So Many Choices

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What are the pillars of a language? Grammar Vocabulary Reading Writing Speaking Those are the major ones, anyway. Back in the day, you would go to a school, and the school would assign you to a teacher. Someone would assign you a textbook or two or three, and off you went. Do your homework, write some tests, speak the new language in class in usually artificial conversations. and if you were diligent, you might have wound up understanding a new language. How did you choose where and how to study? Well, pretty imply, where could you afford to live for at least nine months and also fund your studies? If… Read More

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A Tale of Two 文法

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So I’ve been using Bunpro on my computer, and today I saw the app for it on Google Play, so I decided to add it to my collection of Japanese language apps. Except when I tried to log in with my ID and password, I couldn’t. After a few tries, I took a closer look, and saw that the app was called Bunpo, not Bunpro. Intrigued, I went on a bit of a detective hunt. If you go to the Bunpo home page, you will find that there is a Contact Us heading, but there is no hyperlink on it. After digging a bit on Twitter, I found this tweet:… Read More

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Android Japanese-English Dictionaries: Aedict

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I thought I’d devote a couple of posts to Android Japanese-English dictionaries, since they are so important to have. Right now, I’ve got two main ones I’m using. I’m going to talk about Aedict in this post. Aedict has a lot of features I like. Let me go through the main ones: Wildcard searches. You can add a ? before or after a kanji character, and get a list of all words with that character in that order, i.e. 先? and ?先 are two different searches. Notepad. You can save words to a notepad, you can have multiple notepads with different categories (verbs, nouns, い adjectives, な adjectives…), you can… Read More

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Why Study? There’s An App For That!

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I don’t know how I feel about this. http://eli-talk.com/en/ ELI is a small wearable microphone device worn on the collar. Connected to a smartphone app, it records and analyzes your daily conversation and generates personalized foreign language lessons for you. On the one hand, great! It could probably be a very good study aid! A good self-testing aid! A helper to your learning. On the other hand, you could get a lot of morons like this traveling around the world. (This video does not show the Eli, but the Logbar, but the end result could easily be the same.) (Trigger warning: smug MRA/creeper.) “Respect for culture? Respect for other peoples’… Read More

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Speaking Japanese

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Your typical Japanese class is about 80% listening, and 20% building dialogues off the lesson of the day. At least, in the classes I’ve attended, which have been classes where English was the language used by the teacher. There is one immersion school in Toronto, but I’m not convinced the only difference in the structure is that everyone has to use Japanese. (Of course, this means you speak more Japanese from day 1, which might be a better approach.) Photo via Good Free Photos But there’s a problem, because next week, you start in on a brand new lesson, and some brand new dialogues. Maybe grammar from some of the… Read More

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