Cool clothing

My friend Tony - a genuine "we-went-to-school-together-and-hung-out-at-each-other's-house" kinda friend - has launched a range of t-shirts aimed at articulating aspects of the gaikokujin experience from his new home in Kanazawa on the northern shores of Honshu.
Featuring punny word-play, mixed with cool graphics and playing on expectations, T-Shitsu products are crafted in Japan from superior materials. But as undeniably cool as the shirts are, they are as nothing to the sublime beauty of the website - Tony's other skills lie in brilliant web design!
Check out the range and when you inevitably buy something, let him know Dan sent ya!

Getting back in the groove

Trying to pick up where I not so much left off as dropped out altogether is proving far more difficult that I thought it would be.

I have a subscription to JPod101 once again, but as I sort of found the last time round, the sheer volume of material there now, and of course there's more again, means it is quite intimidating. With my BlueTooth link seemingly on the blink, the best thing about this, and ironically the free bit too, the audio, is largely denied to me.

What's more worrying is that mentally I can't even seem to engage with the enormity of the task, but while I have more freedom at work from the stressful stuff - I'm working to help other people with their stress and that is personally a lot easier - I really need to knuckle down. That said, I do find that reading ドラえもん is reaping benefits - I am recognising more words in the stories these days (at last) and they provide useful queries for my language exchange on the weekend.

But now I'm going to dust off a few old friends:

• Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide - for me the best ordered guide to grammar (and not just online, but full stop)
• J-Gram - widely considered the most comprehensive J-grammar resource, including by Tae Kim, himself a contributor I believe

and two JLPT specific resources:

• Meguro Language Centre - one of my lottery winning dreams is to enroll with MLC for a few months, quite simply if it's not here it's not in the test
• JLPT Study Page - from the Ronseal school of product marketing

Right then, I'm off to Kim's, after new thing for the day...

Thing for the Day

さ - a filler word meaning 'right then' or 'ok', used to acknowledge the other speakers and signify a change of topic.

Building a Japanese Environment

Over on Learning Rocks, my "professional" blog, I have been following the "personal learning environment" thread that has been going around blogs on the same subject.

There have been a few points of view, but the settled opinion of a PLE is the space you build yourself, online in the most part, to help you learn. With Learning Rocks, extensive use of Google reader on elearning blogs, joining in on Wikis and various other bits I do every day constitute my "PLE" with regards to elearning.

However, with Japanese it is proving more difficult. What I'm keen to try to do is find a community of other learners who blog about their experience of struggling with the language. This I seem unable to do. Tony's blog is a perfect example, for although he alludes to his learning and has blogged about it explicitly, it is a small part of his oeuvre. Tae Kim, whose Guide is one of my favourite learner resources, is an intermittent writer and at a very high level anyway.

I could rejoin the forums at JPod101, but I never found them as useful - they are not a place for reflective learning; newbie questions and boasting are the norm.

So, if you know of any blogs that add to the mix and discuss the pleasures of learning Japanese, please let me know and help me build my J-PLE.

Try a Japanese second life!

One of the great ways to learn a language is to emmerse yourself in it, spend time amongst the natives and soak it up.

Easier said than done when your language of choice is Japanese and you live in the UK. So rather than give up, here's a way to do it: www.splume.com.

This is an emmersive online world much like Second Life, but aimed at the Japanese market and, apparently, following a somewhat different design philosophy. Whatever, I'm sure it would be fun.

The glaze...

Am I the only one to suffer the glaze?

The glaze strikes me every time I sit down to study Japanese - my eyes pass over Japanese text as if it were nothing more than a nice pattern on the paper. Kanji entries in my text books are passed over in favour of Romaji - against the protests of my brain that wants the challenge. "NO!" my reading muscle yells, casting me down in to a world of lost meaning and competing spelling (it's shi, surely - it doesn't even sound like si!)

It takes an act of concentration of great magnitude to shift the glaze. I stare intently at the page as if trying to make sense of one of those stereograms that were on every pot smoker's bedroom wall in 1995.

But it's not limited to vision. My ears tune out Japanese TV as if it were nothing more than white noise. To me Jpod101 sounds like trying to pick up Radio Caroline on AM band radio in a winter storm - calming hum with the odd word floating out of the murk. To listen in I have to stop walking and stare in to space to rob my brain of input and free up the bandwidth.

It's hopeless...

More quality materials

For Nihongojira it's my desire to plug only the finer sites that can help in the quest to learn.

Another one I have found, thanks to those wonderfully contributors on the JPod forum is this little place: the JLPT Study Page.

It is specifically geared to the most widely (only?) recognised exam for students of Japanese. Lots of useful references and a system that links to the best grammar resource on the web, Tae Kim's, mean it is a great place to check your level. I'm pleased to see it also references Jim Breen's JDic and Meguro Language Centre.

That's pretty much all the places I recommend too.