The Ninja sensation was so big that when Pat Rod, of the Hollywood Reporter, was in countries like Greece and Turkey she said,”Movie enthusiasts there never asked me about Stallone, Cruise, or Harrison Ford; it was always,’Have you ever met Sho Kosugi?’”

He did recognize that the ninja craze was a fad and moved on to more general action movies by the late 80s. But his sense of timing left an indelible impression on the ninja craving fans.

Sho Kosugi went on to found the SKI Institute in Hollywood teaching everything from taiko to gymnastics along with other martial arts schools in Japan. His two sons, Shane and Kane have also appeared in movies and are occasionally competitors on the Sasuke TV show in Japan (Ninja Warrior here in the US).

Taking advantage of the furigana we have So no “ore” wa (ha) yoko ninatsute.  Japanese use those sort of half brackets as quotation marks. Sono translates as “that”, ore the kanji in brackets is an informal for man or male person. Wa (hiragana is “ha” but it is pronounced “wa”) means is. the second kanji is yoko or side. The string of hiragana after is ni na tsu te. Plugging this into Google translate is comes out as “the summer to”

Broken English translation is That man is the summer to. Which doesn’t make a whol;e lot of sense as is. So we are going to hold off on trying to translate that into plain English from the broken until we get the rest of the lines translated and can see what the other lines are talking about. Japanese often does not have a word for word translation into English and this makes translating an art instead of a science.

Robert Muth’s Kana Drill. The basic demo version is complete for Hiragana for free with a paid upgrade to include the Katakana syllabary. The app is simply for review of the kana syllabaries. A hiragana symbol appears at the top and the user has seconds in which to match it to the romanji pronunciation. The options allows you to set the time and the number of rounds and alter the number of rows that the kana are used in the drill. A very simple and effective free app that I have been using quite a bit to learn kana.

Survive! Japanese Lite is a little adventure game for learning basic hiragana, vocabulary and common phrases. This is a nice little adventure style game that puts the player/user into daily situations that would occur in Japan and uses both audio and text to teach basic Japanese. Very simple and fun idea, the basic game is free with the full version as a paid upgrade. The game begins with the user disembarking at Narita airport after flying into Japan and a little adventure awaits. Very highly recommended little game. The company also makes other study Japanese related apps.

These are just two of the better free apps available for Android, surely more to come as the developers come into Android.

Working into the first frame of the scan, (Japanese is read from right to left and vertically from the top to bottom) The first line is all Hiragana text and in romanji is read as shikashi maa. The second line is mixed with a kanji and hiragana. In manga aimed at younger people there are often little hiragana symbols printed next to or above to help with the exact pronunciation of the kanji. Taking advantage of this the kanji -hiragana is nan to iu.

The first line – shikashi is an interjection roughly equivalent to however or but and the maa is a feminine injection. So this translates as, running shikashi maa through Google Translate (free webtools FTW!), “but well” with an emphasis on the softer pronunciation since its a girl (Mikuru?) speaking.

The second line is Nan to iu. Looking up Nan in a Kanji Dictionary (or running it through Google Translate) we get “what” with to iu being modifiers. This is where being new to the language hurts a little, Running nan to iu through Google comes out as ’sake’ (not the rice alcohol). Generally to iu is a modifier that sets up what follows (or previous stated) as ‘what happened’. It does not have a direct translation. Mikuru is setting up the rest of the dialogue in the boxes on the page.

This is why translating is an art, not a science. Japanese with all its use of modifiers and particles does not always translate in a word-for-word manner.

As always comments and clarifications are welcome. Please help us all by giving your input.

Ki-tae (Jang Hyeok) and Chol-su (Lee Beom-Su) are two goofy happy-go-lucky guys think of a grittier non-suburban version of Beavis and Butthead who unintentionally find themselves at the lowest rung of the local mafia ladder. They get involved in a cocaine deal which of course falls apart, and have to come up with 20 million won to pay back the boss. For the rest of the movie, the two, along with a prostitute named Meg Ryan (Jun Hye-jin) and a cast of misfits and thugs, run around Seoul and Pusan while beating the life out of each other and getting into all sorts of misadventures.

Ki-tae and Choeol-su are very much anti-heroes, they do not fit into mainstream society and tend to have very little respect for its expectations and laws. Nonetheless they become very sympathetic figures and by the end of the movie we are rooting for them to somehow succeed and come out ahead. A very fun little movie with likeable characters and a twisting plot that doesn’t settle down. Very highly recommended movie. The ending fits the characters and their personalties to a T.

Haruhi Scan

Rainbow Hill Language Lab had an excellent blog post up on learning Japanese through reading. He makes the point of Japanese being easier to read than listen to because of the way words run together. There being no way to pause or rewind an audible conversation, it is a leap to listen to a speaker just talking in his (or her) language with a limited vocabulary and even with that it can still be a challenge: just listen to the rapid fire Japanese of manga live reader Rikimaru Toho in the video. Learning Japanese through reading can help to overcome this because you are able to slow down and look something up and return to the  text and pick up where you left off.

To learn any language you need massive amounts of authentic input, and it helps if it is something that you find interesting. This is especially important if you are not living in a place where you are constantly exposed to the language you want to speak.

If the only Japanese you read is in the classes that you go to, the rate you learn new words is going to be pretty low. I make a point in my lessons on eduFire of using words that most people in the class already know. This is so we can focus on practice, without getting hung up on explanations of new vocabulary.

When you read you are going to be exposed to may more words than you would if you were just listening to a conversation. You are also going to be exposed to Japanese that is authentic and without error. Manga is almost 100% dialogue, and depending what genre of manga you read, an accurate picture of modern Japanese spoken today.

Coming soon to this blog – an series of scans from an old Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya manga starting with the above page. Practise with a purpose.

Jumping the shark is a colloquialism used by TV critics and fans to denote the point in a television program’s history where the plot spins off into absurd story lines or unlikely characterizations. These changes are sometimes the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose viewership has begun to decline. In other cases, the changes have other causes (e.g. an actor quitting, different writers being hired) and the diminished interest is the result. The two causes can feed into each other, leading to even greater changes and even lower popularity. Nonetheless, some series remain profitable and popular long after they have been judged by some to have “jumped the shark”. The phrase has recently come into more general usage, and is applied to cultural phenomena other than television programs.

Man Vs. Wild is the survival TV show which features Bear Grylls in various survival situations explaining how to find food/water/shelter and continue to live. Normally something like this would be very interesting, learning survival techniques etc. But the latest moment from the show seem to be all about grossing out viewers, from eating live snakes and maggots to drinking water squeezed from a ball of elephant dung, its all about topping your self in the name of attracting the gross out ratings. Deviating from survival and nature into the king of the gross out TV. The newest is is Bear teaching that you can get hydration and water from rancid water by giving yourself an enema. This give whole new meaning to the phrase “lie back and think of England” …

The ones I have read:

• Pattern Recognition
• Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom
• Perdido Street Station
• The Harry Potter Series

The ones I have not yet read but want to:

• World War Z
• Glasshouse
• Look to Windward

Some of the others are not even on my radar at all.  One has to chose wisely when time is limited. Max Brook’s World War Z I have on a Christmas list so it should be in my little paws soon.

The myth of Akihabara permeates Western fandom as deeply as any other misconception revered by Western anime fandom, but rarely, if ever, is it questioned or explained. Akihabara is not the epicenter of Japan’s cool otaku subculture, nor does that subculture even exist. Akihabara is an over-merchandised shopping complex in the middle of Tokyo’s Chiyoda ward, populated by Japan’s manchildren, gawking tourists and the foreign residents who erroneously portray it as the hub of modern Japanese pop-culture.

I found Akiba to be a fun place when I finally did get to go, walking through places I had only see in pictures was a fulfilling experience, shopping in the “mecca” felt like shopping in any other place just with more moe. Ultimately I want to go back and browse the electronic stores more, look for a laptop or notebook. Akiba seems to be downplaying its former embrace of the otaku subculture although the maid cafes are not going anywhere.

from io9.c0m: Even without strong characters, a good plot can still suck you in. But FlashForward doesn’t have a good plot, or even a particularly linear one. Instead, it’s all over the place, mixing in terrorist threats with Blackwater-esque corporate conspiracy theories, star-crossed lovers and medical dramas, murder mysteries and soap operatics about marriages and alcoholic fathers relating to their long-lost daughters… everything except the science fiction behind the FlashForward, which has become the McGuffin that gets lip service every now and again. In fact, there’s so much everything that the show feels not just unfocused, but incoherent. What’s FlashForward actually about? Ten episodes in, I’m not sure that I really know anymore. And that’s a pretty big problem.

Lost became lost when the plots never reached any sort of conclusion at all, all we had was more and more plots held together by good characters. Lets hope Flash Forward doesn’t go the same way.