a.k.a. the Yasuke! Japanese H.A.C.C.Keyboard
OK. Today I am releasing something really cool.
Category: Learn Japanese
This book is not guaranteed to make you pretty
It’s not your genie
But it WILL change the way you do Kanji. period.
But how?
While arguably the best way to learn kanji is in context (something that our Yasuke! Versus Japanese series does well), I know some of you are prepping for the KanKen test. Others might want to see where your kanji knowledge matches up to where Japanese learn kanji in school.
Let’s see how this newly released update is for you…
“Kanji Anonymous”
A proposed decentralized club for learning Japanese that anyone can set up anywhere.
Mission: to fill the world with Japanese schools.
Learning a language is an interesting thing. Many feel that you don’t “learn” a language but rather “get used to” it. And I would agree in sentiment with that. (But for simplicity, let’s say learning Japanese).
Learning often has more to do with the student – the student’s discipline, curiosity, tenacity, and other aspects of personality – than with the environment. (I have met ex-pats in Tokyo who have lived there for 20+ years and can barely get past konnichiwa; whereas there are disciplined language learners who have reached a level of fluid speech before ever setting foot in Japan.)
So location isn’t as big a factor as one might think.
With that in mind I want to tell you about an interesting option for learning Japanese, outside of Japan.
This is very likely the most important post I have written about learning Japanese.
In a 1996 address, Steve Jobs quoted the statement “Good artists copy; Great artists steal” (which he misattributed to Picasso – but that is besides the point).
What Steve Jobs likely meant – and what we will be talking about – is a fundamental habit of people who master a craft….
In this incomplete but initial starter post, JapanTree is proud to present – the fruit of six years of effort – the world’s first kanji system to adapt the Heisig Method for use in the classroom.
THIS IS BIG.
Lots of reasons.
Here are some reasons that I mentioned to a student I started tutoring back in 2015.
Erin.ne.jp is super useful and free. It doesn’t get much better than that for a japanese teacher (japanese tutor) looking for online resources. Which is why I already wrote about it being a great Japanese teaching resource (especially for immersion lessons). This Yasuke Tip will show you how to get all of the juice out of it.
As a way of increasing the depth of our Japanese knowledge Yasuke Tips has suggested using Yahoo ChieBukuro.
The following is an example search.
Let’s say you want to know the difference between two similar Japanese words. For example, 新し と 新たな.
You can google “新しと新たなの違いは” and get good results. But you can also try Yahoo’s ChieBukuro (Knowledge Bag) to dig deeper. Here’s how.
Hope you made room for dessert because today you’re in for a treat! We’re chatting it up with Gregory Bobin, creator of Tangorin Japanese dictionary!
JapanTree: What motivated you to start your Tangorin project?
Gregory: The faculty at my university declined my offer to digitize and open source the kanji learning materials they were distributing to students in small batches on paper (this was 10 years ago). I also couldn’t afford a denshi jisho at the time and I was working part-time as a web developer as I found all these Japanese-related open source projects online that just needed to be put together with a little code. I started using my own dictionary in class and my friends liked it so I put it online.
JapanTree: What part of running the project do you like the best?
Gregory: I really enjoy normalizing all the data coming from different projects like WWWJDIC and Tatoeba. The code that parses all those input files and builds the Tangorin database is in fact bigger and more complicated than the website/dictionary itself. I also loved watching my friends at university using my dictionary over their expensive denshi jishos.
JapanTree: What makes your app unique and how can readers get the most from your site?
Gregory: I think the user interface is what makes Tangorin unique. My main goal was to make it feel like a paper dictionary where all the information is in plain sight right below the word definition and you don’t have to “click” and move around to get it.
JapanTree: I know your app pulls from some great projects like tatoeba, tanaka, wwwjdic. As a knowledgeable person on those projects, how would you say they have impacted the development Japanese language apps?
Gregory: I’m pretty sure 90% of those apps wouldn’t even be there if it wasn’t for those projects. Especially Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC.
Japantree: Well, I’m sure everyone’s thankful for all those projects, including yours, that have made learning Japanese a little easier. Any last words for us?
Gregory: Thanks for taking interest in Tangorin!
Thanks Gregory. And thank you dear reader. If you haven’t already get your hands on a juice Tangorin today.
You can download the app at the following links:
And the project’s homepage is http://tangorin.com/ (Tangorin project home and extensive online Japanese dictionary)
Have a great day!
Categories
Kanji Link
Found a really interesting site a while back
Called kanji-link
It has a great introduction to kanji
http://www.kanji-link.com/en/kanji/intro/
And thought I’d share it.
The introduction explains how 75% of the kanji fall under just ~30 radicals!
The chart explaining that looks great too. If you’re a teacher its great since its easy to use in the classroom.