TwiddleGeek

MinishooterRS Delta is a fairly new (2007) freeware shoot-em-up from Japanese developer PEPOSOFT. What amuses me about this one is that it’s presented in what I’m sure Yahtzee would call “teeny-weeny eyestrain-o-vision” at 160×120 pixels. While there are zoom options, I’m sure deep in some internal .ini file the game registers that you wussed out.

Seriously though, aside from the tiny, tiny resolution hook, the game is just fun and surprisingly lengthy. Several hidden stages are offered, tons of bosses and a boss mode, and even lots of hidden ships to unlock. There’s no real gameplay gimmicks here, this is a pretty straight-up Japanese shoot-em-up. Dodge the massive onslaught of bullets and shoot, shoot, shoot ’til whatever you’re up against is dead.

Though it’s in Japanese, you really don’t need any knowledge of the language to play. The menu system is in English, and the game is straight forward. Z fires, X boosts, arrow keys control. I’m a pretty big shoot-em-up fan, and MinishooterRS makes for a great distraction. Give it a try, if you like the genre.

Along with playing games and watching movies, I simply love to read. I typically go through a fair amount of books on a large variety of topics including everything from time management to Japanese study, art to various fiction and humor. I’d say my favorite books are of the Sci-fi, fantasy, and study types. I love a good book that can make me laugh, think, or teach me something new. Of course this year I have several more that I’d like to read. I tend to enjoy long running series, last year finishing the complete Harry Potter set and this year His Dark Materials.

First and foremost, I’d like to read a new Bible I recently purchased cover to cover. SpaceKitty helped me pick out a new one over the New Years holiday and I’m quite fond of it. It’s based on the New Living Translation and although I wouldn’t use it for serious study, it makes for a nice and easy read. It neatly separates the books, further dividing them into sections with concise headings and useful information along the way. I’ve seen plans for ‘Reading the Bible in 1 year’ and a local church has plaques for reading plans… but if you do away with some of the hard to follow old English sentence structure, it’s really not that big of a task. This NLT Bible is 66 books with a total of just 759 pages. At a normal reading pace rather than a in-depth study, it shouldn’t take very long at all.

Other than that I’d like to get back into the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I’ve read the first 5 books, and I plan on reading the entire series as soon as I can. It’s funny, and I hear it only gets better as the books go on. I’d also like to pick up some more Halo books. I’ve read the first one, The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund, and found it surprisingly good. I don’t have much desire to read the The Flood, but I want to pick up Nylund’s other two in the series, First Strike and Ghosts of Onyx. Another unlikely series is the Star Trek TNG books. I loved that series, and as much as I never thought I’d get into the fiction, they’re actually very enjoyable books. I’ve read about 13 of the 60+ official books, and I plan on reading many more. Sure, they’re the literary equivalent of junk food, but they’re entertaining if nothing else.

Other than that, I want to get back into some of my study books on Japanese and art. I’ve a lot of great Japanese study books by Taeko Kamiya and Naoko Chino published in the excellent Kodansha series, and I quite enjoy reading them. I also have art technique books ranging from more modern all the way to The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed, first published in 1917. Lots of good stuff to go through, but all of it taking a good deal of time to properly study.

When you’ve been studying Japanese as long as I have, you tend to get bored of using the same ol’ things. Manga is a wonderful way to study, and so are games, but after awhile it does a person good to get some real Japanese. Something that hasn’t gone through an editor, or even a proof-read, especially things that are off the cuff and random. Thankfully, the Internet makes this easy.

Traditionally I use message boards and blog posts as well as blog comments since the posts tend to be small, limited to a particular topic, and filled with usages that would make a traditional textbook author cry. Lately however I’ve stumbled upon a new tool: Twitter. The amazingly popular site-about-nothing seems to have a big following in Japan, and pretty much any time you visit twitter.com you’re likely to see some tweets in Japanese, especially at night in the US.

The main reason this is so much fun is because of Twitter’s 140 character limit and simplistic nature. Rather than long, hard to understand passages you’ll get simple, to the point messages like “???????????” and “????”. Find a few people who post interesting tweets, subscribe to their profiles, and you’ll have all the Japanese you can read. Easier to digest than a blog, great for 5 minute practice, and quite unique. Give it a shot.

Vocabulary study is always a tricky topic. I don’t know of anyone who likes rote memorization, but I’ve always been horrible at picking up words in context as well. Add to that I’m doing all of my vocabulary in kanji these days, and the task feels harder than ever. Where as before I simply had to remember, for example, ?? = cat, now the task is more along the lines of ? = ?? = cat. Thanks to Remembering the Kanji 1 I can often link the kanji / compound to the English meaning faster than I can the Japanese reading, but sometimes I can’t remember the Japanese reading at all.

This is a fairly simple example, but let’s take ?? for example. With the RTK1 keywords of “suspend, fate” I may be able to recall the English meaning of “eagerness” far easier than I can “????.” This wouldn’t be a problem if my on-yomi reading ability was stronger, but I need a much larger vocabulary to build that. But where as ???? = fate was giving me the answer first and making my life easier in the past, ?? gives no such clues without the on-yomi.

So, what can you do when you just can’t remember the Japanese word or reading in question? I personally know of only a few methods. First is good old rote memorization. Repeat ?? enough times, and ???? will eventually become clearer. This has the advantage that it forces the actual reading of the kanji deeper into your head, as it’s really all you have to rely on. It’s slow going and at times frustrating, especially if you’re learning new vocab regularly, but it should be your primary method. But for the words that really give you a hard time and just refuse to stick? There are a few things to try.

In the back of Remembering the Kanji vol 2, deep where no poor lost reader, once hopeful of a system as easy and friendly as RTK1 dares lurk, there is a “Primitive Phonemes” system. Using Heisig’s system, which is usually only used on kun-yomi words but works equally well here, one would break the reading ???? down into single syllable Japanese words. ??????? like so:

? = hair
? = heavens (??)
? = eye
? = well

And you’d make up a story, like in RTK1, along the lines of “The girl with golden hair like the heavens and an insatiable eagerness looked with a curious eye down the deep, dark well.” Now, obviously, this takes a few minutes time. But a few minutes spent on a really hard word in the beginning can save a lot of frustration later. Heisig also suggests that as your vocabulary grows, you can move from single syllable words to any Japanese word you know. For example, you could break ???? into:

?? = sword
?? = destiny

and likewise make a story out of that involving eagerness, sword, and destiny. This is handy as the system can easily scale upwards to handle long words and keeps you thinking in Japanese, but also perhaps confusing as the sounds you create may conflict with the actual kanji in use, in this case suspend and fate. However, this technique is not intended for long term use, but rather as a short term memory aid until the word naturally finds a place in your vocabulary.

A similar but alternative solution is to instead link the syllables to English words of your choosing, usually sound-alike or spelled alike words. For example:

?? = Ken
?? = may

and similarly make a story with Ken, may, and eagerness. The advantage here is that, depending on the word and your experience, the name Ken and word “may” might be much easier to recall than ?? / sword?and ?? / fate. The disadvantage being that it may also be quite confusing and makes you think more in English.

The final method is simply to link the entire word ???? to an English sounding word or words. This can be both powerful and simple, but lacks the systemization of the other methods, leading chosen words to be a bit erratic. Plus sometimes, it’s really hard to think of any examples. In fact, in this case I would link ???? to “Ken may” as well, as I can’t think of a single word that sounds like ????.

So which system is best? That’s easy… on-yomi and memorization. The kanji are a natural mnemonic built right in. But for those really tricky words that you just can’t get past and need a scaffolding to support you while you build your skills, I would say use a combination of the above. If it sounds just like a single word you know, then link the reading to that. If the word is completely foreign, try to break it up and see what you can make out of it. And if you like Heisig’s method of using Japanese vocab to remember Japanese vocab, then by all means give that a shot as well.