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“But yeah as for Japanese learning software, I think they’ve all been pretty much done.” – Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too :/ That mynakama thing looks pretty sweet though.
I have a rough understanding of the concept of TDD but have never encountered those test suites before. What do you mean by “errors”? Solely grammatical stuff or spelling and word choice errors too? I’m not sure exactly how that’d work, seems pretty complex haha.
Yeah, I think there was a thread here in a similar vein a while ago but I can’t remember the name or find it via Google search. There are lots of problems with TextFugu, many that have been around for a year or more. Koichi is apparently working on some huge update to the site, so nothing will be fixed until that is finished. He’s been working on it for over a year and not really touched the current site in the mean time, I don’t think (hence why the problems have been around that long). Some say he may actually finish this update in our lifetimes, but I’ve heard that’s just an urban legend. Basically, don’t hold your breath.
In the meantime, you seem to have gone through a fair few kanji here so I’m guessing you know *how* to learn them now – apply that method of learning to new kanji you find, come up with your own mnemonics, hunt down more vocab with those kanji in them. Or… scratch that and switch to a better method; there are plenty out there other than TextFugu’s! It’s not ideal – and certainly not the kind of thing you’d expect for paying $120 – but there’s not much you can do. Or maybe it *is* ideal because it’ll force you to switch to a different method that suits you more and you may learn them faster! :D
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23jlpt&src=typd
Is that not enough?Speaking of web crawling, there was a project proposed last year that involved something like crawling the web to find pages that are translations of each other (like how wired.jp has Japanese versions of stuff from wired.com), then doing some sort of parsing and sentence-aligning wizardry to form parallel texts from the two sources. Granted, this idea was aimed at aiding machine translation, but I’m sure it’d be pretty helpful for language learning too. Sadly, the professor behind this one – and several other cool-sounding machine translation projects – moved to a university in the US this year, so I’m not sure there will be similar projects this time around.
“Woooah there Kanji! Where’d you come from?!”
Well, China mostly, but some characters were introduced solely in Japan. Oh wait, that’s not what you meant…@missingno15: Haskell is awesome! But nah, it’ll probably be Java or Python or something.
I could actually try doing that “translator” as a fun little side project instead; it would look great on my resume :D
Too bad I’ve got little to no free time right now ;_;I’m actually surprised you didn’t suggest something AKB-based. An app to keep track of who’s actually in the group at any given moment? I’m sure with 48 constantly-changing members, it’s a hassle to remember who’s in the group, who’s out, which teams they’re all in, and what their favourite flavours of ice cream are ;)
@Paige: Sounds great! To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever actually used Evernote, so I’d definitely have to look into it to see how it works and what could be changed. Is there anything you particularly find frustrating about how it works at the moment?
From what I can remember hearing, 400 would be よんひゃく. I think よん is the much more common reading of the two, so if you were to guess a new word/phrase with 4 in it, you’d be better off guessing よん.
Further to your question though, when do you use いっせん and when just せん? Similarly for いちまん and まん. I can never remember >.<
Would 1900 be せんきゅうひゃく or いっせんきゅうひゃく?@Viexi: LOVE your avatar :D
Perfume are just superb.@Joel: You were in Edinburgh? Maybe we saw each other and didn’t even know 0_0
It *is* a entire city but it’s possible.Yeah, I vaguely remember people mentioning that. But when I joined the site, the standard fee was $120 and the site wasn’t *even* half-done then. To be fair, Koichi actually switched my account to Lifetime after only two months subscribed because it was during a sale that I asked him to upgrade me and he was feeling especially Christmassy or something, so I only ended up paying $40 myself. Even though I didn’t pay *too* much, I still feel bad for the people that paid the full. $40 is still quite pricey when you consider better, fully-completed textbooks are on the market for the same price or cheaper (not to mention Tae Kim which is FREE).
@Joel: I’ve never actually seen Hamish Macbeth so I had a look at it on YouTube. I think because it’s a TV show, they’re trying to pronounce their words a bit more clearly, plus it seems to be a certain accent I can’t quite place. With a name like Hamish Macbeth – and the setting they’re in – I’m guessing it’s a more northerly accent. Most people live in Central Scotland, where Edinburgh and Glasgow are, so it’s likely you met somebody with a totally different accent. Even for other Scots, the Glaswegian dialect can be tough at times :P
If you want to get accustomed to real Scottish people, you’d be better off watching something like Burnistoun or Limmy’s Show, both sketch shows by comedians from Glasgow (to be fair, I don’t have as thick an accent as these guys, neither do most people in Edinburgh):
Damn, I wish this stuff had been around when I first started, it does look pretty good. I don’t believe we’ll be getting it any time soon though, as is Koichi’s style ;)
“A discounted pricing scheme will account for this until that section is 100% done.”
That should have been the case for TextFugu from the get go. Ridiculous that it was so expensive in its perpetually half-finished state for all these years.I think the sound of しゃ is kind of a mix between “sha” and “sya”, but it makes more sense to me to write it as “sha”.
@Joel: “More like you’re learning spelling from an American versus someone who can actually spell words properly.”
Ha! ;)“Learning Kansai-ben, on the other hand, is like trying to speak with a Scotsman”
I can attest to that. Our version of English is pretty out there… I feel bad for the foreign students – especially Japanese people – that come here thinking they know English only to be met with that >.<
The teacher at the Japanese class I go to used to be a student here. She said she got a job as a waitress to practise English (as advised by her own teacher back home) but could barely understand what anyone was saying, just having to nod and say “Aye (yes)” and “Ah ken (I know)” a lot :PI wish they had Kinokuniya in Scotland, it sounds awesome :/ Not that I’m a big manga fan, just that they seem to have lots of other stuff, from what you and missingno15 have said anyway.
Joel, you’re on fire :P
You’re going to have translated the whole of FF6 before long.I haven’t taken the N3 exam before. I *may* give it a go in the summer considering they hold it at my University.
I was going to link you to a page on Tae Kim, but considering you’ve used the exact same example, I’m assuming you’ve already seen it.
“One must not not go to school every day” – while you’re right that it’s a double negative, I think a better English transliteration would be something like “If you don’t go to school every day, it’s no good (i.e. you must go)”. It makes more sense when you consider the similar constructions using と and ば.
I think the positive equivalent of that example would be 勉強しちゃ. Here’s some example sentences using しちゃ with other words:
http://jisho.org/sentences?jap=shicha&eng=
