Nihongojouzu

Japanese TV on Youtube

Those of us fortunate to live in Japan have ready access to the entertaining, infuriating  and informative medium which is Japanese TV. Think about it - free listening practice 24 hours a day, and the frequent use of subtitles means that viewers can get written confirmation of what they just listened to (some of those inaka interviewees would be incomprehensible without it...)  and may even pick up the odd kanji or two.

But no need for students of Japanese who don't live here to cry into their miso soup. You have the internet. You have Youtube.

I posted a one-off clip the other day of a US chap chatting in the J-go and since then I have been carrying out an exhaustive exploration of the wealth of Japanese  language video on Youtube (once I finished checking out all the obligatory Chinese youth lip-synching, cat-attacks-infant and stupid offer-speculation-but-no-proof conspiracy videos)

There are two ways two get started. Method One - from the Youtube home page click Video and then look for the Language menu on the lower left hand side of the screen. Click "Japanese" and you will be treated to the latest range of anime, sports, news and scantily clad idol videos posted by the Youtube  otaku army.

Method  Two is  more  coldly calculating -  use the search term function.  I turned up a bunch of videos using the following search terms:

日本語
ドラマ
ニュース
日本語弁論大会
島田紳助

The absolute golden find was however the series 日本語で暮らそう (Nihongo de kurasou) which is a 24 part NHK series of 20 minutes long episodes aimed at  intermediate learners of  Japanese.  Someone has kindly uploaded all 24 episodes so help yourself.

A third, subsidiary method is to note the name of the user who posted the particular video you fancy and see what else they have posted. I found a number of hardcore J-video posters and by subscribing to their feeds I get a steady supply of their latest offerings. Here are just a few examples:

DoctrWagnerJR
JECJimmy
lucidpink

Happy Youtube-ing!

Freelance translator

News of my death has been much exaggerated. Apologies for the lack of postings but I have just finished up my contract as a CIR (Coordinator for International Relations) and now I am a fully fledged freelance translator (J->E: of course!). Winding up the old job and training my successor took a sizeable chunk of my time - time I normally would have devoted to posting here. The transition is complete, I am a free agent and now if I fail to post regularly I can fall back on "I had a big translation project" due. I am going to specialise in legal translation (finally putting that law degree to use!) but anything which (a) takes my fancy and (b) falls within my competence is fair game.

I also have a few other irons in the fire, including public speaking, writing and web-related projects and where they intersect with learning Japanese I will write about them here.