Category: Learning

Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger review

I thought I’d try watching something different yesterday, so I downloaded the first episode of a sentai show called Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger (subbed, unfortunately). Actually I’ve had the mp3s for both the opening and ending themes from the show for a while, and I listen to them almost every day. Watching the show itself though, quite an…experience, shall we say?

After the Last Friends debacle, I lambasted the cast for being uniformly terrible actors. Little did I know how truly bad Japanese acting could get. Yes, I know it’s a sentai show. And I know that on some level the actors were acting badly on purpose. But oh, it was so bad! The dialogue (“Fight with your DinoGuts gushing out!! Warriors filled with DinoGuts can never lose!) The actions! The expressions. So, so, so bad. I don’t even know how to describe it without insulting the characters, their mothers, their families and their entire sexual histories since they were two years old.

Abaranger was so bad, in fact, that I watched every single last second with rabid interest and longed for more. So this is the famous “so bad it’s good” syndrome. Usually when I watch a show, I tend to stop every few minutes or so to check something on the net, eat some snacks, type up a couple of e-mails,etc. Only a very gripping show can keep me from switching at least once, and Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger was one of these. I just had to see how much worse it could get, and it didn’t disappoint me…in a bad way.

If only I could get this show raw I think I could become quite the fan. :-p

On the other hand, I tried to watch Code Geass all over again yesterday and failed miserably. Some shows just aren’t meant to be watched twice, you know? The first time everything is new and moving at a blistering pace, so you don’t have time stop and think too deeply about the story and the meanings of what they’re saying, and of course you don’t know what’s going to happen next so you can take everything seriously. One watch is definitely enough for me. Let’s keep the magic alive, shall we?

I’m going to spend the rest of the day listening to Chage & Aska’s Very Best Roll Over 20th Album on endless repeat.

Giant indecipherable walls of text

You know that feeling when someone spots you from far off and waves to you, but you don’t know who it is so you’re like errrrr… and then the person gets closer and it turns out to be someone you know really well and really like, but haven’t seen in ages so you’re like “OMG, it’s YOU!! :DDDD”? I saw it happen just yesterday on my way home, actually. This lady, standing at the bus stop, dressed up to the nines. A car pulled up just a bit away and the gentleman in the car beckoned to her to come closer. You could tell by the look on her face, she’s like “WTF do YOU want, fool?” as she stalked over to where he was parked (note to sensible ladies out there: don’t approach parked cars at night). Then her face did a total 360 when she saw who it was. It was the most amazing transformation ever, like, WHOA, night into day. She was all like “Heeeeeeeey! It’s been aaaages! Oh I’ve missed you! Tee hee hee hee” and stuff like that. And then my bus pulled away so I couldn’t see the rest of the reunion, but you get the picture, right?

It’s been like that with me and Japanese lately. I won’t kid you: Japanese Wikipedia used to intimidate the hell out of me. I’d open up a page and bam, all these curly lines and huge blocks of densely-packed text. Not a picture or a graph in place to lighten the mood a bit. >__< Sometimes I’d just close the page right away, like “I didn’t really want to know this stuff that badly anyway,” and lately I still get that reaction, but as soon as I look a little closer, I see tons and tons of old friends, all lining up to say hello. 😀 It’s amazing how much more I understand now, ever since I started making a focused effort to read all the pages in Japanese. Even those scary-looking strings of 5, 6, 7, 8 kanji in a row like 最多候補数 and 主演女優賞受賞 that look like they just escaped from a Chinese newspaper, once you look at them closely you see they’re made up of simple 2 and 3 kanji compounds that are a cinch to read. Y’aaaay~!

I’ve still got a long way to go, of course. I come across at least 10 words and compounds  I don’t understand in even the shorter wiki articles, and I still get a little turned off by some of the longer pages, but I’m getting there. I’m definitely getting there. And that’s all for today.

Another source for Japanese magazines

After the whole fs2you/raysource nonsense, I continued the hunt for Japanese fashion magazines online. I can’t remember where I found this link, or I’d give them the credit, but I found another site where you could read fashion magazines. It’s a Chinese site, btw. Who’d have thought the Chinese youth would be that much into Japanese culture? It just goes to show.

But I guess JPseek is still better if you want to actually download the pages as one big rar file instead of reading page by page. And of course JPseek has its other uses as well.

More good ood news: I cleared my backlog of SRS reps and entered 30 sentences so far today. Online Japanese reviews are such a great way of getting sentences. Too bad I keep getting distracted by the Beijing Olympics. I find myself watching even things I don’t care about like the discus throw and triple jump and stuff. But hey, it only comes once in 4 years and it’s almost over anyway. Might as well enjoy!

So many reps to do…

For the past couple of days I’ve had 100 reps to do every single day. It’s mostly my fault because I don’t do reps on the weekends, but it’s so not fun to do so many every day. Especially since I add at least 20 sentences every day, usually more, on top of my old sentences, it becomes quite a chore.

I’m rapidly approaching the 2000 sentence point, yay! And it’s all sentences I found and entered by myself. I don’t believe in “sentence databases” or “pooling sentences” or anything like that. The way I see it, all the sentences in your SRS should be a by-product of your reading Japanese, watching Japanese, listening to Japanese, speaking Japanese, etc., and not a goal in and of itself. You get what I’m driving at? The context is important, not just the sentences themselves. It’s not enough to know the words, it’s also important to know where and when and why to use them, you see? Plus other people’s sentences would probably be incredibly boring to me. These are sentences you’re going to be reading over and over and over again for years, might as well make sure they have some special significance for you to begin with, right?

Now back to planning how to celebrate when I hit the magical 2-0-0-0 number!

あなたの助け舟

It’s the 13th of August and I’m feeling gooood. That means I should help someone else feel good, right? Okay.

You know how I was talking about JPSEEK the other day? After footling around on their site a bit more, I discovered they also have Japanese magazines and stuff (mostly fashion), up for download.* I like fashion, in a look but don’t touch kind of way. Meaning I could browse a fashion magazine for hours but when I get up I’m going to put on the same old jeans and t-shirt and walk out of the house like that. Money must be spent on video games, know what I mean? Speaking of which, Fire Emblem Shin Ankoku Ryuu!! But that’s a subject for another post.

So, by dint of hard work (and Babelfish), I have found for you the location of these downloadable magazines: here. You have to register, and then you have to post in the thread before you can see the link, but hey, it’s better than paying for it, right? I’m such a nice person, though,
that I’ll give you a freebie: the August edition of Vivi magazine (jpseekers don’t get mad at me, we’re all pirates together). You notice they’re hosting their files on www.fs2you.com. Why u do dis? It’s not the most reliable of sites and may occasionally seem to be down. If it seems to be
down, try updating your hosts file with these:

59.63.157.25        www.fs2you.com
222.169.230.101        dyn.www.fs2you.com
59.32.232.195 cachefile1.fs2you.com
222.169.230.98 cachefile2.fs2you.com
221.204.246.79 cachefile3.fs2you.com
61.150.85.80 cachefile4.fs2you.com
60.2.139.27 cachefile5.fs2you.com
61.184.189.10 cachefile6.fs2you.com
61.174.62.132 cachefile7.fs2you.com
58.211.75.49 cachefile8.fs2you.com
61.134.84.238 cachefile9.fs2you.com
61.156.40.181 cachefile10.fs2you.com
218.75.151.4 cachefile11.fs2you.com
58.211.75.31 cachefile12.fs2you.com
124.94.101.133 cachefile13.fs2you.com
221.204.246.115 cachefile14.fs2you.com
218.75.151.10 cachefile15.fs2you.com
58.218.209.126 cachefile16.fs2you.com
61.157.152.173 cachefile17.fs2you.com
125.46.41.27 cachefile18.fs2you.com
125.91.11.223 cachefile19.fs2you.com
59.53.48.134 cachefile20.fs2you.com
59.53.48.136 cachefile21.fs2you.com
59.53.48.144 cachefile22.fs2you.com
61.139.106.204 cachefile23.fs2you.com
59.53.48.172 cachefile24.fs2you.com
124.94.101.146 cachefile25.fs2you.com
61.166.111.227 cachefile26.fs2you.com
How do you do that, you ask? Go to C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc. You see a file called “hosts”? Open it up with Notepad. Copy and paste the above at the bottom (under localhost). Save and close. Now try the link again. Ta-daaa! No need to thank me, just send money.

*Flipping through fashion mags is not clinically proven to improve your Japanese, seeing as you’re staring at pictures 95% of the time. Reader discretion is advised.

And that’s all for today!

Edit: All of a sudden fs2you is asking you to install something called Raysource before it will let you download larger files. Like hell we will. Take your crappy filesharing system and stuff it where the sun don’t shine. Thank goodness I milked it for what it was worth when I had the chance.