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For months White Rabbit Press had been out of the Volume One of their extremely popular Japanese kanji flashcards. Volume One covers all kanji needed for levels 3 and 4 (the easiest) of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. We finally got our shipment in last week.

Here’s the thing. I said in the above paragraph these cards are ‘extremely popular‘ and they are. Or at least they almost always are. For some reason from the moment we got this shipment in, after months of drought, we haven’t sold a single box. This is extremely unusual and quite frankly disturbing to Clay.

Poor Clay.

Any kind soul out there want to have pity on Clay and buy a box? It certainly would make his day to sell at least one this week. We used to sell at least one if not several a day and now this…

Seriously, these cards are the best on the market. If you enjoy having something physical to hold and want to learn the 300 or so most useful kanji, these flashcards are great for on the go studying.

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We have been waiting a few months (funabin/sea mail takes a long time!) for a new beginners textbook to arrive. 50 Keys to Opening the New World of Japanese was highly recommended by a very good customer a few months back. After talking with the author we decided to stock the textbook. It arrived a few days ago.

HORRORS UPON HORRORS
The problem is customs really did a number on the box. The shipping company packed the books well with bubble wrap for every five books and then wrapped all books pretty well. But when it got here most of the bubble wrap was gone and the books were loose. The box (what’s left of it) was in pieces.

While the books are basically in good condition, about half of the books had a broken CD. The publisher will send me new CDs to replace them, though.

Today we are starting to sell the books that had a good CD. The corners are roughed up a little, (see picture for the worst example) but it isn’t too bad. Still, it kind of loses that ‘new book’ feel to see the upper and lower corner buffed like that.

If you are looking for a comprehensive beginners textbook using Romaji, this may be an excellent choice. I don’t recommend relying on romaji too much even at the very beginning stages, but for businessmen, travelers, and those who have no intention to learn written Japanese, this textbook sounds great.

‘50 Keys to Opening the New World of Japanese’ is a complete Japanese language course for English speakers commencing or returning to Japanese study; examples are in roma-ji. As the title suggests, this text breaks down fifty of the most important Japanese lessons into manageable keys. 50 Keys provides an excellent grounding in everyday and business Japanese through clear examples and grammar explanations written specifically for English speakers.

All materials are in one publication (Grammar, vocabulary, exercises and a CD for listening practice). Instead of buying several books and CDs, use this book for your complete beginner’s course.

50 Keys to Opening the New World of Japanese

Regular $36
Damaged new books: $29.80 (17% off)

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Many websites use what’s called ‘Captcha’ to make sure those filling out comment forms or user registrations are actual humans.  It is the annoying little ‘type the obscure word you see in the scrambled picture above’ bit.

Well, we were getting quite a large number of spam bot user account attempts (The user account has to have a valid email address so none of the attempts really worked, but it was a problem) .  A few days ago I turned on a Captcha for the user registration page.

This morning I checked the new user list and noticed the spam account attempts were stopped dead in their tracks after turning on the Captcha.  But… so were the ‘real’ human accounts.  We didn’t have a single new user sign up for three days at TJP.  I tested it myself with a dummy account and sure enough, it gave an error and wouldn’t let me sign up.

I immediately emailed Phreadom (our resident code genius) and he quickly fixed the problem.  Within an hour or two we had 18 new signups (all 100% human).  There must have been dozens if not hundreds of people trying to sign up during our Captcha down days, but no one complained.  If you were part of the silent majority, sorry!

I’m just happy things are working again.

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When I go somewhere and know there will be at least a few minutes of reading time, I like to take a few books. I really should just limit myself to a single title and ‘rough it’ with just that, but I usually like to pepper my reading time with different subjects or tastes. I never know just what mood I will be in after all.

Of course carrying several books (especially thick books on the English or Japanese languages…) can get heavy. That’s why I was immediately interested when Amazon announced their Kindle e-book reader a few months back.

The screen is supposed to be greatly superior to other electronic e-book readers on the market. I greatly prefer paper to reading online, but the Kindle is supposed (I haven’t tried it yet) to be about as easy on the eyes as paper. One reviewer said after five minutes he forgets he isn’t reading from a real book.

It connects with the Amazon store wirelessly similar to a cell phone. This means wherever you go (in the US at least) you can buy a book, download blog posts, or get newspapers and magazines.

I was thinking of getting one for our upcoming Japan trip, but decided not to just yet. We will have some major expenses with the new baby and it will take a lot of e-books (cheaper than their printed versions) to make up for the $400 investment. That and I wouldn’t be able to use the wireless feature in Japan.

Still, it is definitely on my shopping list.

Have you tried it? What do you think?

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We are expecting our second child. The due date is late September and as with Makoto, we will have the baby in Japan.  This time however, we will have a two-year-old with us!

When Makoto was born, I made three trips back and forth between Japan and Florida in a span of five months.  Maybe I’m getting old or perhaps my wanderlust for adventure has waned, but I don’t want to do that again.  This time I will go with Makoto and Yumi later this month (May 28th) and come back with Makoto, Yumi, and Baby sometime in October.

Also last time I was the only person running TheJapanShop.com.  I hired a daughter of a friend to do the packing but I handled everything else by email or by staying in Japan a very short time each trip.  It was an incredible amount of stress and difficult being away from Yumi and Makoto, but amazingly we survived.  This time, we have several other people who can handle the majority of the business without me.  It’s nice not to be needed.  I will of course do a lot remotely (Thanks to Mr. GotoMyPC.com) and by email.

We will be in Japan for a little over four months.  Not having the normal day-to-day business work to do, I will have more time to work on TheJapanesePage.com.  Speaking of TJP, Yumi’s morning sickness came just when we were having extreme trouble with moving to the new servers a few months back.   Yumi’s energy level went down just as Makoto’s energy level skyrocketed and the troubles at TJP multiplied.  I didn’t get much sleep then

We are excited but it will be quite a trip.  (Think Makoto, a newborn, and two tired parents on a return trip)

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Today is Wednesday. In TheJapanShop.com land this means it is Super Suiyoubi! Today we are spotlighting two new readers: Read Real Japanese Essays and Read Real Japanese Fiction.

The cover price is $24. Today’s super price is $14—$10 off!

I’ve only read through about a quarter of the Essays book, but I’m impressed. Both books come with a CD and every word or phrase is explained in detail.

Here is what I wrote for our Super Suiyoubi Newsletter folks:

From Clay: About a year ago I was complaining how few good readers exist for beginning and intermediate students of Japanese.

Well, The awesome Graded Readers series with CDs came on the scene, Giles Murray published his new Exploring Japanese Literature, and more recently we’ve released our own $5 downloadable readers with MP3 files.

These two new books (Essays and Fiction) add to this explosion of good readers for Japanese students.

The stories are short (very good for when you don’t have a lot of time)
and thoroughly commented.  Unlike Murray’s Breaking and Exploring
books, there is no English translation, but nearly every word or phrase
is given in the gloss and explanation.  I think this is a good way to
force the student to parse each phrase independently.

The Japanese is written vertically like a Japanese newspaper or novel
giving it an ‘authentic’ feel.   All in all, these two books (the
Essays and the Fiction) are excellent.

However, I wouldn’t recommend this for the beginner.  Although every
word and phrase is explained, it is still pretty high level Japanese;
the stories are written for native Japanese readers.    The ambitious
upper beginner may learn a lot, but only with much effort.  This is
really for intermediate students and up.

To see if this book is right for you, please click on the image (on the product page) for a few scanned images.

These books are selling fast. We sold four of each since I started typing this!  These are really nice readers, though;  I’m glad they are going to good homes.

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Here is our dog, Tevye trying to get some shuteye before Makoto comes storming in. Tevye likes to sleep on the couch. This morning, I found him asleep on top of this tiny pillow.

And here is a top down view:

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Our latest $5 download reader is the Mouse Bride story.  It is a charming Japanese folk tale about a father-mouse and mother-mouse trying to find the ‘greatest man on earth’ for their one and only daughter to marry. One nice aspect of this story from a language learner’s point of view is similar sentence forms are repeated with the different characters. Beginners can get a lot out of this product, but hiragana and a very basic Japanese vocabulary is required.

This pack includes 23 Megs of:

* An E-Book in Flash for interactive reading and listening
* A 11 Page PDF (for printing)
* A slow MP3 recording of the story
* A normal speed MP3 recording
* And as a special Flash bonus, “40 Common Japanese Family Names”–click on any name to hear it read
* Works with PCs or Macs (the only difference is PC users use the .exe file for the Flash E-Book and Mac users use the flash embedded HTML file

In the flash file, click on any sentence in the story to hear it instantly read by a native speaker. Print the PDF for offline review. The PDF and Flash program contain the story, a running glossary, and extensive grammar and vocabulary notes. The Flash program also has a button to display a loose English translation if needed.

Drop the MP3 files into your MP3 player to listen when away from the computer. Or burn the MP3s to a CD to listen in your car.

As an extra bonus, we are including the “40 Common Japanese Family Names” Flash file which helps beginners learn super common names.

For more information, please see the bottom of our $5 Instant Gratification Download page.

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This morning, my friend Gary and I were talking about the competition Apple’s iPhone faces with the new Google phone and others. He asked if I had heard about Microsoft’s myPhone—or perhaps spelled, miPhone.

I hadn’t heard of the miPhone, but with a little imagination here is an early concept photo:

Now if they could only get Skype to work with the miPhone…

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We just completed our fifth downloadable product. Like the Shitakiri Suzume e-book, this one is a reader. It is the story of 一寸法師 Issunboushi, a pinky-sized man full of courage. Click on any sentence in the Flash e-book to hear it read, print out the story with a running glossary, and listen to the story read at normal speed or at slow speed. All for only $5!

Drop the MP3 files into your MP3 player to listen when away from the computer. Or burn the MP3s to a CD to listen in your car.

As an extra bonus, we are including the “6 Common Counters” Flash file which helps beginners learn how to count objects.

Beginners can get a lot out of it, but you definitely need to know hiragana well and a very basic vocabulary too.

This pack includes 25 Megs of:

• An E-Book in Flash for interactive reading and listening
• A 13 Page PDF (for printing)
• A slow MP3 recording of the story
• A normal speed MP3 recording
• And as a special Flash bonus, “6 Common Counters”–click on any number to hear it read
• Works with PCs or Macs (the only difference is PC users use the .exe file for the Flash E-Book and Mac users use the flash embedded HTML file

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Yesterday Makoto, Tevye, and Hana were all fixated on a single tree in our neighbor’s yard. Curious, Yumi and I looked a little closer:

It was a fat little squirrel munching on an acorn while sitting on a branch. I snapped a photo with my phone. Trying to get a little closer to get a better picture, the little fella left the lunch room.

Recently if we want to get the dogs (and Makoto) outside quickly, we simply yell, 「リス！」 リス risu is squirrel in Japanese.

The kanji (hardly ever used) is fun:

栗鼠 【りす】 Chestnut (栗) and Mouse (鼠)

It was a silly thing to do, but 栗鼠 was actually one of the first kanji I learned. I don’t think I could write it now, but I remember using it to show off my amazing kanji skills in front of a Junior High class in Japan. I’m sure it looked horrible and I really messed up the stroke order, but they got a kick out of that.

Who knows, maybe the squirrel above was really munching on a chestnut?

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The one and only Prof. Breen chimed in yesterday (thank you!) about the strange RSS feed at TJP.  Right now the front RSS button only feeds blogs and group posts.  This isn’t very useful and Phreadom (our super admin) quickly installed a RSS feed for the forums.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work with many feed readers.  Phreadom is working on that.  It does, however, work very well with Firefox’s Live Bookmarks.  If you use Firefox, please give it a shot!

1) Log into TJP.
2) Go here (or go to the forums and click on the RSS button at the top right)
3) Choose which forums you would like to subscribe to (or choose all) and press ‘Submit’

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We are releasing a new $5 download pack today. This time it covers 25 of the most useful kotowaza (Japanese proverbs).

This pack includes 27 Megs of:

• An E-Book in Flash for interactive study and listening
• A 27 Page PDF (for printing or onscreen study)
• A slow recording of each example sentence (heard in the Flash program)
• A normal speed recording of each example sentence (heard in the Flash program)
• And a 15 minute MP3 with each proverb, semi-literal translation, and example sentence read slow and normal with space for repetition
• Works with PCs or Macs (the only difference is PC users use the .exe file for the Flash E-Book and Mac users use the flash embedded HTML file in the Data folder)

To read more about it, click here (scroll to the bottom) for all of our $5 instant gratification download products. We also sell it on our TheJapanShop.com Kotowaza download pack page.

We are hoping to have another one ready to be released next week!

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There is nothing more uniting for Americans of all persuasions than the universal hatred of April 15th, Tax Day. There are no Democrats or Republicans on April 15th—just one gaggle of sleep-deprived, grumpy folks waiting in line at the post office.

I don’t know why I’m complaining; it only takes 60,000 pages to explain the tax code.  The environmentalists, on the other hand, really should be upset.

Einstein is said to have murmured, “The hardest thing to understand in the world is the (US) income tax.”

That quote is precisely why he is now known as a genius.

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While reading the TJP forums, a user named Mattan used this word:

“The girl on youtube is like way more キモフィス・・・”

(check out the link above for context if you are interested in the ‘girl on youtube’)

So, curiosity got the best of me. What could キモフィス mean!?!

Googling, I found this site. It is nice to know I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what キモフィス meant!?!  (For the record, Yumi hadn’t a clue either)

It seems there is a progression of 気持ち悪い spinoffs:

キモい　-> キモス ->　キモフィス

キモフィス is some 70x more キモス than キモイ

I’m glad that is clear.

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I get the Monday edition of Investor’s Business Daily which I receive each Saturday—it is always fun to see two days ahead in the future. Reading it this morning*, I found a short article about a new craze in Japan called Eternal Poppety-Pop.

Apparently, many people find popping the bubbles in bubble wrap to be shear diabolical joy. I don’t have this problem; I spend a few hundred dollars buying bubble wrap every month or so. I just don’t like popping my pennies away!

But I do remember a friend (in his fifties, no less) who visited our office one day and found the bubble wrap. One bubble by one bubble (until I could wrestle him to the ground) he gleefully popped and popped and popped.

This company may be on to something. (Incidentally, my friend is no longer welcome to my office.)

I had to do some Googling to find the ‘real’ Japanese name but here it is: むげんプチプチ

むげん　【無限】 mugen infinite
プチプチ puchi puchi the sound of bubbles popping

And I believe here is the company’s website.

Could this be the next たまごっち? (or maybe it already is… I’m not in Japan to say, but I still have my たまごっち)

–

* I probably should feel guilty for reading the Monday paper on a Sunday; there could be dire time-space continuum consequences after all.

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This morning I was woken by Hana licking me right on my chops.

Drifting between Sleepyland and Good-Morningland, I was a little confused about what was happening.

The incident got me thinking of a time when Hana and Tevye were puppies. They loved to show their puppy love back then; any face within five yards was fair game.

They also loved cat poop.*

I had the latter problem in mind when we took them in for one of their first vet checkups.

But before we could even open our mouths, one of the nurses got within that five yard range and declared, “I just LOVE puppy kisses!!” whilst and at the same time letting the dogs have their way on her face.

I hated doing it, but I had to ask the question. I’m not sure, but I suspect the nurse’s next action was to gargle—and gargle well.

–

* In fact, it was a big (and nasty) problem for the longest time. We lived with my parents and their four cats back then.

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Previously, I mentioned some minor troubles with the iPhone I bought last December.  Last week I finally sent in the last loaner and received my second ‘real’ replacement iPhone.  I had two loaners and two ‘new’ phones in the last month or so.  Including my original phone from December, that means the current phone I have now is #5.

I am very pleased with the iPhone and don’t regret buying it.  But I would love to not have to use iTunes and would LOVE to see Skype running on it.  I’m going to Japan next month.  Since I can’t use the phone part of the iPhone, Skype would be a life saver.  I can use my laptop of course, but that just isn’t as sexy.

This website talks about using a third party software to run Skype.  I haven’t tried it yet, but I certainly don’t want to do anything to the phone that would require yet another call to Apple support. 

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Yesterday we noticed a little rumbling in the sky. I kept saying ‘thunder’ to Makoto and he quickly matched the sound of the word with the sound in the sky. Yumi did the same with かみなり kaminari.

We didn’t think much of it until suddenly the wind and rain really picked up. Looking out the window, it seemed as if a hurricane had arrived. I knew there was bad weather north of us the day before but I didn’t know it was heading in our direction.

I took Makoto to take a look at our back yard. I saw a kind of large limb on the ground and pointed it out to him. Then looking over we saw our huge pine tree flat on the ground;  half had fallen into our neighbor’s yard. This was a big tree.

We had noticed the tree not looking too healthy, but I had no idea it was that weak. Of course the wind was very strong.

After the rain slacked, I marched over to my neighbor’s house. He hadn’t heard the noise and was surprised to see new foliage in his yard.

He was very nice about it saying at least no one was hurt. I told him I would call him on Monday after talking with the insurance people. I hope the tree can be removed and the fence fixed this week.

On the good news front, while in my neighbors yard, he spotted a golf ball in his grass.  He asked if it was ours.  I said I didn’t think so, but it could have been.  He gave it to me to give to Makoto.  For a straight hour Makoto played with that golf ball tossing it in the open umbrella I had just used.  The best things in life are free.

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Too late. Makoto managed to text message and call my sister. He also found out how to get to the camera function. Here are his unedited masterpieces:

And here is the only picture that actually had an object in it—his foot:

I’m not sure if he is ready for the mainstream yet, but even in these early pictures he shows greater talent than many avant garde artists. Stay tuned.

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