Seriously, who still buys these things?

My guess is: people who also just purchased a brand new Sony Minidisc player¹ and/or will only use devices that bears the same comforting look as the pocket calculator they had back in High School.

I don’t see why else anybody would willingly spend up to twice the price of an iPod Touch on a tool that will, at best, do roughly what any iPod/iPhone does… minus the thousands of non-Japanese-related features.

Trust me, I am very receptive to the argument of the simple tool that does one thing and does it well, without the clutter and confusion of a myriad peripheral features… But if that’s what it takes, buy an iPod Touch, forget it can be a music player, a web browser or a gaming platform and use it solely as a Japanese study tool: you will still be getting a better deal than with one of these ridiculously overpriced/underfeatured denshi jisho.

In case you are considering such a purchase, or if you already own an iPhone/iPod Touch and wondered what apps you should get in order to turn it into the ultimate Japanese studying tool, here are my three picks:

#1 Kotoba!

Kotoba! is the best mobile Japanese dictionary, bar none. It uses Jim Breen’s public Japanese dictionaries for its data and provides absolutely every single lookup method you could ever desire, combined into a sleek and intuitive UI. If you factor in Apple’s built-in handwritten Kanji input², you have a Japanese dictionary that far outpaces any handheld electronic toy out there.

With all that and despite being a commercial-grade application, Kotoba is absolutely free! Not “free”, not free³: absolutely free, as in freeware, born out of the dedication of its author, Pierre-Philippe di Costanzo. So get it now and go make a donation right after.

#2 KanjiBox

Yes, I am ever so slightly biased on that one…

But there is a reason I set out making KanjiBox for Facebook many years ago: none of the other kanji-studying application came even close to what I wanted in such a product (smart drilling, stats etc.). This is still mostly true with iPhone apps.

To me, a Japanese study app should offer, at the minimum:

1. Intelligent questions: not just throwing a couple random kanji and asking you to pick one (“Gee, I wonder which between 大 and 嘛 could mean big“)…
2. Smart drilling: what’s the point of using a software if it cannot store my answers and use the data to adjust to my level at all time.
3. Progress feedback: I don’t know about you, but knowing where I stand in my studies is a huge motivation factor. Sure, it’s a stupid bar chart, not a perfect representation of my actual everyday fluency, but it still helps setting studying goals for myself (and knowing whether I am somewhat ready for JLPT).

These, and a couple less critical, but still thoroughly enjoyable, features, such as the competitive edge brought by scoring (and comparing with your friends), are what I expect from language-studying software in the 21st century. And you would be surprised how few (if any) of the apps out there do that.

Which is why I have no qualms recommending my own KanjiBox to all serious Japanese students.

For those who can’t get themselves to purchase KanjiBox for whatever reason, I suppose my next choice would be Kanji, which fails at practically all the points mentioned above (it really is the most basic type of flashcard app), but at least has a nice clean UI and won’t set you back too much with its one-buck price tag (probably still too much for what it is). As for KanjiBox’s lesser doppelganger, Kanji Flip: I would perhaps recommend it (although I am no fan of its UI and self-quizzing method), but at $6, it is ridiculously overpriced (that’s twice KB’s price for half the features).

I am sure there are a few free applications that do most of what the ones above do (after all, Kotoba is by far the best dictionary app, and it’s free). But frankly I haven’t seen them yet. And you do know what they say about getting what you pay for.

#3 Japanese Podcasts

Alright, I lied, it’s not an app.

But you now have a pocket-size device with a powerful dictionary and a versatile study guide: it would still be silly not to take advantage of the fact that it can play sound and music (huh, some would even say it is its primary purpose).

I have personally never found Japanese dictionary with audio cues and other attempts at replacing a basic classroom teacher, to be very useful, for two reasons: 1) you will still need to spend time with a real native Japanese speaker anyway (especially around the beginning). 2) Japanese pronunciation is really straightforward: if after a couple hours’ worth of studying you cannot pronounce every single word in a dictionary, you probably need to take on another hobby.

On the other hand, nothing (and certainly not rote learning of entire lists of kanji and vocabulary) will ever replace listening and conversation practice.

Better than limited phrasebook apps, I think using the iPod for what it was meant to do —download and play music/podcasts — is a nicer way to get your regular dose of Japanese practice. As for which podcasts: there just isn’t a way to recommend something that fits all levels and interests.

For beginners, Japanese 101 has a nice array of podcast material (not so convinced by their apps, on the other hand), if you are at a slightly more advanced level, I would suggest directly checking out real everyday-life Japanese podcasts, in a topic that you like. The important part being to find materials that are engaging and updated regularly…

If you really don’t know where to start (and have a sufficiently advanced levels), check out NHK’s podcasts: they have a variety of feeds covering many different topics from daily news to pop music (they also have Japanese lessons, but I don’t know what they are worth).

Whatever you do, stay the hell away from those “Hi, I am 14-year old Mike from Arkansas, and I will be teaching you Japanese: KONNECHEVA!” podcasts… No offense, but I have a couple Astrud Gilberto records at home: you don’t see me trying to teach you Portuguese over the Internet…

頑張って！

And that’s it. For $201.99, you have the ultimate Japanese learning and reference device. And it even plays music for that price!

Why only three recommendations when there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of Japanese-related apps in the iTunes App Store? Because as mentioned above, there is a beauty to simplicity. Redundant tools rarely improve your experience, they just scatter your attention (and waste your money). That being said, feel free to explore more apps (and send me your recommendations, if you think they deserve being added here⁴).

1. “fit up to twenty tracks in your pocket!”
2. ok, not quite Kanji: Chinese Hanzi… but for most purposes, it will really work just the same. Just make sure you set it with Traditional Chinese, not simplified
3. “Free… for a limited time. Purchase the full version for only $19.99″
4. Need I mention that “WRITE Your Name in JAPANEESE” and other “60 KANA YOU MUST KNOW” apps, really do not need to be brought to my attention.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

3 Apps to Turn your iPod into a Japanese Study Tool…

Guess them all and win a bunch of iTunes coupons for free installs of KanjiBox for iPhone (along with my undying respect for your extensive musical culture).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Think you know Japanese music?

KanjiStory.com is a website geared towards people studying Japanese kanji (and, I guess, to a lesser extent, Chinese… but it probably needs some tuning for that). It provides a simple yet powerful interface for people to write kanji mnemonics in the form of a simple story.

The best way to see what I mean is to go register (10 seconds, one click), read a few stories and finally: take a stab at writing your own. Allowing users to contribute stories is at least 90% of the point of this website at this stage, so please do not just go, check out the dozen sample stories and call it a day without trying the editor.

The current version of the website, although quite spiffy code-wise, needs a huge amount of work to be called a proper beta. And then, there are two million cool features just waiting to be added. However, given my very limited time resources, I figured I would first check to see how much interest (and active participation) in the project I can raise, before committing any more time working on it.

Do not hesitate to post your comments and suggestions below, but keep in mind that this is all very early-stage development and that many new features will come, once (if) this ever takes off the ground as a community project.

As an aside, if you are a reasonably experienced PHP dev with an interest in contributing to this project: get in touch (use the address: “zedrdave” at Google’s mail).

If you want to be kept informed of future KanjiStory-related news, easiest way for now is to sign-up as a fan on the facebook page (until I set up a proper forum and RSS feed on the website).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Kanji Stories…

KanjiBox for iPhone

By far the best way to spend your Summer while improving your Japanese (whether at the beach or on a crowded Tokyo subway, wedged between two sweaty salarymen). This application works on all iPhone and iPod Touch models (provided they run iPhone OS 3.0 or later) and is entirely offline (doesn’t use any internet connection at all).

More info and screenshots on KanjiBox’s website…

And of course, for our ipod-deprived brethren, there is always KanjiBox for Facebook: free and full of fun multiplayer goodness!

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Study Kanji on your iPhone

It was both rather unexpected and yet blindingly obvious in retrospect: 大君 ['taikun'] was the title used by the Shogun in his relations with foreign dignitaries.

As a funny sidenote: 「君」['kun'], which I believe used to be a term of honour (“Master” etc.) is nowadays mostly used in Japanese to address young schoolboys (come to think of it, exactly as the English word ‘master’). Which would make the literal meaning of 大君 to be “Big boy”… Not quite the most imposing title you could find.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Surprising Etymology of the Day

1. Replace every ‘ない‘ by ‘へん‘.

2. Don’t say ‘とても‘, ‘ほんとう‘ or ‘ちがう‘, but: ‘めっちゃ‘, ‘ほんま‘ and ‘あかん‘…

3. Throw in loud ‘ほら‘ (with a throaty roll of the ‘r’) at random intervals in your conversation.

I’m totally ready for my move to the countryside.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

分からへんな

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Really need to work on that…

Should you attempt to follow, it will help if you have the same awesome Muji kit handy, but an inventive and resourceful person could do without (none of the ingredients are that hard to find, and the schematics can probably be figured out from scratch with limited engineering skills). Also, this is not a completely faithful translation of the original instructions: I have added a couple personal touches as well as skipped the more obvious advices (be careful with the knife, do not stick your tongue in the oven etc.).

Anyway, off we go:

Ingredients

In the kit:

• cocoa powder（ココアパウダ）: 10g
• cookie mix (クッキーミックス）: 400g
• powdered sugar（粉糖）: 100g

Additionally you’ll need:

• butter (or margarine): 80g
• 2 eggs: 1 full, 1 with white and yolk separated.
• sugar: 150g
• milk: 60ml

Instructions:

1. Melt the butter (by staring intensely at it, using telekinetic powers. failing that: your microwave on 500W).



2. Set aside a large spoonful of it and mix it with the cocoa powder.
3. Mix the rest of the butter with the sugar and whisk until it reaches a noticeably whiter shade.



4. Pour in the cookie mix, milk and full egg and mix the lot. Knead into a dough.



5. Set aside 1/4 of the dough you just made in 4) and mix it with the cocoa paste you made in 2). You now have two balls of dough: one big plain, one small chocolate-flavoured.



6. Spread the dough into a 4mm (not three, not five: four mm) layer. Use rolling pin and flour as you see fit.
7. Let the dough rest for about 20 mins while pre-heating the oven at 170° C
8. Using the conveniently provided schematics (or making up your own), cut out all shapes required by your engineering project and dispose on the oven shelf.



9. Spread a thin layer of egg yolk on each part with a cooking brush. Now is also a good time to carve some patterns (bricks for the walls etc.)



10. Put in the oven: remove after about 13mins, when it reaches a nice biscuit-like consistency.
11. Beat the egg white (use a few drops of lemon juice) and mix it to the powdered sugar: there’s your icing! That thing will glue absolutely anything together.



12. Using the helpfully provided pastry bag and the icing you made in 11), glue all the pieces of your house together.



13. Some more icing for a snowy roof, a little pine tree here, some bushes there…. You’re done.



14. If you are lucky, yours might look half as cool as ours.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Christmas Non-Gingerbread House

For example, any Japanese girl knows all too well how to obtain the following cutesy icons:
おんぷ[onpu]　→　♬♩♪♫
ほし[hoshi]　→　☆★

On a more pragmatic note, you can also choose from a very complete set of arrows:
やじるし[yajirushi]　→　↑↓☝⇔ etc.

And one of my personal favourite: european currency symbols that would otherwise take half an hour to find on a standard US keyboard:
ゆーろ[yuro] →　€
ぽんど[pondo] →　£

Another very cool set for your scientific paper-writing needs:
すうがく[suugaku]／えんざん[enzan]　→　√∃∀≠±∇

Not to mention the entire greek alphabet:
あるふぁ[arufa]　α
べーた[be-ta]　β
がんま[ganma]　γ
でるた[deruta]　δ
しぐま[siguma]　σ

etc. etc.

You will find even more of these in this large (albeit probably not exhaustive) list of special character shortcuts.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Nifty Japanese Input Trick

Now, there are many ways you could go about harvesting the Web’s boundless resources to help you in that quest.

You could for example do aerobics while watching awkward multicultural multilingual 80′s lesbian action:

…

Or you could sign into your Facebook account and add my latest online realization.

Kanji Box will fulfill your most secret kanji fantasies: it does absolutely everything, short of showing up for the test for you (gory details here). To top it all, it will let you compete against your friends: nothing like a bit of competition to get you worked up on the kanji skills (cue uplifting karate training montage).

[for all Facebook-haters out there: I feel you. I am not myself overly smitten with the concept. But I must admit Facebook sucks marginally less than its competitors, and its 3rd party API took most of the drag out of developing Kanji Box' multi-user features... so do not expect a standalone version too soon, sorry]

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

A new tool to learn Japanese

I just got a brand new handheld Japanese dictionary. It’s very complete, using one of the best database out there, smaller than a few credit cards stacked together and I paid 20,000 yens for it.

Oh, it also plays mp3s.

And movies.

In fact, it does a whole lot of things, pretty much anything I want it to do, provided I have time to write a program for it.

It’s an iPod Nano, running µClinux, thanks to the brilliant work of the iPod Linux team.

If you remember, I was severely torn over the purchase of this little thingie. But then I look at it now, and think of the first computer I ever played with as a kid: this thing has more RAM, more storage, a better screen resolution and more CPU power. And you could fit it inside the floppy drive of the former… I’m getting dizzy, merely thinking of it.

Anyway, I spent some time this week toying with my compiler and finally finished some very early alpha of this little dictionary program. In order to make it usable, I also added an extra Text Input module to handle kanas (text input is very nicely handled by Podzilla‘s API). Inputting speed is currently similar to a phone, and I’m planning to improve it eventually, with predictive kanji input.

In the meantime, I no longer have to carry an annoyingly incomplete pocket paper dictionary, to help me with my daily reading in the subway.

Now, imagine an iPod with Bluetooth that you can use with a small wireless keyboard (possibly using speech synthesis and earphones to get feedback on what you type without having to stare at the screen), and you got one of the cheapest, most badass PDA out there.

I think I’m starting to like that whole “twenty-first century” thing…

PS: If you are interested in test-driving this alpha, contact me in private and I’ll send you the files: but please do realize that you need to install iPodLinux on your iPod first, which is no walk in the park. Do not under any circumstances contact me for assistance on setting up Linux on your iPod: read the detailed instructions on their site.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

What does your iPod do?

I was just communicated by my Man in Japan, the results of the JLPT test Level 3 (yea, not feeling that ambitious at the time)… The one I took back in December of last year…

And it would appear I do indeed speak some Japanese. At least just enough to fool the government officials who passed me.

And to quote some hopelessly optimistic piece of j-pop fluff:

Yatta!!!

I soooo 0wN0rz N1h0|\|Gø!!!11!1

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

JLPT Results

The fact that it took me three months to get to it, is a testament to the sad state of affairs of this industry (and my own sorry ass’ inability to get anything done when not threatened at gunpoint). Actually, the decision to start reading mangas is an old one, one that arose around the time I woke up one day and realized I could suddenly understand Japanese (すっげぇ〜！日本語を喋れるよ！さああ、僕は貝が好きなの・・・). Well, alright: understand might be pushing it a bit, but I’ve been known to conduct reasonably flawless weather-related conversations with my neighbours: a major improvement from my arrival on Japanese soil, where my vocabulary was essentially limited to three Japanese words, one of which I cannot repeat on this site unless you can testify you are over 18 and click here.

Thing is: drunken conversation with Samurai friends did and still does wonders to my verbal skills, I can pull off a semi-decent everyday-Japanese provided it stays on the topic of whose turn it is to pay the next round, or monosyllabic expressions of my appreciation for miscellaneous types of music or other artistic works. Anything slightly off the beaten path usually gets me nodding complacently until I somehow manage to catch a few words that could clue me in on whatever it is we are talking about. Similarly, that whole level-of-speech issue has not been getting any better: you know things are bad when your friend – who has just chugged half a gallon of rum directly off the bottle – kindly worries about your use of excessively colloquial expressions.

Horizons have to be widened and grammar needs improving dramatically.

Hence: Mangas

First, because books are convenient: you can study them anytime, anywhere and by yourself; they do not require a language exchange partner who will be either convinced you are hitting on her, or actually hitting on you (and yea, the feminine form here has a purpose: just check the number of candidates for language exchange in English or French out there and their repartition by gender).

Also because, taking my cue on the local upcoming generations, I cannot read kanjis for shit. Which rules out most magazines and daily newspapers. Some magazines are not that hard – possibly even below my level – but there are only so many times you can read about the latest news on panty thieving activities, detailed voyeuristic recounts of schoolgirl groping-related arrests or nampa tips, straight from the pros (the gist of which can usually be found in all its quaint alliteration-riddled English translation glory on the Mainichi’s website).

As for regular books, real literature, eternal classics of the Japanese masters: try opening an original Mishima volume for laughs, just once. I swear, that guy uses kanjis even my dictionary has never heard of.

Mangas, on the other hand, rarely make use of overly elaborate kanjis, yet can cover a wide array of situations and lexical fields, all along offering saucerplate-eyed visual clues of the ongoing story. Additionally, most have furiganas for part or all of the kanjis used (depending on the target age for the series).

Let’s stop here for a slightly tedious digression that you may want to skip if you know anything about the Japanese language and the black magic art known as reading it:

As you may know, Japanese is written using both kanjis (roughly 1000 to 2000 different ones for basic books and newspapers) and two syllabaries known as kanas. A syllabary is similar to an alphabet, in that each character represents a sound, but unlike, say, the latin alphabet, Japanese kanas each match a full sound (“ma”, “mi”, “mu”, “mo”, “ra”, “ri”, “ro” etc). Each syllabary contains 80-some characters and is usually the first thing anybody will learn when studying Japanese.

In theory, every Japanese word could be spelled using only kanas (and thus easily readable by anybody with reading abilities above kindergarten level). This is quite convenient in cases like computer interfaces, where words are typed using kanas, before being turned into kanjis through some menu selection or such. In practice, though, most people (yours truly, included) will find it incredibly tedious to read a text written entirely using phonetic kanas (remember that Japanese doesn’t separate words either). For texts meant to be readable by kids or sufficiently important not to take a chance with the odd illiterate countryman, a compromise is found by writing both the kanji and its kana spelling alongside. These kanas are usually written in a smaller font above (when writing horizontally) or to the right (when writing vertically) of the kanjis they explain. They are called furiganas and will make the most arcane reading accessible to the casual reader.

One important reason to love furiganas, especially for foreigners, is that if you encounter a kanji you are unfamiliar with, you will probably want to look it up in a dictionary… Which is infinitely easier to do if you actually know how to pronounce it.

It is still possible to look up both meaning and reading of an unknown kanji by using a method known as “multiradical lookup”, relying on the number of strokes and a few recognizable components of the whole ideogram. Even if with a bit of habit and the right tools, multiradical searches can be done fairly fast, they are considerably more annoying to conduct than regular phonetic lookups.

End of digression

Finding readable materials…

Wasn’t an easy task…

First, as I’ve said, I know little about mangas, beside the obvious classics (so obvious that I have yet to spot them in a traditional manga store) and the ones I have come to associate with the utter stupidity of the genre, such as featured on TV or in the hands of greasy subway otakus. Neither ones, a welcome option as a motivating studying support. My friends didn’t have much to offer in terms of advice either: Yutaka had kindly suggested タッチ, a series revolving around baseball and the usual preteen subjects, written in Japanese well within my grasp… Unfortunately, my seething hatred for this unfathomably boring sport was just too much to overcome and I all but gave up, halfway through the first volume (I would heartily recommend it to any beginners who really gives a damn about baseball, though).

Then, I followed the common sense-laden advice offered by the very helpful maintainer of 日本語の道 and went for “anything I felt like reading”, without worrying too much about difficulty or level of language. After a bit of shuffling around the manga section of Shibuya’s Book First, I became the proud owner of a volume of Arsène Lupin’s – 3rd of the name – new adventures… Rupan Sansei, as he is known to his copyright-agnostic Japanese fans.

Why? Simply because it was one of the only character that I somehow remembered ever catching on TV as a kid. Probably seen at most once or twice, on vacation at some cousins’ house (TV watching wasn’t exactly a big hobby of mine, as a kid… It could have become one, had my parents ever deemed it necessary to own a TV). Also because the French novel character it is very loosely inspired from, was my absolute favorite, from age 6 to 10 (didn’t have TV, but we sure had books, oh yes we had). Given he had practically guided my first steps through French literacy, it seemed only fitting his distant cousin would do the same for Japanese. So I picked up a re-edition of the first volume, paid for it, went out and eagerly unwrapped it – because these damn things are always sealed in plastic, so as to thwart freeloading attempts of their perennially cheap readership – and discovered that there wasn’t a single furigana in the entire manga. And I do mean, not a single one: hell, even proper nouns were laid out in all their naked unreadable kanji glory. To this day I am still not sure why a comic book featuring the wacky antics of a sex maniac amidst an abundance of scantily clad buxom women, would make itself so difficult to read for its obvious intended readership of horny teenagers in full hormonal breakdown. I suppose it has to do with the fact it was published 30 years ago, when reading standards were substantially higher: they wouldn’t bother going back and add furiganas now.

Anyway, as I said in my aside, while querying unknown kanjis without furiganas is feasible, it is also much more than one wants to deal with when catching a few pages in between two subway rides.

On my next visit, I made sure this time to stick with the most basic of language levels. Initially, I ran a few laps around the store, trying to assess the market segment covered in each aisle, by sampling a few random covers here and there. I stopped after realizing that, for the past 10 minutes I had been leafing through the volumes of the ボーイズラブ section (sure it was written in big bold letters above the trays, but seriously: I suck at katakana engrish, I tend to tune it out much more often than even kanji signs): in fact, the one specific volume I had in my hands was most definitely outright yaoi stuff. I’m not sure what was more embarrassing: realizing I was holding 200 pages of lurid sexual romances between high-school boys with bad hairdo and rosy cheeks… or that beside my pale ass, all three other customers in that area were teenage girls wearing braces.

It was maybe time to query assistance.

I therefore went on to expose to the nearest employee the motives and nature of my sudden interest in mangas, asking for buying advice. The young and bubbly clerk I confided in, turned out to be surprisingly helpful for Japan, where the impeccable politeness and willingness to bend over backward for the customer, still doesn’t brighten the fact that most store employees act as glorified label-readers for the hapless information seeker. To my amazement, not only did she not respond to my query with the helpless look of the a lamb lost at night in the middle of a hyena housing project, traditionally reserved to foreigners foolish enough to inquire in a Japanese store, but she even had, gasp, suggestions as to what could fit both my taste and language requirements.

And this is how I left with volume 1 of Detective Conan: ostensibly kid’s reading, the animated version of which I had already glimpsed at, on occasion, without noticing too much of the formulaic quirks that make most anime damn near unwatchable (but we went through all that already…). We aren’t talking kindergarten coloring book either: quite a bit of blood and seriousness in the plot, and language I could see a pre-to-mid teen reading. But the important part is that it’s got furiganas for every kanji, making for a totally painless reading experience at any level.

It’s now been a few days, and I’m happy with this choice: in fact, I am reaching a point where I am really itching to read through to the end and know what happens, which is what you want when picking language practice material. At this speed, I’ll probably be done by next week-end. I guess then, I will milk the whole series for what it’s worth, but I also welcome any suggestion with details on availability at my favorite local mangaka… Be aware that a recommandation with only the English translated title and no author nor any idea of which category to look into, isn’t likely to materialize into my next bedside book… But if you wanna share your manga-reading/japanese-studying tips: now is the time, here is the place…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Why Manga does not suck completely

“Me… money… want… money… please…”

Ten months and twenty full pages of Japanese phrasebook later: trying to open a bank account in order to cash my first paycheck. After literally half-a-dozen fruitless attempts, I find one bank (みずほ, if you must know) that doesn’t mind the fact that I have: 1) no relatives born within 50 miles of the branch, 2) not been living a few decades on the island, 3) no inkan emblazoned with my kanji name and 4) a suspiciously pale skin color, compared to the local shade in fashion. I am not about to ask if they have multilingual staff on the premises.

In Japan, whenever a foreigner steps into a business asking for service, it is customary for staff to hastily draw straws. Failing that, they seek the one employee who has foreign country’s experience (usually a one-week honeymoon in Thailand). Failing that, they send the youngest trainee with instructions to commit seppuku if things get out of hand.

Two hours, many outdated Japanese-English dictionaries and one slightly rattled employee later, I have a Japanese bank account. It only took us 40 minutes to figure how to spell my name in katakana. It will only take me a few more months to figure out how to withdraw money from it.

Three years later: “Hi, I just lost my cash card in Paris, need to change my two-year out-of-date address, make a bank transfer (without my card) and, oh yea, gimme 50,000 yens in cash, by the way that’s a lovely necklace you got here. kthanx.”

Somehow even ended up with her personal phone number on the back of my checkbook.

This language thing is becoming way too easy, high time to leave the country.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Records of three years of bank dealing in Japan

Turning now to Chinese characters: We are learning them again at last, and many make me pleased. The character for “to endure” is a knife held to a heart. A tomb is required to draw “antique.” There are other things, too, of course: the local glyphic idea of “peace” is a woman in a house, while that of “family” is a pig in a house. This surely explains either less or more than it purports to.

Like most people, I too struggle to give more or less apocryphal interpretations to kanjis in order to make them more memorable. Some of my findings are quite far-fetched. Yet, this particular set never occurred to me before (as usual: mouse-over to get kanji pronunciation and meaning):

• 忍, as in 忍ぶ, is made of 心 and 刃
• A woman (女) under a “roof” (宀), becomes 安… Though in japanese, the 安 character doesn’t really hold the meaning of “peace” as in “war and peace” (usually written 平和), but rather a “spiritual, inner, peace” (安心). Interestingly, it is frequently used to indicate “cheapness” or “easiness” (安い).
• A “pig” (豕) under a “roof” (宀), becomes a “house” (家) and by extension: a “family” (家族).

Funny how the semantic oddity has been perfectly preserved in the transition from Chinese to Japanese (commonplace, indeed, but certainly not the all-encompassing rule).

Of course, there are hundred of these observations to be made, and I could probably come up with stories for nearly every kanji I know, but to stay with the farm theme, there is this one classic I really can’t get over:

Japanese kanji for “beauty” (美) is none other than a combination of “big” (大) and “sheep” (羊): makes way for all sorts of weird thought processes when a friend points out a 美人 in the street…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

The Marvellously Entertaining World of Kanjis

I’m sure nobody’s eager to hear the fascinating tales of my uneventful yet appropriately social week-end: birthdays were celebrated, morning were slept in, lazy afternoons sitting in the sun, sipping on drinks and writing physics were spent, ice-cream while people-watching on the steps of Shibuya’s Oy’ Oy’ department store^(*) were had… Nothing quite blog-worthy, as you’ll realize: no waking up in puddles of bodily fluids in some unknown street/train station/love hotel, no unexplained whip marks in the lower back, no kidney unaccounted for in the morning. Only routine Summer week-end stuff, minus the drink-till-you-puke and hangover stories.

Luckily, I have just what we need for such an occasion!

And thus, let me introduce our generic cultural blog-filler of the day:

The Tsukubai Mystery

The sharpest minds among you may have noticed I used many highly unoriginal cutesy japan-themed baubles in my latest redesign. Perhaps the least obvious of these, being the small icon I use for comments and trackbacks numbering (e.g. here). This graphic is a slightly stylized version of the actual thing, such as you can see it here or here. It is located in Ryoan-ji temple, in Kyoto.

This type of wash-basin is called a tsukubai, from the verb tsukubau: “to crouch, sit, bow”, as it is in such a humble position that visitors are expected to use the water and purify themselves. Common around zen temples, tsukubais tend to come in all forms and shapes, but the stone basin, bamboo pipe and wooden scoop are fairly standard.

Cue Indiana Jones soundtrack

What makes this particular tsukubai stand out, beside its location in one of the popular Kyoto temples, are the inscriptions on its top. For, you see, these seemingly undecipherable characters have a meaning!

In a very suspicious attempt at giving this site an ounce of cultural legitimacy, I went to the length of providing a nice little figure to which I will be referring henceforth:

When I say “undecipherable”, I do realize that to most of my non-japanese-reading readers, the “please stop” japanese road sign would offer about as much of a challenge, if not more… But in fact, even to the average Japanese eye, the inscriptions above are pretty arcane stuff. There is a riddle. An easy one, but kinda cool nonetheless.

You with me? Ok, let’s start:

The characters around the center (where the water rests) nearly all have some sort of meaning, although you would be hard pressed to combine them into something sensible:

• The top one, 五, is the kanji for “five”.
• The one on the right 隹, I am assured, is an old radical for “bird” (written 鳥 in modern japanese). Which is to say, it doesn’t mean much as it is.
• At the bottom, is a fragment that has absolutely no meaning by itself, but appears in the kanji for leg: 足
• On the left: 矢 is the kanji for arrow. Funnily enough, while you probably don’t have many occasions to place that one in daily conversations, it has also become a radical for many medecine-related kanjis (the kanji for “medecine” is made of an arrow being “contained”, presumably removed from a body: 医. “Doctor” is: 医師).

In the end, we get something like: “five birds [leg] arrow”, assuming we read them in this order (frankly no idea if kanji should logically be read clockwise or counter-clockwise). And I can assure you this doesn’t mean anything more to your Japanese neighbour than it does to you. Quite possibly even less if he isn’t on drugs like you and me.

The Solution

Confronted to the difficult task of solving this enigmatic inscription, the average zen student will usually sweat it a few months, before eventually going for the axe (in zen koans, picking up an axe and decapitating the zen master very often turns out to be the answer. And if it wasn’t the answer, at least it can become the solution). That is, until he suddenly realizes that the water basin itself is a kanji!

The square, in this pathetic excuse for a noble language, is a very common kanji for 口: “mouth”. Which doesn’t really help us much, until further realization that, combined with each of the four other kanji, it forms new kanjis!

五 becomes 吾, 隹 becomes 唯, 足 appears full as it should, and 矢 becomes 知:

吾唯足知

With a bit of [optional] grammar prettifying, we obtain:

吾唯足るを知る

Which reads something like “I learn only to be contented“, otherwise put:

“He who learns only to be contented is spiritually rich, while the one who does not learn to be contented is spiritually poor even if materially wealthy”…

And aren’t these words of truth indeed, dear brethren.

Please don’t thank me for this small bit of spiritual guidance: it was a pleasure, really.
But feel free to send your bottles of Bombay Sapphire Gin to my PO box.

^(*): Yea: I know. But it sounds so much cooler like that.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Tsukubai

After nearly killing a client’s DB yesterday (and spending most of my night restoring every bits and pieces semi-manually), I felt it wise to secure my own DB here. The one that stores this blog. Guess what happened then?

Yea, I blew the DB too. Or to be more precise: mySQL blew the part of the DB encoded in Japanese.

Here again I just spent half my night recovering everything that could be. Unfortunately all Japanese content for entries posted in June and early July is lost for good: not like it had much literary value, but still a bummer. And in case you are wondering about backups: believe me, I have backups, hundred of them… It just turns out that this piece of crap SQL isn’t even able to properly back up an exact binary copy of your tables that won’t screw up when it encounters encodings it can’t handle properly. So every single backup I have, is identically screwed.

My last personal piece of advice to any mySQL user out there, is to stay away from mysqldump do a freaking binary copy of the db files directly.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

As if a million bytes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I have compiled below a short list of all those I could remember, off the top of my head, along with a few friends’ contributions. I have made arbitrary use of katakana and hiragana, more or less dictated by what I’ve seen more often in writing. Rule of thumb is that most of these can be found in either form, depending on the mood of the author and the type of material it is used with. Mouse-over the kanas to get the romaji pronunciation….

The ubiquitous (all the time, provided you ever watch TV or speak to a Japanese teenager):

• ピカピカ glittering!
• ソラソラ sparkling!
• ギリギリ quick (chop chop!)
• ぺらぺら fluent (in a language)
• ぺこぺこ starving
• モシモシ [when answering the phone]

The commmon

• ドロドロ messy/dirty (a room, a floor) or muddled (a relationship)
• チャキチャキ efficient
• ツルツル smooth, slippery
• プンプン intense smell or furious anger
• ポツポツ bit by bit
• ベタベタ clingy (overeager lovers) or sticky (sweaty gaijin pig)
• じめじめ humid, damp
• ゆらゆら flickering

The uncommon (friends use them, dunno how universal they are):

• バラバラ scattered, all over the place
• エロエロ [will let you guess that one…]

The rare (those you likely won’t find in a dictionary, as they are total slang):

• ブリブリ high
• パキパキ fucked-up (much stronger than the slightly ‘cute’ ブリブリ)

The manga-style (those that sound like a comic strip description all by themselves):

• キョロキョロ looking around restlessly
• イライラ getting nervous (also as kanji: 苛々)
• うろうろ walking aimlessly
• カチカチ scared motionless

The real deal (actual onomatopeia, such as used in comics):

• ワンワン bow-wow (dog)
• ザアザア water sound (rain, river etc), white noise
• ケラケラ cackle (hen)… [not quite certain]

The fake (not really 擬音語, but still close):

• 色々 miscellaneous
• 時々 sometimes
• 中々 quite, considerably

Now your turn: send me your favorite 擬音語!

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Pikapika Dorodoro Barabara Buriburi Punpun Wanwan…

And thus here you go:
Dr Dave’s Keitai Kanji Multiradical Dictionary!

Of course, you can use this dictionary from any browser, but it has been made especially compact, so as to offer convenient browsing on a small keitai screen.

Why bother making yet another multiradical dictionary when Jim Breen (and many others, most likely) already offers a very decent one on his site?

Two reasons:

1. I wanted one that be easy to use from a keitai. Jim Breen’s is still a bit heavy to load and browse with a small screen.
2. I wanted a smarter system for radical selection. All the systems I’ve seen so far let you choose your radicals from a checkbox list of all common radicals. Such a list can be quite long. This makes finding each radical quite tedious and particularly cumbersome on a keitai. Mine use a slightly different approach, that requires at least some knowledge of basic kanjis, but make it much faster then.

Instructions

Fairly obvious, really:

• Screen 1: enter a string of kanjis. Can be any kanjis containing one of the radical you want to match or directly a radical. In practice, this means you should pick kanjis that look similar to the one you are trying to match… Say, you want to figure out [汾], you could enter [分] and [海]…
• Screen 2: you will get a list of all radicals matching any of the kanjis entered previously (in our example, you’d get: [ハ], [刀], [母] and [汁]). Select the ones that belong to the kanji you are looking for (e.g. [ハ], [刀] and [汁]). Optionally, enter a number of stroke, with a margin of error (if you want to get any stroke count, do not change the ‘all’ value).
• Screen 3 will give you a list of all kanjis (if any) containing all the radicals selected in the previous screen, ordered by frequency and stroke count (in our example, you’d get only the kanji you were initially looking for: [汾]). Along with the kanji, you are given stroke count and unicode value. Clicking on the kanji will do a word search in WWWJIC (translations). Clicking on the unicode value, will give you WWWJDIC’s Kanjidic entry (kanji pronunciation keys and data).

This script has been successfully tested with AU’s EZweb, but should work on any net-enabled keitai, please let me know if you encounter any problem. Suggestions and general comments most welcome.

Hope you’ll find it useful, I know I will!

Note: As usual, this project uses extensively the amazing amount of data gathered and made available by the EDRG on Jim Breen’s website.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Multiradical Kanji Dictionary for your Keitai

• … you keep complaining that nobody serves real rice anywhere in Europe (only that crappy non-sticky thai version). Yea, I’ve become a rice snob.
• … you manage to find yourself with two slices of whitebread and scrapes of Nutella for sole dinner, because it’s Sunday evening and you forgot that there isn’t a 24h combini on every streetcorner in Paris.
• … you burst into inextinguishable laughter, to the stupefaction of everybody else on the bus, when that big stocky white dude gets in with his cool-ass Japanese t-shirt proudly proclaiming「ホワイトトラッシュ」in bold letters on the back.

Otherwise, it’s good to be back home. I think I even missed the mushy weather.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

You know you’ve been in Japan too long, when…

Then I realized I had very little to say about the Deeper Meaning of Life tonight.

…

Health is good.

I’m told it’s a good sign that I have stopped spitting blood.

Damn, I meant to mention: if you are planing on reading, you may want to stop eating now. If you are planning on eating, you may want to stop reading now…

Of course, I’d appreciate this news even more, had it not been replaced by recurrent bouts of blood sneezing. It would appear that, despite near-seasonal-record temperatures registered all over Europe for the past two weeks, I have managed to catch, of all things, a cold.

I think I know exactly when I caught it. Right after my surgery. Not only were the conditions memorable, but they also featured some very strange insights in the utterly fucked-up way my poor excuse for a brain seems to work:

Dunno if that was due to the longer-than-expected duration of the surgery, but apparently, my post-op wake-up was a bit more shaky than should have been…

The usual procedure goes something like this:
1) open eyes 2) say “hello world” and give my bravest sickly-young-boy smile with a thumb up worthy of the most ridiculous afternoon soaps 3) feel intense pain in every parts of my body, barely mitigated by the horrible aftertaste of anesthetic in the back of my throat 4) give the International Sign Language version of “please more painkiller in my I.V. drip” 5) go back to sleep…

Instead, it went something like:

1) open eyes 2) instantly feel the coldest of ass-freezing cold that I have ever felt in my life. Not cold as in “gee, I wish I had put on an extra garment under my skirt today”, more along the line of “why am I waking up in a vat of liquid nitrogen?”… 3) instantly go into ridiculously overdone and uncontrollable spastic shivering, doing absolutely nothing to reassure the nurse in charge of my wake-up 4) repeatedly state my advanced state of coldness in half mumbled attempts at verbal communication…

Now, and this is the funny bit: for some unfathomable reason, my poor confused brain, usually straining to conjure up enough Japanese back at home for the most rudimentary food orders, thought it entirely appropriate to address the poor western woman in charge of my health, in the most whining and dramatic Japanese I have ever heard myself pronounce…

It took me many long seconds to realize that “Tsu… me… taaaaai, Tsumetaaaaai…” wasn’t gonna get me an electric blanket any time soon, but likely a trip back to the surgeon, with recommendations to check if he hadn’t left a few loose screws in the finish…

Actually, beside the fact that it now appears this cold wasn’t as much in my head as I thought: it’s kinda neat…

I don’t dream in Japanese. In terms of self-validation of my language skills, chemically-induced semi-coma is the best I got so far… If you think I’m above stroking my ego over such measly victory, you are dearly underestimating the powers of my bottomless hubris and propension to self-love in all its incarnations.

Nevermind the fact that my next attempt at communicating with a Japanese nurse, should it ever occur, will no doubt consist of my informing her that 私のホバークラフト は鰻が一杯です。 or something similarly skillful…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

The last one, I swear

Lucky for me, just when it might happen, something comes up to remind me that I’d still get my ass kicked at japanese crosswords by any 5-year old.

Even if that reminder is some utterly stupid technical detail of tear-inducing banality. The fact that it resulted in the waste of a complete afternoon and nearly failing to secure my plane ticket in time for my departure, sure helped giving it due attention.

For those of you wondering, just note that Sumitomo Trust (住友信託) and Sumitomo Mitsui (三井住友) most definitely aren’t the same bank. And moreover: Sumitomo Mitsui is spelled freaking backward in Japanese (Mitsui first), thus appearing under the マ (‘ma’ and other ‘m’ sounds) section, not the サ (‘sa’ and other ‘s’ sounds) section. As such, even if 住友信託 is the only bank appearing under that section and your brain tells you it looks close enough to be the bank you are supposed to make your transfer to, believe me: It’s not.

Well, all that to say that I’ll be off the island from the end of this week until the end of next month. Please feed the Godzilla when I’m away and take him out for a bit of city-stomping at least once a week, his cans are in the top left shelf in the cupboard. Rie is taking care of the garden and the cats.

bipppu no ato ni, messeiji wo rekohdo shite kudasai…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Last Kanji Showdown before Departure…

As I used to do with the old paper one, I take it out all the time when riding the subway in order to check some random stuff I’d read on an ad or heard somewhere (unfortunately, it doesn’t have any multi-radical kanji search, so I still need to have at least some clue on the pronunciation of what I’m searching for). Often, I end up drifting through definitions for a while, browsing along some thin line of thought and picking words I might want to remember.

This evening, I accidentally stumbled upon this pearl, reprinted verbatim from my phone’s dictionary:

腎虚 (じんきょ [jinkyo]): “man’s emaciation due to sexual intemperance”.

Can you actually believe there is a word, a single word, for “man’s emaciation due to sexual intemperance” ? Yea, neither can I.

In other news, my favorite kanji of the day is:

火の粉 (ひのこ [hinoko])

Which means “sparks”, but literally translates to “fire dust”. Incidentally, the “dust” (粉) in “fire dust”, is also the dust in 花粉症, or “flower dust affliction”, known to the West as “hay fever”, responsible for a strong seasonal comeback of the ever fashionable white cotton facemask (for many years before coming to Japan, I had been convinced, along with the rest of the Western world, that these masks were exclusively worn to prevent germ spreading while they are in fact meant to protect from pollen).

Damn I think I just made an informative and somewhat useful entry here. My editorial integrity is sinking these days.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Kanji of the Day

Literally.

It has got a present tense, a past tense, many inflections for each, but absolutely nothing to accentuate a verb in a way that shows it is taking place in the future.

This is not as inconvenient as one might think at first: present tense is used instead, and, when the lack of context calls for it, precisions such as “tomorrow”, “later”, “after” clear up ambiguities.

Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.

in Japanese, “I will miss you” becomes “I miss you”.

In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is 寂しい (samishii: lonely, desolate), instead of saying “I will miss you” or even “I will be lonely”, you say “I am lonely”…

In other news, arguing all day long while walking aimlessly in a city taken over by muddy snow and icy wind chills is about as fun as it sounds.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

The Future of Japanese

The night was an interesting one to be in a sports bar, since, along with the important rugby game, Judo finals were on in Athens. Judo being one of Japan’s stronger discipline in the olympics, one half of the place was packed with Japanese fans (many of them still wearing yukatas and jimbeis from their evening watching fireworks) cheering for the Japanese competitors, while the other half was occupied by mostly-gaijin rugby fans rooting for the All Blacks (the place was definitely big enough to fit everybody happily).

Since both girls’ Tani Ryoko and guys’ Nomura Tadahiro brought this year’s first crop of gold medals to Japan, the mood was definitely upbeat. And while I usually loathe most sports on TV, Judo can be really entertaining to watch: especially if you compare a mere 5 minutes of intense fighting and people flying all over the place to, say, three full hours of painfully boring commercial-laden graceless ball-pushing by slices of 10 seconds.

Watching Judo here made me realize something really interesting that had completely slipped my mind up to that point: when I first arrived to Japan, I actually spoke much more Japanese than I thought.

My level of Japanese back then was a resounding zero. nada. nil. If you were to exclude the three weeks of rushed crash course readings and the few notions Yutaka had been kind enough to try and impart on me, I had absolutely no knowledge of Japanese whatsoever until I set a foot in Narita for the first time in my life in October 2002. At least that’s what I thought. But yesterday, I realized that, without knowing it, or more exactly, without remembering it, I had known a whole bunch of Japanese ever since childhood.

See, as a kid, I could not be bothered much with sports… particularly the kind that required you to build some form of “team spirit” and where smashing your opponent’s head in the concrete was not considered the principal objective… if said sport involved the use of a ball, then I downright hated it. Don’t ask me why, I just couldn’t stand soccer, basketball, handball, to say nothing of hell-spawn cricket.

My parents, instead of spotting an obvious display of what would later bloom into my current fully asocial psychotic personality, decided I just needed to have some kind of regular physical activity that didn’t involve being nice to my fellow schoolmates and gave me to choose between judo or ballet dancing…

Well, we all know how parents are: just pick one thing and they’ll give you the other. bastards.

Yea, little dr Dave, back in the days, was a proud judoka and happily broke miscellaneous bones and teeth (well, teeth are bones, technically, aren’t they?) under the loving yet strict supervision of some sort of Miyagi-style sensei (except his Japanese probably had a serious mediterranean accent, but otherwise, he had the same deceptively quiet ojiisan look). Overall, I must say it did me much good in many respects and might have been the only time ever in my life where I won some kind of medals that were not filled with milk-chocolate.

Another consequence of this practice is that, unbeknownst to me, I built what I now realize was a fairly consequent Japanese vocabulary. And the weirdest part is that I still remembered all these words (some of them are actually very common in everyday Japanese) but never made the connection when I had to learn them again here… it all dawned on me yesterday.

In Judo, the referee starts every fight by saying hajime, ends with sore made or puts the fight on hold by matte. A skillful move gets awarded a waza ari, two waza-ari becomes a victory (ippon) through an awase-waza (although I do remember hearing a simple waza to waza ari: ippon too). All these words are quite common in everyday Japanese, but there are also the more technical terms such as the ones used for throws: harai-goshi, uchi-mata or the ever dreaded tomoe-nage (the one that usually ends up with somebody flying teeth first into the ground).

I would never have thought I actually knew more Japanese words than sushi, samurai bukkake and banzai before coming here…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Judo and Japanese