And, because it’s semi-permanently $20 off right now, I’m doing 50ish percent off of that lower price, and making it $49 instead of the regular $60. With that $11 you could buy a lot of Pocky. “I can’t remember ever pricing TextFugu this low,” says the used car salesman living inside of me.

As some of you may know, and as I’ll get into more detail in tomorrow’s State of The Fugu Address post, we’re working on a new version of TextFugu, which will cover a lot more material than the current version and span beginner through advanced and then get you working towards fluency. It’s a much bigger project so it will probably have a higher pricetag once it’s all said and done (for the Forever Price). That being said, anyone who has a Forever membership of current-gen TextFugu will be getting a free upgrade. In the past I limited it to certain groups, but now it’s going to be everyone until the new version is ready for signups.

TextFugu will be on sale for around a week. Last day of the sale will be on January 7, 2014, so you have some time to think about it / dig through the couch cushions for loose change. I hope you all had a wonderful New Year, and let’s be sure to learn a ton of Japanese (and other things too) in 2014!

TextFugu SALE: Forever 50% Off

P.S. If you’re having trouble with registering your fancy new account please email hello@textfugu.com and I’ll help you out right away. Sometimes with extra server load the registration form doesn’t redirect properly, but I’ll be keeping an eye on things as much as I can in the meantime, support emails included!

It’s been more or less accepted in the field of educational psychology for decades that mnemonics help people learn a second language. Using mnemonics, you can learn vocabulary more quickly than through normal means.

But aside from all of the academic talk, learning with mnemonics usually feels a lot better too. Nobody likes memorizing things by rote, repeating them over and over and over until they finally stick. Using mnemonics is a process that makes a lot more sense and can actually be fun.

What Are Mnemonics?

Mnemonics are a different way of remembering things. It’s any kind of technique or trick you can use to better learn and remember something. You use something that you already know or can learn easily and connect it with something you don’t.

A mnemonic could be a word, a memory, a story, a picture, an acronym, a song, a dance, or anything else you can imagine. The important thing is that mnemonic is distinct, memorable, and strongly associated with whatever you’re trying to remember.

Confused? It’s a little complicated at first, but let me give an example to break it down a little bit.

A Colorful Mnemonic Example

Schools use mnemonics all the time to teach things like days of the week, the mathematical order of operations, or US states. If that doesn’t seem familiar, then try this technique that a lot of science teachers use.

There are seven basic colors in the rainbow, and they are:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• Green
• Blue
• Indigo
• Violet

Lots of teachers turn this initially meaningless series of letters (ROYGBIV) into a name: “Roy G. Biv.”

Your pal Roy G. Biv

It might seem ridiculous at first, but for most people it’s a lot easier to remember the name of this made-up person than it is to remember the proper order of the colors of the rainbow. Once you have that name memorized, it’s easy to work backwards and figure out why his name is Roy G. Biv and what that all means.

Using Roy G. Biv as a mnemonic might seem gimmicky and silly, but over a decade after I first learned about it in school, I’m still able to easily remember the name and what it stands for. That’s the power of mnemonics.

Types of Mnemonics and Techniques

Aside from constructing colorful, fictional characters, mnemonics are used all the time to help people learn Japanese. There are a lot of different types of mnemonics and technicques used in learning Japanese, covering everything from kanji to days of the week. Here are some of the more common and/or effective mnemonics used in teaching and learning Japanese:

Keyword Mnemonics

Keyword mnemonics are probably the most common mnemonic used to learn Japanese. Here’s how a keyword mnemonic works: you have a word you want to learn. You take something similar to that word you want to learn, and make a link between the two using vivid, memorable imagery. Take this example from our ebook Hiragana42:

There are lots of things you can do to make keyword mnemonics more vivid and memorable: adding in different senses (i.e. smell, taste) into the mnemonic, or overdramaticizing or exaggerating the mnemonic (like imagining the “ひ” nose as a massive, pimply, covered in warts, etc.), for example. There’s a lot that falls under the keyword mnemonics umbrella.

Pictographs

One of the most basic types of mnemonics used for learning Japanese is pictographs, or imagining a picture in Japanese characters. It makes a lot of sense, considering that early kanji were more or less pictographs.

The most common examples are kanji like 月 and 日, which mean moon and sun respectively. It’s easy to imagine 月 as a crescent moon and 日 as a sun.

It can be very effective early on in learning Japanese, but pictographs get hard once characters get complicated.

Songs

Several of my Japanese teachers have used songs in their lesson plans, usually to teach series or patterns of words. For instance, when I was young I learned the order of the kana (あ、か、さ、etc.) through a song. In high school, my Japanese teacher taught us the days of the week in Japanese using the familiar song Frère Jacques, and another song for days of the month.

Movement

For learning directional or physical words, moving your body while learning certain words can be very helpful. Many Japanese teachers teach their students different directions (右、左、前、後ろ、上、下) while encouraging students to point in the directions while saying them. You might touch your hands while learning the Japanese word for hands (手)—stuff like that.

Japanese Learning Resources That Use Mnemonics

Nowadays, lots of different books, websites, and apps use mnemonics to teach Japanese. The most famous example is James Heisig’s book Remembering the Kanji, which pioneered using mnemonics to learn kanji.

Since Remembering the Kanji was released in the 70^s, there have been a lot of resources that have built on that initial concept. Other traditional textbooks, like Henshall’s A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters have also used mnemonics to teach kanji.

More modern resources use menmonics a lot too. Tofugu uses them to teach hiragana in our ebook, Hiragana42 and to teach kanji on WaniKani and in lessons in TextFugu.

Besides all of the shameless self-promotion, other sites like Kanji Damage and Memrise also use mnemonics to teach kanji. Dr. Moku uses mnemonics to teach hiragana and katakana, and I’m sure I’m missing many other resources that incorporate mnemonics.

You don’t even necessarily need a textbook or a website to teach you mnemonics. Sometimes, the most memorable mnemonics are the ones that you create yourself. This can be especially helpful if you’re having trouble with a particular vocabulary word, phrase or kanji.

No one technique or resource will be able to teach you Japanese in its entirety, but if you’re serious about studying Japanese, then you should definitely have mnemonic resources in your arsenal. Take a look at any of the resources I mentioned above or at our list of Japanese resources and find which ones work for you the best.

Bonus Wallpapers/GIFs

Aya has once again provided us with some extra desktop backgrounds and animated GIFs. Enjoy!

Wallpaper (1280×800)
Wallpaper (2560×1440)

GIF (700×438)
GIF (1280×800)

I also wanted to announce this new (yet unnamed) product early because I wanted some help from any of you intermediate to advanced Japanese learners out there. More on that at the end of the post, but I was hoping you could tell me a bit about how you study your Japanese in certain situations.

Before we do that, though, here’s a little bit about the resource. We’ll call it “Kuma” because, well, I have no idea, but there are several bear pictures in the prototype version.

Intermediate / Advanced: Materials will be stories and articles in Japanese. Each will include an audio recording by the native Japanese speaker who wrote it as well as an English translation.

Variety: One thing that I thought was really important was that there was a large variety of authors writing the stories/articles. Right now there are about 25 different authors and well over 100 articles/stories, and I’m hoping for that number to grow for both of those things over time. As you become more advanced, it becomes more important to learn using different types of people. Men, women, younger, older, different viewpoints on life, different dialects… All these things are Japanese, and if you don’t hear and study with all of them, you’re only learning one type of Japanese. I want to cover many types of Japanese for you.

Flexibility & Simplicity: The goal of “Kuma” is to provide the materials. What you do with said materials is up to you. The more advanced you are at Japanese, the better you should be at knowing how you study best. I want to provide materials that allow you to study the things you need to study most. Need listening practice? Grab the audio and put it on your phone to listen to. Need reading practice? Go for it. Need to practice speaking? Why not try language shadowing? By keeping things simple, you have the flexibility to do what you want. TextFugu is more about hand-holding, “Kuma” is more about letting you do what you please.

It Is A Paid Service: Before you ask, yes, it is a paid service. Heavy discounts for early adopters. I haven’t decided on the final price point, but it will be similar to TextFugu when at full price. Probably will be a discount for TextFugu users, kind of like how WaniKani has a discount for TextFugu users.

Current TextFugu Members Get It Free: If you’re a Forever member of TextFugu before “Kuma” goes live, you’ll be getting a Forever account of “Kuma” as well. Obviously “Kuma” was supposed to be part of TextFugu before it grew into the monster size that it is, so it’s only fair that you guys get it for free as well. Monthly members at TextFugu will also be getting some free time on “Kuma” as well.

Bears: It will probably have bears. Bears are pretty cool.

I was really surprised to get as much of a response as I did from native Japanese speakers interested in making materials for advanced learners to study with. I was hoping to find one or two people. I ended up with around twenty-five. The amount of materials is still blowing me away, and it has caused this to become a very large project, much bigger than I thought it would be.

Right now I’m at the stage where I’m trying to create a template that will work for all or most of the materials, and this is where you come in (I hope!). Say you are given some Japanese text, the audio that goes with it, and an English translation… what do you do? How do you study with it? Let me know in the comments below for one hundred fugu points, redeemable for good karma at your local Buddha Bank.

Oh, and as for when you can use it… well, it will go something like this in terms of priority:

1. TextFugu Members
2. Wanikani Premium Members
3. Tofugu Newsletter Subscribers

So, if anything, be sure you’re subscribed to the newsletter so good things will happen to you. I’m hoping for the first invites to be sent out within a month. Don’t forget to tell me how you’d study with these materials in the comments below. It will help me to design a better lesson template!

TextFugu 50% Off

30-Day Ebook, Free

Wow, did I just finish writing this article? I think I did. I better keep writing otherwise you’ll feel like you didn’t look at enough words today.

Tofugu Tshirts Are-A-Coming!

If you’ve read this far, you must be the type of person who wears clothes. Well good for you (can’t say that about most Tofugu readers). A couple weeks ago we tried out a tshirt service called Teespring, which lets you upload a tshirt design and then has a Kickstarterish method of collecting money from people who want tshirts. There were a couple of things keeping us from doing tshirts in the past:

1. Usually you have to buy a ton of tshirts up front, guessing on what sizes people would want.
2. You have to ship them all out yourself (Ughh!)

This service solves both of those problems in that your money goes straight to them and then they ship it out for us to each individual. We did a test run to make sure the quality was up to snuff (if you ordered a tshirt, you should be getting yours soon, I just got mine!) and they look pretty good. So, I guess it’s time for us to finally do tshirts (thank you to the bajillions of people who have emailed me in the past asking about it, your dreams have come true).

We’ll be posting about the next round of tshirts very soon. Our main thing is that we want to make tshirts that we’d want to wear here at Tofugu, so the designs may not necessarily be a Tofugu fish right in the center of a tshirt (that would be okay… but only okay). We’re thinking we’ll do tshirts on a quarterly or bi-yearly basis, depending on how popular they are. Right now there are two designs we’re debating on. Tell us in the comments which you’d rather have to cover your naked body so we can make a decision.

The shirts will be American Apparel, available in both men’s shapes and women’s shapes. So, if you were to buy a tshirt, which would you buy? Please let us know so we may make educmacated decisions on what tshirt to begin selling.

Tshirt Comment Battle, GO!

This is just a quick Public Tofugu Service Announcement letting you know that yes, we care about you students, and that yes, you should be studying Japanese during your math class instead of actual math (just kidding, study your math or you may turn into a liberal arts major, eeaughhh!).

Anyways, TextFugu “Forever” is 50% off until September 25 whether you’re going to back to school or not. Of course, just like all Forever memberships, you get access to all future updates, changes, and special deals for other Japanese-related products (for example, you can get instant access to the WaniKani Closed Beta). TextFugu usually only goes on sale twice a year, so you know, do what you will with that information.

Click Here: TextFugu 50% Off Sale

If you have any questions about it, please feel free to email koichi@textfugu.com and I’ll help you out. If that’s all, then it’s probably best you stop looking at this flashing monstrosity of an image. Unicorn beseeches you!

And yes, sorry for the super short not-really-containing-anything post. Perhaps our Japanese resource reviews or Japanese guides section can keep you company until tomorrow?

Fine Print: This text is really really small and hard to read.

There hasn’t been a lot of good news coming out of Japan lately (though I’d say a big part of that is news agencies trying to shock audiences as much as possible so they can make more $$$). At this point, sure, the nuclear reactors are kind of a problem (though time will only tell), but the real issue is the hundreds of thousands of people that are displaced, homeless, cold, cut off, or without food (i.e. people are going to start starving soon). While you probably can’t do much to help with the nuclear reactor thing, you can do something to help the people… After all, it’s the people who need the most help anyways. If something like this happened to you, you’d surely want to be helped as well.

Ways You Can Help

There are tons of ways you can help that do involve your hard earned cash. I’m sure they’re pretty good. I’ve donated myself. The more I read, though, the more it seems as though relief organizations are “over funded” (i.e., they have more money than they know what to do with, and the money you’re donating isn’t doing anything… and eventually will probably make it to some other country, which is good too, I suppose).

I think donating money to help is good – and I think that donating money will have more affect in the next week or so (when we can finally see who and what needs the most financial support), but right now it just doesn’t seem like funding disaster relief will help very much right now.

That being said, if you’d like to donate anyways, that’s great. Just be sure you don’t earmark your donations (so that they can be used in other places of need as well). Japan is printing off loads of money… money isn’t the issue. Red Cross and other big relief organizations will surely help and play a role in repairing Japan, but if you tell them you only want your money spent on Japan, it’ll probably end up being inefficiently used (like I said, there’s plenty of money already).

NihongoUp, JapanTimes, and so many other list off many more ways to donate. The most important thing is that you make sure your donated funds aren’t earmarked. I’d recommend Doctor’s Without Borders (as does that above article), but anything you donate will probably eventually help someone, and that’s good.

In the meantime, though, there are other ways you can help.

Buy TextFugu (And Donate 110% Of Your Payment)

If you were going to donate some money anyways, here’s an offer for you.

Before you go all crazy saying “omgwtfbbq he’s trying to make money off a disaster” – please keep reading.

Over the next 5ish days or so (we’ll see how long I can afford this), 110% of every dollar spent on TextFugu will be donated to disaster relief in Japan (more on who the donations go to in a minute).

Here’s my thinking on this: At first, I was going to donate part of the revenues, but then I realized that would just make it seem like I wanted your money, hoping more people would sign up to make up for the difference. So then I thought… okay, how about 100% of the revenues? I probably can’t afford to do this for a really long time, but even if sign ups stay the same, then at least I’m donating a good chunk of money to Japan. If sign-ups go up, then I’d be able to donate a bigger chunk of money to Japan. Then I realized that even though technically this is money I’m donating, it feels like you’re donating and I’m doing nothing, so I want to throw some of my own personal dollars (or more of them) into the mix. So I thought, why not donate 110% of revenues instead?

So, before you get in a tizzy, know that I’m donating extra money for every sign-up on TextFugu.

So here’s the deal. As long as you see a big green message on the homepage / pricing page of TextFugu saying I’m doing this, I’ll still be doing this. In about a week, I’ll probably take it down (and let you know how it went, of course). If you don’t see this big green message on the homepage, 110% of your payment probably isn’t going to disaster relief. So, if you’re interested in TextFugu (or want to give it to a friend, or something) you should do it now. Otherwise, go donate money directly, because that’s cool too.

I don’t know who / where the donation will go to yet. I’m thinking I’ll spend the next week researching smaller organizations that will have big impact. I want to donate to someone who will deliver the most help for the dollar, if you catch my drift. I don’t think that organization will be Red Cross or something like that… It might end up being that, and if it does, of course the donation won’t be earmarked only for Japan, but I’m hoping I can find an organization that has a lot of impact.

Other Japan/Japanese related companies trying to help the relief effort include NihongoUp (50% of revenue), Flutterscape (matching donations up to $3,000), CrunchyRoll (matching donations up to $5,000), jlist (5% of orders up to $10,000) and… (let me know if there’s others in the comments below, please!).

Give Blood

If you’re in Japan, now’s probably a good time to give blood. It doesn’t cost you anything, and there’s going to be a ton of people who need it. If you click on the map above, you can find places around Tokyo to give blood, though I imagine there are many other local areas all around Japan that will be accepting your vampire food. Rules for giving blood in Japan are pretty strict, though, so make sure you take a look at this before donating.

Giving blood definitely saves lives, and will probably be one of the nicest things you can do right now (and you should keep doing it, because giving blood is awesome, and you get cookies).

Volunteer

I’m not sure what’s needed at the moment, but if you’re in Japan, and want to help, you can try to join one of the volunteer efforts that are starting to come underway. It’s divided into areas, so you’ll have to call each government individually to see (non-Japanese language support is probably limited).

Sendai (Miyagi) – 022-262-7294

Iwate – 019-637-9711

Fukushima – 024-523-1254

There’s more information on volunteering on Hikosaemon’s blog.

Send Socks & Support Letters

It’s friggin’ cold in the Sendai area (where the earthquake hit). Disasters like this are also psychologically damaging. Socks and letters will help both of these things.

Jason Kelly is fairly close to the “disaster area” though far enough away to still get mail. If you send him socks, he’ll make sure people get them. If you send “support letters” with the socks, people will get them too.

It also looks like “HopeLetters” is doing an electronic version of the support letter. Check out HopeLetters to send something to relief workers or students.

Nothing like a little letter to make someone feel a little bit better. It’s those human touches that make lives improve.

Don’t Panic

The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is panic. I almost feel like foreign media is panicking more than the people actually affected by the earthquake (actually, I’m pretty sure this is the case). While the situation is terrible, and lots of people are suffering, it doesn’t help to make up stories (though this one was kind of funny), spread rumors, and act off of unreliable information. It’s pretty safe to assume that whatever any not-from-Japan media news source (Tofugu included, by the way) probably doesn’t actually know what they are talking about when it comes to nuclear reactors and earthquakes and things like that. CNN, Fox, whatever… they often don’t know what they’re talking about, and love to blow things out of proportion. Don’t let them scare you, and don’t let them scare others. Sure, the areas affected by the quake suck in a lot of ways, but Big News Media is going crazy, as they always do. Whatever they can do to get viewers and make as much money as possible (*ahem* remember Charlie Sheen?).

So, don’t panic, and just do what you can to help. Accurate information will get to you eventually—it’s not worth spreading rumors, making things worse.

That being said, Tofugu won’t really cover too much about the quake. If I do, it’ll either be focused on helping or be some sort of positive quake-related news story. If you want to see everything else, you don’t have to look far.

Stay Positive

Okay, I don’t know if this actually helps, but I think it does. Stay positive, everyone! Things will get better (especially if everyone chips in to help), and Japan will end up a stronger country because of it (and so will its friends an allies, who are helping out).

So, be happy, even in difficult times. Happiness, kindness, and sharing will be the thing that makes this situation better, so you might as well start now.

Over the next week, I imagine we’ll see how things play out, and then figure out the most effective way to help real people in real need. When that happens, I hope you give and help as much as you possibly can!

Any other ways to help folks out without donating money? Let me know, and I’ll add the good ones into the article. Thanks!

P.S. Donating money is good. It helps people. You should do it anyways.