Andrew Parker’s Blog

A few months ago I started using bloglines to aggregate RSS feeds.
The result?

81 feeds, and 136 articles I’ve kept unread because I haven’t had a chance to read yet! I’ve noticed that I now spend about an hour a day just reading the new entries, and despite a concerted effort to try to clear the backlog, I’m getting further behind.

Will the growth of RSS lead to yet another form of information overload?

TinyApps has a post (complete with some nice screenshots) discussing the use of jBrowse, which augments a web page with “furigana” (Kanji with the hiragana reading above it). While it’s a great idea, it’s a plugin that is only available for Internet Explorer (firefox and safari are both superior).

rikai.com is a great alternative that uses javascript to augment a site, displaying the readings and meanings of Kanji (including compounds, and some katakana words) when you mouse over the page. Just enter the URL into the box near the top of the page, and hit Go.

For example, given the following text:

the augmented version of this page will look like

Notes

• You can also enter Japanese text directly into the box for a translation.
• If you enter a URL, make sure it is the only thing in the box, otherwise it will be interpreted as text (see above point).
  This includes empty lines (i.e. don’t put in the link and press <Enter>)
• The augmented page has some advertising at the top
• It doesn’t seem to work when the URL contains japanese.
  For example, my blog entry こんにちは！ doesn’t work.

This is a small test to check entry of 日本語 (Japanese).

2年前から日本語をべんきょうしています。
私の日本語はまだ下手ですががんばています！
[For the last 2 years I’ve been studying Japanese.
My Japanese is still poor, but I’m sticking with it!]

Learning Japanese is great fun, but it’s definitely a challenge.

Superficially, everything is “backwards”. For example, the phrase “there is a cat on the desk” is translated as ”つくえ の 上 に 猫 が います”, which is literally “desk’s on cat there is”. It’s difficult to construct a sentence in this way, but after only a little practice understanding such a sentence isn’t hard. It’s quite amazing how the human brain can adapt to these patterns. Ironically, one of the things I enjoy about learning Japanese is that I also get to learn more about English grammar (perhaps it says something about the quality of the NZ & Australian education systems?). However, I think the biggest thing I’ve learnt is that I have absolutely no idea how I construct sentences in English!

Of course, I’m still at quite a basic level in my study of Japanese. I passed JLPT level 4 (the easiest level) last November, JLPT level 3 is probably a couple of years away. No doubt it’ll get a lot harder!

Then there’s the biggest hurdle to “learning” Japanese - the writing system. Kanji is enough to scare any sane person into giving up Japanese. For a bit of a a discussion of the background (and power?) of Kanji, Jonathon’s article is interesting.
Perhaps more on learning Kanji later.

PS: If my Japanese above is incorrect, please let me know!

PPS: I’ve got to say, one of the nice things about having a mac is the ease of entering Japanese. Like everything else on the mac, it “just works”, while at the same time being incredibly powerful

Welcome to my blog.

This is my first web site, so nothing here at the moment.