Audio Crack

Konnichipa is, apparently, this lass' cute way to say konnichiwa, which means 'good day'. It's really instructive in either how annoying or how mesmerising you find it. I take no responsibility for any ear worms you acquire (from the German 'ohrwurm'). The tune sounds a bit German actually, like crazed polka music.

I have so many of these weird videos saved. I promised Bek it wouldn't only be her who suffered them.

Lang-8

You may know that I've been studying Japanese as a way to prevent insanity, however Japanese is not really a good language to do this. I'm now more insane than ever, less social, yet more tech savvy and so I've attached a widget to the sidebar which links to my Lang-8 journal.

What is Lang-8? Well it's a really simple yet amazingly useful idea. When I taught English, one of the truly terrible jobs was correcting student diaries. There seemed an endless stream of them, and most were filled with incredibly mundane entries like "today I didn't do anything, I slept and watched TV, and had something to eat". I mean, sometimes they would write these sorts of things every single day. Do any thoughts at all go on in English student's heads apart from the basic necessities of life? Were they unable to at least tell me how they felt, and I don't mean physically, I was hungry, thirsty, sleepy, I mean their true secret deep thoughts, the ones which they dare not speak of, only hurriedly scribble down in a flurry of passion and guilty emotion? Why couldn't they let me in on their loves, their dreams, even their dirty, dirty secrets? I thought diaries were kept locked up, saturated in juicy details, leaking information to the minds of ingenious siblings bent on exposing who Katie 'really likes'.

Anyway, I digress. Lang-8 is an online diary writing website aimed at language learners. You write a diary in the language that you are learning, and native speakers from that language correct it for you. In return, you correct journals in English. It's basically an honour system, you aren't forced to correct diaries, but as you gain friends and notoriety you kind of feel obliged. So yes, I'm now correcting diaries again, and I'm not getting paid.

It's a great idea, it's free, correction is much faster than writing a post yourself so it's not a big deal to edit a few, and best of all, people write interesting stuff about their lives, their thoughts and cultural differences which they find puzzling. It's addictive to read these short, pithy opinions about this and that. You can leave comments on each journal entry, so often you get correction and discussion, which is marvellous. Also, it allows you to still interact with natives no matter where you live. I know it's not as good as speaking to a language exchange partner, but it's good to have the discipline to keep coming back, writing something and then checking where you went wrong.

So if you're a language learner, try it out. Especially if you speak Japanese, kick my grammatical butt if you feel the need to.

You could also search for my nickname on the site (phauna) and add me as a friend, please. Unless you are my enemy. Don't do that if you are, soon I'll find you, when you least expect it. Expect me. Although you won't know when I find you, just expect that I *will* find you, sometime, when you least suspect it.

Ball-Shaped Onions

Here's an ad which caught my eye. It says "with the power of onions, a healthful life." I've never thought of onions as a wonder food, and have thought even less of them as a delicious drink. I suppose the ad execs were thinking onions are cheap, they aren't bad for you, and voila, new health food.

They have a lot of faux health products in Japan, as do Western countries, however a lot of them centre around the amazing properties of regular food. For example, pills which contain the equivalent of 25 sweet potatoes. Just try and eat 25 sweet potatoes a day. You can't, can you? Well just throw back one of these pills. And then there are the testimonials, some old man saying he tried to eat 25 sweet potatoes a day but couldn't carry them all home from the store on his bike. So he takes these pills, and he's not dead yet. Proof of their efficacy.

Oh and they still have those vibrating belt machines which supposedly wobble off fat. They had those machines in gyms in Korea, and people used them.

Origami Cup

I'm sure you may have some idea how to make an origami cup from a square of paper. If not, try it out, it's quite handy and easy to learn.



Bek got this particular origami paper with her health check papers. If you want health insurance in Japan you need to undergo a yearly physical. Of course a physical requires some analysis of your body. At least some parts of your body. And if you note the colour of this paper and it's prescribed use you may guess that there is also some analysis of your bodily fluids.

The instructions ask you to use this cup to hold your early morning urine. Bek at first thought they meant to carry it from home to the doctor's office in this cup. A mighty feat on the Tokyo subway, to be sure. Of course that seems unlikely. However I think it's amusing that your origami skill somewhat dictates your ability to collect your sample. And the square seems quite small, resulting in an even smaller cup.

Luckily I'm allowed to be unhealthy as I like without having to pee into a tiny, leaky square of folded paper.

Kanji

I haven't been posting much lately because I have been trying to learn kanji. These are the Chinese characters that are in use in Japan, and once a Japanese person has left high school they are supposed to have learnt a select 1945, although there are many more. These kanji are the most commonly used and are usually taught in order of difficulty. It takes six years, I think, to learn them all and the main method is copying them out hundreds and thousands of times.

Suffice to say I don't have six years to spend trying to get literate. I think most Japanese learners initially think to themselves that they can just learn the speaking part, or at the very least the two alphabets which are used in conjunction with kanji, hiragana and katakana. However, it seems apparent that to read anything at all you need to learn them. All of them. They are mostly used in combinations of two or more, meaning learning individual ones now and then won't help much.

So I found a method, and am studying hard. I know it sounds surprising, but I think anything done on a computer is enjoyable, so it seems not so bad.

I am using this book, Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig, and his method is to learn them all at once, by making up an imaginative story containing the smaller constituent radicals in the kanji. The characters are often made up of combinations of other kanji, and through these you can invent a mnemonic. This is quite normal and common, I think, however he also advises not to learn the Japanese readings at first, but just to link it to one single English word, which contains at least one of the meanings the kanji conveys. To learn everything about one kanji is too difficult, so you kind of break the work down into meaning and reading.

So, I'm almost there, amazingly. I've learnt how to write 1400 kanji, and learnt one single meaning in English for each one, and it only took six weeks. I'm giving myself until March to learn the other 600. However, just using this method with pen and paper would be almost impossible, so this website comes into play; Reviewing the Kanji uses a Leitner flashcard system, which tests you on the keywords in progressively longer and longer intervals. This means that cards you are good at don't get tested often, saving time, whereas those which you have trouble with seem to come up very often.

Right, so what good is that, I still can't read. Well now I will have something to hang the sound of a kanji on, namely a story and a meaning. Kanji won't be a tangle of unrecognisable line and dots anymore. Also I'll be able to guess the meaning of words using the individual kanji, and I can write them too. So the job won't be done quite yet. Soon I'll have to read a lot of manga and train ads, etc. and learn how the kanjis sound.

At least it won't take six years. Fingers crossed, only six months, because that's all I have.