iPhone user? Check out our list of best iPhone Japanese learning apps

Android user? Check out our list of best Android Japanese learning apps

Here’s a selection of what I consider to be the best WP8 apps for learning Japanese:

Tango Master

(Free) By far the best Japanese language learning app for Windows Phone 8.

As the name suggests, the app’s primary objective is to help you learn vocabulary, but it’s so much more than just another Japanese flashcard app.

Tango Master includes an offline Japanese dictionary, SRS flashcards with 40 prebuilt study lists, a Japanese website reader with integrated dictionary, and several educational mini-games (shiritori, rapid fire and memory).

Though the app tends to be fairly slow, you can pin each section and vocab list as a separate live tile which lets you access what you need in one click.

Japanese Hub

($9.99) A new, and only competitor of Tango Master, Japanese Hub includes an offline dictionary, a textbook with simple language lessons and dialogues, and SRS vocab and kanji flashcards.

Some interesting features which differentiate it from Tango Master are pronunciation audio of every word and sentence, and a feature where you are asked to draw kanji on the screen during the kanji quiz (though you have to compare your writing with the original yourself).

The price is rather steep for an app that is not very different from, and so far nowhere as polished as Tango Master, but the trial version is definitely worth a try and new updates seem to be coming at a steady rate.

Human Japanese

($9.99) A renowned beginner Japanese textbook with well organized lessons, engaging cultural notes, and integrated dictionary and native pronunciation audio. It doesn’t go beyond the very basics, but the content is presented in a very attractive manner.

Human Japanese is one of the most expensive language learning apps out there, but if you’re a complete beginner to Japanese, you should definitely give the trial a go.

Hiragana Pixel Party

($3.49) A most interesting little game that blends language learning with rhythm-baesd gameplay.

The objective of the game is to tap the right kana, at the right time, to the rythm of the in-game music. As you progress, more and more kana characters get unlocked based on your score.

This might not sound particularly exciting at first, but add cute pixelate graphics and a catchy tune and you have a surprisingly fun game, as well as a surprisingly efficient way to learn how to read hiragana and katakana.

Learn Japanese with our online Japanese learning games

Write Japanese

($2.49) If Hiragana Pixel Party is where you learn to read kana, this is the place where you learn how to write it.

Write Japanese is a well designed app that teaches you how to write hiragana, katakana and a handful kanji, and then checks whether you’ve used the correct stroke order. Unfortunately, only 50 kanji are available, so the app isn’t useful beyond beginner level.

Obenkyo

(Free) A decent free Japanese learning app with quite a good basic textbook and a kanji database.

There’s a lot about this app that could be improved, but it has a few unique features, some interesting content, and a very nice price point, so there’s no reason no to check it out.

Daily Kanji

(Free) Daily Kanji is a free Windows Phone application that displays a different kanji on its live tile every day.

You can select the range of kanji based on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) level, go through past kanji, and view stroke order diagrams. The app is really simple, but what it does, it does well.

NHK Japanese

(Free) We’ve always recommended NHK News as one of the best ways to practice Japanese reading and listening, and this app allows you to do all that on the go.

The app makes it easy to access all NHK Special Japanese and NHK Standard Japanese content, both past and present, listen to the audio, and read through the transcripts.

Kleio

(Free) Kleio is not meant purely for Japanese language learning, but it’s a very well done SRS app with desktop sync and all the features you’d expect from a this kind of product product.

In fact, it would have been an excellent alternative to Anki on every platform, if not for the lack of decent Japanese language decks shared by other users.

Bonus: Lost in translation

(Free) Last but not least is this fun little app based on the popular site called Translation Party.

Lost in translation prompts you to enter a sentence, and then translates it back and forth between Japanese and English until an equilibrium is reached. That is, until the translation in both directions is no longer modified.

Machine translation is far from perfect and so the app often churns out most amusing results.

The post Best Windows Phone 8 apps to learn Japanese appeared first on Japanese LinguaLift blog.

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25% off LinguaLift

First of all, until May 5th, you can use golden-2512 as the coupon code on the subscription form to get 25% off the first payment, whatever the plan you’ll choose to subscribe to!

Review LinguaLift, get 3 months free

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The post Golden Week sale appeared first on Japanese LinguaLift blog.

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Illustration by Mister Kha

I’ve been using the method for a couple of years without using any specific name to describe it, but later came upon a video by the remarkable scholar, autodidact and polyglot Alexander Arguelles describing a similar technique and calling it shadowing, which describes the process rather accurately.

How-to shadow

To start shadowing, you’ll need a player, a pair of headphones, and an audio recording in your target language, at your level of proficiency.

The ideal content is roughly one page long, at natural speed, on engaging topics and with no artificial pauses and absolutely no English. A great place to start is the Assimil audio CD, though the Japanese graded readers are also a good choice.

The basic concept is as follows:

• listen to the text once—if you don’t have at least a general idea of what’s going on, you might be better off choosing an easier topic
• listen to the text a few more times until you are confident that whatever you still don’t understand you won’t be able to figure out from context through subsequent hearings
• listen to the text while reading the transcript and look up any words you’re not confident about
• listen to the text and repeat with a minimum delay—rinse and repeat until you can read it confidently at the same speed as the recording, then do it once more and move onto the next track

By the time you move onto the next text, you should understand every word and sentence, and essentially know the text by heart. If you can’t read most of the text from memory while in the shower, you haven’t repeated it enough.

Note that you shouldn’t look up any vocabulary or grammar until you repeat the text several times. You might only barely understand the content on first playthrough, but if the text is of the right level, you should figure out the meaning of many, if not most words and sentence patterns after hearing it several times.

Walk your way to fluency

Make sure to speak loud and clear. If you’re not too self-conscious, this is a great time to take a break from the computer screen and have a walk in the park.

In fact, Arguelles argues that to learn effectively through shadowing, it is crucial to observe these three points:

1. Walk outdoors as swiftly as possible.

Walking outdoors forces you to get comfortable using the language in unusual settings, in a more automated way, while performing other activities. Just as you do with your native language.

2. Maintain perfectly upright posture.

Together with point №1, maintaining an upright posture increases oxygen intake which further benefits your brain, and thus the learning process. It is also one more thing you need to think of simultaneously, and will make you a more confident speaker.

3. Articulate thoroughly in a loud, clear voice.

Good articulation is crucial if you want to perfect your pronunciation, and together with №2, speaking in a loud, clear will trick your brain into thinking that what you are learning is particularly important. Think of yourself as an actor playing a part.

Proficiency through efficiency

You might have noticed a pattern here… each step works in tandem with each other, and that is in fact the key to this technique, and intensive language learning in general.

To make that jump from stagnating at a higher-beginner level to being able to learn by actually using in day-to-day life you have to work more, and as there are only that many hours in a day, it means that you have to learn more efficiently by working on several skill-sets at once.

The post Shadowing: The better way to learn a language appeared first on Japanese LinguaLift blog.

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5. Why learn Japanese?

Looking for 10 easy steps to become better at Japanese? Here they are:

Learn.
Learn more.
Learn even more.
Learn even more than that.
Learn when you don’t want to.
Learn when you do.
Learn when you need to.
Learn when you don’t.
Learn every day.
Learn to love learning.

Nothing less, nothing more. It’s that simple!

Want to display this infographic on your site?

Simply copy and paste the code below into the html of your blog or website:

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It takes years of careful study for a human being to learn shodo properly. But the calligraphy robot can reproduce its works of art instantly. Is there anything at all that robots can’t do?

Photo by npdoty

How the robot works

The calligraphy robot uses a master and slave system where the head of the brush is the master and the tip is the slave. A motor attached to the robot records the movement and also speed of a human artist.

But what’s really unique about the robot is that it can perfectly replicate the force that’s applied to the brush, which is an important element of shodo. It does this by using specially designed sensors. It’s the first robot developed that can do this.

The robot’s developers hope that it can reproduce calligraphy perfectly. Tests were conducted with Juho Sado, an 89-year-old master calligrapher. Although Katsura and his team say it’s difficult to get an exact replication, Sado was impressed with the results.

Why the world needs calligraphy writing robots

Robots can do cool stuff faster and more perfectly than we can. So what? Keio University scientists don’t develop robots just to make we mere humans feel inferior. The purpose of the calligraphy robot is to help preserve this traditional Japanese art form.

Young Japanese people live in a world full of cool gadgets, video games, and other attention-span crushing shiny objects. There’s a growing generation gap and fewer of the nation’s youth than ever before are taking up traditional calligraphy. The fact that many young Japanese people struggle to remember the kanji (漢字 – Japanese writing system that uses Chinese ideograms) used in daily life and the low birth rate are also contributing factors. Many fear that calligraphy is a dying art that not enough young people are taking up.

Robots can store and preserve this data in what’s called a skill repository. They can also be used for teaching calligraphy. Shodo is usually taught by older Japanese directly to younger Japanese through intuition and experience. Now, the process can be automated and hopefully, no nuance will be lost.

The calligraphy robot’s debut

The calligraphy robot is still in the early stages of development. The first prototype is basically a robotic arm with a mess of wires. It isn’t much to look at but it can do amazing things with a brush and some ink. It was displayed at the Japan information technology exhibit at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (CEATEC) in Chiba in 2012.

Maybe they’ll develop a robot that can write everyone’s hundreds of yearly nengajo (年賀状–New Year’s cards) for them?

The post The calligraphy robot appeared first on Japanese LinguaLift blog.

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Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who served at the consulate for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania. During one month in 1940, he and his wife Yukiko hand-wrote visas that allowed 6,000 Jews to escape Germany by passing through Japanese territory. His actions were unauthorized and in fact prohibited by the Japanese government, whose entry requirements would not have allowed Jews to enter its territories.

The extermination of Jews in Lithuania during the Holocaust was particularly horrible. Nearly 200,000 were killed and many believe there were more. It’s fairly certain that the thousands of Jews Sugihara allowed to escape would have perished.

Why did Sugihara, who was a low-level diplomat, disobey orders and risk his career? For one thing, he was always an iconoclast. As a young man, he defied his father who wanted him to enter the medical profession and instead decided to study literature. He studied English at Waseda University and then studied in Harbin, China. He fell in love with the cosmopolitan nature of the city and this is what led him to answer a job ad looking for foreign diplomat trainees.

After his training, he was posted in Kaunas, which was then the capital of Lithuania. Lithuania was strategically located between Germany and the Soviet Union, so it served as a good escape route. But when the Soviet army moved into Lithuania in 1939, this became impossible for many.

One night, a group of Polish Jews woke him up begging to be rescued. He knew he could help them but first consulted with his wife, Yukiko. She was instrumental in encouraging him to make the decision. She later said that at the time she was nursing their third child. Looking at the newborn, she realized that all of these people were also children with mothers. It was this feeling of compassion that moved the two to start writing visas immediately.

Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara wrote all of the 6,000 visas by hand. The visas allowed a ten-day stay in Japanese territory. Through his Soviet connections, he arranged for the refugees to be transported on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, Russia, where they would then go to Kobe. Some stayed in Japan, but many moved on from there to Shanghai or Dutch-owned islands in the Caribbean.

At the end of the month, the Japanese consulate in Lithuania was closed. It’s reported that Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara were still writing visas and throwing them out the train windows as their train pulled away.

In 1985, Israel gave Chiune Sugihara the Righteous Among the Nations honor for his actions. There have been many tributes to him elsewhere around the world but he is little-known in Japan. There is a famous monument to him in Lithuania and when Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko went to pay their respects to it, Japanese television had to explain who the Sugiharas were.

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When you’re new to learning Japanese, or a foreign language in general, one of the surprising hurdles to overcome is the jargon… in your own language! So many technical terms are thrown around flippantly and rarely explained outright that it’s easy to get lost.

This series serves as a basic introduction to some terms that you’re bound to meet on your journey towards Japanese fluency. This isn’t an exhaustive vocabulary list but rather a primer on a few terms that you might find difficult to wrap your head around as a beginner.

We’ve started with Japanese writing and grammar, and this time we’ll look at Japanese pronunciation.

1. Japanese writing vocab refresh
2. Japanese grammar vocab refresh
3. Japanese pronunciation vocab refresh
4. Japanese etiquette vocab refresh

Furigana

Furigana (振り仮名) is a reading aid consisting of small kana characters printed or displayed next to kanji. It is used to indicate the reading of obscure characters, clarify ambiguous names and vocabulary, as well as in children’s and learners’ materials.

Furigana is also known as yomigana (読み仮名), and in technical context, ruby (ルビ).

Mora

In our Japanese textbook, we’ve tried our best to avoid technical vocabulary, but there’s one new word that our students have to learn as it’s both difficult to paraphrase in simple terms and extremely important when learning Japanese.

Coming from the Latin word meaning ‘delay,’ a mora divides a word into equal parts, according to how long it takes to pronounce. This means that a long syllable consists of two and a short syllable consists of one mora when written down.

Every word in Japanese is written with the same number of kana characters as there are morae in the word in question, yet it doesn’t necessary have the same number of syllables.

For example, the words Tōkyō (to-o-kyo-o, とうきょう, ), Ōsaka (o-o-sa-ka, おおさか), and Nagasaki (na-ga-sa-ki, ながさき) all have four morae and are written with four kana characters, yet they have two, three, and four syllables respectively.

It is crucial to understand this difference, the importance of morae versus syllables, in order to perfect one’s pronunciation, as well as understand many of the Japanese written arts (e.g., haiku).

What terms do you struggle with?

I hope this brief glossary has shed a little light onto some potentially confusing topics.

Are there any other terms related to the Japanese language that either currently confuse you or have confused you in the past? Let us know in the comments and be sure to check back soon for our Japanese etiquette vocab refresh!

The post Vocab refresh part 3: Japanese pronunciation appeared first on Japanese LinguaLift blog.

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Photo by mookE

Buildings don’t usually quietly shrink floor by floor, but the Japanese company Taisei Corp may be changing that. It has developed a new demolition process called Tecorep–Taisei Ecological Reproduction System–that tears down buildings without people even noticing. It’s faster, safer, quieter and more environmentally friendly than the traditional wrecking ball or blow-stuff-up methods.

Collapsing on the inside

It’s exciting when a new building goes up, but you don’t see folks from all over Japan crowding into the Chiyoda Ward taking snapshots, pointing and going, ‘Look! You can almost notice how it’s gotten just slightly smaller from last week!’ But once you know that the hotel is shrinking floor by floor, it’s pretty amazing.

The Akasaka Prince Hotel is quietly collapsing on the inside. Demolition workers started at the top and they’re working their way down. They put in temporary columns and reinforced the top floor with steel beams to create a kind of adjustable lid. After an electric-powered crane removes all the material from each floor, the top floor and roof are lowered using massive jacks. From outside, it looks like there’s nothing funny going on, except for the hotel getting 6.4 meters smaller every ten days.

There is dust and noise but not much and it’s mostly inside the building. The Tecorep process reduces dust by as much as 90% and noise by 17 to 23 decibels. According to Taisei’s head of construction development Hideki Ichihara, carbon emissions are reduced by 85%. Whenever possible, the materials removed from inside the building are recycled.

The future of building demolition

This is an ideal solution for a city like Tokyo, where buildings are so closely crammed together that in some places you can stretch your arms and touch two buildings. In this kind of urban Tetris game, it’s hard to tear down buildings with all the dust, noise and mess traditional demolition methods produce. There’s also the fact that demolition jobs don’t always go as expected.

The Akasaka Prince Hotel is only the second building to quietly and unassumingly shrink and disappear. But the shrinking method is likely to be used a lot in the coming decade, when a number of 100-meter-plus buildings will reach ‘old age’ and need to be torn down.

The hotel was originally 40 stories. On January 8th when reporters were invited to witness the process firsthand, it was down to 31. By the end of spring 2013, the Akasaka Prince Hotel will have quietly disappeared.

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Photo by rhosoi

Actually, the baby probably won’t eat anything at all, but it’s symbolic. The ceremony is for good health and abundance. It means that the baby will never go hungry throughout its life.

The ceremony is usually done at home. The baby gets dressed up in a tiny kimono and the folks prepare a huge meal. A little table is set up for the baby. The meal consists of rice, fish, vegetables, and sometimes other foods that may have symbolic meanings.

The main course is tai (鯛, sea bream). Other foods may include umeboshi (梅干し, pickled plum), sekihan (赤飯, sticky red rice usually eaten during ceremonies), sumashijiro (すまし汁, a kind of clear soup), and nimono (煮物, a dish of stewed vegetables). Sweets may also be included. Sometimes the parents give the baby a stone to nibble on. It’s supposed to help the baby develop strong teeth.

After the food is served, the parents pick up bits of it with chopsticks and press it against the baby’s lips. The baby looks at its parents in a confused way as if to ask, ‘Where’s the nipple at?’ Pictures are taken and baby cheeks are pinched. The parents eat their meal and, when done, descend on the baby’s. The baby doesn’t really care.

Breastfeeding is very common in Japan and from the age of about a hundred days, parents begin to introduce the child to the wonderful world of food. Soft foods are gradually introduced into the baby’s diet, but nothing like the huge fish staring up from the little tot from its plate during the okuizome dinner.

Okuizome is the third official baby celebration. Oshichiya (お七夜, the seventh night) is a Buddhist ceremony for longevity that’s held seven nights after the baby’s birth. The second ceremony is omiyamairi (お宮参り, visit to the shrine), where the family takes the baby to a local shrine to report its birth to the local gods and thank them for making it a good one. Omiyamairi is similar to a christening ceremony in the Christian tradition.

Babies in Japan are busy

Okuizome is an important celebration in the life of a Japanese baby and photo albums across the country are filled with cute pictures of little ones in kimonos with plates of giant fish and other treats set before them.

The post Okuizome: A Japanese baby’s first meal appeared first on Japanese LinguaLift blog.

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Today’s tastier red rice

The rice of ancient Japan had a naturally reddish color. Rice was intimately connected to Japan’s old time religion, and it was often given as an offering to the gods. The only trouble is that the rice was highly tannic and therefore not so easy on the tongue. This is why modern white glutinous rice has replaced it.

Red rice of an ancient kind, and the present rice. Photo by gtknj

Sekihan (赤飯, red rice) is the modern version of this ancient ceremonial rice, but we can assume that it tastes much better. The red is produced by adding azuki (小豆, lit. ‘small bean’) into the mix. These small russet-colored beans are the same beans used to make anko (餡子)the red paste found in Japanese sweets such as anpan (アンパン, sweet roll with red bean paste) and taiyaki (たい焼き, a sea bream shaped cake with red bean paste inside). The beans imbue the rice with their color and slightly sweet flavor.

Let’s party!

Sekihan is what you serve when you’re celebrating. It’s commonly seen around the New Year’s holiday. It also makes an appearance during birthdays, weddings, and other celebrations like shichigosan (七五三), a celebration for children who have reached a certain age.

In the past, it was also customarily made when a young woman reached menarche, often without telling the male members of the household what was being celebrated.

Photo by Incanus Japan

It’s so associated with celebrations that the idiom ‘Sekihan ni shiyou yo‘ (赤飯にしようよ, ‘let’s have sekihan’) means something akin to ‘time to party!’ This phrase is only used for something big and significant, like the announcement of a pregnancy or the passing of entrance exams. However, it can be used sarcastically to tease somebody who’s full of their not-so-amazing accomplishment as well.

Making your own sekihan

Sekihan is one of the easiest Japanese dishes to make. You just put the beans into the rice cooker with the rice and water, push a button, and in about an hour you have sekihan. The key is to make sure you have the right kind of rice. It has to be Japanese glutinous white rice, which is known as mochigome or mochimai (both written as もち米). A mixture of roasted black sesame seeds and salt is usually put on top.

There are variations as well. Japanese glutinous rice is quite heavy so some people mix it with a lighter type of rice in the rice cooker. Others spike it with more sweetness, adding sugar instead of salt.

Sekihan is not only delicious and festive, but also good for you. Azuki contains high levels of vitamins, protein and iron. It promotes good blood circulation, which is why the Japanese consider sekihan a nice pick-me-up for when you’re feeling tired. It’s also a dish vegetarians, vegans and folks who are gluten intolerant can enjoy.

The post Sekihan: Japan’s festive red rice appeared first on Japanese LinguaLift blog.

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