while browsing mozilla's latest updates, i came across quite possibly the most useful add-on i've ever seen. i will share it will all of you lovelies.
Requirements: Must use Mozilla Firefox as internet browser.
Description: Immediate Japanese Kanji translation device. (i.e. after installation, when you mouse over kanji you do not know, the application gives you immediately [in a small pop-up] the meaning, pronunciation and dictionary form of the character. also, if the word is inflected at all, the program breaks the word into it's base [dictionary] form for ease of understanding.
Directions:
1. first go to: http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/
2. scroll down about half way until you reach the first blue box in the middle of the page. once there click "Install"
3. next, in the second blue box click on "Install" under Japanese-English Dictionary
4. open both executable files
5. open your mozilla browser
6. click on the Tools menu and select "Toggle Rikaichan"
and that's it! Enjoy browsing webpages in nihongo! ^_^
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
thanksgivings
thanksgiving was last week. our 'day before thanksgiving-thanksgiving' party went off without a hitch. we had about 25 people show up in all. there was much merriment and eating.
my turkey turned out tasty - a little dry, but reasonable and the green beanies pretty much all eaten. the stuffing was immaculate, all of it went. em and jay brought amazing potatoes with dill. megart brought mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows. joel and erica brought 3 pumpkin pies. tessa was there in spirit and had mike bring a tasty cran-granola-brown sugar medley. valerion brought the turkey deep fryer. mei yun and chen han (actually came!!) brought sushi! and made mike re-fall in love with SB. i may be forgetting the rest but it was all delicious. oh yes, martis was also there in spirit - as was his vat of corn... but unfortunately he had to talk to the cops all night.
here are some photos from then:
as always i was extremely pleased to see filer and sohrab come out for the festivities! ^_^
my turkey turned out tasty - a little dry, but reasonable and the green beanies pretty much all eaten. the stuffing was immaculate, all of it went. em and jay brought amazing potatoes with dill. megart brought mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows. joel and erica brought 3 pumpkin pies. tessa was there in spirit and had mike bring a tasty cran-granola-brown sugar medley. valerion brought the turkey deep fryer. mei yun and chen han (actually came!!) brought sushi! and made mike re-fall in love with SB. i may be forgetting the rest but it was all delicious. oh yes, martis was also there in spirit - as was his vat of corn... but unfortunately he had to talk to the cops all night.
here are some photos from then:
as always i was extremely pleased to see filer and sohrab come out for the festivities! ^_^
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
teaching plans
this is a post specifically about teaching english to Chen Han:
when i first met with him this was the background information i was given:
he is 21, is attending a Pittsburgh Public highschool, and doesn't think his english is good.
given the above information i assumed that since he was in high school he probably had an elementary (at worst) competency in english. that was, unfortunately, wrong. he knew almost no verbs. almost no adjectives. and lord knows, no sentence structure, tenses, pronouns, possesives, etc. i mean the only thing i could think was: WHAT IS HE DOING ALL DAY IN SCHOOL?! and why the hell is the school not helping him!?
well, there was some relief when i realized that they had supplied him with an ESL study book. "good" i thought to myself "i'll just teach out of this book and help clarify if there are any questions." wrong again. the book first of all looks almost identical to my 8th grade Ven Conmigo spanish book, and the text in the book is COMPLETELY in english -- the language he doesn't understand. great.
so for the first week after getting my bearings i selected very few topics from this ESL book that were completely obvious without knowing english and started there. the first week we learned: colors, body parts, clothing, some classroom objects (the standard opening lesson for almost all language learning). but this book is just ridiculous, for instance, in the clothing section, it lacked the word "shoe" and instead only taught "sneaker" it lacked the word "sweater" and "shirt" but instead only listed "sweatshirt". i mean, really. come on.
for the second week of instruction, i had scoured amazon.com and other book sites (as well as checking all the barnes and nobles in pittsburgh) for a chinese/english learners book. there are almost none that i can find. after close to 5 days i came across a chinese/english oxford picture dictionary. that came late in the week, but helped tremendously. i couldn't imagine learning japanese if my JSL book was written completely in japanese. the only problem is that for structural issues, for example subject verb object word order in english, stuff like that isn't going to be listed in a picture dictionary... so that is my biggest obstacle at the moment.
things that i taught during the second week were: food items fruit/vegetables, subject pronouns (I, he, we, they), object pronouns (me, him, her, us), reviewed all clothing, body parts, colors (still a little trouble with "brown" and "black"). it's sooo rewarding because he just definately learned them and worked on them at home. some of the notes that we had made during previous lessons had little chinese kanjis next to them - showing he'd been trying to figure them out on his own. we also learned the word "and" "on" and about 10 verbs! (make, put, push, cut, eat, wash) finally!! some verbs! now we can make sentences ^_^! trust me... it's really really hard to communicate without verbs. oh, we also introduced the concept "not".
during the third week: we reviewed all old material again, reinforced subj/obj pronouns, some use of the word "not" but that was more on the back burner during these lessons, added more verbs (point, raise, put away, take out, write, listen, talk, erase) --obviously out of the first lesson in the picture dictionary book, and did lots of writing and spelling exercises. actually, every week there is at least a little bit of a spelling component, but there seemed to be more sentence practice this week. english vowels are just stupid. they make no sense for a new learner, so while i understand that speaking and writing of a language are completely different, i want to put a good deal of emphasis now on spelling so that it's not completely debilitating in the future. also we went over some basic expressions of greeting and leaving.
now we are in the fourth week: we are learning days of the week, months of the year, times of day (morning, noon, midnight, etc), re-did greetings and expressions (i'm sorry, excuse me, etc), lots of adjectives this week with their opposites (heavy/light, old/new, fast/slow, expensive/cheap, soft/hard, etc ~ about 10 pairs altogether). started introducing possessive pronouns (my/mine, your, his/her, our, etc.), more work on "not". "not" + noun = not a book. "not" + adj = not pink. "not" + verb = do not eat. also, in light of learning calendar phrases, i'm trying to teaching date counters: ex: Nov. 1 = November first, Nov. 16 = Novemebr sixteenth. there's always seeming like there are lots of little things creeping up that i'm like "oh wait... thats actually said like this... " english is very irregular!
as i teach today, i'm planning on doing a lot of review - there's been a lot of material covered so far - and lots of sentence structure/practice today! we'll see how it goes.
if any of you have any suggestions or helpful teaching websites, please let me know!! sank-yuu!
when i first met with him this was the background information i was given:
he is 21, is attending a Pittsburgh Public highschool, and doesn't think his english is good.
given the above information i assumed that since he was in high school he probably had an elementary (at worst) competency in english. that was, unfortunately, wrong. he knew almost no verbs. almost no adjectives. and lord knows, no sentence structure, tenses, pronouns, possesives, etc. i mean the only thing i could think was: WHAT IS HE DOING ALL DAY IN SCHOOL?! and why the hell is the school not helping him!?
well, there was some relief when i realized that they had supplied him with an ESL study book. "good" i thought to myself "i'll just teach out of this book and help clarify if there are any questions." wrong again. the book first of all looks almost identical to my 8th grade Ven Conmigo spanish book, and the text in the book is COMPLETELY in english -- the language he doesn't understand. great.
so for the first week after getting my bearings i selected very few topics from this ESL book that were completely obvious without knowing english and started there. the first week we learned: colors, body parts, clothing, some classroom objects (the standard opening lesson for almost all language learning). but this book is just ridiculous, for instance, in the clothing section, it lacked the word "shoe" and instead only taught "sneaker" it lacked the word "sweater" and "shirt" but instead only listed "sweatshirt". i mean, really. come on.
for the second week of instruction, i had scoured amazon.com and other book sites (as well as checking all the barnes and nobles in pittsburgh) for a chinese/english learners book. there are almost none that i can find. after close to 5 days i came across a chinese/english oxford picture dictionary. that came late in the week, but helped tremendously. i couldn't imagine learning japanese if my JSL book was written completely in japanese. the only problem is that for structural issues, for example subject verb object word order in english, stuff like that isn't going to be listed in a picture dictionary... so that is my biggest obstacle at the moment.
things that i taught during the second week were: food items fruit/vegetables, subject pronouns (I, he, we, they), object pronouns (me, him, her, us), reviewed all clothing, body parts, colors (still a little trouble with "brown" and "black"). it's sooo rewarding because he just definately learned them and worked on them at home. some of the notes that we had made during previous lessons had little chinese kanjis next to them - showing he'd been trying to figure them out on his own. we also learned the word "and" "on" and about 10 verbs! (make, put, push, cut, eat, wash) finally!! some verbs! now we can make sentences ^_^! trust me... it's really really hard to communicate without verbs. oh, we also introduced the concept "not".
during the third week: we reviewed all old material again, reinforced subj/obj pronouns, some use of the word "not" but that was more on the back burner during these lessons, added more verbs (point, raise, put away, take out, write, listen, talk, erase) --obviously out of the first lesson in the picture dictionary book, and did lots of writing and spelling exercises. actually, every week there is at least a little bit of a spelling component, but there seemed to be more sentence practice this week. english vowels are just stupid. they make no sense for a new learner, so while i understand that speaking and writing of a language are completely different, i want to put a good deal of emphasis now on spelling so that it's not completely debilitating in the future. also we went over some basic expressions of greeting and leaving.
now we are in the fourth week: we are learning days of the week, months of the year, times of day (morning, noon, midnight, etc), re-did greetings and expressions (i'm sorry, excuse me, etc), lots of adjectives this week with their opposites (heavy/light, old/new, fast/slow, expensive/cheap, soft/hard, etc ~ about 10 pairs altogether). started introducing possessive pronouns (my/mine, your, his/her, our, etc.), more work on "not". "not" + noun = not a book. "not" + adj = not pink. "not" + verb = do not eat. also, in light of learning calendar phrases, i'm trying to teaching date counters: ex: Nov. 1 = November first, Nov. 16 = Novemebr sixteenth. there's always seeming like there are lots of little things creeping up that i'm like "oh wait... thats actually said like this... " english is very irregular!
as i teach today, i'm planning on doing a lot of review - there's been a lot of material covered so far - and lots of sentence structure/practice today! we'll see how it goes.
if any of you have any suggestions or helpful teaching websites, please let me know!! sank-yuu!
updates:
for the past three weeks or so, i've been teaching english to a chinese boy named Chen Han at Sushi Boat in Oakland. i've come to the following conclusions: english spelling is たいへん. that is all.
i know no chinese and he knows barely any english, so communication at times is also たいへん。i wish he knew japanese, this would be much easier. either way, i love doing it. and apparently sushi boats loves me too. i am given food almost every time that i teach, which i'm very grateful for. you can tell that these people are genuinely appreciative of my efforts and i almost forgot what simple joys can be had with such small offerings.
i'm also an acting english translator of any and all legal documents for them and am currently trying to tackle DMV issues for them. it's all pretty amusing for me to see people's reactions to me acting on their behalf. this woman at the DMV for example, took one look at Mei Yun and her uncle - immediately realized they were speaking chinese, looked at me and pretty much right there i could read on her face that she'd already given up trying to help. it's like foreign people aren't worth their time or its too much effort to actually explain things. i mean, she was only interfacing with me - an american - and she still resisted answering MY questions.
i just hope that if i get accepted to JET i'll find people to help and guide me like i am doing for my chinese friends. i am paid with hugs and food, and that's good enough for me! ^_^
i know no chinese and he knows barely any english, so communication at times is also たいへん。i wish he knew japanese, this would be much easier. either way, i love doing it. and apparently sushi boats loves me too. i am given food almost every time that i teach, which i'm very grateful for. you can tell that these people are genuinely appreciative of my efforts and i almost forgot what simple joys can be had with such small offerings.
i'm also an acting english translator of any and all legal documents for them and am currently trying to tackle DMV issues for them. it's all pretty amusing for me to see people's reactions to me acting on their behalf. this woman at the DMV for example, took one look at Mei Yun and her uncle - immediately realized they were speaking chinese, looked at me and pretty much right there i could read on her face that she'd already given up trying to help. it's like foreign people aren't worth their time or its too much effort to actually explain things. i mean, she was only interfacing with me - an american - and she still resisted answering MY questions.
i just hope that if i get accepted to JET i'll find people to help and guide me like i am doing for my chinese friends. i am paid with hugs and food, and that's good enough for me! ^_^
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Saturday, November 03, 2007
this year for halloween i passed out candy to trick-or-treaters for the first time. it was pretty cute, but there weren't quite as many kids as i thought there would be. apparently, they all thought it would be much cooler to "trick-or-treat" at the stores on Forbes and Murray - at 5 in the afternoon (half of the store's employee's just put on {e.g} a witches hat and that was their whole costume)! the real halloweeners knew what was up though, so it was ok.
i told maria about JET and swore her to secrecy, which i think she'll actually adhere to. i'm not planning on dropping the bomb to the rest of my family until i know something more conclusive [read as: get accepted].
last night we went to La Feria, the peruvian restaurant, with quite the crew: beth, bressers, steve, nick, and james. chuck met up with us later and we all went bowling at forward lanes. beth and i were share-buddies again and we drank chisaii beer again.
i told maria about JET and swore her to secrecy, which i think she'll actually adhere to. i'm not planning on dropping the bomb to the rest of my family until i know something more conclusive [read as: get accepted].
last night we went to La Feria, the peruvian restaurant, with quite the crew: beth, bressers, steve, nick, and james. chuck met up with us later and we all went bowling at forward lanes. beth and i were share-buddies again and we drank chisaii beer again.
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