I’ve became somewhat lazy with Japanese studies, so I will write about something slighly related: Mahjong. There’s some hype going on recently (meaning the last few years) about this game originating from China. Don’t stop reading if you think you know it from boring computer games. What most people outside Asia associate with Mahjong isn’t the actual game! They think of “Mahjong solitaire” which basically uses the same set of tiles, but is something utterly different. Mahjong itself is a four-player game much more comparable to Romme or even poker. It’s quite complex and has tactical depth that makes it a competitive and exciting game to play. Yet it can be played quite relaxed and casually, and in my opinion is worth a try for anyone interested in Asian culture.

First you should know that there isn’t one set of rules, but a whole lot of variants played around the world. I certainly prefer the Japanese variant - “Riichi Mahjong” - which also seems the most popular on the net. For starters it might be easier to learn Chinese Classical Mahjong first, as less rules and ‘hands’ have to be known to play your first game. Anyways, I’ll start a collection of useful Mahjong links right here, and maybe I can get someone interested in the game.

General
http://mahjong.wikidot.com/ - A great wiki for rules of all variants of the game

Media
There are a lot of Chinese movies dealing with Mahjong, most of which can be found here.
If you’re into anime, you could also check these. I’d recommend Akagi, which I have partly seen and which seemed to start off the hype.

Riichi Mahjong
http://eng.riichi.nl/index.htm - The most comprehensive website on Riich Mahjong, containing a great pdf with rules.
http://www.delfosse.com/mahjong.html - Another explanation of the rules, as a secondary resource
http://reachmahjong.com/en/rules/glossary.html - A glossary of Riich Mahjong terms
http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/mahjong/mahjong_e.html - A neat singleplayer flashgame. Also contains a quickstart guide to get you started, and a list of all hands (scroll down^^)

Multiplayer games

• 天鳳 / Tenhou - A Japanese multiplayer Mahjong game. Currently the best one I know.
  • English Tenhou documentation
  • Tenhou imageboard
    

  

• 闘牌王 / Toupaiou - A multiplayer Mahjong game with a lightweight client and relatively easy registration. (Client can be run in either 2D or 3D mode)
  
• 雀龍門 / Janryumon - The most fancy client you can imagine, check out this video. Unfortunately, IPs outside Japan are blocked by both the website, and the game itself. Took me 3 hours, but I got it to work. Osamuku made a guide that might help. Maybe I’ll go through the site registration process in another post..
  
• A list of other Japanese clients can be found on Osamuku’s Mahjong blog

I’m also working on a Mahjong game myself, for no real reason. I have no idea if I ever get the time to continue/finish it, but should that ever happen, I’ll be sure to release it here.

Screenshot of the current state. (makes no sense)

I guess when you’re using older Japanese software, you’ll not be too unfamiliar with Mojibake, like this

What most people know is that they can change their locale in the system settings to fix this. However, not everyone is aware that there is a workaround to this, at least for XP: Use AppLocale to set a locale/codepage for specific applications. For the sake of completition, here’s the correct version:

Not really my discovery, but check out this site: http://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/
You enter a verb in dictionary form, and it gives you a list of amost all conjugations. It also has a picture of Ultraman on it, so this link is really worthy of our collection ;)

Something else I’ve found is a software called Wakan:
It’s basically an offline dictionary, but with neat little features. For instance it can translate vocabulary you have in your clipboard like seen here:

It can even translate everything on your desktop, but well, it’s horribly slow and loves to crash. Decide for yourself!

Results came, I am now proud holder of ４級..

As the 4th grade is basically a piece of cake, and I only scarcely passed that is nothing special. But failing so badly that day, it was unexpected and honestly made me happy. This is the first actual feedback that 2 years of studies were good for *something*.

だから今年に３級するつもりです

Added the possibility to vote. I hope I now find out if people actually read all that stuff I hack down here. I’m happy about any feedback I can get.
レートしてくださいおねがいします！

A weird but useful way of learning Japanese is simply *watching Japanese TV*. And thanks to technological progress, capitalism and ruthless advertisement, that is possible from anywhere in the world. So here I’ll talk about ways to watch Japanese TV online.

• Option 1: Websites
  It wouldn’t be the “internet” if you couldn’t find dozens of websites that offer all types of visual entertainment. This includes videostreams of actual TV stations as well as material that is exclusively braodcasted over the net. If you don’t mind watching stuff through a small frame inside an annoying website, I appended some links at the end.
• Option 2: Keyhole TV
  I wrote about this tool a while back. It became quite popular by now, but to be honest I couldn’t bear this for long. The choice of channels might be decent, and the software is small and easy to use - But the video quality just sucks. Also, being a P2P network it is SLOW. Anything below 20 fps makes me aggresive, so this is really no long-time solution :)
• Option 3: Livestation
  This is an alternative that is not limited to Japanese programmes. It’s an application that lets you select any favourites among a few thousand international TV channels, including about 10 Japanese ones. The quality is much better than KeyholeTV, but the weak spot in this one is the client. The software is horrible. It forces you not only to flip through a bunch of preset channels (with ads), it also slows down the system immensely. I can’t really do anything else while this thing runs. If you wanna try it anyways, check it out here. You’ll need a (free) account.
• Option 4: TVU networks
  The same as Livestation, just *worse*. It’s full of ads, the video is reduced to a small frame, the choice of channels is lousy. I won’t even bother to paste a link, don’t use this!
  
• The nerdy way: Direct Streams
  So what is my workaround for all these miseries.. Remember the websites that offer streams? Nobody will tell you, but you can also watch most of these streams without a browser, in any video player! The tricky part is just to find the stream URLs. Website providers try to hide them, or at least cover them up. In addition there are many variations of streaming. The best type is a continious media stream (like mms://end.live.pod.tv/tandm500). Just think of it like an infinite video. Most players can handle those, and you can just bookmark it anywhere. Unfortunately, there are other types: I’ve discovered Advanced Stream Redicrecting to be common for most of these streams. Basically there’s not a single stream, but more of a playlist of “static” streams. These streams are normal videos that play content from beginning to end. This way, the broadcaster has more freedom. Anything from a single, repeating video to continous television is possible, by concatenating many short streams that will be played in a succession. E.g. news channels use a single stream for each headline, and put a fixed number of news in a Last-In-First-Out matter on their server. This way the user only receives complete news. However, this means that the media URLs keep changing. Instead of the streams, you need to bookmark the playlist (commonly an .asx file). Don’t bookmark the references inside the asx file; Also don’t *save* the asx file. This is possible, but naturally that would just be a “snapshot” of what the channel looks like at the moment. The asx file is what changes. To make things more confusing, asx files can be encapsuled inside other asx files. If this is the case, you could save the “outer” asx, as it’s content remains the same.

Meh, I hope I didn’t confuse you too much. Long story short: Please don’t blindly accept the conditions people force upon you: Play the streams yourself instead of downloading stupid software, or visiting annoying websites. Conveninently, I made a list of URLs.
Direct streams: Show links

General TV streaming sites: Show links

メリークリスマス and あけおめ！ Here’s a present

To me, studying with music is the most fun method. But even if you have the original lyrics, and a translation, you don’t always figure out everything. So I thought it would be a good idea if people explained their favourite songs in detail, as that makes awesome study material. I go through each verse and use this scheme:
1. I give the original line
2. I list new words
3. I give annotations to less obvious stuff
4. I write down the final translation

I’m not quite fond of grammar terms, but that actually is a good thing: I try to express it in plain words whenever my grammar skills fail me, making this more understandable to like-minded folks.
If I made a mistake, or you want to do something yourself, comment here or check out the thread I wrote on TheJapanesePage

-> Go to translation 思い出はおっくせんまん / Okkusenman

I wanted to write this post for a LONG time: How do you actually learn a language?

Firstly, studing can be split up in many doctrines that set different requirements at the student and also different goals. I’ll dare to make a simplification of this:

You have two extremes: One being a pure academic approach, the other being an immersed approach. What I mean by this can be easily explained with grammar. The academic learner studies theoretic rules of a language (He knows that an Ichidan-verb ending on く in Base 3, formes it’s て-Form by replacing the last syllable with いて, and thus can create the request きいてください - “Please listen”)
The student focusing on immersion has heard a certain sentence or pattern so many times, that it just stuck to their head. (He or she feels that anything but きいてください would just sound odd)
Between these two methods, there is anything in between and neither can be seen as the better way. Both extremes have advantages and disadvantages that I can only scratch:

Academic:
The amount of information you need to remember is reduced
Takes advantage of the ability to think structured
More thinking is required when speaking, fluency suffers
You rather develop algorithms for the language, not feeling

Immersed:
Less requirements at studying skills (e.g. no need to learn grammatical terms)
Results in more natural speech
Needs much more time
No linguistic insight in the language
Might result in passive studies when not attempting to speak by oneself (trial- and error)
Not understanding much at early stages

Secondly, some simple math: It’s not really a secret, that the methods of learning a language determine the set of skills you’ll finally gain and obviously influence the ‘time-efficiency‘-ratio. However, when not dealing with static time investment (as it is the case with anyone learning Japanese as a hobby), fun becomes an important factor. If you are not a studying-machine, fun mostly determines the time you invest at the outset!

You now have a <time investment> / <total time> ratio, that is modified by fun. Sadly, the amount of fun you have, often reduces the efficiency of your studies, so it becomes really a tricky thing. Do you simply want to maximize the fun, or rather calculate the “correct” amount of fun, for the most time-efficient study?.. You’re still with me? :)

Of course, I’m not the only one who had these kinds of thoughts, and tried optimizing the progress and ways of learning. A few months back I stumbled upon the site of a guy who you could call a “confrontation extremist”. The link says it all: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/
And believe me, this guy means it! Just to get an idea of the general extremism, let me show you a few lines:

[..] you need to spend every waking moment listening to Japanese — and every sleeping moment, too

EVERY. WAKING. MOMENT. Of course, you may have school to go to, maybe a job. You can make small exceptions. But your school doesn’t run 24 hours a day, does it? You do sleep at night, right? Leave the Japanese on all night. You have class, right? Listen to Japanese in class if you can get away with it (i.e. if it won’t damage your learning experience). If not, listen to Japanese while you do your homework. You take lunchbreaks, don’t you? Listen to Japanese. You walk or drive or otherwise commute places, don’t you? Listen to Japanese while doing it. You do have free time, right? Japanese owns your free time. [..]

Riiight. I’m not that much of a maniac! But despite all these mad sounding ideas, there’s so much valueable information on how to study on that website. It’s a whole book, and I’ve read through it partly, without much orientation. Still, I plan on summing up and filtering out good stuff, that normal people can actually use.

The entry hall, filled with 566 participants

So here’s my real experience of the JLPT: Despite I regret not studying enough and probably failing the degree, I’m glad a took the test! Out of the few thousand participants, 566 came to Düsseldorf. It’s was quite an international event, and the attendees spoke 17 different languages as their mother tongues - so they told us. Regarding it was an “exam” (in a way) it was quite fun and during the breaks there was some interesting chattering - The kind of people who took the test was really diverse: I was sitting in a room with about 20 others going for Level 4, and the ages ranged from a 14-year old child prodigy who learned Japanese as his 7th-or-so language, to a 52-year old buisiness man who had such an affinity to Japan that he decided to give it a try. Without any exception, everyone there learned Japanese for fun. Although the avarage examinee was actually studying something related at university.

As a conclusion I see the JLPT as a boost of motivation, whether I passed or not. Even if one should feel down after screwing up (and I really made some lame mistakes, and just started guessing at some point) I felt like resuming my studies at the very same night. I aim to speak the language rather than holding a degree. I felt certain of that, when I was told afterwards that ‘ikutsu’ is a different way to ask for one’s age. My initial thought hasn’t been “Damn, missed another point!”, but rather “Hey, good to know”.. However, when learning Japanese something like Level 2 should come along as a bonus at some point - but I’m in no hurry, and there’s plenty of time left ;)

Among all JLPT Levels 4級 really stands out, being a piece of cake. However it’s entirely possible to fail, just by following these simple steps:

1. Never work through a single workbook. Instead change ressources continuously and use the web as a primary one.
2. Don’t care too much for grammar or numbers, as those are obviously boring.
3. Remain convinced that watching a shitload of Japanese movies will actually improve your understanding
4. Compensate any remaining skill with the lack of sleep and/or real motivation

Meh, this is just a first impression - don’t take me too serious