Are you taking total-immersion classes?
Damn you & such.
Beat me to it.
The scary thing is, that song’s been stuck in my head for at least the past two months. I even bought a copy off iTunes to see whether I could neutralize it, but it didn’t help.
I guess you could say that, although the course wasn’t advertised as such. My tutor speaks only in Japanese to her students, even after class, which is impressive, but can be somewhat annoying at times. I’ve only heard her speak English once, when she was on the phone with someone else.
As far as total immersion is concerned, I’ve taken the liberty of defaulting everything I do on my computer to Japanese. My browser’s home page is the Japanese language version of iGoogle. I have Gmail set up in Japanese, as well as YouTube. My YouTube channel is in Japanese, including my Introduction and About Me sections.
With the exception of The Straight Dope, all my non-work, online communication is done in Japanese, and all my online friends converse with me in Japanese only.
There are a few websites I frequent that allow me to watch Japanese dramas online, such as mysoju.com, which help improve my listening and pronunciation skills.
I’m also a member of Japanesepod101, and Japanese Online Institute (JOI), mostly for their quizzes.
Even when I’m not actively attending to the language, I have it in the background somewhere, e.g., news programs on internet radio, music, etc…
I’m pretty much hit from all sides, every day, by the Japanese language in my personal life and, I’ve found, it’s really making a difference with my retention.
Wow! I think I may have found someone more interested in it than me!
How do you set up the Mac to run in Japanese? Would it be best to set uop a new user account?
I set up a new user account and discovered that you can change all the Finder menus, etc, to Japanese by making Japanese the top language in the list of preferred languages.
I never found it difficult on a Windows machine with the correct IME. You just get a little extra bar that you can click to change your input. Easy-peasy.
Not that I’m going to switch to Windows to type in Japanese, but I am curious, how easy is it to switch from Hiragana to katakana in the latest Windows OS?
On my Mac, if I’m typing roman characters and want to switch to hiragana, I just hit the caps lock key. If I want to switch to katakana, all I have to do is hold the shift key. To go back to hiragana I just release the shift key. It’s very easy and eliminates having to leave the keyboard for the mouse to click on anything. Of course I can also use the standard Ctrl-shift-J for hiragana, Ctrl-shift-K for katakana, and Ctrl-shift-L for roman characters, but the single key method works better for me, allowing me to type a little faster with fewer breaks as I switch from one to the other.
onomatopoeia, is that use of the caps lock key configurable?
Question… do you use a Japanese word processor? If so, what do you use? Can you recommend one for the Mac? Can things like OpenOffice or Pages be set to do vertical Japanese text?
I’ve suddenly become interested* in Japanese typography. I enabled the Asian text features in my copies of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Indesign, but I’m unclear whether there are features relating to furigana. (There are certainly a lot of other features…)
Here’s a mockup I did in Illustrator, a couple of days ago, using a drawing I did a while back. I could make a text box and fill it with vertical text. When I hit Option-: for an ellipsis, it even gave the the vertical Japanese one! But I made another vertical text box with smaller text for the furigaba.
(I still don’t know how to get that extender character in katakana. More experimentation is required.)
[sub]*This is known as ‘giving in to the obsession’. 
[/sub]
Somewhat. You can have it so when the caps lock light is on you’re in hiragana (the way I have it), katakana, or romaji. The way I work, the hiragana selection is the only one that makes sense. When my caps lock light is off I know I’m in the roman character set. When it’s on I know I’m in hiragana, and to shift to katakana I just hold the shift key. Couldn’t be simpler for me.
I just use MS Word. I’ve done vertical text in Word, but it is somewhat clumsier than I think it should be because it requires setting up tables, and since typing vertically is not really important to me, nor a requirement for my class, I don’t bother with it.
Hey! That’s pretty cool! I haven’t gotten into anime or manga myself, but understand how important vertical typing would be for those who produce this type of material.
Well, it’s only five more days until the JLPT. Anyone else taking it?
It’s actually been a few years since I’ve used it, and it was back on XP, so I’m afraid I can’t answer that one. I don’t remember it being a pain, though.
Not I. 実は、この頃片言の日本語しか話せないんです。* But good luck to you!
*じつは、このごろかたことのにほんごしかはなせないんです。
Transliteration and translation:
[spoiler]Jitsu wa, kono goro katakoto no nihongo shika hanasenai n desu.
To be honest, these days I can only speak “broken” Japanese.[/spoiler]
As far as the XP IME goes, it usually figures out what’s supposed to be in katakana and automatically converts it w/ the spacebar. If it doesn’t you can always just hit F7 to convert it.
Aside from that, it’s just alt-shift to switch to JP and alt-tilde to switch from half-alphanumeric to kana in the first place. And there are very few programs that don’t support unicode… mostly legacy stuff. So JP on Windows is not really a problem… I mean, I’m typing this out on my Win Mobile phone right now and 日本語ができる. (I can do it in Japanese)
As for immersion, I think that’s the best way to go, though obviously daily interaction w/ native speakers is far better than just immersing yourself in Japanese media… Thankfully, I’m able to use it everyday in conversation… Though that gets tiring sometimes. When you’re learning, it’s exciting to have any conversation in JP, but eventually, when you get good enough to understand what’s being said, you realize that a boring conversation in JP is still a boring conversation. And then there’s the laziness that causes me to reply in English even if my friend’s speaking JP. You wanna practice the language, but if the content of the conversation is more important than what language it takes place in (or I’m just tired), I’ll use the one I can express myself best in.
My 101 teacher eventually learned to make jokes about reading tea leaves with the coffee thing, a lot of “no, X-san, tea is ocha.” Of course someone, of all things, mixed up 見る (to watch) and 飲む (to drink), that was… interesting.
Interesting, although I would have a concern about what the conversion algorithm misses, or may miss. As I’m typing, I don’t spend too much time paying attention to what’s on the screen as I’m concentrating more on getting my thoughts down after translating in my head. I then do a quick proofread when I’m done. With the Windows IME, I think I’d feel more compelled to check as I type, thereby slowing me down.
That’s true. My challenge is there aren’t many native Japanese speakers in New Jersey, so I pretty much have to be content with online conversations and media, at least at this point.
From the little you’ve posted in this thread, I think your Japanese is not too bad, actually. Perhaps you should take level 4 of the JLPT just for kicks, to see how proficient you really are.
ETA: Of course you’ll have to wait until next year as registration for the 2009 exam is now closed.
I might take the level-4 2010 JLPT if I get that far. It’s held at York University in Toronto. Apparently the first five classes at my school will prepare me enough for that. I have a suspicion that I’m going to have to supplement things quite a lot to have a realistic chance of passing, though. I was looking at the JLPT site last week. Looks intense.
I bought Japanese in MangaLand 1 and Kanji in MangaLand 1 last week. I want to learn the katakana by January, when I go back.
Thanks! The ironic thing is, I’m more influenced by French and American comics than by Japanese, except possibly in some minor stylistic areas. So if/when I write comics in Japanese, they will be non-Japanese.
Here’s Adobe Illustrator’s online help page for ‘Asian text’. Lots of formatting and spacing options. There are a fair number of Japanese fonts supplied with the Adobe suite as well. I may have to fake some things though…
How kind of you to say. 
I’m okay if I have a dictionary at hand, but my vocabulary has gone to hell, and as for reading/writing, I’ve forgotten most of my kanji. (At max, I knew probably about 1,000; now, it’s probably more like 100.) Definitely something I’d love to get into again, if I can ever find the time.
Japanese on a PC is a breeze. 85% of my work emails are in Japanese, and I can go back and forth between Eng and Jpn without even thinking about it.
Japanese wasy the easiest foreign language I’ve studied. By far. Partially because the grammer is relatively structured (fewer irregular verbs, for example). But mostly because there are only five vowel sounds. Which means, easier to hear, and easier to pronounce properly right away.
I used this bookyears and years ago, and remember it being pretty good. I only used the first half of the first book (by the the time I got to the second half of the book I was reading newspapers and such enought that I was able to learn new kanji from context), but the book still made an impression on me. I’d definitely check it out.
Best advice I can give you is to find a subject you like and read about it in Japanese. I liked baseball, so I read a lot about Japanese baseball in newspapers and the like. If you like video games, grab some Japanese RPGs (the old Final Fantasy & Dragon Quest games are great). Exposure is the key!
I’ll probably never use a Windows machine to type Japanese. My last experience doing so a few years ago was wrought with frustration. My sense, based on the comments in this thread is it’s better now, but burn me once and all that.
How can you put Japanese and easy in the same sentence? My mind just exploded.
I think I will. Thanks!
Good advice.
I keep forgetting there’s a Twickster looking over my shoulder and have to keep editing my posts to expunge the conversational Japanese parts or translate them back into English.