Chances are you have a picture on desktop as a background. Maybe even a picture related to japan and Japanese. I admit that it might look good, but you paid good money for that monitor space, don’t waste it. Look at this:
What is it you ask?
Well it is only the best use of desktop space there is,
Three RSS feeds from three major Japanese newspapers, http://mainichi.jp http://www.hokkaido-np.co.jp and http://www.asahi.com/
Two gaming related RSS feeds from http://www.kotaku.jp/ and http://www.famitsu.com/
A timer for time boxing, my email plus the AJATT twitter feed.
Oh and a clock and computer resource monitor.
The benefit is simple, rather than staring that the same image I’ve seen hundreds of times I get the latest real world and gaming news plus Japanese practice all without changing any of my habits. Even if you cannot read it all simply having it there will mean that you will have yet another place in your environment where immersion is inevitable.
Oh and the best part was how easy it was easy to do it by using the open source and pure awesome windows program RainMeter. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to set everything up. Of course if you have time to get lost in it Rainmeter also has a ton of potential for customisation. Either way http://www.customize.org/rainmeter/skins is the perfect place to start once you have basic Rainmeter installed.
Ugh, this reads way too much like a peice of marketing, msut go to show how awesome the program is right?
Man it has been a while since I felt like this, when you don’t really know what you are doing, following tutorials word for word yet it is just not working. I think I am just about over it for now but it has put me in a reflective mood, in the past I would have struggled and given up. And maybe later coming back and getting it right. Lately though I seem to be struggling and then achieving, maybe I am just trying harder, or my skill set has reached a special level where it is semi-transferable. I must say though, programing, or at least flash programing, is very rewarding, one can see playable progress at nearly every stage.
Today is my last day before my school starts up full time. Its always a balancing act to keep up with school work while still enjoying my hobbies, this is what is so awesome about summer break, I can work on my projects as much as I want. Most of what I worked on this year, like my fallout 3 mods and smrsimple, have already been mentioned here. Those were only my earlier projects though and during the later half of summer I got quite a bit done as well.
In websites I got two more done, Cameroncreekmining.ca and Japanesesimple.com. Cameroncreekmining is my father’s hobby company’s website and was a fun project. Not only did I get to impress my father but I also got to try out a new CMS, Concrete5, all while getting him away from his old website which had been built using some shovelware website builder. The neat thing about concrete5 is that it uses a in browser editor so that he can now edit the site anywhere he is without touching any html. Hopefully this will acutally get him to do so every so often. Japanesesimple.com is my personal project, I’m learning japanese and finding interesting things along the way so I thought I might as well share with others. In truth though I just really wanted to make another website and do so in a field I am interested in.My thought is to keep the subject matter simple and basic, allowing me an actual finish date.
Another area I have spent some time playing in is adwords, since my father has products to sell it would be silly for him not to advertise them. Another excellent excuse to do something fun and interesting.
Using proper graph paper to practice Kanji on can really help your writing conform on shape and proportions, or at-least I know it really helped mine.
Finding the perfect graph paper image was a bit of a pain so in the end I just made my own. I did some cleaning up and editing last night to get every last square out of the paper. I also added some white space on the edges so that it should turn out well on most printers. The US Letter sized paper it should be 15 perfect boxes high and 22.5 boxes wide. I also created a slightly different image for A4 Paper which should by 15 by 23~24 boxes, unfortunately I don’t have any A4 to test it with. In fact I technically don’t even have US Letter size either, only Canadian P, an approximation of US letter in metric units.
When printed with the file’s DPI it creates ~1.20cm squares. Not all software has this sizing option, for instance Microsoft Paint will not print it correctly. I know for a fact that irfanview does it right since that is what I use.
Note, when resized as they are below it appears as if they have major flaws, I assure you when full size these images are perfect.
US Letter sized Graph Paper:
A4 Sized Graph Paper
First off I should mention that I red and am reviewing the 1984 edition of this book. No I didn’t find this at some used book store. Instead this book is a bit more of an heirloom. You see I am not the first one in my family to learn Japanese, both my Grandmother and Grandfather on my mother’s side learned a bit of it. This book was given to my grandfather for his birthday by one Mr. Suzuki, a retired engineer who for a period of time moved to my mother’s hometown in rural Alberta and taught Japanese as well as becoming friends with my grandfather.
At first I was a bit optimistic and expected something akin to Dr. Heisig’s work Remember the Kanji(RTK). While Len Walsh gets close his primary focus is on the character’s origin and how it was simplified from that, this is in contrast to RTK where primitive elements are the focus. Also unlike RTK, Read Japanese Today includes the readings. Since I have no intention to learn readings piece-meal I for the most part ignored them, had I not I see no way that someone would be able, as the book’s back claims, learn or even get through the book in “just a few hours” if they were to attempt to memorize ~500 random readings. Read Japanese Today appears to be trying to cover a bit of everything, including surnames. Quite a few surnames are included along with other words in a word list that comes ever so often after a new Kanji has been introduced.
One thing I did enjoy was the history provided, for instance Mr. Walsh mentions how some Kanji are undergoing a change at the time of printing, for instance ward(区) used to use the Kanji for goods(品) were as the modern version has a cross inside. In general he also gives other interesting facts such as why so many Japanese female names need in ko(子) or why ocean(洋) has a sheep in it.
I would actually not recommend this book to anyone seriously studying Japanese since there are so much better ways to learn what is covered in this book, ergo RTK+Sentences. With that said the student of Japanese is not really the target for this book, this piece of marketing reviles the truth well enough: “Make your stay in Japan more than just a superficial tour—READ JAPANESE TODAY!”(Source: Back of Read Japanese Today). With that in mind this book does what it was meant to, give the average tourist some basic knowledge of Japanese, an admirable goal. It may also find use as a tool to inform say a family member who is taking issue with your study or who just would like to know a bit more. One friend of our family has a son who is also planing to study Japanese and took note of this book after seeing it, the trivia aspect of it was her primary interest.
