Tofugu.com

I was reminded of this game over on the eduFire forums, where one of the tutors started a game up. What a great vocab game! I remember playing this a lot with my crazy little kancho-giving host brother, back in the day. Here’s how it works.

• One person starts with a word
• The next person takes the last letter (hiragana) from that word, and uses it to start the next word.
• Then it goes on and on and on until someone loses (more on that in a second).

(more…)

Now, you will almost never see Tofugu talking about anime on the site, at least not directly. But how could I not pass this up. I’m not particularly interested in the fact that Hulu has anime. Who cares about that? The most interesting thing is that they aren’t dubbing (most of) it. It comes in Japanese, and they provide subtitles. Considering that Hulu is very similar to watching normal television programming, their decision to not do sucky dubbed versions of shows surprised me. Well done, Hulu, well done. I’m actually impressed. (more…)

I played around on this website for way too long. Thanks to Cscout, I came across the website kyokasho.net, which allows you to choose from several school subjects, and then doodle all over the pictures of historical figures. I remember those days. They weren’t all that long ago. I would ignore the teacher (maybe that’s why I became a Japanese Studies major?) and do all sorts of horrible things to my textbooks. One thing I remember doing was erasing numbers in my math books (those pen erasers were good for this) and rewrite the numbers in the same font so the poor sap who got my book the next year could be as confused as I was. When I wasn’t feeling like such a horrible person, I’d doodle on the faces of historical figures. This is exactly what this website allows you to do. Some folks get pretty ridiculously creative. It’s great. (more…)

So, as I promised (and a day late), here’s how you can get you fill of free Japanese lessons, right from your own home. There’s two ways to do it. The first way involves a contest (I’ll talk about this more a little later) and the second way just involves clicking around a new Youtube channel I’m a part of. Let’s go into more detail! (more…)

I’m going to keep this super short, since it’s only a sneak peak and not a not-sneaky-peak. This will officially be announced on Monday, most likely, but I thought I’d do a little shout out from here first, since you’re all pretty cool froods, who know where your towel’s at. (more…)

Forget that bible thing. Someone must have edited out the good part. You know, the part where it says that Jesus came to Japan when he was 21 to study theology, returned to Judea at the age of 33 to preach, and then got crucified…or so we all thought! (more…)

I came across this story on Flickr while looking for something completely different, which forced me to do some more searching on my own. Of course, the curse is in Wikipedia, as well as in Shane’s atypicallife, but you can read it right here as well. Possibly with a little more snarkiness. Maybe.

What/Who does the Colonel curse?

The Curse of Colonel Sanders is a curse brought down on the Japanese baseball team, the Hanshin Tigers. Starting in 1985 until now, the Hanshin Tigers have never won the Japanese baseball equivalent of the World Series (The Japan Series). Supposedly, evil Mr. Sanders is the one preventing it. (more…)

I’ve come out of my blogging hibernation to share the news about Japanese cellphone company Willcom’s newest creation, the Kuma (Bear) Phone. I’ve always loved Willcom’s cutesy designs, but they’ve taken it a step farther this time, embedding phone parts into an actual stuffed animal ↓

Yep, that inocuous-looking teddy bear actually functions as a stand-alone mobile phone. (more…)

First off, I love eduFire. It’s a great website with great people, a great interface, and a great mission: They want to make it easy for tutors to teach students a foreign language. Right now, there are forty-three languages being taught on eduFire (and that number is growing as tutors increase), including Arabic, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, and of course, Japanese. And yes, I am one of the forty-one Japanese tutors currently teaching on eduFire (but more on that later).

But, how does everything work? Everything’s pretty simple right now, and the eduFire staff are constantly making improvements to the site, mostly based on user suggestion. The site’s creators are very good about listening and responding to feedback, and their employees are very friendly (If you are a tutor, you will be contacted by Marco, who will join your lesson as a “student” and walk you through eduFire and answer your questions. Super cool Frood. (more…)

This article is all thanks to rjhoolan, who tipped me on this via Twitter. First off, thank you rjhoolan for this tip. It’s freakin amazing! Anyways, if you’re reading this, you probably want to watch some Japanese television. Not only that, but you probably want some LIVE Japanese television. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Let’s start with the bad: This doesn’t work on a Mac. Supposedly they’re working on a Mac version, but who knows when that will turn out. But, if you have Windows (or are running bootcamp, VMware, or Parallels on your Mac), this should work fine. If you ask me, this is a good enough reason to install windows on VMware, allow it a mere 256mb, and let it do its magic. It’s that amazing.

The service that lets you do this is called TVU networks.  They explain themselves much better than I can, so let’s let them do it.

TVU uses a new broadcast technology called Real-Time Packet Replication.  With this technology, all the viewers who are watching a channel at the same time are cooperating to give everyone the best possible signal.  TVU’s application does not create any new files on your hard disk because you’re watching live TV. [source]

So, that’s how it’s done, but I bet you want to know how to get it up and running, like now. Who wouldn’t? Ridiculous Japanese commercials await! (more…)