Oh dear. The cherry blossom tree on my balcony opened a flower on the shortest day of the year. Now in full bloom…. Only 3 months early.

Next year I’m hoping to bag the JLPT 1, which is a helpful if somewhat archaic measure of Japanese ability that is useful proof to show to companies / scholarship foundations or annoy friends with at parties. It theoretically covers all the day to day kanji you would need to, say, read a newspaper, roughly 2000. Despite its drawbacks, I’ve definitely benefited from a more focused vocabulary building, and the consensus among me and friends much better at Japanese than me is, it doesn’t matter what your system is, you just need a system. Furthermore, the tests are happening twice a year now in Japan and its a little 6 monthly motivator to do some studying.





So, 2009 has been the technological boom year for Japanese study. I think I came by rikai chan last year, and it seemed like the bar had been set, but no, this year has offered even more. Majorly helped along by the iphone. (rikai chan, for those still surrounded by paper dictionaries, is a firefox plugin with a look-up J->E dictionary and also a tool for providing both the reading and English definition of any Japanese text on the web. It’s got phrases as well as words, and they’ve just updated the names dictionary which is working super smooth now – just press enter twice on the lookup bar)

So, where to begin..

Anki

This is a program based on ’spaced repetition memory system’ which is basically where the computer calculates which how well you know a piece of knowledge that you’ve stored on the program based on your answers after having flipped the computer flash cards. Did you find it easy / good / hard or you need to see it again? From there, the computer calculates how long until you should see that card again. Each card then accumulates a history of your learning of it. The idea being that it catches you in time before you forget, and aids the transition into long term memory. You can do this with paper but the computer is doing some difficult and tedious calculations to constantly be on top of which ones you know and which ones you don’t. Anki could actually be used for learning anything where you need memory based learning, but as the name suggests, creator Damien Elmes made it with Japanese in mind. There are a bunch of freeware SRMS programs out there, but I like anki for some important reasons.

1) A community has started to build up around it and now 3rd party plugins are easily available. This mean individual words that you add to your ‘knowledge’ library can be much more easily assimilated using my favourite plugin – example sentences using Professor Yasuhito Tanaka’s 180,000 english-japanese paired sentences. Go to File>Download>shared plugin then pick ‘example sentences’
2) Its connected to an internet server so you can pick up where you left off by studying online at the office or wherever. A free iphone app called StudyArcade also connects to this server so you can use it on your phone.
3) You can tally how many kanji you’ve learnt and at what level, or just see which ones you’ve missed. Make sure to download Japanese Support File>download>shared plugin> Japanese support
4) Although I don’t use this function, because I found adding content myself is the most effective way to learn, there are pre-made knowledge decks of all JLPT levels, Heisig, and no doubt a number of other popular learning systems

Downsides?
Well, yeah,
1) The user interface is a tiny bit counter intuitive to begin with, so don’t be surprised if it takes you half an hour or so to figure out how to make the kind of flash cards you want
2) There’s no iphone app yet!!! Would definitely pay a few bucks for the ability to use this seamlessly on my phone. StudyArcade is an OKish substitute, but, you don’t get the example sentences plugin, the synch function is only one way – so when you get home the cards you practiced on the train aren’t logged so they are still ‘due’ for revision on the main anki server, and StudyArcade’s developer often lags behind updates with Anki, so a couple of times this year, owing to Anki’s new updates, StudyArcade couldn’t access the server and pull new cards. At one point I was adding 20 new words a day so the stuff on my phone soon got out of date.

Next is….

Denshi Jisho

I just found this 2 days ago. How I love it! Its really simple, just an online Nelson basically. I have a paper Nelson dictionary, 20 years old, falling apart from my mum…. but it has to be quite a kanji emergency for me to whip it out. Usually I just ineffectively type in the sound of the radical I think is giving the yomi-kata and hope its in the same family and will therefore be listed on the computer… seriously lazy and often futile. But no more! Denshi Jisho is a really simple search by radical tool. I don’t know why I couldn’t find one of these before. Thanks very much Kim Ahlström for developing it.

Rikai.com Kanji Map

Ok so this one looks like its been there since the 90s based on the design of the site…. no offence…. but this is a great tool for the other thing I used Nelson for, once upon a time… that is finding vocab associated with a particular kanji. Great for vocabulary building around kanji you already know – which is a great confidence booster. I’m not sure if this is related to rikaichan. Developed by Todd David Rudick. If you land on the home page it can be disorientating with all kinds of unrelated content. Stick to the map.

shinkanji

Next, something I’ve been looking for for a while. a drawable kanji look-up tool for my iphone. I figured there must be hundreds, but only landed on shinkanji today after a long search. I haven’t been able to find a free app that does this, and shelled out £3.49 for it, but so worth it for quick kanji recognition.

So that’s what I’ve been using this year.

Lastly,
I also came across this Kanji Reader device for that pesky portion of text that isn’t digitised. It looked like it could be quite good except that its $300 and the dictionary didn’t seem to be that big.

So what have all of the above tools – bar the kanji reader – got in common? Well, it’s this nice man, Jim Breen.

Like many of the above heroes of modern Japanese learning, he’s first and foremost a specialist in computer science. And somehow on top of that, he has created what must be the most widely distributed Japanese-English resource on the web. Its open source and mirrored in several locations making it nice and speedy to access. I’d venture that even a lot of the paid dictionary apps on the iphone have probably come from this free resource. The dictionary as it stands now consists of 130,000 entries, 720,000 names – notoriously difficult to fathom the reading of – and the Tanaka Corpus I mentioned in regard to the example sentences plug in for anki, is another branch of the WWWJDIC project which besides Mr. Breen is supported by some other key developers. check out Jim’s page for a huge list of Japanese resources, everything from Japanese Linux operating system software to how to get divorced in Japan.
I couldn’t thank all these people enough, no time has it been easier to access Japanese language tools than 2009, now there’s no excuse other than my own time and commitment!

No comment necessary. Good luck, if you are a wealthy citizen of a first world country, perhaps you might consider investing in this alternative to a sustainable society.

The jury is still out at Copenhagen, but round the world popular protest has tried to bring home the urgency of the situation. Here in Japan, a single vigil was organised, (a full 70 times less than the UK…) The new prime minister made a promising gesture by pledging 20% cuts (not sure on which level…) but let’s hope the polar bear kits on sale for ¥3000 at the march caught some people’s attention…

The scandal surrounding East Anglia University’s climate scientists is a worrying development. What is most worrying is that important researchers failed to guage the level of public understanding. Those involved had a responsibility to step down immediately and allow the small section of the science they were involved in to be re-reviewed and have the truth published. I don’t have much reason to doubt their explanation of what happened but it was arrogant of them to not apologise and allow the truth to be restored by inviting in inspection. Meanwhile, though the number of peer-reviewed, climate-related researchers whose theory of climate change is that a) its happening, and b) its man made, is as near as 100% as one could ever hope to be in order to start preventative measures, the media reporting of it however, (by journalists, not scientists) is all over the shop. No wonder doubt is left in people’s minds… some 6 million listeners of The Today Show had to listen to climate change denier Ian Plimer on November 12th, the only person they interviewed on their piece about this week’s Copenhagen summit. The BBC, which has a policy of impartiality, hardly put accross a proportional view of the science. What hope is there in other less scrupulous media after a big shock story.
Mr. Plimer suggested on The Today Show that the reason all these swathes of scientists are making it up is because they want research grants. Well I admit people do stupid things for money, but research grants aren’t exactly a quick-rich scheme. This is the average salary of science jobs advertised on a careers website Indeed. I guess there is some lee-way in that and maybe some scientists with particular reputations have more lucrative salaries but come on, the ball park figure of $78,000 is not phenomenal. It seems like a fair compensation for the work done. Are we really to suppose that all these scientists are after a change to the world order, the end of market capitalism, rationing of resources, just for a few research grants? There isn’t anything more than the most superficial of advantages for falsely advocating climate change. Turn the tables. What does Mr Plimer and other climate deniers have to gain? It would be wise to check the backgrounds of each and everyone of the minority of loud voices propounding denial theories. As it turns out Mr Plimer is a director of 3 Australian coal mines. Coal is Australia’s biggest export, it also happens to be an incredibly polluting CO2 intensive energy source likely to be subject to increasingly higher taxes if Copenhagen can make any progress. Mr. Plimer is not a $78 grand scientist, and the vested interests he talks about concerning climate scientists ring hollow when put next to his own ‘other’ interests. We should begin with this question every time. What does this man have to gain?
I would personally be super happy to learn that the abundant earth can give us the great aspects of our present lifestyle continued ad infinitum and also bring them to the majority of the global community who don’t yet have our freedom or opportunity. I like foreign travel, meeting people from other cultures. I like having lots of different kinds of food to eat regardless of the time of year, I’m glad that despite its faults our governments and economies have given people in my generation chances that my grandparents could never have dreamed of. We have achieved a lot. But when the evidence is overwhelming that its time to change the systems we have in place to adapt to the challenges of the future, we have to do that because there is no alternative.

Congratulations Rob, about time you had the ear of the TED audience.

Determined to finish this today!

UPDATE: I finished this bike ride which charts the edge of the area that the bees living on a highrise building in Ginza can fly to. I think in balance there was more green space than I expected for Tokyo, and I also noticed how much more mixed the spaces in Tokyo are than I originally thought. The whole of Koto-ku seemingly full of schools and families. I only saw one actual bee on my journey, not a honey bee, some more lethal looking variety looking slightly drunk and unfortunate on a pink flower outside someone’s house.

Here are the live maps recorded from the gps on my phone:
Roppongi Hills to… a few metres down the road
Azabu Juban to the sea
Daiba to Ryogoku

I enjoyed reading the piece about Al Gore in The Guardian today. It addresses many of the issues facing the environmental movement and people’s feelings about it. When I left the UK there was a lot of support for green issues and finding others who were involved was easy. Outside cozy England and, not-so-much, I’ve found. One thing is for sure, its easier to be hopeful when you have other people in your network to add to the sense of community and accumulated political clout. So, what struck me is that Al Gore, at least publicly, is putting across a tone of what journalist Oliver Burkeman called “optimism infused with urgency”. He makes no qualms about this pressing issue – how do you engage people without the Waterworld-come-Day-After-Tomorrow overtones?

When making his Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore arguably had it easy: it’s fairly straightforward to grip an audience when you’re portraying scenes of apocalyptic destruction. The new book pulls off a considerably more impressive feat. It focuses on solving the crisis, yet manages to be absorbing on a topic that is all too often – can we just come clean about this, please? – crushingly boring.

Well, if Gore can’t switch us on to a brighter side of politicking our way out of the crisis, there’s only a couple of people left. I don’t believe he has all the answers but I certainly appreciated the dose of optimism with my breakfast this morning.

I’m going on a bike ride today, track my progress:

The Ginza Honey Bee Project (sorry its in japanese) is keeping bees on the roof of a building in the centre of the city. Bees can apparently fly 4km in any direction……. so I thought I’d see what they can see by cycling around the circumference of it. Potentially opening myself up to all kinds of scary cyber privacy issues but decided to use an iphone app called mymovingmap to track my progress. The circumference of the circles is about 25km…. Setting off in about 20 mins I hope.

UPDATE I managed half way around and took about 500 pics but then the light started receding and I called it a day. I got from Roppongi Hills going North (clockwise) around the area and ended up just south of Asakusa on the sumida gawa river that borders between taito and sumidagawa wards. I’m thinking of finishing the ride on Monday by going anti clockwise from Roppongi down through the sea-facing wards and back up again to nearby asakusa. Wow those bees travel far, I was pretty tired coming back – even though I didn’t do the circuit I was still the other side of the city when I decided to came back, it must have been between 20-30km in all. The mymovingmaps gadget worked great, when I sort through all the info I collected I’ll put up a collated map of where I actually went.
It recorded my journey in pieces, they are:
Roppongi Hills to… Just down the road
Gaien-Mae to Ichigaya
Iidabashi to Asakusa

(some parts missing)

Stay tuned for more on Monday.

Oh my poor dead blog. My respect to people who blog regularly, I’m just not making the time for it.

On a general list of things to do with this blog for a long time has been clean up my trans siberian posts and organise it so its more useful to other travelers.

I’ve enjoyed doing the other posts too, but I spend a lot of time looking up facts and graphs and making pictures so it kinda takes a long time to put it together. I should probably be less precious about it.

Still, investigating things like the cherry-blossom-as-climate-change-indicator last year was really illuminating, and stumbling across a researcher who’s spent his whole life compiling studies that show the warming temperature in Japan since way back in the Heian era was amazing, though took a long web crawl to find it.

Another thing on my to-do list is to link up what I’m doing in school with my blog posts. I’ve loved searching and putting together the previous posts, and contextualising some of my everyday observations with more detailed facts and figures, but it seems like it would make more sense if I started joining up my issue based illustration with some words and put it up on this blog.
Right now I’m looking at what seasonality means in modern Japan, how its changed / warped / disappeared. Maybe you’ve seen those quintessentially Japanese strawberry christmas cakes…