Interestingly, just after posting my blog post Friday night, one of my friends on Facebook had posted this link. It’s a neat story about a train station in Japan that stays open for just one patron. It’s neat when you post something and then immediately see tangentially related news.
A couple of other links I forgot to add previously:
– influent, a game on Steam that I’d like to pick up along with Koe , whenever it releases. These promise teaching Japanese, and so they have my interest.
– I’ve also got memrise, for vocab… but I can only use so many tools at once. I might actually forget about playing Fable in Japanese for now and just focus on Human Japanese.
– Wanikani seems to be another recommended resource. But see above.
It’s been interesting trying to find a dictionary to use. There seems to be a lot of people arguing on reddit over which is the best (apparently all Android solutions are lacking), but it seems that Japanese is well regarded, as is Google Translate itself. jisho seems good enough for now as a web-based dictionary. If you’ve got an iOS device of some sort, it seems that the go-to app is “IMIWA?”.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I said on Friday, “An hour a day seems doable”. That’s nonsense. I’m so bloody strapped for time right now. I wasn’t able to find more than 15 minutes yesterday, and that’s only because I looked at the memrise app while I was on the toilet. At least I was able to put some time in today. On that note: I decided to try launching Fable in Japanese and was immediately greeted by:
I wasn’t really planning on reading the Terms of Service anyways… but… uh… we’re not off to a good start. It struck me that since my computer’s language settings are English, maybe I need to enable Japanese in Windows. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/language-packs#lptabs=win81 made it seem as though the process would be simple enough, so I added the language and tried it again.
Whatever. I hit the button that had an A on it. Clearly that means “A-OK!”. The game launched in, and it looks like in-game the text is Japanese. So hopefully this is doable.
Google Translate is pretty ace in that it lets you take pictures of text and translate it. As you can see in the below image, I was able to take a picture of the Spacehamster Japanese app’s logo and translate it. It means “Japanese” and you can even hear and see the Japanese pronunciation. But it’s not as good at picking up longer sentences in smaller font. The opening screen of Fable was kind of garbled at first. By manually correcting the capture using the drawing tools, I was able to get it to translate correctly.
While this seems super powerful, and like it’ll be very handy if I find myself needing to translate signs or something… I don’t know if it’s the right approach for learning to read. I think I might need to learn how to properly look up Kanji in a dictionary based on radicals? I don’t know… it seems too easy this way… I can imagine that I’ll have a lower retention rate if I’m not forced to look up individual words… but at least I could fall back on this if looking up words leads to incoherent translations.
For now at least, I guess I’ll focus on Human Japanese.
I’ve kind-of-sort-of got typing figured out… わかります。 Now that I’ve got it sorted out (You can hit the Windows button plus space to switch keyboard languages, and once in Japanese mode, you can hit alt ~ to toggle on kana input. It’s actually the first time I’ve ever legitimately typed kana on a computer. In the past, I’ve copied and pasted the kana tediously from the interwebs.
Which means, I can track phrases that I learn!
Such as the first one in Human Japanese: ここを… alright, so I’m not as well off as I thought… I can type the Hiragana… but no idea how to switch it to Katakana… nor is my Katakana good enough to recognize the symbol I’m looking at at the moment:
Luckily the internet is full of wisdom, and I should be able to figure it out with it’s help.
At any rate, I like the writing in the app so far, and the formatting of it as well. It seems like it does a great job of breaking down sentences…. when you press on the kana, you can hear a pronunciation, and then you can see the translation, and the ingredients.
Some language rules that are covered in Chapter 1 include:
1. Give each vowel its own, distinct pronunciation. ああ for example.
2. The only exceptions are that え is extended with い, and お with う.
3. Japanese does not use stress modulation as in the word “com-pu-ter”.
I’ve always had difficulty remembering #2, which is why I write it down now. The rest of the chapter seems to mostly cover consonant pronunciation – something I believe I have down.
I’ve just finished chapter 1. I’m finding the Microsoft IME typing to be rather odd to get used to (particularly trying to fill in flash cards using Anki). It doesn’t seem to be designed for Japanese font input and constantly toggles back to the line that I’m not trying to type into. I’m also going to have to actually make an Anki account so I can sync cards between my computer and phone.