And when I say that I can read I mean that I know the syllables, that is I can pronounce the words in the text. I still don’t know many words and wouldn’t know what was written even when I know how to pronounce it. It feels kind of like you’re a little kid that can read the words very slowly, but not always have a grip of what you’re actually reading.

I’ve always been interested in language and recently gained an interest in linguistics as well. However I’m not that good when it comes to languages, sure I can read, write and speak English fluently, but for example I took French classes for four years and can barely say even a single sentence now. Besides English and Swedish I can read and understand spoken Norwegian as well as Danish (unless the speaker has a heavy dialect). I now wish that I had taken classes in German instead of French when I was in school, since I think I would have more use for German due to my interest in WWII history. But nevertheless I still have an interest in languages, and that is of key importance when you want to learn a new language. You need to be passionate about it and you need to devote a lot of time to it.

Tools for learning Japanese

This article is not intended to list good ways to learn Japanese, since I am unable to do that seeing as how I don’t know Japanese yet. But what I will do is list the different tools and sources I use right now, and then later on I intend to write more in depth articles on each of the tools I find really useful.

Course books

These first books are the course books for the Japanese courses I’m planning on taking this fall. So these are books intended for students, and I hope they will give me some good foundation to stand on.

Genki 1: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese 1 & Workbook

The main course book, and it’s packed with lessons for both speaking and reading/writing. So far I find this book to work quite well, it has some odd parts and it’s quite clearly primarily intended for foreign students living in Japan. With its associated workbook I think it will be a good start for learning the language even though I have to do all the classroom exercises by myself instead of with a friend for the moment.

Easy Kana Workbook

Or Easy Kana Workbook: Basic Practice in Hiragana and Katakana for Japanese Language Students to give it its full title. It’s a simple “repeat what I’m writing” sort of book, and I think it will be helpful when you’re trying to write Hiragana and Katakana. It’s quite fun actually to experience again how hard it really is to learn a new writing system. So you’ll definitely need a lot of practice to be able to write kana at the same speed as you can write your latin alphabet.

A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar

It is what it says, a dictionary of basic Japanese grammar. I haven’t really looked into this book so much yet, but it is interesting to note the usage of romaji (romanization of Japanese). Genki 1 only uses romaji in the first two lessons, but being a dictionary this book isn’t written “in order” so to speak and you’ll find romaji written under every single word or sentence.

Kodansha’s Furigana: Japanese-English Dictionary

I really like this dictionary. It doesn’t use any romaji at all, but it does use furigana — which is when you write kana above the kanji, so you don’t need to know every kanji to read it — which I find to be the absolutely best solution to learn Japanese for beginners. As for the dictionary part, it’s pretty straight forward and uses sentences for setting words in context and so on.

Manga as a language help

Japanese in Mangaland: Learning the Basics

I wouldn’t recommend to use only manga when you’re learning Japanese, since the language used in manga might not be best for a beginner to learn. It can contain very much slang and doesn’t always follow the rules, even such basic as when to use katakana or hiragana. But this book has some benefits as well. The lessons aren’t as stiff as traditional course literature, it also introduces new language concepts at a different rate and always shows panels from well known manga series to illustrate the point.

Manga series

I think that using actual manga series in combination with the books mentioned above can be a nice and fun way to expand the learning. I’ve bought two books, both in furigana, that I have yet to read. I planned on ordering from Amazon.co.jp but their shipping costs were so high that it was cheaper to buy imported books here in Sweden, although that selection was clearly limited and I ended up buying Chi’s Sweet Home and NANA.

Technology is your friend

Dictionaries and translation

Books are great for learning new languages, but with all the technology around us it would be a disservice to yourself not to use it. Mac OS X comes with a Japanese dictionary, a Japanese-English dictionary and a Japanese thesaurus — which are all a great help for looking up words and so on. (I’ll write an article on the subject of Japanese on the Mac later on, because it’s a fantastic tool in itself.) And then you have Google Translate that does a fairly good job translating sentences, paragraphs and even complete websites. I should add that I only use Google Translate to translate Japanese to English and not directly to Swedish, since the translation into English is always much more accurate.

The Firefox add-on Rikaichan is another great dictionary help, just hover over a word (in kanji, hiragana or katakana) it will show a detailed list of meanings as well as the pronunciation if you hover over a kanji and the stem of the word.

Smart.fm

Smart.fm is a, as the company behinds it says, next-generation learning platform. What Smart.fm does, and does well, is to remind you when you need to study something, and it does this very intelligently. It was Smart.fm that made me learn hiragana and katakana so fast, and not just fast but also did it by building up a foundation. This service is not intended for cramming, it’s main purpose is long time learning. I think this tool will be exceptionally helpful in learning Japanese, and I intend to use the Genki 1 goals on the site along with the course book, as well as several other goals.

Human Japanese

I’ve tried quite a few iPhone apps and the only one worth commenting on at this point is Human Japanese. The best way to describe it would be to call it an interactive language book. The text is very well written, and it has a different style from most course books, but since it’s written by a single person there are some problems. I’m guessing that the person that wrote it finds grammar the more difficult part, but learning new words very easy — which results in chapters where 50 or so new words are introduced as if you learn them instantly, and at same time another entire chapter can be devoted to a specific language structure that I had absolutely no problem of grasping after a sentence or two. So this does make it a bit annoying, but all in all I find it to be a great resource. The application also features thousands of voice recordings that will help you learn pronunciation and improve listening skills, it also features games and quizzes that helps the learning of new words.

YouTube-channels

There is a rather large J-vlog community (video bloggers in/about Japan) on YouTube. I currently subscribe to 20 j-vlog channels via RSS, but I won’t list them here right now — that will be a later article I imagine. But what I do want to say is that it seems to be a truly friendly community and it’s a great way to get a glimpse at life in Tokyo in particular and Japan in general. I’ve also found that since these people talk about every day life and not classic text book Japanese they’ve introduced me to several words and sentences that are really convenient but not something that I would normally learn (at least not this early on). On a side note though, most of the j-vloggers I follow are foreigners living in Japan, and since Japanese isn’t their native language it’s important not to take after their pronunciation.

Enter SizeUp. This application, developed by Steven Audette over at Irradiated Software, does just what I was looking for. SizeUp can move around windows, resize them and easily place several windows side by side or four on a quarter of the screen each, it can even move windows across monitors and spaces. You just use keyboard shortcuts, so you never have to use your mouse again to move a window, it’s like it was designed for my own specific needs. I must say that this application enhances my OS X experience many times over, it is so simple yet so powerful.

SizeUp is now priced at $13. Previously, when I bought it, it didn’t have a normal purchase price. Instead Irradiated Software used a payment model they called “Name Your Price!”, which meant that you could choose to pay whatever you thought the application was worth, with a minimum of $4.99 to cover PayPal expenses and so forth and a suggested price of $12.99. I was surprised to see that they had stopped using that method and went back to the more traditional way. Either way, you can read more about this on the company’s blog if you’re interested in software pricing. There is a demo you can try out which will pop up a window, every fifth of so move, about it being a demo version, I did find this pop up really annoying and it took away quite much from the experience of just using the keyboard — but I’m thankful that there was a demo, which also resulted in me paying the suggested price of $12.99 because I instantly realised the potential of this application.

If you’re the kind of person that likes to use the mouse more than keyboard shortcuts the developer has another app, Cinch, for that very reason — although it doesn’t have as many features.

Pages

Pages, which is both a word processor and a page layout application, could be compared to Microsoft Word in the word processor department, but Pages is so much more according to me. The grammar and spell checking works a bit differently and both the applications has their pros and cons here, Word however supports more languages than Pages does.

The true power of Pages is it’s simplicity. And with that I don’t mean that it lacks functionality, I mean that the software is simple to use, everything is located where you would imagine it to be (something that can’t be said about Word where most things are in weird places that you only know where they are because you’ve used the application for so long). It’s very simple to change a setting for either an individual paragraph or the entire document.

I said that Pages was also a page layout applications, something that Word is not, and this is where Pages shines the most. When I moved from Word to Pages I was shocked to find how easy it could be to place images and objects into the text. Images and objects used to be a nightmare to deal with, but now I can control them just as easily as the text — they behave just the way I want to without me having to dig though a lot of different settings.

A feature I like that I think most people overlook or simply don’t care about is the advanced typography tools. Pages has been criticized by some for the lack of faux italics and faux bold (i.e. having the application fake it when the font used doesn’t support italics or bold). I personally think this is a good thing, faked letter looks horrible. What Pages on the other hand does is to take full advantage of all typographical features the font is made for, which includes true small-caps, ligatures, ornaments and the like.

The last few months I’ve spent quite some time writing reports (IMRAD-style). Yesterday for example I put together a report of almost 10,000 words spanning more than 40 pages, written by me and three other classmates, containing several illustrations and a rather nice page layout if I may say so myself. I can simply say that I would not have been able to do the same job if I had been using Word, and what I would have produced with Word would not only have looked less appealing but would also had taken a much longer time to put together.

All in all, I love Pages.

Keynote

Before I got to the university it was very seldom I saw a PowerPoint-presentation, but in the last few month I’ve seen quite a few. The all have one thing in common, they look outdated. And I’m not just talking about the presentations from the teachers, no the students presentations are (sorry guys) just as boring and uninspiring. When it comes to presentations, the actual esthetics of something is important, so why is it that it feels like PowerPoint-presentations looks the same now as they did in the ‘90s?

Keynote is another great part of iWork. Even someone with no knowledge of design or typography can make stunning presentations. You can start out with a template, but it doesn’t take much to make the presentation unique and specialized for your needs. Personally I’m not a fan of transition animations between slides, and although Keynote has a few nice animations I think one would do best to stay away from them. That is animations between slides, the animations for text within a slide can still be pretty useful to highlight what your talking about etc.

Since I haven’t worked much with presentations before I haven’t used PowerPoint even close to the extent I’ve used Word, so I can’t talk so much about pros and cons. But what I have noticed is that once again every little setting in Keynote is precisely located where I thought it would be, even the first time I started the application.

Numbers

Numbers is the latest addition to the iWork family. It was first included in the ’08 version and is therefor still at version 1.0 (whereas Pages is 3.0 and Keynote is 4.0). You can notice that Numbers is not as “complete” as the other two applications in the bundle, but for my needs it can take over the tasks that Microsoft Excel handled before.

One big difference from Excel is the look and feel of the application, and just like the other iWork applications the settings are exactly where you would imagine them to be. With Numbers it’s easy to make a nice spreadsheet, both for printing and screen display.

I haven’t had that much need for this application yet, mostly used it to create graphs and draw up some conceptual database tables. I will probably go back here and write some more about it later after I’ve used it some more.

Update:
iWork ’09 has just been released, and I’ve downloaded the trial version and tried it out a bit. Don’t see that many new features I would use, if I had owned EndNote X2 it would be worth the price but right now I think I will just keep using ’08 until Snow Leopard is released.