The differences can be summed up as such; that Chinese is heavy and messy, that Korean looks alien like and that Japanese is lighter, sometimes much lighter, than Chinese.

You’d be forgiven if you thought that ‘alien like’ and ‘lighter’ are too subjective to be useful.  My use of these terms is by no means scientific nor standard, but it is descriptive, and likely a bit derogatory. Fear not, a more complete and useful description is provided later, but first I should explain to more depth.

Since Chinese is the basis from which Korean and Japanese have evolved it would be logical to start with it.

范丽青：前两天已经公布过一个两岸新增航点以及春节增加航班班次的新闻。尽管春运期间空运资源异常紧张，而且京沪穗深的机场也异常繁忙，但是大陆民航业务主管部门还是想方设法来尽量满足两岸同胞春节期间往返两岸走亲访友和旅游休闲对航空的需求。 Courtesy of  news.workercn.cn

Notice how ‘cluttered’ or ‘dense the text is. Beyond that there is not anything discernable about Chinese other than it is not Japanese or Korean. Someone with an understanding of the characters would of course take issue with my description since a more accurate term would be ‘detailed’.

Now compare the density of Chinese with the light, less dense, text of Japanese.

通常必殺技をはるかに上回る威力を持つ、スーパーコンボ。これよりも強力な超必殺技が、”ウルトラコンボ”だ！　今回入手した写真は、リュウのウルトラコンボ。ド派手な演出からくり出される波動拳の強化版といったところだろうか。体力ゲージが一気に半分くらい減っている点も見逃せない！ Courtesy of Famitsu.com

The important factor is that Japanese uses both the Chinese characters and the かな, whiten in the Roman alphabet as ‘kana’.  The kana are extreme simplifications of certain Chinese characters and instead of carrying meanings as the Chinese characters do, they represent sounds, much like the English Alphabet. They are used for Japanese invented words and words from for foreign languages such as English. The kana are thin and comparable to the English alphabet in density. A general rule of thumb for telling Japanese apart from Chinese is to look for areas of high density, the Chinese characters, followed by areas of light density, the kana.  To achieve a better understanding you will likely have to study the kana, it is not hard to learn them but it is a bit pointless unless you are also studying Japanese as a whole.

Finally last and the easiest, Korean.

복수노조 허용 및 전임자 임금지급 금지 등 노조법을 두고 30일 국회 환경노동위원회에서는 고성이 오가는 등 몸싸움이 벌어졌다.  Courtesy of chosun.com

Notice how alien like it is? Okay so you’ll likely want something a bit more concrete, that’s perfect, because such a thing exists. Written Korean contains circles. If you can remember that then you are set. Neither Chinese nor Japanese texts will ever contain circles. In fact the closest thing Chinese and Japanese have for circles, are squares. This is caused by stroke rules which do not allow the curves needed to make a circle. Convenient eh?

So perhaps a more complicated yet more useful general rule would be that Japanese has periods of density followed by less dense areas, that Korean contains circles and that Chinese is neither Japanese nor Korean.

[/update]

Of out of all the websites that qualify as Works of Art I can think of few that were not Japanese in origin. Perhaps it is the writing system and the subsequent dexterity? Could it be their religious dirty-phobia that keeps their designs minimal? Or could it be their suicidal work ethic? If these reasoning sound weak it is because they are. The Japanese just happen to produce some very beautiful websites.  One such produces of beauty are at mono-lab. They produced monochrome, the free wordpress theme I have now started using here, and I simply love it.

I love it so much I wanted to thank them. Now first I should explain the beginning of the story. Imagine me, bored, perhaps I’ll reskin the blog. Normally I skip the absolutely most popular themes, the internet does not need yet another aero themed blog. I’ve often fared well searching in the, popular, yet not near first page popular range. This time I found monochrome, I want to fill the blog if only to do the theme justice.

Now as an amateur programmer the first thing I did was inspect the template’s source files.  I noticed to odd things, first there is no license, and there is a file called “japanese.css”.  So now that I am curious what is it I see when I view the author’s site? They are giving out the psd, and no sight of a license. This solidly puts them in my FOSS section of gratitude. Due to these facts plus the large presence of beautify Japanese typography  I am now very excited.  So I had the perfect idea, I’ll thank them, in japanese.  A simple task I think, I can watch whole TV shows what is a little complement compared to that?

ありがとう、これはさいこTheme!

Thank you, this is the oldest theme!

Wait? “The oldest”? Yup, thats not what I intended to say.  In fact it is closer to a word for ‘Last, end, conclusion’ than the word “best” I was trying to say. So I can at least edit it right? Oh no, all the buttons are in japanese! Ok don’t panic, look at the target URL, ok so one of the links leads to a URL containing “reply” in it, it must be the other one. Ah, it appears to work. Fix my mistake and submitted. Wait! Now there are two comments! A dictionary look up later and I find that the button I had pressed meant “quote”.  So I’ll make one more post, maybe they will not ban me.

I’m so sorry, I thought that was the edit button, I didn’t mean to say that the theme was “さいご” I meant “セっこう. ORZ

So in the end I, insulted them, and spammed them. No regrets though, I’m sure they’ll understand and I still came out plus one awesome theme.

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?

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.

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.

Well we both know that it does not work like that and so you should not plan as if it did, don’t let risk become a factor in your success where it doesn’t have to, a proper Japanese environment is foolproof, so let’s see how we can make your audio exposure impossible to mess up.

Audio source
Unfortunately nothing is quite as versatile as a computer so you might have to make a bit of sacrifice in regards to audio variety. If your audio source was mp3s or CDs then you’re in luck since at most you might have to put up with a subset of your full library. If you were using streamed internet radio you will have to put up a fair bit of pocket change to get something stand alone that will do this. Streamed video is perhaps the hardest yet most rewarding due to thigns like keyhole TV and Livestation, don’t despair though, there is an, option covered later in this post.

Coverage
Chances are only one sound source will just not do it, if this is the case don’t worry you do not have to double your investment, just add an abstraction level.

Say you had an mp3 player plugged into something for constant charging and you had it playing music 24/7 through a set of speakers. An easy way to double the number of sound sources, speakers, would be to us a FM radio transmitter. You now would have an mp3 player plugged into something for constant charging with it playing music 24/7 and the audio jack going to a FM transmitter which is also plugged into for a power source, then you have a radio in your bedroom set to your radio station as well as one in your computer room . Done, I mean you have two sound sources now right, shouldn’t this be enough? Well, Ha! Enough is never enough, let’s see what it would take to add a third radio, Step one, turn on radio, Step two, tune to station, Step three, there is no step three.

Here lies one of the greatest parts of using a FM transmitter, not only is setup easy but your costs are silly low. Take a quick stock of your house, how many radios do you have? Chances are you have plenty, but if you don’t all you need to do is go down to your favorite big box retailer and buy the cheapest one they have. You don’t need any features other than FM reception and some speakers, no need for an audio in jack or CD player or iPod docking station.

Tools
I would expect that the average person would be able to create a single stand alone sound source, such as a CD player with a burned CD set to repeat, with things they already have. For the more complex systems you will likely have to invest in something, be that a FM transmitter, streaming internet radio or a mp3 capable of playing while charging (A feature sadly lacking on most if not all big name mp3 players, yet common on the cheap Chinese models). I suggest you look online for anything you need especially if you are getting an FM transmitter since this is one of those things stores love to make big money on.

The, option
Oh what would be a good metaphor for this, how about, kill an ant with a shotgun. Oh I see, you have no clue what I am talking about, well I expect as much seeing as how I have not mentioned, the, option yet. Ok so you see there is this option, it is a very, good, option and would allow you all the power of a computer and still be stand alone. This option the overkill option is, a computer, well not just any computer, a second computer. If you are a geek, chances are you have thought about making a home server a number of times, if you are not a geek this option might not be for you. If you do not have a second spare computer you can see about finding a cheap one from your local computer recycler, I would expect to pay around $80 to $150, a very reasonable price. Make sure whatever you get is actually capable of using the software you want, beyond that you can skip getting a monitor provided you are comfortable using remote desktop software such as VNC. If you are going to go this route there is quite a bit about it already written about home servers throughout the internet, a simple Google search will reveal what you need to know.

Inconclusion
No matter what option you go with the important thing is that you do use something. If you are not ready to go all the way start with the simplest thing, remember the goal is that Japanese always be present in your environment, there are no penalties for having multiple audio sources playing at once.
 

The promise of Suzumiya Haruhi the video game

The Promise of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの約束, Suzumiya Haruhi no Yakusoku) was the first Suzumiya Haruhi video game released for the PSP in December 2007. It is a fully voiced visual novel with exact Japanese subtitles. Like most visual novels the story does not require much interaction on the players part, it might as well be an anime in that regard. What really sets it apart from its anime counterpart is the easy at which one can study from it. When pressed the L shoulder button will bring up a history of everything said. Not only can you reread the text but you game will also repeat the audio.  This audio repeat can be done by pressing triangle from within the main game or by pressing the circle from the text history.

Altogether an excellent game for studying and enjoyment, mind you the level of Japanese required is not trivial, the subtitles do though open the possibility for using a dictionary.

Offical Website: http://b.bngi-channel.jp/psp-haruhi/

Step #1: Change your store location to Japan if it is not already set to that. This can be done by scrolling to the bottom of the Store page and selecting the location, Japan is at the very bottom.

Step #2: Then copy and paste “ニコニコ” into the search bar and hit enter.

Step #3: Download the app titled”ニコニコ動画”, to do this click “get app”.

Step #4: Sync your iPod Touch/iPhone so that the application shows up there.  You can now safly change back to your local itunes location, the Nico nico app will not disappear.

Step #5: Start the application, this might take a few seconds. Then switch the far right tap labeled “設定”

Step #6: Enter the top menu, this one is labeled “アカウント設定”

Step #7:  The top two feilds are for your Nico nico account infromation. “メールドレス” is where you input your email. “パスウーント” is for your password.  Once you have these filled your done, you can now start viewing videos by going to the far left and selecting a catogory.

From left to right the Nico Nico Douga app taps are:

Categories – Featured – My Favorites – Search – Settings