A category for anything to do with Japanese. Mainly includes stuff I originally watched in Japanese. There may or may not be English versions available.
Well “The Fifth Elephant” by Terry Pratchett turned out to be a terrible book as far as Discworld novels go. Among the bad Discworld books it’s slightly above Monstrous Regiment and slightly below Men at Arms, about on par with Night Watch. You know, I don’t think Terry Pratchett has got it any more. Or maybe I’m just too used to him now. Or maybe it’s the Spirit of Japanese, punishing me for daring to stray from the path of immersion.
Anyway, this is a blog about Japanese, not a blog about books (English ones, at that) so let’s get back to the point, which is… GAMES. To be precise, Ar Tonelico 2 and Mana Khemia 2. I should be buying stock in Gust right about now, really. I can hardly wait for the weekend to start so I can sink my teeth into them. Which one should go first? I enjoyed AT more, so maybe I should keep the best for last? Then again why suffer through MK2 when the first Mana Khemia wasn’t really up to scratch? It was made after AT and it had worse graphics, can you believe that? Okay, so it’s settled. Ar Tonelico 2 it is. At least it will keep me occupied (and learning Japanese) until Fire Emblem DS comes out on 7th August.
I can never resist a good Terry Pratchett, so I’m cheating a little this week. I’ve been getting into some Japanese novels (一般小説) and light novels but nothing comes close to the power of a good Discworld novel. I’m not too fond of the Watch stories though, give me a good Rincewind book any day. Or Small Gods. I could read that book 10000 times.
Studying is going well this week, cheating aside. I hit upon the idea of reading online Japanese reviews of my favorite games. There’s nothing I love more in the world than a well-written bad review, especially of games I love, so I’m in good company there. I was hoping for more trollsome posts, but we’ll take what we can get. So anyway I’ve been getting loads and loads of sentences out of those reviews, sentences written by and for ordinary Japanese.
Re: Youtube project, I’ve dled tons and tons of videos but I haven’t watched a single one yet. Watching stuff is WORK! Here’s a long list of the stuff I’ve gotten so far. I don’t know what link corresponds to what file though. I wasn’t being very discriminatory in my downloads, I just grabbed anything that looked like an interview or a 記者会見 and downloaded it. And geez but there are a lot of Gackt files in there. He’s not a bad musician – not good either – but he’s a BORING interview. Tries too hard to look “cool” and “mysterious” and stuff. Be yourself, man! Yah, whatever. Here goes. (Warning: long list is long!)
As I said earlier, I’ve been experimenting with programs to save Youtube streams to my computer for future watching. Most of the websites I went to looked rather fishy and/or buggy, so eventually I just went to download.com and got the first sensible-looking program there, the appropriately-titled Youtube Downloader 2.1.6. Works like a charm, it does. And interface is as bland and simple as anything, just the way I like it. You end up with .flv files (Flash Video) which Windows Media Player can play with the right codecs. I don’t remember installing any codecs specifically for flash video, but I guess CCCP comes with them because they play just fine.
For my first experiment I got part 1 and part 2 of The Rock’s anti-Toronto promo, his very best promo in my opinion. He always was better as a heel, anyway. Some things need to be preserved for posterity and not left to the whims of Youtube’s capricious operators. Now I can watch it whenever I want. Like, right now.
More relevant to my Japanese-learning ambitions: interviews with J-pop and J-rock stars. Youtube has a lot of clips from morning programs, Music Station and Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ, so I’m getting lots of those for now. T. M. Revolution~~~~~~~!
It’s Saturday! And a very important day in my life. Which is why I’m sitting behind my computer blogging about Japanese. …Okay, now I feel silly. Back to the Wii to finish some games.
About Anki though, it’s an SRS system that, unlike Khatzumemo, allows you to upload pictures, sound and other files, not just text. Based on the experiments in this AJATT post, I managed to obtain (ahem) a text-to-speech program called NeoSpeech, and I’ve been using it to convert some of my sentences to spoken Japanese. The results, as might be expected, are extremely wooden in all but a few cases. That doesn’t matter though, because I’m not using the sentences for listening practice. I’m using them for writing practice. I put the sentence – picked out of my usual reps – in Neospeech, put the result in the question portion of Anki, and put the written sentence in the answer portion. My task is to accurately reproduce all the kanji and other portions of the sentence correctly just by listening to the spoken word. It’s pretty challenging, though. I’ll have to try it for a few more days before giving a better verdict, but it has potential as a drilling method.
Previously I used to add sentences after I’d done all my reps. Going through the articles one by one, whenever I came across an interesting sentence I would stop, copy it into the SRS, look up any unknown words, add them as the answer, press Add. And then and only then would I get back to the article. As you can see, this frequently hampered my speed of reading and my enjoyment of the articles. Plus I felt some sort of pressure, looking at the number of sentences added and thinking “I need to add 23 more to make up my quota for the day!” which further lessened my enjoyment.
So for the past couple of days I’ve switched up my way of doing things. I created a new Word document that I leave open all day. When I find a good sentence, I copy and paste it into the document and then just keep moving. No need to analyze, no need to look things up. If there’s a kanji I don’t understand I leave it for the next day, unless it gets in the way of my understanding. When all that’s done, when I open up my SRS the next day, before I do my reps – not after, because sometimes reps take forever and then I tend to get lazy – I add all the sentences one by one, looking up the words as I go. This has the added advantage of giving me an “extra” repetition since I’m seeing the sentence again after the previous day. It’s been working pretty great so far.
The hunt for good radio programs continues! And I haven’t been able to make myself watch any of the j-dramas I downloaded, because I really don’t like j-dramas! But I can watch them alright when I’m super-duper bored. I just haven’t had any of those days in quite a while, so I just keep stockpiling and stockpiling. And that’s all for today.
