狂った!

I’ve moved the blog to WordPress, and it can now be found here.

This is a clip from the ever popular trivia izumi. The TV program is conducting an experiment to see how many fathers will allow their daughters to marry a man older than the father.

This makes for an excellent study since the “boyfriend” is basically saying minor variations of the same thing over and over again. The cameras are hidden so the fathers reactions are all real.

またあいのりをアップルロードしました。是非御覧なさい。

本日の８月２８日のあいのりです。

あいのりはだんだん暗くなってきた気がします。何年前からずっとファンだったんだけど、年明けから、大分変わったと思います。

本日のあいのりです。

Jun-Daiたちへ。日本語の勉強に対して、テレビ番組を見るのはかなり役に立つと思います。よく下のほうに字幕がついているので、見ながら、知らない単語等が調べれる。ちょっとやってみてください。

I was recently introduced to a Python-based JRPG for aiding the memorization of Japanese characters (仮名 and 漢字), modelled after the old Japanese Nintendo RPGs, like Final Fantasy. The game is fairly simple , with slightly fewer controls than the original Nintendo had, and without much of a storyline, but it’s a nice combination of nostalgia and challenging character memorization.

The central conceit of the game is that you have to get past groups of 漢字 monsters by fighting them in battle. Each monster has a character or set of characters, and you defeat them one by one by typing in the pronunciation for their characters. Any 仮名 that you haven’t encountered yet will have ローマ字 written above it, and any 漢字 you haven’t encountered yet will have ふりがな, but the second time you should encounter a particular character, it will most likely not have any hint, and so you must recall its pronunciation from a previous battle. If you type in the wrong pronunciation (this game improves your typing accuracy and speed as well), you lose HP, but the monster will give you hints to help you out. If you lose too many HP, you wake up in the hospital and have to find your way back to where you were.

As you might expect, the 漢字 become harder as you progress through the game. It begins with ひらがな, works through the カタカナ, and pushes you all the way to JLPT 2 vocabulary. The game’s creator built it as a study tool for the JLPT, which he intends to take next December. I expect I shall use it for the same purpose.

The game is simple, fun, and intuitive enough that I would recommend it to anyone seeking to fill out their Japanese vocabulary in new ways.

In order to run the game, you must have python (which you can get at http://python.org), pygame (which you can get at http://pygame.org), and a font file called kochi-mincho.ttf or some equivalent (this comes preinstalled on Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions, so I didn’t have to find or configure anything on that part).

The game itself can be found at http://zabor.org/jrpg/. You’ll find avid fans of it on the #nihongo channel on irc.freenode.net.

Apparently the Japanese Postal Service provides its postal code database in CSV (comma separated values) format free of charge. So, i decided to implement a PHP class that stores that data into a MySQL database and provides a number of methods for address validation, searching, and the like.

Included in the package are several usage examples including one that has mixi style dropdown lists for towns.

You can download Japan_PostalCode.tgz here. And here are the referenced MySQL library and searchpath file as well.