Until now, I've been able to ignore the implications of not knowing some items of vocab as thoroughly as I should. Now, though, the first words I put into Volats are coming to the end of monthly testing and moving into yearly testing; so if I'm not certain that I'll remember them, it's a bit risky to let them through this final barrier. With the old shoe-box system, you could take a dodgy word and bring it back to any random place in the box so that it would be tested more times before moving forward. (In fact, I remember sneakily doing that when I'd let too many days pass without testing myself and couldn't clear the backlog). With the database, you can easily do the same, by manually reducing the number of 'passes' for the item, thereby increasing the number of tests and the frequency of testing. But that feels a bit haphazard.

So I've developed three new buttons, and used one of them in anger on this very forgettable word:-



"70% happy" reduces the number of passes to 70% of the number you've actually recorded. This would return a monthly item to weekly testing, for example. "You work in the butcher's don't you? Give me a clue. Is it Harold?"

"30% happy" reduces the number of passes to 30%. This would return a monthly item to daily. "Ah yes, I'd have remembered you if you'd brought your sister along again."

"0% happy" returns the item to the very beginning of testing. "Look, I've seen you a few times, but wouldn't know you from Adam. Let's start over."

It's a while since I looked at Rosetta Stone Online, and it was a surprise to find my licence hasn't expired. Must put some serious time into this while I still can.

Picked a lesson at random, and found a new verb usage: ところです／でした after the dictionary form, meaning 'is/was about to'.

Here's a screen-shot:-



The other sentences about the horse would be:-

馬は飛び越えています and

馬は飛び越えました.

You listen to the sentence read at full speed, and can choose whether to to have the text in romaji, hiragana or kanji/hiragana. Your task is to pick the right picture to match the sentence, and you need your wits about you to get it right. I'm convinced this helps tune the ear in, and gets you picking up the grammatical subtleties. Very worthwhile.

Took a look at the Hiragana Times website yesterday, and signed up for their daily e-mail 'Hiragana Times Easy'. The first arrived this morning, a paragraph in hiragana, with a vocab list and links back to the site for a full English translation and a 'standard Japanese' (kanji and kana) version. It's a bit of a stretch for me, but a good source of vocabulary and not too much to digest in one day. I would have thought that anyone working at this level would have mastered some kanji, and found myself going to the standard version to look for verb roots. Having the English and standard versions available is a boon.

All in all, a good find.

Following a recommendation from Heather, I've taken a look at the wikibooks Japanese course. The kanji lists are good, in that they are structured around the levels defined in the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. As with Wikipedia, the content is provided by ordinary bods like us, so there are gaps and no doubt the possibility of errors. If we all threw our best efforts at this, it would no doubt be very worthwhile - both for the result, and for the benefit we would gain from putting the effort in. So I had a go at adding examples to some of the kanji sheets, and picked up some new compounds in the process.

My favourite online resource for 漢字 is zhongwen.com, an online 'genealogy and dictionary' of Chinese characters. The content is vast, and you can click on any character within any of the compounds or genealogical tables, to go to the page for that character. I don't know if anything similar exists for Japanese.

I wouldn't expect to find language learning tips in a science fiction novel, but Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow has this, in a conversation between a whizz-bang linguist and the 'vulture' who has been tasked with replicating his approach:-

"Sometimes I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present."

"I do the same thing. Have you noticed that lullabies nearly always use a lot of command form?"

So, thanks to Alice from Sarah's book club for that little nugget.

After which, I came across a site of Japanese songs specifically for people learning the language. They're graded by language level, and each song has the lyrics in either romaji or kanji/kana, a vocabulary list, an MP3 file and even a karaoke version in midi format. I looked at 春が来た, and liked the repetitiveness and stickiness of it.

Today was enrolment day at Goldsmiths, so I went in to sign up for Japanese 2.

Full of confidence, fair bouncing into the building, the memory of my solid exam result last year still fresh. Then in came Junko-san, the year 2 teacher, and hit me with the Japanese end of a conversation. Bam! She may as well have been Jonah Lomu flooring me head-on. I couldn't even give a coherent reply to お元気ですか.

Well, I suppose that's at least reminded me just how important these classes are for me. Vocab lists and films are all well and good, but they've not stopped the speaking bits of my brain from atrophying.

As I told Junko-san, I need classes!

... but it won't stop me leaping on a train to the NFT for their season of films by Masumura Yasuzo. What a feast of delights this looks to be.

... in London, with such a wealth of culture on our doorstep. My Events page looks pretty full, and I'm amazed at how new Japan-related events keep coming up. Last night I went to Sokurov's 'The Sun'. Issey Ogata's portrayal of Emperor Hirohito was spellbinding. And on Monday I'll be at RADA for a Noh-style version of Ibsen's The Doll's House. Not quite sure what to expect, but hey.


That seems pretty trivial and self-indulgent in the light of what others are going through. Not to get too mushy, but I was relieved to hear from the great Dr Gary Ramdeen, formerly of the Beijing Languages Institute and the China Medical University, now living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that he and his family are all fine.

Here he is in Beijing in 1982, with a taxi.