May was a busy month for Tofugu! During May, we made more videos than in the last couple of months combined. Here in this video roundup post, I’ll cover all the videos from the month of May just in case you missed any of ‘em.
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The first video of this month kicked off the new trend of five videos a week! From this video onward, both Koichi and myself have been working hard to bring you all more videos each and every week. In this video, Koichi talked about DVDs of women eating meals, or oshokuji no jikan (お食事の時間) for those lonely, lonely people who just want someone to eat with them. In less creepy news, Koichi also announced the Sticker Haiku contest, giving sweet Tofugu stickers to people who wrote the most awesome haikus!
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Remember how the Rapture was supposed to happen earlier this month? In this video, seer of visions Koichdamus makes his prophecy about the Rapture which includes a giant radioactive monster mutated by Fukushima radiation, MechaJesus, and the people of Planet X (which is right behind Jupiter, duh).
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Koichi picks the first five winners of the Sticker Haiku contest by reading each one aloud in his celebrity impressions. Remember: if you can guess all five celebrities Koichi is impersonating, you can win a pack of Tofugu stickers!
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Koichi announces the second five winners of the Sticker Haiku contest, this time without celebrity impressions, and explains why he likes each one. Congrats to all the winners!
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In this video, Koichi explains how you can use subtitles in Japanese T.V. or movies to help learn Japanese. Koichi also dresses like a beautiful, beautiful woman for…educational purposes? Something like that.
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Ever wanted to go out and catch your own fish dinner, but don’t want to do all the hard work of cleaning, gutting, and cooking the fish? Well at Zauo, a cool, gimmicky restaurant in Japan, you can do just that! Watch Koichi catch his own dinner from the aquarium in the restaurant and enjoy the fruits of his labor.
This video is very dear to my heart, because it introduces me, Hashi, as Tofugu’s very first employee! We take a look around the new and improved Tofugu office, and I awkwardly operate the camera and introduce myself to the world. Check it out here.
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In part one of a two-part series about how to spend money to help learn Japanese, Koichi takes a look at MyGengo, an online translation service. For a small fee, MyGengo will have a real-live human translate whatever Japanese you want to throw at them. However, this kind of service is only helpful as a last-ditch effort to translate few sentences or paragraphs, and shouldn’t be used for whole pages of Japanese.
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Part two covers Lang-8 Premium, a cool website where you write journal entries in the language you are trying to learn (in our case, Japanese), and those journal entries are corrected by native speakers. The premium subscription to the site gives you a few benefits: your journal entries are given priority over free users, and you can get PDF printouts of your entries, just in case you’re the old fashioned, pen-and-paper type.
And that covers it for May! Look forward to more video roundups in the future as we make more and more videos for all of you.