Thursday, August 02, 2001

Japanese Culture & Language

More japanese culture stuff this morning, first up is a link called Japanese-style Furniture but which is only a quick description of tatami, futon, furo, and kotastu. A really good read is an article from September 1998 about a teacher taking some LSUS students to Japan for a few weeks. Right now I'm ripping a 4 CD Japanese language CD (Pimsleur's Quick and Simple Japanese) out to MP3 to listen to in the car on my road trip in late August (what better time to practice langauge skills then when you're by yourself in the car). This was just the $20 introduction CD set (the other 3 courses are $250 each!) I know a few words from watching years of japanese anime (I prefer the japanese audio soundtrack over the normally horrid english dubs), but I figure it's time to try and do some real learning of the spoken language as well as kanji. (I also have a spanish language CD set on order from amazon in order to brush up on the spanish that I took back in high school.) Learning to speak japanese will be especially difficult for me because my least preferred method of expressing myself is through speech (and I have poor aural retention), if I really want to learn it I may need to do it through immersion (like a trip to Japan for a few weeks, or through the poor substitute of listening to as much japanese language audio tracks as possible).

posted by Wuphon's at 6:50 AM