put in my SRS to study. I struggled with the process at first, but now I have a pretty good system for getting them down, and I’d like to share that with you.

First of all though, why use anime? Why not sample sentences from textbooks or dictionaries where they’re already translated?

Well, and I’m sorry for getting all neuroscience-y on you, but listening and translating builds neural pathways, while copying from another source does not. By the time you’re studying a sentence from an anime in your SRS, you already have a neural pathway for how it sounds and what the individual pieces mean. This provides a stronger background for the next time you hear the word, whereas with a sentence from a textbook, you’ve still yet to hear it in context and that neural pathway has yet to be established. It is still worth it to learn sentences from textbooks, in fact you can input sentences much faster, but taking in sentences from a contextual, audio source is the fastest way to incorporate them into your memory.

Now AJATT likes to recommend watching shows without subtitles, but I’m inclined to disagree, at least for the purpose of mining sentences. The key is to use the subtitle as a guide, not a translation. I’m a subtitler myself, and rather than a literal translation, the subtitle is usually an English phrase that means roughly the same thing, and fits in context. Idioms and colloquialisms are usually converted to English counterparts in the subtitle, which can be very useful for contextualizing Japanese phrases. As my high school Japanese Sensei used to say, “In America, you have ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease.’ In Japan, we have ‘the crying bird gets shot.’

Basically what I’m saying is that you should listen, and keep listening until the words you hear come out to make a sentence that means roughly the same thing as the subtitle. You do this by listening for a word, spelling it out in hiragana, and then looking it up in a dictionary. If the meaning fits as part of the subtitle, move on. Then you plug the subtitle into your SRS. This forces you to remember the whole context, the listening, and the meaning of the individual parts to remember the sentence correctly.

More on listening though, sometimes figuring out what people are saying is hard. So first of all, choose a show you know something about, so the words aren’t that strange. I chose Eyeshield 21 because, being an American, I know lots about football, so the content itself is rarely confusing and I can focus on the language. If most of the sentences are about Proton Mass Accelerators and such, you may have a hard time translating with most dictionaries.

You should also try to get a sense of what characters you can understand and which ones speak either quickly, weirdly, or with heavy dialect. I’ve found that female characters are usually the easiest to understand, but that doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to them. Try figuring out what a bike gang member is saying sometime, it’s very much fun.

I’ve only been doing this for a couple of days and I’m already seeing huge improvements, so I hope you can say the same.

I know that TiVos are mostly replaced these days, now that Comcast and Dish provide their own digital recorders, but if there’s one thing TiVo was great at, or is (is past tense appropriate), it’s fast forwarding and rewinding. There were a serious of soothing beeps and boops that let you know how fast you were going, and when you hit play while fast forwarding or rewinding it would always back up just the right amount.

But my favorite part was this little button here. It would just backup the tape 2 to 3 seconds and then start playing again, which is an unbelievably convenient feature.

You may be wondering why this is important, and what this has to do about Japanese. Well, today I was watching my new favorite anime, Eyeshield 21 , and copying down some sentences from it to use on my SRS. I was watching on Crunchyroll , so I couldn’t exactly use a remote, and I spent hours (minutes) clicking to move the tape back to the phrase I was copying.

What I’m trying to say is a was really wishing for a TiVo, and more specifically, a TiVo remote.

So do any of you have TiVos? Do you use it to copy down stuff from Japanese shows? If not, you’re a sad, sad pile of wasteful, wasteful waste.

You may have noticed that all the pages have disappeared in favor of the brand-spanking new Review Database. I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m really proud of this one.

I’m not a big-time programmer, so this is really my first foray, and I think it turned out pretty well. One of the things I’m doing at the paper for work is designing a database for all sorts of contact information for local officials. After a long day of coding, I decided to let off some steam…by doing more coding. But this was a lot more fun.

I really like this because now, rather than have to add each new review to a page, I can just pop it in the database and it’ll update right on the site. Better for me, better for you.

Anyways, enjoy the review database with full search and sortability. Oh yeah. This is the big time. Either click the tab or click here.

You can find this station here.

Listening to Japanese as often as you can is important for getting good at Japanese. Just surrounding yourself with spoken Japanese presents you with an opportunity to absorb it without thinking about it constantly. That’s right, you don’t really have to focus on what’s being said to learn, I mean, it helps, but listening while you’re working out or writing on your blog can still help you become more familiar with the language.

So listening to Japanese is a good thing. There are lots of cool bands and CDs you can buy, so you should definitely start building your collection. But what happens when you don’t have your CD collection with you and you still want to listen to Japanese. Well, that’s why kamisama invented Internet radio.

You see, at my work, I can’t bring in my Japanese CDs and my iPod is currently broken, so I’ve been listening to a lot of internet radio. The new site that I’m listening to is called Armitage’s Dimension, and so far I like it a lot. It’s a station geared towards Japanese Pop/Rock/Anime music. The cool thing about it is that it’s entirely request driven, so the songs you hear are usually pretty solid.

Ease of Use: 8.5

The reason I first started using AD was that it was so easy to get started. You click the listen button on the homepage and there you are. You don’t have to make an account, although you should, and many media players are supported. Making an account is very easy, and then you’ll be requesting songs in no time. My only gripe is that the title of the song is listed last, rather than first, so it makes it tougher to find the song you’re looking for. Overall though, very user friendly.

Authenticity: Depends

The authenticity really depends on the song, so I don’t feel comfortable assigning a numeral. Be careful with songs from anime, especially theme songs, most of them are fine, but don’t learn about rocket-propelled grenades unless you absolutely have to. Again, this station presents you with real Japanese music, so the failings in authenticity are in the music, not the station. Therefore, this category doesn’t really apply, yeah Todd, thanks for wasting my time.

Quantity of Knowledge: 6

If you’re looking for anime music, change that 6 to a 9. Otherwise, keep it that way. The music database for this station is entirely user-updated, which has its ups and downs. There are lots of categories (like anime music) and artists that are absurdly fleshed out, while there are other glaring holes. For example, this stations displays a catastrophic lack of The Blue Hearts, one of my favorite Japanese bands of “Linda Linda” fame, but they have just about every album for another band I really like, L’arc en Ciel. Also, the fact that the database is user-maintained means that it doesn’t have all the late-breaking current singles from Japan. Instead, it feels like a favorite Japanese music playlist on your iPod, which is nice at times.

Price: 10

Oh it’s obscenely free. Have you noticed I’ve been reviewing a lot of free things lately? Guess who doesn’t have money to throw around…just kidding. I just generally feel that if you’re already putting in so many hours into study, it shouldn’t cost you a bunch of money as well to learn Japanese. P.S. I just bought myself a new sousaphone for marching around town, and it’ll be here in a week. *excited*.

Fun: 9.5

I really like the way the request feature works on this station. You can request something and then generally hear it within 5 or 6 songs. It’s not quite instant gratification, but it’s close. And if you hear a song you like, you can add it to your favorites, and then request it quickly in the future when you want to hear it again. It’s a lot of fun fleshing out your favorites and listening to whatever song is stuck in your head. And of course, it’s always great to hear any anime soundtrack you may want to, good times.

Overall: 8.6

Again, I’m going to stress the “greatest hits” feel this station has, as opposed to current stuff. But, by being entirely request based, you know that the song you are listening to is a song someone really likes, so its a good way to discover new music. Also the community on the website is pretty solid, and there are a lot of other Japanese students there. This site is definitely good at what it does, so I like it a lot. Too bad about The Blue Hearts…

Well….good luck. Reading the newspaper in Japan requires an absurdly high level of kanji-fluency, making it very difficult for foreigners to read it. This makes sense with the Japanese 鎖国 (sakoku) mindset. Sakoku refers to National isolation and the exclusion of foreigners. Japan was sakoku for many years, so a lot of Japanese beliefs and policies harken back to that mindset of everything being design For Japanese Only.

As a journalist myself, I think this is a problem. In the news world, we have a phrase that goes something like “don’t use a dollar word when a nickel word will do,” meaning that you should only use difficult words if they can’t be expressed in a simpler fashion. The way I think about it is this: writing “erudite” instead of “smart” doesn’t make you any more of either. Newspapers exist for the readers, not for the writers, and in a growingly international world, it’s a damn shame that you have to have a native level of fluency to read the paper.

A lot of you are probably thinking, what about papers that are translated into English like the Daily Yomiuri and the Mainichi Daily ? Well, as the Mainichi Daily scandal shows us, the news we get is not always the same as the news Japan gets. I know the WaiWai column is an extreme example, but Japan is also very sensitive and very proud, so the news we get that’s translated in Japan sometimes has a tendency to glorify Japan rather than being honest and critical like a good paper should.

Well, do you think you have what it takes? Here are some quizzes with the most common kanji compounds from newspapers. See how you do.

Other than that, I have a question for you all. How can Japan make its news more readily available to foreigners in an unbiased form? How can newspapers become more readible? Can a newspaper with fewer kanji and a lower vocabulary be successful?

Hey there, I know this isn’t a review, because well, frankly, I don’t have time to write one. But. I think this is something you guys should check out. This manga is called Eagle (イーグル）by Kaiji Kawaguchi, and it follows a Japanese news reporter who is covering a Japanese-American senator’s run for the presidency. It’s set in the timeframe of the 2000 presidential elections and features such characters as Bill Clydon (Clinton) and Al Noah (Gore). Especially if you’re familiar with American politics, this is a very interesting manga, and it has a lot to do with newspaper, which is the theme of the week.

I first read this in English, before my Japanese was good enough, but now I’m looking forward to reading it in Japanese. Unfortunately, I don’t know where to find it online. Can somebody help me?

Here’s a link to buy it in English. And you can find scattered volumes in Japanese here .

If you know any better place to obtain these, let me know.

So, I’ve realized that I’ve never really put up anything about myself. I know you’re all just here for the knowledge infusion, but that’ll have to wait ’til tomorrow. It’s time for a proper introduction.

The thing that made me think about this was that I was linked by Tom @ Hello Mother, Hello Father with this thing called Meme which is essentially a blog post that gets passed around the internet to help build traffic for related sites. I mean, it seems kind of like a chain letter, but who am I to complain about free traffic. The way I see it, this is a harmless way to have readers find more sites they might be interested in, and have them learn something about the bloggers they read from in the process. Anyways, here are the rules:

1. List the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.

Well first of all, this is me:

1. My name is Todd.
2. This summer, I’m working at a Chicago-area newspaper doing reporting, writing, and copy-editing.
3. I’m a college student majoring in English and Japanese.
4. At school, I work subtitling documentaries. My most recent one is about resident Koreans living in Japan, it’s called “Zainichi.”
5. I’ve spent months living in Japan, mostly in Nagano, but I’ve had extensive stays in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nagoya as well.
6. Outside of Japanese, my main interests are writing and Ultimate Frisbee.
7. My secret talents include swing dancing and playing the sousaphone.

Alright, there’s the facts. Now, I just want to make this abundantly clear to everyone, I’m not a Japanese expert, teacher, or linguist. I’m a student, just like you, and I struggle, just like you. The reviews and articles are written from a student, well experienced student, viewpoint, which I feel is something that education, specifically language education, has lost sight of. What matter most is not how people teach, but how people learn. And that’s what this is all about. LJT is all about sharing my experiences with you as a student, so you can know what’s helpful and what’s a waste of time. That’s where the best education happens. Students talking to each other. To quote Pink Floyd, “Hey, Teacher, leave them kids alone.”

And now for the links:

Sanjo-chan @ cen.taku.me
Kirin @ JCDRKawaii
McAlpine @ The Soul of Japan
Jamaipanese @ Jamaipanese.com
Khatzumoto @ All Japanese All the Time
Saleem @ 100 Japanese Things
Alex @ Victory Manual