Just an appetizer: IPod Touch

こんにちは、みなさん。　竹彦です(たけひこ)。Recently I bought my 兄(あに) an Ipod touch and since I had some money left over the next day even though I'm not an apple fan I really just wanted it for the 8gb HDD and 日本語menus. So after transferring my 音楽 (おんがく) from the 2gb memory card on my phone to this now what seems like colossal space to fill up. I was astonished to the point that I search out all of Nobodyknows+'s CDs and reveled with glee, because I wasn't stuffed into the "Do I Realllly like this Japanese song?" syndrome. However, since my ultimate goal for the device was done I was satisfied. This was until my brother showed me that they have a flash card program in the app store for free by the name of Isrs which after I found out about this app then I went on a downloading tangent grabbing at anything that has 日本語 in its 名前。Afterwards I discovered that all of these applications though free cost half of my memory, which is rather problem since I haven't tested their worth yet. When I started process of elimination I found that many of them were crap till you buy, but some were good on the beginner level and really helped the beginners get to a higher point then made them pay. I'm ok with the latter because their helping people stay in the Japanese learning community so before I end this post I would like to name the great apps that I will keep using for now:

• WNJapanese
  
• JPhrases
  
• dNihongo Lite
  
• JLPTStudyFree
  
• Reibun Lite
  
• JLPTSelfStudy
  
• BunpouLite
  
• J Sensei
  
• I-Sokki V. N5
  

And some one tell them to make a commercial about that it would be good to hear "Learning Japanese , Well there's an App for that." またね

I have an Important Announcement!!

For everyone who read my last post on this blog I’m glad to tell you that I HAVE GRADUATED FROM THE FIRST GRADE!!! Since I already knew the mathematics needed to get into college they passed me on to the second grade ^_^. What changed from last time when I was shooting out a big game but didn’t add up? Well from my last post I expanded on how to work with my kanji studies.

First, I diligently worked on trying to put in to plans what Phantasm helped with about doing the simple kanji. From that I started plunging everything that was on the Grade 1 Kanji list (http://bit.ly/hAWgm2) which to my surprise was that I knew many of the kanji of that were on the list so I would urge anyone who is also a beginner to do this because it’s paramount to know these easy ones. Further it became a necessity to get the kanji in my muscle memory, but since I ride the bus in Atlanta to get places and 60% of the people are nosy and negative then it has to look like homework which is why Studyjapanese.org’s worksheets have become such an enourmous help in my life. (http://bit.ly/kXl2yn) . Since, reviewing is  imperative and something that I have to do, I’ve done it by looking up kanji as pictures and saving them on my phone and JPL (http://bit.ly/jUH2c8) lets you from the kanji and 4 different fonts and 80 different color which allows you to surpass the monotonous black and white colors of most kanjis that are pictures.

The second thing I would say that has helped is definitely doing AJATT. I have been in a nonstop environment of 日本語の音楽 and アニメ that has only been stopped by the invasion of English that’s by my teachers, family or friends :). And have been pushing futher to read more into my grammar book so far I’ve been able to do 2 pages a day which when I think about it will equal to 14 pages a week and 56 pages a months which for a 229 page book means I can finish it in 4 months and one week while still being able to focus on Kanji and vocabulary without overloading myself with too much at one time. In Addition, what allows me to track my progress on how I’m doing is what kanji are becoming easier to understand, how fast I can respond to a Japanese person on Skype when speaking Japanese, and how much I can feel my self-getting closer getting to my ultimate goal.

With these said I will gradually work with myself until I can get to the third grade of kanji and be able to surprise you guys with another accomplishment.

Results from the two weeks

 It took me a while to write this cause I didn’t want to look like a fraud not fulfilling the words of my previous post by not putting as much in my kanji practice as my vocabulary. I have been stabilizing my vocabulary ability which as ta132 says “maintaining more important that going ahead” which made me happy to continue with that. Though since  this is something of a problem I asked Phantism how did he learn kanji when we was a 初心者 and was blown away by the practicalness of his idea when he said “I started with the simple kanji”. I had to take a moment to think because this was profoundly genius due to I was just mindlessly gathering any kanji that was thrown to me in Japanese Skype conversations. However what was so genius about this was the kanji I was trying to write/understand was kanji that even children in Grade 1 Japanese weren’t even bothered by to understand or to even write (since their parents are a walking dictionary. Or they have furigana around the signs). Now my plan is to study all of the Grade 1 kanji first which was hilarious while anki’ing them because most of the Grade 1 kanji is what I understand right now which means this is the right path that I will be on and this will be the experiment that I will be doing.