Android and Japanese, half a year on

So its been almost half a year since I purchased my HTC Tattoo (you'll remember thats an Android phone, I'm no ink-junkie!), and I've been getting a good amount of use out of it.

I often translate my way through a good(?) book on the way to work, on train journeys etc. This usually means I'm crammed into one seat, with very little room to move. Previously I used my "Papyrus" denshi-jisho, which being the size of a medium size book itself left me with even less room. I'd be constantly switching between resting the novel on my lap to look up a word, to resting the Papyrus on my lap to continue reading. Being only on my second Japanese book, you can imagine how I have to look up about 10 words on some pages, meaning a lot of switching, and a fair amount of irritation.

The Tattoo, on the other hand is spectacularly dinky, so I can rest the Tattoo with Aedict on one page while I read the opposite page! Very handy.

In my last blog post about Aedict I was a bit critical of the kanjipad, which requires you to write using the correct stroke order. Certainly, I would love a Tegaki style input that fits closer to my very messy way of writing kanji. However there is a nice feature of Aedict that I didn't discover until they released the new version: When looking up a kanji you can now view its stroke order. Of course, you need to first find the kanji, but as I said previously, the skip lookup and radical lookup will help you here. So, I am starting to learn the stroke order of some of the radicals, which is a great help!

I also criticized the sorting of results.. But after using Aedict for a few months, it turns out that this is not really much of an obstacle to looking up words.

Aedict's new layout is very nice too, showing you the most recently viewed results, which is pretty useful. Aedict has also been able to deinflect verbs for a while now, which has on occasion saved me a fair amount of confusion.

More than anything Aedict's lookup speed is its greatest strength. When emailing my wife and need to use a technical word (lately a lot of words about pregnancy!) its actually quicker for me to whip out my phone and search using Aedict, than it is to open a new tab, load up wwwjdic and look up a word online! Its that which impresses me the most about Aedict.

I still find looking up kanji a bit of a hassle, and that is the thing that takes the most time (I can still only translate maybe 2 pages of my book per bus ride, the same as with my Papyrus). I attribute this mainly to the kanjipad (and I guess, my slow pace at learning the stroke orders)

As well as Aedict, I've sampled a few Japanese IMEs. I have to say, none of them are perfect. Simeji tended to mistake where I was pressing (possibly due to the Tattoo's smaller screen resolution, but they should support it since it is in the market, so your guess is as good as mine), and OpenWnn Plus (which I recommended last time) had a tendency to crash. I now use OpenWnn/Flick support, which is basically the same as OpenWnn, but it doesn't crash on my Tattoo! However, when typing English, I still prefer the HTC's default input method, since you can generally just bash the keypad in the general region of the letter you're aiming for and carry on. No way can I type even half as quickly in English using any of the Japanese input methods.

I've seen some Japanese/Chinese handwriting development occuring, which I'm very excited about. Perhaps that will be useful in looking up kanji in the future? I hope it works with the HTC Tattoo!

I will also give a special mention to AnkiDroid, a simple flashcard program for Android. It works using the same deck specs as Anki. This is great for me, since I already used Anki on my desktop, and now I can sync my anki deck to my phone from the internet, allowing me to memorize such words as 破水 in preperation for heading out to Japan for my the birth of my first child! I'm using a beta at the moment to get hold of the sync feature, but I've read that synchronisation is soon to come out into the stable releases (that said, I have never had any bugs or errors of any kind while using this beta, and I have a lot of confidence in their dev team who are very responsive).

Overall, the HTC Tattoo is a great device for Japanese, I'm spectacularly pleased with it.

HTC tattoo and Japanese

I know its been a while, but I think this warrants a blogpost:

I've been dragging around a battered old Nokia for the last 5 or 6 years, and decided it was time to change. However, being the "I just want a phone to do what a phone needs to do" kind of person, I looked for a new phone with 3 things in mind. 1) I want a phone to make phone calls (duh) 2) I may as well replace my walkman with a phone, and save pocket-space 3) Perhaps I can get a phone that will replace my denshi-jisho (electronic dictionary).
Long story short, I bought the HTC tattoo. After a bit of research, I found this blog-post: Paddosan.com. He introduced Aedict, which uses the almighty edict by Jim Breen, which is a brilliant dictionary.

I was a bit concerned, however, about some issues I'd heard about the tattoo's small screen resolution. Would it be enough for reading the Japanese fonts? Would it be enough for inputting Japanese fonts?

Well, I've well and truly laid those anxieties to rest. The tattoo works superbly with Aedict.

Here is my review of Aedict:



Aedict's kanjipad allows for writing in a character by hand (using your finger as a pen) which is very nice for complicated kanji. However - this will require you to know the stroke order of the kanji. Now, I was taught the stroke order at school, but I was never tested on it, and thus never learned it. I'm guessing most Japanese courses are the same in this respect, so perhaps the kanjipad is going to be of only relatively limited use for most users of Aedict.

Considering my last point, the presence of a radical lookup system is a life-saver, and Aedict really excels here. The tattoo's touch screen makes scrolling through the radical list quick and easy. As with linux's gjiten, you can tell Aedict how many strokes there are in the character you want to look up, and you can also specify how much error (i.e. how many strokes more or less than your guess, useful if your not exactly sure).

Searching in English is very easy, as you'd expect. However, the quality of the results is not spectacular. As with the online edict, you get a lot of slightly odd expressions appear, and it is difficult to find the most appropriate word. That said, the "Priority" words (those words among the most common 20000 or so) do appear at the top of the list.

Searching in Japanese is also easy. You can type in romaji, but I used openwnn because it is a little more intuitive for me (if you've ever used a Japanese mobile phone, you'll probably find the same). Again, you can get a large volume of results for some searches, which can be a pain.

Still, despite the large volumes of results that Aedict produces, it presents them all on one page, so scrolling through dozens of results isn't as difficult on the tattoo as on edict.

You can also get a kana table.. which looks pretty but has pretty much no function. I think this would have been better used as an input method for those people who dont want to install an IME like openwnn. However, since I do use openwnn I'll leave it at that.

One thing I was fairly impressed with was the "skip lookup" which I overlooked at first because I assumed it was a setting, not a lookup method (whooops). Basically, you answer 1 or 2 simple questions about the character, and it brings up a list of most likely candidates... I was highly sceptical at first, but it turned out to be a real time saver for some very complicated characters.

Overall, I'm very pleased with Aedict. It has allowed me to dispense with my chunky "Papyrus" dictionary, making translating on the bus much easier, and while each lookup method has its own failings, my complaints with one method are usually covered by another. Nonetheless, a more gaijin-friendly handwriting recognition (I'm thinking tegaki-python here) and better sorting of relevant results would be grand.

Getting married in Japan

Wedding ceremonies. White dresses, gold rings, lots of flowers and church bells! Sounds great doesn't it? That's why I was so set on having one, even more so than my fiancée, in fact.

However, even before proposing to my bride-to-be it soon became apparent that getting married was going to be a bigger challenge than I ever expected. I mean, sure the ceremony itself is going to be expensive, and require a bit of effort from my end. However, in comparison to the bureaucracy that the marriage incurs, the ceremony itself is going to be a walk in the park.

Usually people in Japan just get married, and update their family registers. If you're a foreigner, however things are different. And hell, you'd expect them to be, what's worse is being British. (For once) I've no problem with the bureaucracy on the Japanese side, it's my own country that's giving me frustration now.

If you want to get married in Japan you've got to go through the following procedures (Courtesy of the UK in Japan website):

"Japanese law requires that all marriages here must take place at a local Ward or City office. The couple must submit a notice of "Intention to Marry" or "kon-in-todoke" to the Ward/City office, the Marriage officer will then issue a "Certificate of Acceptance of Notification of Marriage" or "kon-in-todoke-juri-shomeisho" and the couple will be married."

OK, sounds oh-so-simple. However...

"When the marriage involves a non-Japanese national, the Marriage officer must be shown a "Certificate of No Impediment" (CNI or in Japanese "yoken gubi shomeisho") by the non-Japanese party."

Fair enough, you wouldn't want married people coming from abroad and picking up extra wives, I guess..

Now, you can get a CNI in Japan (see this link), or you can get one in England by giving notice to marry at the local registrar office. This then needs to be taken to the consular office, that will have the Japanese equivilent drawn up for you (which will set you back about £63, for Her Majesty's Government's coffers).

Well done, you're now married...

This is the best bit though, if you want to settle in the UK with your newfound wife check out these fees (here) 87,750 yen thats over £500 pounds! I mean hell, that's a little steep, don't you think? It can't possibly cost £500 worth of man-hours to process one application, I think we can all rest assured that Her Majesty's government will be enjoying a tidy little bonus on all these VISA applications.

Its not like this is to put people off sham marriages either, they've plenty of checks for this kind of thing (although I do wonder about the "are you a terrorist" bit)

The whole VISA thing is completely farcicle. I probably wouldn't be complaining if I had a decent job, but getting to Japan and back, plus the wedding costs is going to make this a very expensive year as it is.

The worst part is the procedures, though. For Maachan to get herself a VISA there is a pile of supporting documents and whatnot that she'll need. I'm sure the Japanese information is out there, but it seems like its not so easy to find. Whatsmore she doesn't seem to be getting much cooperation from the local authorities in getting hold of the information. Once my exams are over, it'll be my task to go over each chapter of the VISA legislation and figure out exactly what is needed, because the VISA application form notes are simply terrible.

Nabe

So, I managed to find some udon noodles in the university's shop (I love that place, so much oriental food!). I also happened to have my special nabe saucepan, so I thought I'll make nabe!

To my amazement, I also managed to find a large, white radish, which is usually used in nabe. It was under the name of "mooli" in Tesco, but I know it as daikon. Nevertheless, that meant I'd be able to make a pretty convincing nabe, at least by my estimation.


Here's what I ended up using:

-1/4 of a mooli
-1/4 of a romaine lettuce
-handful of beansprouts
-2 carrots
-4 slices of bacon
-1 pack of udon
-a small pack of tofu

I figure thats about enough for 2 people, but I didn't have lunch, so I was particularly hungry. Although, you might want to consider adding a pack of udon.

So, here's pretty much how it went:

-I peeled the mooli and cut a few slices about 3/4 of a cm thick, and I peeled and cut 2 carrots, not into slices, but into wedges, because I like it to be thick, but find wedges easier to pick up*. Once cut, these all went into half a pan of water and put on full heat while I prepared everything else (I find it best to put these in first because they take a long while to cook).

-next, I chucked a few slices of bacon in (I should point out that proper pork is a better meat to use if you can cut it thin enough, but I'm too lazy for that, especially since I'm just cooking for myself)

-while all of that bubbled away, I cut some tofu into 8, approximately 1cm, blocks and chucked it into the pot along with some beansprouts

-at this point, I cut up some mushrooms. You can cut them up quite thick and chuck them in straight away, or cut them thin and add them a few minutes before serving *2.

-it was going to be a little while until the mooli were soft enough, so I used this time to make the sauce. I pretty much improvised here, as I don't know the actual recipe, but for a refreshingly sour sauce I added soy sauce, vinegar and lemon juice together.The main constituant was soy sauce, and there was probably about equal amounts of vinegar and lemon juice. The sauce shouldn't taste overly lemony, vinegary or too much of soy sauce. The best thing to do is just make it and see how it tastes. It will be pretty strong, and might even necessitate diluting somewhat, depending on how you like it.

-OK, with the sauce done and the mooli now soft enough to skewer with a chopstick with little resistance, I chopped some romain lettuce into quarters. I took just one of these quarters and cut it in half lengthwise before dumping it together with the udon noodles in the pan. You can add a tablespoonful or so of the sauce to the pan too.

-from putting in the udon and lettuce, I waited about 3-4 minutes before taking the pan off the heat.

-So far as serving up goes, I just placed the pan on a heat-resistant placemat. Then, with sauce in a seperate bowl, transfered food from the pan into the bowl, and ate from that.

Mmmm. Lovely. Another note, when you have eaten everything, and only water remains in the pan, you can add that water to the sauce-filled bowl you've just eaten from and then drink it. Dunno if that's everyone's cup of tea, but I think its a great way to finish off the meal, as well as making sure you don't waste a scrap.

*Back when I was in Japan, my fiancée somehow managed to cut a piece of carrot so it ended up almost perfectly round. Don't ask how the hell she did it, but it was a real b***h to pick up with chopsticks

*2) My fiancée told me afterwards that it was a little strange to use mushrooms at all, but I think they taste good, and there are a number of versions of nabe that use mushrooms

Travel Journal

So, here is my travel journal, it's a bit of a read, but there's plenty of nuggets of Japanese culture in there.

Enjoy!

Travel Journal - My year in Japan

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First post

I've long kept a blog in Japanese (here: ブログ) but I've not had much reason to blog in English of late.

I expect to use this blog mostly to discuss Japanese language and culture, and my other passions, science and photography. The latter of those three being the only thing I really talk about in my Japanese blog.

I'll also throw in information that I've found useful from time to time, but for the most part, I'll keep to the above themes.

To start off, I've got a Travel Journal from my time in Japan which I want to share, because it's a shame to have it lay around unread, so I'll spend the next 30 mins (hopefully) posting that here.