First of, I just wanted to show this awesome video: “Skype Me Maybe” – sung in 30+ languages by 17 polyglots! Super inspirational!
Now, onto another set of language-related links. Most of them are about – surprise, surprise – Japanese, but there is also some Norwegian, French and general language links mentioned.
Not sure if I mentioned this before, but here is the wiki-page about Kyouiku-kanji. If you feel like the 2000 joyo-kanji is too much to grasp at first, mastering the 1006 kyouiku-kanji can really bring you a long way when it comes to reading and understanding Japanese.
Japanese idiom dictionary! This is great for figuring out colloquial use of japanese, which can be hard if you don’t have a real japanese person at hand to ask.
Japanese proverb dictionary! (You have no idea how impressed Japanese people get when you throw in a proverb or two in your conversation!)
Kokuji 国字 or Wasei Kanji 和製漢字 are Kanji that were created in Japan. Most of them only have KUN readings, but there are some Kokuji that have ON readings because they were assumed to have them according to phonetic association with similar characters. Here is an extensive list of kokuji.
Verbling is like chatroulette, only in the languages you are studying. Super neat idea, although I am a bit camera shy myself.
If you are interested in Norwegian language, you can listen to free podcasts called “Språkteigen” here. It is a program produced by NRK, in Norwegian, about quirky (and not so quirky) aspects of the Norwegian language. For intermediate, advanced and native speakers.
And here is a bonus video: 日本人が知らない日本語. Funny drama in Japanese, about Japanese. The Swedish girl’s Japanese accent cracks me up every time.
Masaaki Hiromura is just pure genius! I love this project, where he has replaced certain parts of the kanji with what it means. I absolutely loved this. I also love what he has done with various spaces around Tokyo, you can see more of his amazing projects over at his website.
I made a salad this morning for breakfast with tobiko, mozzarella, avocado, tomato and green leafs. The combo of the avocado and the tobiko was really nice, it made the avocado taste almost like toro.
And then I went to my classes…
…and walked through the park.
アーユータィヨド？
And I stopped by the pidgins again. It is the next best thing to having a bird of my own.
More mascots, this is a huge banner outside a new building with apartments.
Right now I am reading two books, one is called “Stuff” and it is about compulsive hording – a really interesting book. I am no horder, in fact, I am quite the opposite, but even though I do not keep things, I find the thoughts behind why we keep things very peculiar and interesting. The other book is a collection of mathematical and logical problems, which is always interesting to read just for fun. What are you reading?
What I should be reading is keigo, so I will try to get around to that now.
A new term has started, and I want to do well. Pictures are funny, I feel my face looks so different on camera compared to RL, or even compared to how my face used to look in pictures just a few years ago.
The (not so) long walk to school.
I always take a back street through a little park on my way to classes so I can look at the flowers and not be run over by the cars.
I always wonder why not more people get electrocuted by all the wires hanging everywhere.
I stopped by a parking lot before school to look at the pigeons.
And then there was school. Today it was three hours of reading, and one hour of listening. Apparently I have started intermediate Japanese now, and how that happened I have no idea, because there is absolutely nothing about my Japanese which can describe it as intermediate.
The view of Shinjuku from the school’s balcony.
And then I walked home again… and now I should probably start reading through the material for tomorrow.
学校が始まります。。。School is starting in 1.5 hours, I have forgotten half of what I am suppose to know by know, the kanji is mixing themselves together in my head and all I see are little squiggles on the paper, vocabulary I used to know seems foreign to me, like I see the words for the first time, and the grammar points seems more Greek than Japanese to me at the moment. Despite a half-assed effort over at renshuu.org and lang-8.com during the latest days, I can only conclude that I have to step it up quite a bit from today.
How do people learn? How do people push their brains to a greater capacity? I am trying to go back, trying to think how I learned English in the first place, how I learned HTML and CSS, how I learned to take pictures – but all of those things seems so internalized I can not remember my initial struggles with it.
I do remember asking my English teacher in 3rd grade – “In the name ‘Sonic The Hedgehog’ – what does the word ‘the’ mean?” My teacher answered me that the word “the” did not have any meaning on its own. Today I know that answer was wrong, that was my teacher not knowing how to answer that question to kid, who probably would not understand what she was trying to tell me anyway. Today there is Wikipedia, today I know that I can look up the word the on Wikipedia and get an explanation, but I am not sure sure my nine year old self would have understood it even with the help of Wikipedia. I don’t know. What is curious to me, is that the way I felt about the word the as a nine year old – this is the way I feel about Japanese today. I read about Japanese. I try to research various aspects about the language, I try to grasp the concept of it. I read and I research about how people learn, about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, about vocabulary acquisition, shadowing, about ways to memorize kanji efficiently… but despite reading about Japanese – I am not sure I can fully grasp the concepts and internalize them. Maybe I should spend more time practicing the actual language, and less time trying to grasp the concepts and trying to find the best way to learn.
Do you think you can learn if you don’t grasp the concept of what you are doing first?
