This is going to make reading Japanese online easier!

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that I love Popjisyo. It's great to paste Japanese text there (it also translates Korean and Chinese, though I don't know those languages) and find out what the more difficult words mean.

But yesterday, a guy at Barnes & Noble who's majoring in Japanese told me about Rikaichan, which is a popup dictionary tool that shows what a Japanese word means. It's for Firefox and some other browsers I haven't heard of, but since I'm not crazy about Firefox, I added Rikaikun to Chrome.

It's great! All I do is turn it on, and when I'm at a Japanese website, I just hover my mouse over a word, and it shows me what it means! Actually, it doesn't always translate a word because it seems to not recognize some kanji or kana combinations, but it's still very handy.

It's so handy, that there's a risk of becoming lazy: if all it takes is just a hover to understand a word, then we're tempted to not try to memorize it.

But if I want a more fully functioning popup dictionary, then I still like Popjisyo. It seems more precise and extensive. But Rikaikun is better than nothing!

If it weren't for the production, this show would be a dud

My husband likes to watch Top Shot. I'm not interested in watching a bunch of people shoot at a target. But what I have noticed is that if it were not for the excellent producing, the show would have nothing special about it.

The editing is really good, and the music adds drama. There are interesting camera angles and they even vary the speed of the bullets. Even the titles are well-designed. It looks like a sophisticated show, even though there's not much to it. Aesthetically, it's high quality. So whoever produces and edits that show is doing a good job.

I'm glad they've taken the time to make it tasteful. But I'm still not interested in the content.

30 years of music distribution

This is very interesting: a 30-second animated gif presentation of pie charts that represent where people have bought their music over the past 30 years. I've posted the first and last images here, but go to the site to see the entire thing. Fascinating!

A book that looks interesting

I've been wondering for a while why American culture seems so isolating even though there are people all around us. In my exploration of this topic, I found a great essay about feeling isolated in the church community, and within it was this quote from The Pursuit of Loneliness:

It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based. We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business...we seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it...our encounters with others tend increasingly to be competitive as a result of the search for privacy.

The book was written 40 years ago, but it seems like the concepts can be applied today as well. I really should read this book. Even though I'm American, the culture can still be baffling at times.

Joyo kanji lists - handy!

It used to be that we would have to acquire a paper chart of joyo kanji (a list of regularly used kanji that is created by the Ministry of Education) either by purchasing one in a Japanese bookstore, or by scoring one from a school, but Wikipedia has a complete list that includes readings and meanings. Whoever took the time to post it and edit it is incredible!

The Japanese About.com site also has a list that is organized by grades, which is helpful, too, though it's not as complete as the Wikipedia one.

I'm so glad I no longer have to rely on just paper and books to improve my Japanese! Way to go Wikipedia!

Bilingual security

Rebelx sent this to me from a security site. This is some complicated security!

Happy Father's Day in Taiwan!

Last night, a Taiwanese friend on Facebook posted "Happy Father's Day", so I did an online search to see why she would say that. It turns out that today (August 8) is Father's Day in Taiwan, and here's a good explanation about what it means:

[It] is widely observed on August 8, the eighth day of the eighth month of the year. In Mandarin Chinese, the pronunciation of the number 8 is bā. This pronunciation is very similar to the character "爸" "bà", which means "Papa" or "father". The Taiwanese, therefore, usually call August 8 by its nickname, "Bābā Holiday" (爸爸節).

She probably posted the greeting yesterday because Taiwan is about 13 hours ahead of us, so our August 7 was already their August 8.

Last week of teaching a lot

Since January, I've been teaching ESL for several hours a week, and since the school isn't in my area of the city, the commute has been quite long. But this week is my last week, and my schedule will be a lot more manageable through the end of the year. I'll probably go back to teaching one day a week, which I've been doing for a while.

I've noticed that some of the other teachers aren't doing a lot of other work outside of school, but I've been working at a couple of other places, so I've been very busy. I know...it's very American to say "I'm so busy" and I really don't want to say it, but it's been true. Plus, some other things have developed in my non-work life, so I've really been running around all over Chicagoland and helping people out.

But this week is the last week of daily commutes, long hours, and fatigue. I've really enjoyed teaching this year, but I'm glad that I won't be frequently drained or tired from doing so much every day. And what's cool is that I've begun a big writing project, so the diminished teaching hours will be replaced with lots of writing on that project, in addition to the other writing I often do on a weekly basis.

I think I should change my homepage at this point to describe what I actually do for work and my other interests, though I do list that stuff at my Googoo Plus page.

Anyway, through the end of the year, my work life will be more writing than teaching, with some of the usual radio work thrown in. I'll probably also set up another reading for the anthology and actually try to promote it more.

There's so much to do. I will have more time to write here, and of course, I will have more time to read Japanese!

Spelling mistake that makes sense

This sign spelled "daily" wrong, but in terms of non-English phonetics, the misspelling makes sense.

Language learning site

Oliver sent me a link to his free language learning site that has various European, and even some Asian, languages. I signed up initially for Japanese and added Portuguese, since it's such a hard language to pronounce.

There are a lot of features including audio, vocabulary lists, sentences, interactive quizzes, and more. The weak area is the "text" section: there are categories listed, but when I click on some of them, no text is there. But if I really want to understand Japanese texts, I can paste anything I find online into Popjisyo to see the meaning of words I don't know.

Anyway, check Oliver's site out--there's a lot of fun free stuff there.

Some beauty from Japan

I saw this at the Mainichi site: a field of flowers in the Furano Basin in Hokkaido. The article says that there are about 60,000 lavender flowers, and when the pleasant wind in the northern part of the country blows, the poppies, lavender, and baby's breath flowers sway in the wind. The article also says that the earthquake that Japan experienced this year has caused tourism to decrease, but during the current season, there tend to be several tourists from early in the morning on weekdays.

For the first time in a while, my mind is free

When I started this blog, and for a while after that, I read a lot of blogs and commented on several as well. Then things developed in my offline life that required energy and attention, and I felt like I was working so intensely in those other areas, that I didn't have the mind space to interact with other blogs as much or post here as consistently.

This year has been especially busy work-wise, and this week, I finally have the mind space to think about this blog and to seek out others. It feels great! I think the problem has been seeing my podcast get good feedback online and off, and get many hits on certain interviews. Meanwhile, while this blog has had thousands of visitors from over a hundred countries over the years, I don't experience much feedback, which makes me wonder what's going on out there.

Also, I've been writing for work, and again, there's feedback from clients and financial reward. But it's also the amount of work I've had that's caused my head to be filled to the point that I really need to decompress when I'm free, not post or read posts at blogs so often.

I post and read others' posts at Facebook, but don't write there extensively. However, maybe it's the interaction I like, even though I'm not a big fan of social networking.

Anyway, since my work situation this week has been very normal and manageable for the first time in months, I've decided to create mind space to post, read, and interact at other blogs. I need to mine the blogs I already read to see who they're linked to, and I'll take recommendations as well.

The Americanisms Brits hate

I saw an interesting article at the BBC about how annoying Americanisms are entering British English, followed by another article with reactions from Brits, who shared their own hated terms.

I don't use all of those terms, so Brits shouldn't hate me :D But here are the words I use that are listed there:

bi-weekly, transportation, turn, shopping cart, bangs, take-out, a half hour, train station, period, season, math

Actually, those words aren't wrong, they're just different because Americans use different vocabulary than Brits, obviously.

I agree with their opposition to various phrases because they're just incorrect, but one I'm particularly annoyed with is "Where's it at?" instead of "Where is it?" I often hear that around town.

But I have to admit that I sometimes use "I could care less" even though I know it's incorrect. I know the correct phrase is "I couldn't care less" but I hear the incorrect version so often, I end up using it, too. Sorry Brits and grammarians!

Note comment number 27:

"Oftentimes" just makes me shiver with annoyance.

I did a post about oftentimes almost five years ago, which people still hit today.

If only it were that easy

Someone sent me this video about how to write a novel. Just follow these steps and voila! It's that easy :p

Ground bee?

What does that mean? (via rebelxphoto)

FB translation fumble

I'm still using Japanese for my Facebook account, and when they changed the chat feature, I saw this message over my list:

友達と今すぐ会話 クリックするだけで、すぐに友達と会話が楽しめます。 [With just a click, talk with your friends right now, and you can have fun conversing with your friends right away.]

I don't know why that seems redundant in Japanese, but that's essentially what they seem to say. (Btw--we say "chat" in English, but in this case, they don't use the katakana representation of that word.)

Anyway, I saw that they had this in English after that Japanese:

Your chat availability settings have not changed.

And below that English sentence, it said:

詳しくはこちら [get details here] or 隠す [hide]

So I clicked on the "details" option and it said in English:

We don't have a translation for this content in your locale. Please select an available language from the right.

So after all that, the only language that was "available" was Japanese; English wasn't an option, even though they'd just given me a mixture of English and Japanese statements. Seems like they have to get their translations squared away. Or maybe I've confused FB again :D

This guy is *really* good at languages!

This guy has hit the big time: he speaks amazing Cantonese, and is already a sensation, so you probably know about him already. Now that he's been featured in the mainstream media, he's going to be even more of a star.

Another FB victory!

Over a week ago, I discovered that I managed to confuse Facebook, so the ads I saw were showing up in Japanese and German. Well I've done it again! Now the ads are in Arabic and French. Confounding Facebook is fun!

Can you find the mistake?

After I joined Google+, someone sent me this cartoon from a Google art compilation, but I noticed it's missing a word:

I've been enjoying the great weather

Chicago has bad weather several months a year: we hardly get any spring, and end up with several months of winter. So when it becomes sunny and warm, it's hard for me to spend time on a computer outside of work. Today is very muggy, so I'm waiting for it to cool off a bit before I go back outside.

So that's why I haven't posted anything here or even at my podcast: the weather is too good to avoid.

But I have had time to think about accepting reality, that just because we think we love to do something, it doesn't mean it will actually happen the way we want it to. I alluded to letting go of a dream in an earlier post, and the rethinking process is going okay, though it's still not easy.

That's why it's wonderful when it's sunny outside: we can get away from disappointments and let the sun soak our minds.

Anyway, I might be getting yet another online writing project, so I'm thinking of changing my homepage to be more business-oriented. I'm not going to go corporate here, but I think I should be letting the world know what I actually do for a living :p