This morning, I downloaded a customizable flashcard program Genius helps you memorize things. Genius organizes your information and carefully chooses questions using an intelligent "spaced repetition" method that’s based on your past performance. It performs fuzzy answer checking and even highlights errors visually.
and a hiragana card-set to go ( Read more... )

People! Why is there no Tengwar mode for Japanese? Surely it can't be so difficult to take the letters and throw some vowel diacriticals at them?

As in "the shareware-payment folks".

Today, I clipped my toenails, am baking two loaves of Peanut-Butter Bread (using unbleached but hulled wheat flour for the sponge, a cup of rye, and the rest whole-wheat), practised writing hiragana vowels again with my shiny new workbook (obtained at great speed yesterday -two minutes before the UBC bookstore closed- along with more (purple! ( Read more... )

Things I've learned about Japanese this week (only the first of which was from my teacher):

• Doubled consonants in Romaji (Roman alphabet), are not pronounced like I’d assumed (e.g. “penknife”). Rather, only the first of the two is a glottal stop. (E.g. "bo'tle") See comments.
• Japanese f (e.g. “tofu”) does not involve teeth. As wikipedia says: " ( Read more... )

I was so pleased to learn this, yo. <-- That "yo" there with its emphasis is Japanese! I'll never feel guilty about using it again. Pretentious, yes.

Our class uses doubled vowels in our Romanji to indicate long vowels. In the case of "ee", I find this confusing ("oo" less so, because the "w" option is halfway in between). It's ugly, and I want to go on record as preferring macrons.

Excuse me while I go practice how to write vowels now.

P.S. My hovercraft is full of eels.

An interesting thing I've noticed after upgrading to Tiger:

My computer's name is a Chinese character, in the Finder. In Terminal, it used to be auto-translated to ch'an. I remember being impressed the first time I noticed this. Now, however, it's auto-translated to zen. Strange. I wonder what I need to tweak to fix this, since the computer ( Read more... )

I just registered for an eight-session beginning Japanese class, to begin a week from tomorrow. Who wants to bet that I know the (spoken) content of the first couple of meetings already? Except that I can only count to five alreadyWhy Japanese before Chinese? Puns, mostly. (Are any other languages besides English and Japanese nearly as fond of ( Read more... )