Aguro

Wow it’s getting pretty late so I must hurry… Today there was an outage so meh….

• Mnemosyne: The usual review and adding new entries. The 2 kanji that I added today are 蛍 and 茹でる. I first met the word 蛍 from the movie ほたるの星. But yeah, as you can see it’s written in hiragana there.
• jpod101.com: Episode 6 of beginner season 2. Lol I forgot what the grammar point was :). But it’s about 冬休み. No new words…
• CLQ: Thanks to the outage, I read a real book. I did the first part of the exercises of ch. 19. I can’t believe they teach you stuffs like お暑うございます which the IME couldn’t even parse…
• News reading: The last flight of some old JAL plane. What’s interesting is the new word あしらう which in this case means “to decorate”. 翼を円形に広げた優雅な赤い鶴を垂直尾翼にあしらったボーイング７７７: Boeing 777 with its vertical tail decorated by a red elegant crane spreading its wings into a round shape. Lol I hope the translation is correct
• 2ch IRC: Just asking how to read the 間 in 羽田－伊丹間 (flight between Haneda and Itami). It is read 「かん」.

I really should be sleeping now.

じゃお休み…

Nothing happened quite much today:

• Mnemosyne: The usual review and adding new entries. It’s amusing that the 2 new kanji I added today are 梟 (owl) and 蛙 (frog), which landed in my word list due to 2 jpod101 consecutive episodes on animals.
• jpod101.com: Episode 5 of beginner season 2. About how to turn adjectives into adverbs. 楽しい→楽しく などなど. Yawn since there were no new words.
• 2ch IRC: I confirmed that 「3-1-1=1」 is read 「3 ひく 1 ひく 1 は 1」. Also someone used the orz=3 emoticon. The =3 is for おなら.

Let’s hope tomorrow can be more productive!

Since the beginning of my Japanese study, I’ve used a word list. At first, it was just a tab-delimited text file. I actually planned to write about my current word list format, but found my old list an amusing attention grabber.

First of all, you can download it here (10.4 KB), unedited, uncensored. I probably last utilized it in 2005.

At that time, one of my main activities was to gather words from anime. Rest assured, I did some pretty silly ear transcriptions. That and my lack of knowledge for any Japanese grammar back then caused me to record inflected, and worst of all wrong, phrases. Here are some highlights (of course in romaji, since it’s what I used at that time):

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I couldn’t study Japanese for as much as I wanted to today. Probably because I spent too much time at the IM… Here’s what I did today:

• Mnemosyne: The usual review and adding new entries.
• jpod101.com: Episode 4 of beginner season 2. Gee, I miss the days where I could do 2 or 3 episodes a day. This episode talks about the counters 個, 本, 箱, and 枚. I still forget all the time that 三本 is read さんぼん.
• Wikipedia: 第二次世界大戦: 2 paragraphs. Now we’re discussing about the start of the cold war.
• Novel: 薬草を探せ: I read chapter 30. The series will soon end, and I think I’ll miss it.
• Routledge dump: 2 sentences. I’ll describe about Routledge dump later.
• 2ch IRC: As always, asking questions while practicing my slangs and gag-making skills. Someone wrote 親墨 in place of お休み. I also joked about いいじめ as a good version of いじめ. 寒いかな？
• Eating anime: I watched Clannad episode 23. Nagisa-chan gathered courage just to call Okazaki Tomoya by his first name, LOL :). Oh no I’m out of episodes!

The progress on this blog isn’t as prosperous as I had hoped. I’ve got some unfinished big writings, but I’ll probably be better off describing all the small things, the small details, about how I study first.

Students of Japanese language will learn many common phrases at the beginning of their study. One of those phrases is 「ただいま」 (tadaima) which is often translated as “I’m home!” That’s indeed the meaning conveyed, but if we translate it literally, the meaning is actually “just now”. What in the earth did the speaker just do (now)? Well… “I just came back home now“.

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Oyasumi posts like this simply lists what studies I did for today. They are:

• Mnemosyne: The usual review and adding new entries, which will be summed at the next word dump post.
• jpod101.com: Hey, I finally finished all beginner season 1 episodes!!! I listened to the first episode of beginner season 2 today.
• Wikipedia: 第二次世界大戦: Only a paragraph. Hell will probably freeze over before I finish this thing.
• Novel: 薬草を探せ: I read chapter 29.
• And lots of chatting on 2ch’s IRC channel lol

I probably could elaborate so that this post becomes at least a little educational, but It’s 23:00 here and I better sleep soon. Look, I won’t even fill in the tags except with…

In this article we will learn show how to ask “What is this?”, “What is that?”, and how to answer it like “That is a book”. I can assure you that the materials presented on this lesson will be useful for us that don’t know the name of many objects. After learning from this article, please do ask the name of objects around you to those with a more advanced level of Japanese.

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What a better way to start this blog than to do word and kanji dump? It has been quite a trademarked item at my old blog anyway, and I’m looking forward to continue it here! Just to give some context, my first ever word-dump-like post was in 2005 where I dumped 80 grade 1 kanji and was all crazy with carefully-selected statistically-sound government-approved list. Moving forward almost 3 years, I’ve studied more than 2500 kanji and changed my method to hunt-anything-you-find-in-the-wild-and-ignore-everything-else.

Since the last dump almost 2 months ago, I’ve gathered 47 new kanji and 96 new words. This totals to 2,656 kanji and 11,032 words. I still haven’t found three grade 5 kanji and one grade 6 kanji, in which this batch doesn’t help! Anyway, I have a plan to make a graph of my kanji acquisition once I reach 3,000 kanji, so keep an eye for it.

Sources for the kanji are varied, with ones deserving mention including the novel 「薬草を探せ」 - 光の戦士 まやちゃん 物語 その1 (’Search for the magical plant’ - the tale of the light warrior Maya-chan book 1), something that seems to be a high-level ranting on Aozora Bunko I randomly found about Confucius and Mencius, and the social networking site mixi.

Here are the kanji:

孔架猟秩寮傑升孟浩采巽甫兜嶽痒漉膳麓畫劃冲呑肘獰趙蔽鰻鼡畏猥體隈苫吠椀煽俎轍枡舛桀桝磔沌縷婁擱

And the new words:

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If you’re reading this post right now, you probably know me from my old blog, Singularity on the Plane. Well, that blog eventually became too messy, with an entanglement of topics ranging from Japanese to programming, and posts sometimes in English and sometimes in Indonesian, that I think would be distractive for those English speakers only interested to study Japanese.

When I decided to get serious in blogging, I knew I had to make a separate blog for my Japanese studies. So this will be my new home for stuffs you all know too well such as kanji and word dump.

I also made a new blog for writing articles about Japanese language and culture in my native language, Bahasa Indonesia. If you’re an Indonesian, please be sure to visit Yumeko! Things posted to Yumeko will most likely be posted here also, so English speaking visitors can just stay here and not worry about missing any of my writings (like they would!) However my personal study progress will only be posted here, written exclusively in English (no hard feelings there, it’s just that I don’t have the time to translate everything).

I’ve written some stuffs on the About page, so you might want to read it. Stay tuned for the things to come!