I have now gotten a blog in Japanese as well! I felt that I wanted a good way to practice writing/reading and just generally use Japanese more, so I started http://nikkichou.com/. にっきちょう (nikkichou) in Japanese means diary.

フレデリックのにっきちょう

Everything I write in that blog is stuff I have learnt so far. I want to use it as a sort of measuring-device of how much Japanese I know so I will only be using the kanji (Chinese characters) that I have studied and I will not be looking up words to write. This means that the blog is sort of limited in what I can write about, but that’s the point. As I get better I will be able to write about broader and broader subjects.

I have decided to not put it here based on feedback from people on twitter, so it has it’s own home over at tumblr. If any Japanese people are reading this blog, you can jump over to the other one and correct my probably horribly incorrect grammar and word-choice. If you don’t know any Japanese, I doubt you will be getting very much sense from it because Google Translate does a really horrible job of translating it.

I will put a link in the sidebar here later so you won’t have to remember the name of it.

Sorry about the in focus/out of focus problem. My camera and I don’t really agree on where to focus.

Anyhow, this video is basically just for myself. I want to look back at this 11 months from now and see how much better I’ve gotten.

I also went to Hanabi today. I will show you what is in the next post, maybe tomorrow. I have some video too! Here is a preview:

My name is Fredrik, which is easy to say in Swedish, but seemingly hard in every other language. It’s pretty hard to say in English so my old english-teacher from high school used to call me Fred in class. Which I think is an acceptable nickname.

As I’m moving to Japan now though I feel I need a Japanese nickname, Fredrik is obviously impossible to say so it would become something like “Furederiku” (フレデリク). Furederiku sound awful and is way to much to say. Furede or Furedo or something like that doesn’t really make it better either. And my last name is pretty much impossible to say in Japanese as well.

So.. I need a Japanese nickname. Suggestions anyone?

With learning Japanese that is.

I always feel I achieve more when I have a very clear goal as to what I am supposed to achieve. So I set up a goal for myself, and it’s quite a simple one (simply expressed, not simply achieved).

Pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test or JLPT next year.

The JLPT is a standardized test to measure how skilled one is at Japanese. There are four levels to this test where level 4 is the easiest.

To pass level 4 you need to know about 100 kanji (or Japanese signs for those who don’t know the word) and you need a vocabulary of about 800 words. You also need to know enough grammar to match the knowledge of what is found in the books “Japanese For Busy People I”, some chapters of “Japanese For Busy People II” and one chapter from “Japanese For Busy People III”. And it just so happens that I own the first book, which is a good start!

According to Wikipedia you need to study this much:

So if I study one hour a day that means it will take 150 days or approximately 5 months.

Now one hour a day is a lot of time and I don’t even begin to fool myself into thinking I can keep that up. But on the other hand, the tests are usually at the end of the year which means I should have at least a full year to study.

I can do nothing more than try to keep an hour a day up, if I fail to do so I will fail the test and I will have failed myself. I really hope I can do it.

As previously stated, I really want to learn Japanese. To this end i bought a japanese dictionary/translator. It does work very well and I have managed to use it some, but it has pros and cons like everything in life.

The translator itself is very handy, as you can see it has one big screen, which is also a touch screen for easy navigation and selection. The bottom screen is where you write in Kanji to have the translator recognize it. The first catch with this is that it is stroke-sensitive, by which i mean it senses in which direction a stroke is made and in which order they are made. This is then used to select a Kanji, rather than just matching exact looks. The pro with this is that when you actually know the rules for drawing Kanji you don’t have to draw them prettily to make it recognize them. After you’ve drawn one and it selects it wrong, you can bring up options to which the character drawn might be as well. Usually I find the correct character in the alternatives.

Here it is with some scale, a manga book under it and my hand for reference, as well as my moleskine.

As you can see it’s not very big, but big enough to make the buttons and such easy to use. It weighs very little so it’s easy to bring along.

One thing I’ve found in trying to use this is not that all the menus are in Japanese, you get around that pretty quick by using the short English quick-use manual. The biggest problem for me right now is that it’s dictionary and word-translator. Which I of course knew and wanted, but this means when trying to translate for instance the manga, I have to translate character by character without context, making it somewhat difficult to put together into a sentence. I however wanted this to be able to learn words and kanji by themselves, the problem comes from me not knowing enough theory to put it together correctly.

As I said before, the menus are in Japanese and the English manual is short so there is a lot I don’t know about this thing yet.

There is space for microSD, a USB plug for connecting to the computer and headphones – mainly for playing the 70 000 words a native speaker has recorded into the thing. I don’t know what to do with either the SD or the USB.

Therefore, the device is more useful the more Japanese you know.

As you can see, I’ve already pimped it with a cube

Learning Japanese does sometimes seem like an insurmountable task, thousands upon thousands of words to learn and thousands upon thousands of characters to learn. All without coming into natural daily contact with it. I think while living here I could learn to speak the language probably within 6 months, but at home, the only contact I would have with the language outside of myself trying to learn it – would be if I watched anime, which I unfortunately don’t do very much because I can’t seem to find really good ones. I really doubt there are people subtitling normal Japanese TV-shows and putting them online as well, which makes natural contact all the more difficult.

I’m planning on trying to schedule like and hour a day for learning, but it requires huge amounts of discipline. Discipline I don’t actually believe I have, school easily takes a hold of your life and it’s extremely easy and convenient to claim “I don’t have time”.

On the other hand, it would kick ass to be able to speak three languages, and to have the third one be Japanese would just be beyond awesome.

Vi har hittat på en hel del kul, så för att jag inte har skrivit är inte för att det inte har hänt något utan snarare tvärt om.

Emma har skrivit väldigt bra på sin blogg om allt som hänt så jag har inte känt att jag har kunnat tillägga något, och jag antar att alla som läser och tittar här även läser och tittar på emmas blogg och emmas bilder, hon har lagt upp lite videos också!

Jag har det bra i alla fall och det är riktigt nice här, har börjat komma in i en härlig stämning, i stil med att jag känner mig lite hemma här nu och tillbaka till.. ja, det går inte riktigt att förklara. Men att det är helt rätt att vara här.

På måndag tänkte vi ta tåget till Kyoto och stanna där två nätter för att utforska lite nytt. Jag planerar även att starta ett projekt med att köpa en liten översättar dator och försöka översätta Manga, för att försöka fortsätta lära mig språket.

Jag grämer mig extremt mycket varje gång jag ser en bok eller försöker beställa från en meny att jag inte kan språket, jag vill verkligen kunna det!