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Japanese Language Study with Anki

I’m not that good about studying Japanese. Studying for school, sure: there are short-term, immediate consequences to not doing my work, not to mention public ridicule from professors and classmates if I clearly don’t know what I’m talking about or what’s going on. But with no (immediate) consequences and no (guaranteed) public ridicule if I don’t learn my five kanji for the day, Japanese always seems to fall to the bottom of my to-do.

Then I try to read a website, or an advertisement, or I have to ask my friend for the umpteenth time what a word means, or I know what I want to say in English but argh how do I say it in Japanese… and motivation returns. Life is hard living in a foreign country and only sort of knowing what’s going on, or what’s written on something, or what someone just said (and what to say back). There’s a lot of being confused and looking dumb.

Still, it needs to be easy for me to study: not easy in the subject matter, but easy in the method. If I have to read worksheet instructions or fumble around trying to find the right flashcards I lose my motivation in about half a second. Not to mention there’s no immediacy to gathering all these physical study materials: I have some already, but if I decide I need to learn something else I have to go to amazon.co.jp or the bookstore and poke around and obsessively read reviews to make sure what I’m looking at is a good product and on and on. Being a poor and mildly OCD is not a good combo.

And lo, in that void of a quick, convenient, well-priced (and isn’t free the best price of all) study tool comes: Anki. Anki is actually a generic flashcard application, but it allows for shared flashcard decks. So after downloading and installing the program, I can search through Anki’s massive database of flashcards and find that many people before me have created Japanese-language flashcards. No need to laboriously input data myself. There are flashcards for all the kanji for JLPT 1, 2, 3, and 4 (these designations are outdated now that the JLPT is organized by N1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, but it’s not as if the kanji I need to be fluent have changed), flashcard packs of 6000+ Japanese sentences, hiragana and katakana for beginners, grammar, and many more. Better still, Anki has an iPhone app. At $25 it’s more than a little pricey, but if you consider that the desktop client and all the flashcards that come with it are free, it more than evens out.

And finally, if you’re a particular studier who wants things just so like I do, you can edit the flash card packs you download. I didn’t like how the kanji flashcards gave me the kanji and the reading then asked for the meaning; I wanted them to give me the kanji and ask for the reading and meaning. With a quick template edit, I changed all 1000+ flashcards so I could have just that.

Studying has been a lot easier – or at least a lot easier to guilt myself into doing – since I started using Anki. With the iPhone app I can do my reviews on the train, syncing my progress so the desktop app knows I did my work when I get home. I can’t say I’m as diligent as I need to be, but I’m headed in the right direction.

So all that said… anyone want a box of White Rabbit kanji flashcards for JLPT 3-4? They’re starting to gather dust.

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No pictures for this one, but let me know if you’d like me to break it up by adding a screenshot or something.

VOWELS ARE TRICKY

Engrish is the name given to butchered English by the Japanese people. It provides hours of entertainment and a barral of laughs. Now I’m not saying that I don’t butcher the Japanese language so this post it all in good fun.

Our manager is very good about putting notices up in Japanese and English which is greatly appreciated. However, they don’t lack English mistakes. One of our favorites was when he bought new “flying pans” and proudly announced it on the board. So the other day I came upon the following photo at our guest house and I am more than happy to share it with you.

Now what he means is “Staff Only” to ward off people from putting their belongings in this specific corner of the house.  However, with the easy vowel mistake of “a” and “u” it has now become “Stuff Only”.   Now if this was an area that we all shared it wouldn’t necessarily be a mistake -although a bit weird- as maybe he is might be implying that you can’t put food or something there.  But because it’s a private area it makes me what do ask, “What things can we put back there other than stuff?”.  Haha.  Makes me giggle every time I walk past it.

Thank you Koga-san!

vowels

Cultivated Eggplants!

The eggplants I planted in May have gotten big enough to pick!  Due to the fact that there wasn’t much rain during rainy season and that it got very hot, very fast, the eggplants are a little on the small side and the skin is a little tough.

However, this year is the first year I have tried to grow my own vegetable.   I didn’t really know what I was doing especially since all the products are in Japanese (pretty sure I wouldn’t have known what I was doing with products in English either!).  Therefore the fact that such small and cute vegetables grew makes me very happy!  Not to mention delicious!  Fresh food is definitely the cream of the crop!

eggplant

ENGRISH FAIL

The other day my Japanese boyfriend made a bookmark folder on his computer called “Engrish.” I was happy to see it because 1) he never studies English and 2) he was using that humor that I love about him. However, it turns out that he didn’t realize he had used an “r” or even worse, he didn’t know it was an “l”! (>_<) I’m afraid to ask.

Engrish is a common term to make fun of the plethora of mistakes that Japanese people make in English (I know we butcher Japanese characters as well too).  It’s all pretty endearing stuff but having lived here for awhile now I’m pretty used to the weird English or the common mistakes that they make and when I see them it almost doesn’t faze me.  However recently I have seen quite a few examples of usage mistakes working against a product’s mission.  These still make me giggle (although it’s sort of sad).

So the other day, I saw a whole line of these “Preshower Bug Repellents”.  Sprays, rubs, you name it, they had it.  I wonder if these are the instructions: Apply and then wash off? NAME FAIL. Did not a single person in the whole manufacturing design/manufacturing line notice this mistake?

Engrish