Learn Japanese Today

In accordance with the whole new Sunday Sing-Along idea, I thought you all should be made more aware of the best way to convert songs into knowledge.

Alright, first things first. Listen to the song a couple of times. Don’t look at the lyrics yet, they don’t matter. Just listen to the song a couple of times and try to figure out what it’s about. You don’t have to know every word, just figure out the situation.

Why is the singer singing the song? Who is the song to? What’s the purpose of the song?

Once you’ve done that, you can start looking at the lyrics. Use the lyrics to guide you through times when the singer is unclear and you’re not quite sure what they’re saying. It doesn’t matter yet if you don’t know certain words. Look at words you know, then keep trying to figure out what the song is saying.

Think of each verse and chorus as its own chapter in a book. Each of these “chapters” will be about a more specific person, place, thing, or event, while the whole “book” (song) tells a story connecting the chapters. Try to see how that’s done.

Now you can bust out your dictionary. Look up words you don’t know, and if they’re not in there, look up the root word. Then look around on the internet for colloquial conjugations or just try to figure out what it means by context. The words you find in songs are often quite different from the ones you find in textbooks.

Keep looking up words until you understand the song. If you have the time, you can translate it as well. It certainly won’t hurt your Japanese. If you don’t want to translate the whole thing though, you can choose some of the choicer sentences and plug them into your SRS to study later.

Good Luck!

I guess some stereotypes are true.

So today, I was working on a story for the paper about the amount of food the Chicago Bears consumed during training camp. For example, they ate enough liquid eggs to fill 4 standard-sized bathtubs.  You know, that kind of thing.

Anyways, I was looking at per capita seafood consumption to make some sort of statistical joke about the Bears eating more seafood than Ethiopia, and I found out that Japan eats more seafood per year than the US, despite being much smaller. Go JAPAN!

I had the statistical data in front of me all day, I think per capita consumption was 49.8 pounds per year according to an NOAA study. But now I can’t find it. And I’m tired because I worked for 14 hours. Go JAPAN!

I know you’re watching the Olympics. You have to. You’re probably watching the Olympics right now while you’re reading this. And of course you cheer for your favorite athletes. You yell at the screen. Why not yell in Japanese?

がんばれ！(ganbare!): This is a fairly common phrase that means “do your best,” but is also used in the same context as the English “good luck.” The Japanese don’t need luck. They just do their best. This cheer is appropriate for just about any activity, but is somewhat on the tame side.

行け！(ike!): Not to be confused with the word for “pond,” this word is a rough command form of “GO!” Use this word repeatedly to cheer people on in races or any contests where speed is involved.

速く、速く！(hayaku, hayaku!): Equivalent to the English “Faster, FASTER!” or “Hurry up!” Again, it should be used for contests of speed, especially if your athlete is behind.

勝って！(katte!): This command does not beat around the bush. It means “WIN!” Good for any sport, especially towards the end.

勝った！(katta!): Another derivative of the word katsu (to win), this is a celebratory cheer meaning “We Won!”

やった！(yatta!): This is possibly the simplest exclamation on the list, it’s another celebratory cheer meaning “Hooray!”

こいつを破れ！(koitsu o yabure): This is a fun one, and you may want to be careful who you say it around. It means “destroy those guys.” Use this one in a game between bitter rivals. For “destroy that guy” change koitsu to aitsu.

ぜんぜん負けられない！(zenzen makerarenai!): This one is a defiant cheer meaning “We can’t possibly lose!” Good for when your team is up against the wall.

まさか (masaka): This expression of despair is something along the lines of “Oh, no” “It can’t be” or “Goddammit” depending on the level of emphasis. This is a good thing to say when your athlete either loses or underperforms.

チェ!  (che!): It may not sound like it, but this exclamation means pretty close to the English “Shit!” It’s good to show an outburst of anger, like when an opponent does something well.

Print this list out and start actually enjoying the Olympics. See if you can use each word at least once in a single event. Ganbare!

It was my birthday yesterday, so I went out to dinner with my brother at this very delicious, very expensive sushi place in Chicago called Mirai. We had some strange and delicious dishes including thinly sliced strips of ika (squid) in an uni (sea urchin) sauce and some wasabi tobiko (flying fish roe mixed with wasabi) topped with a quail egg. Pretty interesting stuff. The highlight of the meal was definitely the platter with three different levels of fatty tuna, each unbelievably delicious in its own way. The meal ended up costing $200 for the two of us, but thankfully my parents had agreed to reimburse me as their big birthday present for me. Definitely a good one.

Anyways, the reason I brought this up was a certain dish we ate called “Spicy Mono.” I don’t remember exactly what was in it, but I’m still laughing at the name today. Can you imaging going into a restaurant and saying, “Yes, I’d like the ’spicy thing’ thank you.” This got me thinking about how the word “thing” is used in English and Japanese.

In Japanese mono can refer to just about any noun you can think of except for maybe places, whereas ‘thing’ in English generally refers to concrete, inanimate nouns. I guess you can use it sometimes for abstract nouns, but in most situations it sounds awkward like, “bravery is a thing that lets you overcome fear.” You would usually just say “bravery lets you overcome fear.”

Also, in Japanese, the word koto means the same thing as “thing,” but for verbs. I really like the word koto because it just doesn’t have any real counterpart in English. Instead we’re forced to use words like “action” and “process” when koto would be much simpler. For example, if you were explaining what a pass is in football, you could say “The action of throwing the ball” but in addition to sounding silly, it also sounds like it just refers to the quarterback’s muscular movements, excluding the ball moving through the air. If you followed that up with “the pass was intercepted” people would be very confused.

Instead, what is typically said in English is something like “it’s when someone throws the ball.” But what is “when” referring to? If the game is on Sunday, does that mean the “pass” is Sunday? There aren’t any other time-sensitive words in the sentence. What’s implied in the sentence is “it’s what happens when someone throws the ball.” But even that has the problem of ignoring the throwing process. English has developed in such a way that we know what people mean when they say “it’s when someone throws the ball,” but that’s because we’ve been without a word like koto for so long that we break grammar rules to create the same effect. In Japanese you just say “bo-ru- o nageru koto” or “the thrown ball thing” and everyone will know what you’re talking about.

Japanese - 1
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Actually, the score is probably much higher. Who do you think is winning?

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.