Stöckchen, Backlinks und T-shirts

So mein T-shirt habe ich jetzt auch, danke an den Jungs und Mädels bei 3Dsupply. Dann will ich auch das stöckchen von gedankenponie annehmen und weiter leiten:

ich, im letzten blogger “trend”

Irgendwie will ich nicht noch mal die ganze liste der teilnehmer hier posten, haben das schon genügend leute gemacht… Auf jedenfall haben wohl noch ein paar leute jenseits des T-Shirts von der aktion profitiert 😉
Teilnehmer und status der T-Shirt sendung kann man hier nachlesen.

online tools to learn japanese

the gateway

Originally uploaded by Dan65

Last Thursday i was asked by my Japanese class in Bielefeld if i could give them some links for a few online services i used to help me learn japanese. After some though i decided i could just transform it in a blog post.

My first acknowledgement should be that it is mostly based on a review from tofugu, i first saw there youtube video, but they also have it written down here. One thing one should say is that they address people of all kinds of level, some of the tools aren’t that great for bloody beginners like me… Anyway i would advise people to follow there blog since they always have nice information about everything surrounding the japanese language, sometimes even free classes!

When you are a beginner like me, there is only a few key things you should focus on i believe:

• Vocabulary, you can’t learn enough of it, you have a whole language to learn at the start the learning curve is really steep. The absolute winner in that category is iknow.co.jp it’s absolutely great, completely free. Since Dafi (san?) was asking me about it, here’s how you can change it so that everything is in hiragana (no Kanji):

first open the iknow interface, click on setting (top right corner)

then go in the Quiz tab and choose Kana mode

Feel free to add me on iknow, i also created lists for the lessons we had. So if you prefer to focus on what we learned at class, thats not a problem either.

• The second thing one needs is grammar, hands down best for that is Tae Kim’s Guide to japanese Grammar it’s really clear and good. Probably works best for my style of study since i favor theoritical approach and generally abstract rules a lot (I’m a mathematician what else could you expect…).
• Now in order to understand how to use the vocabulary you just learn, you need a lot of good examples (at least i need), thankfully iknow is taking care of that in a really great way, having an audio file for each sentence by a native speaker is also a gift from heaven.

Those 2 services are by far the one i use the most for active learning. There are two other things i’d like to mention in that part:

• The Yamasa Kanji online Dictionary is also very usefull when you study Kanji, they have three different fonts when displaying a Kanji, one of them being dynamic so that you can see how to write it. Onyomi, Kunyomi readings are also there which is convenient.
• The second thing i will try to use, as a heard a lot of good about it, will be “Learning the Kanji”, but it’s a book and neither free nor online, so not so much in the scope of this post. They have a website though, where you can track your progress if i understood it correctly.

One thing i’d like to mention here is Lang-8, even though i have the impression it’s a little bit too early for me to write there (i hope to write an entry this weekend if i have time). This site is definitively worth a try, i think it will cost a lot of time to be active there, but that’s also where you will make the most progress, since you have to actively write in japanese i see it as a kind of ultimate test, you are only able to write what you truly know. It looks like a formidable site, i’m just a little bit scared of using it (and i haven’t foung the time till now).

Last but not least, if you happen to stumble on a site with some japanese text, or want to translate a few things, there are 2 option who are really great:

• Rikaichan an absolutely great firefox add-on that translate on the flight the stuff your mouse is hovering on, defiitively a must have (firefox as well 😉 )
• WWWJDIC even though it has a slightly nerdy and ugly interface, it has a lot for it. It’s probably the most exact tool you can get for translation having a lot of usefull dictionary entrie (type of verb/adjective and so on), there is always a few sentences as example which is nice.

That’s it! I use frequently each of the service mentioned here, they’re all really good at what they do. At the end, I’d like to point out something Koichi mentionned in his video, these tools are not meant to replace a japanese class, there are here to support and help you improve your learning process, keep that in mind!

P.S. I completely forgot, you always can follow gefrierpunkt [de], to test how much of the old stuff you know, it’s a really nice read.

ich will auch ein T-Shirt!

Vor Berghain/Panorama Bar mit einem xkcd T-shirt.

Leute die mich regelmässig sehen, wissen das ich ein großer Fan nerdiger T-shirt bin. Bis dato habe ich bei xkcd.com und questionabelcontent eigekauft, um die zeichner für die coolen comics zu unterstützen und natürlich auch weil ich die T-shirts super fand. Bei Thinkgeek auch viele geile sachen gefunden und auch ein paar T-shirts gekauft. Die neueste entdeckung dank gedankensolo ist 3Dsupply, bei denen habe ich zwar noch nichts gekauft, aber falls die aktion die sie gerade machen gut klappt werde ich mich in zukunft auch mal bei denen blicken lassen 🙂

Hier die aktion die das ganze ausgelösst hat:

Veröffentlichst du einen Beitrag in deinem Blog, in dem der Link auf unsere Seite http://www.3dsupply.de enthalten ist, schicken wir dir das Shirt kostenlos in deiner Wunschgröße zu. Dabei muss nicht mal unsere unglaubliche Großzügikeit, das gute Karma beim Tragen unserer Shirts, die unzähligen weiteren Nerd-Artikel in unserem Shop, oder was auch immer erwähnt werden.

Hier der link zur anmeldung für die ganze Aktion: feed me!

P.S. beim schreiben (ziemlich sofort) habe ich gemerkt das der wordpress editor erneuert wurde, wirklich gut ist er jetzt 🙂

truth, classical media and “new media”

comic courtesy of xkcd.com[en], thank you for the comic, for publishing in CC[en], and for existing in general (you make my day 3 times a week).

Yesterday i stumbled on a post on friendfeed[de] (thanks to franz for pointing it out), linking to an article of the Südeutsche Zeitung[de] warning people about risk of false information when getting news through so called “new” or “social media (friendfeed, twitter, blogs and the like). The funny part being that they made a mistake themselves (that they now have corrected).

There is a classical stance by the newspaper, that try to say that only their information can be trusted, everybody else failing to have that “journalist ethic” badly needed to give acurate information. This seems to fail more and more, or maybe, it is just pointed out more and more, and in a clearer way. Another example being a Times online article[en] published recently that was completely wrong. As far as i know it was debunked by Michael Arrington on Techcrunch[en].

What’s the lesson to be learned? Well every source of information can at times (some more often than others) give false information, you have to stay critical before everything you read.

I learned my hard lesson in a similar way recently, i was reading a really good article about the mistreatment of a french journalist by the police on Maitre Eolas’s blog[fr] as he announced, he described by the very detailed how the journalist was treated and then commented on how it was or not the procedure, of what was legal and what was common etc. Very good read, you learned a lot on how everyday justice works in france (it’s not beautiful to say the least). Only a few days later a read the related article in lemonde.fr[fr], and it’s only then that i realised what was hidden behind the whole story: one more try of the gouvernement to scare journalist, to warn them to behave “well” (you know France is a democracy…). What’s the moral, i failed to see the big picture while reading Maitre Eolas’s blog, is he at fault? not at all, he even warned in the begining what he wanted to do. Actually the Le Monde article is much more partial and oppiniated then the blog, but sometimes that’s what ones need in order to get the big picture.

The good thing about blog’s and the likes is that you tend to be much more carefull when you read, i think it may be a blessing for the press, but eventually there claim to give but the truth and all the truth is bound to fail. Sometimes i wish that they simply assume being partial and stop publishing 3 lines article retelling an dpa, afp or reuters news. I don’t want to know what happened, i want to understand what happened.