Study Japanese

Japanese is a language I studied through the end of primary school and throughout high school. I was even lucky enough to go to Japan on a 3 week exchange and stay with a fantastic host family which allowed me to see a lot of their every day life, at home and at school, as well as a few of the tourist places as well like Hiroshima, Osaka, Kurashiki, Miyajima and Himeji Castle.

The great thing about staying with a host family was doing all the things my host sister would do. Except for a couple of short trips we stayed with our host families so I got to try a lot of new foods cooked by my host mother and enjoy the wonderful pleasure that is a relaxing japanese bath at the end of a long day. The extended family (grandmother and grandfather) lived with us and my grandmother worked as a beautician at the back of the house so I was very lucky to be made up and dressed in a kimono by her.

I also found during my stay how difficult it was to hold a conversation in Japanese. I think I was studying grade 11 at the time (Australian high schools go up to grade 12 before university) and I found the person I could most easily hold a conversation with were the two neices of my host family who were 5 and 6!!

It has been more than 10 years since I officially studied Japanese and a couple of times I have tried to pick it up and study again in home from books or the internet. Recently I found a fantastic site that I think will really help. It is called Japanese Class and it gives you vocabulary and kanji lessons as well as practice questions and for more advanced users, reading articles from Japanese news sources. I've been enjoying the practice questions and it tracks your progress and encourages you to log in every day.

You can track my progress in the footer on this site and feel free to send me a friend request. My profile is here.

私は勉強するつもりです!!

I have also downloaded a program called Anki which enables me to study kanji in a system similar to flash cards. I have downloaded the JLPT level 4 and 3 kanji and hope to find some more kanji and vocab flash card downloads as well as I progress.

Another site I have been looking at is called iKnow which looks fantastic for the study of Japanese as it uses a combination flash card style system with 4 styles of questions and example sentances. The only down side is though it has a fantastic setup which looks a little easier to use than Japanese Class, it is subscription based and about $90 a year. At this stage I can't afford to splash out with a subscription.

I contemplated starting a journal on Lang-8 but for now I think I want to practice a little more as I feel like I don't know enough vocabulary as yet. Instead I have started yet another blog to try and put a few things into practice and learn some vocab that applies to my day to day life. It is also helping me with the different forms of verbs as the lessons only focus on the plain form. I know this is a problem area for me as school taught ~ます form only until close to the end of high school and I had a terrible time trying to get my head around plain form and ~て form verbs.

The blog I have started is called "and chicken". The japanese word "niwatori" was already taken on blogger so I chose "toniwatori" instead. I've made a couple of simple posts already and learnt a few words such as にわ which means garden.

 と鶏  -  私のブログ

Learn AJAX

My role at work changed at the start of this year and I have a much more hands on role with the web development, specifically programming for web sites. This has meant I need to become a lot more familiar with JavaScript and Ajax as this is one area that I am not very confident in.

Prior to a big upcoming job which was quoted at about 60 hours I sat down to learn a bit more about Ajax and how APIs work. Just quickly, Ajax is a new way to use the JavaScript language with jQuery which makes it very flexible and enables you to run functions and all refresh sections of the website without reloading the whole page. API is an Application Programming Interface which enables you to request information from another site with queries.

For my experiment I decided to set up an Instagram account and then try to get the images from there and post them into the side bar of this blog. It required two API calls to translate my username into a user id and then retrieve the photo information I required.

Secondly I wrote a part PHP and part Ajax web page which enables the customisatio of the script. It gets the information from a form and uses jQuery to update a div to display the script needed to show the images just like in the side bar of this blog.

While this has been a reasonably simple project I learnt a lot about how Ajax is structured compared to JavaScript and it extended my knowledge enough that I had a bit more confidence going into the big job at work. A lot of what I learnt was able to be applied at work straight away and helped me be able to concentrate on my tasks instead of having to learn basics during work hours.

The script is publically available so if you would like to use it or even just see what it does you can take a look.

Instagram photo widget

Making Jam

Our satsuma plum had a fantastic little crop this year and with more plums than we can eat it was a great time to experiment with my first attempt at jam making.

I don't have a jam recipe book yet so I turned to the internet and found a fairly simple recipe with a ratio for ingredients from the Canning USA website. I decided to use this recipe without adding pectin as I read that plums have a naturally high pectin content.

Of course with any first try... I promptly did it wrong! But the jam still worked out really well and is sweet and delicious to our taste. If I had followed the recipe better perhaps it would have been overly sweet??

2lb of plums makes about this much jam

I used 2lb of pitted plums, 2 cups of sugar, 4tbsp water and 2tbsp lemon juice. I followed the rest of the instructions reasonably well, heating to the right temperatures using my new candy thermometer and I tried to check the liquid for a "thick syrup" but then decided I didn't really know what I was looking at and it tasted good so I would bottle it and see.

It was quite fun watching the stewed fruit jam go into the bottles and putting the seals on then watching the plastic tighten up as the jam cooled.

Second batch I used the same amount of sugar but included a 50g packet of "Jam Setta". I also cut each halved plum into 3 instead of leaving them as halves. This made a slightly thicker jam which was a little easier to spread but still had the same great flavour.

You get about the same amount of jam as you have fruit. So 2lb of fruit made a little under 1kg of jam. I like the size of used 190g pesto jars best for bottling the jam.

Of course the best way to sample freshly made jam is with freshly made scones!

Homemade scones and jam... time to buy a cow and make my own cream?