Updates on Learning Japanese, Word Lists, and iPhone stuff

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Things have been hectic. I decided to start taking JLPT exam prep classes offered at the NC Japan Center, and I find that that has been helping me to focus on acquiring new vocabulary and grammar. For some reason or another, I had gotten a bit bogged down doing the self-study ...

Turning Your iPhone Into a 電子辞書

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

So what's a 電子辞書 (denshi jisho)? Well, it's Japanese for "electronic dictionary."  It's a great little gizmo that's really handy if you're learning Japanese. They're usually full of all kinds of dictionaries, and now they have things like a drawing pad where you can draw a character on it, and ...

Great iPhone Japanese Dictionary

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

I was looking for a good portable dictionary for my iPhone, and I've found a couple of programs. One is great, one is free. If you're going to use either one of these, make sure you install the Japanese keyboard on your iPhone, and take the time to learn how ...

A Secret to Japanese Language Success: Post Less, Study More

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

I've gotten a lot of great advice and tips from reading all kinds of message boards and blogs, but to be honest, I think the best most important lesson I've learned is that eventually, you just have to stop drinking the bathwater and start getting things done. When I saw the ...

Iversen’s Method, Vocabulary, Japanese, Kanji, and Anki

Monday, July 27th, 2009

After seeing this post by Vosmiura on the RtK forums, I'm going to try Iversen's method of learning lists of vocabulary before entering them into Anki. I'm not usually obsessed with getting particularly high pass rates or having high long-term retention percentages (mine is already around 96%), but I've been noticing ...

How I Learn Japanese (Now) (part 2)

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

So I want to talk about SRSing today, because it's the one item that is overemphasized and underutilized at the same time. Using one is a process that demands constant care and feeding. It's sort of like having a sick plant. Some people will nurture the thing for a while, ...

How I Learn Japanese (Now) (part 1)

Monday, August 4th, 2008

EDIT: I put the links in at the bottom of the page, in a more coherent order.  I also added a couple I found recently. This is something I've been wanting to talk about for a while, but I never really got around to doing it for various reasons. But now ...

Getting Japanese Books

Monday, July 28th, 2008

If you're like me, and studying Japanese, you probably want to get your hands on some books in Japanese. If you live in North America and have tried to order from amazon.co.jp, then you've probably run into their oppressive shipping fee structure. If not, I'll explain briefly. When you buy ...