Silver Case

This started out as a post about my iPod. It had a lot of zombie podcasts I couldn’t get rid of regardless of how much sync’ing I tried to do.  A surgical strike via Windows Explorer solved the problem and now my 2GB iPod Nano has a nice balance of JapanesePod101 podcasts and music.

I continue to study Japanese.  My attendance at class has been fine except for one night I had to skip in order to collect a prescription for Luke’s …ummmm … foreskin infection (ouch!).  I learned katakana myself because I got annoyed having to refer to the teacher’s legend. For some reason the syllabus doesn’t require us to learn katakana, however lots of vocabulary is in katakana.  Anyway, that was comparatively trivial.   Where am I now?

I haven’t mastered all the vocabulary in the chapters we’ve covered.

Trying to memorize the words off the long lists we have doesn’t work well for me.  I transcribed the vocabulary onto blank business cards used as flashcards. That seems to be a lot more effective. I probably have a hundred cards right now.  Something I’ve just realized is that I master words much more quickly if I cover them in dosages of 10-15 cards at a time, preferably in clusters of words that have something to do with each other.  I was trying to chew through chunks of fifty words at a time and found it terribly inefficient.

Given the stack of non-mastered words I have left, I should be able to knock it off by tomorrow evening.

One note is that presently I am not learning the Kanji, only the kana for each word. Kanji will be a separate effort.

I need/want more practice writing and speaking sentences using the grammar we’ve been taught. 

The class offers little time for much practice speaking and the assignments we’re given are relatively brief and don’t punish me with enough of the rote practice I feel I need.  I’ve been trying to “run laps” myself and write lots of sentences using the vocabulary and sentence constructs I know, but it doesn’t feel as exhaustive, exhuasting, or as thorough as I desire.  I think the solution will be to get a personal/private tutor to come by and work me over once or twice a week.

I was annoyed by my inability to competently operate my Canon G90 Wordtank

But now I see that the key is to learn kanji stroke order, so that will be a little side-project for  when I get tired from the more important vocabularly memorization and grammar practice points.  There are so many japanese language resources on the web that it seems almost sinful to pay money for a book on writing kanji.

I haven’t done much with my alternative learning tools lately

I’ve been too busy to have the time for other textbooks like my Manga-based tutorial and I haven’t spent much time listening to JapanesePod101 lately.  I’ve been running to work a few times each week, but I find listening to Glenn Gould play Bach has been the most comfortable companion, moreso than rock or Japanese lessons at any rate.  But now that I have my ipod de-constipated, I will fill it with a better range of practice material and so should steal an extra 15-20 minutes per day for study.

I guess that’s it for now. I have a stack of green flashcards howling for my attention.

I was very excited when I bought my Canon Wordtank G90. It has a stylus that lets you write kanji on the screen and then it deciphers it for you.

Theoretically.

I struggled to use it while I was in Japan. I had high hopes that when I returned to Singapore I would figure it out, write a nice little guide, and then translate away. It’s been much more of a slog than that. I have enormous difficulties writing kanji that it recognizes.

Tonight I was trying to practice with it, using some of the simpler kanji from lessons from JapanesePod101. I was trying to write, for instance,　せんのう　’Emperor of Japan’. (*) 　The first character I could write relatively easily, it’s simple. The second I struggled for fifteen minutes. In vain. I could never get it to work. I’d either run out of time or it would just misread whatever I was writing.

I know the wordtank kanji recognition is sensitive to stroke order. I looked at some quick stroke order primers and my brain had a buffer overload.

In distress, I called on Ling to come show me how she’d write it. She took one glance and dashed out a (I thought) shabby-looking copy of what I saw on the original kanji. I tried several time to replicate that order on my wordtank and failed. Ling grabbed the pen, scribbled her kanji scrawl, and the computer recognized it instantly and accurately. ugh.

So I guess I really will have learn how to write these stroke orders. Any good primers on this? Ugh.

(*) For some reason the Microsoft japanese keyboard system doesn’t know or recongize the kanjii for せんのう。 Dunno why. Maybe I’m using it wrong, but none of the options work, whether I try to browse the options individually on せん　and のう　　　or together as せんのう. I tried to cut-and-paste that kanji from adobe, but when I pasted it, all it showed was “??”.

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So the answer really does seem to be “learn stroke orders.” I found a few sites that illustrate the stroke order for basic kanji. The Wordtank quite dependably recognizes these when I follow the correct order.

I bought a Canon Wordtank G90 Electronic Dictionary at Yodobashi Camera in Shinjuku today. I chose the G90 instead of the V90 because the V90, although it will pronounce words for you, only does it for the Chinese dictionary. I have no interest in Chinese, so there’s no reason to pay the extra money.
The G90 has an English ‘quick reference’ but I don’t think it’s complete, or at least not thorough. The ‘quick reference’ is perhaps 15% of the entire manual, the balance being in Japanese. For example, it is mentioned that you can turn the menuing to English from the setup menu. It’s up to you to figure out where the setup is. Ha. Also didn’t explain how to get to the “draw some kanji/kana on the screen”. (There is a small icon you need to click) Perhaps some day I’ll write a proper manual with screen shots for the thing and stick it online.

Anyway was just playing with it to see how it worked. Of course the first thing I did was enter “fuck” into the English-to-Japanese dictionary. It does auto-complete. Wow. A lot of results:

1. fuck
2. fuckable
3. fuck-all
4. fucked-
5. fucked-up
6. fucker
7. fuckface
8. fuckhead
9. fucking
10. fucking A
11. fucking hell
12. fuck-in-law (even I don’t know what this one means)
13. fuck me
14. fuckoff
15. fuckpig (this wins the ‘Total Completeness Award’ — don’t think I’ve heard this term since university)
16. fuck-up
17. fuckwit

Anyway, I’ve only had the thing for a few hours, and don’t have much more to say about it yet.