My site has now moved to newer pastures you can find it here

Another to start the day, Aya Matsuura has some great songs which I'm sure you can find more via youtube or itunes.



In other news moving to my new web host is almost sorted and I've selected a new theme that should hopefully look pretty nice.

Following on with the trend here is another great J band I recently had the joy of being recommended by Squintox on Twitter.



Keep the recommendations coming

Well on my quest to find more Japanese music to my liking I came across the above named band かりゆし58 think there excellent. I've included one of there songs below many more on You Tube, now just to get there album.

Anybody else have recommendations?

Well not done one of these in a while a quick update on my current sentence stats.

The 1799 seen cards in this deck contain:
873 total unique kanji.
Old Jouyou: 843 of 1945 (43.3%).
New Jouyou: 16 of 191 (8.4%).
Jinmeiyou (reg): 7 of 645 (1.1%).
Jinmeiyou (var): 0 of 145 (0.0%).
7 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 80 of 80 (100.0%).
Grade 2: 160 of 160 (100.0%).
Grade 3: 165 of 200 (82.5%).
Grade 4: 126 of 200 (63.0%).
Grade 5: 89 of 185 (48.1%).
Grade 6: 71 of 181 (39.2%).
JuniorHS: 152 of 939 (16.2%).

Deck created: 7.5 months ago
Total number of cards: 1799
Total number of facts: 1799

Card Maturity
Mature cards: 1241 (69.0%)
Young cards: 558 (31.0%)
Unseen cards: 0 (0.0%)
Average interval: 81.5 days

Card State
Active cards: 1798 (99.9%)
Inactive cards: 0 (0.0%)
Suspended cards: 1 (0.1%)

Correct Answers
Mature cards: 90.4% (2074 of 2295)
Young cards: 87.3% (15622 of 17889)
First-seen cards: 91.5% (1744 of 1906)

Trying to fill all of the grades of the Jouyou list is proving to be difficult ^^

Recently I've been trying to find way to increase my productivity when it comes to mining sentences or mining words that I'm yet able to read. It's not always the most productive way to go around reading random Japanese text from what ever the source may be and then collecting sentences for the bits you don't know, if your like me you prefer to actually read what you can then later come back and mine what you don't understand although in practice this isn't always the case, as we forget/misplace the source of the material.

This spurred me on to find some software to record what I was interested in and wanted to mine but that also takes up very little time and allows me to get on with what I'm doing at the same time, less distractions is always a good thing especially when learning a language.

The software that I found that had all the features I wanted and more was Evernote basically its a piece of software that allows you to take notes either by manually writing a note into the software or selecting what it is your wanting to remember and clicking save, the great thing about it is you can quickly tag notes with "Japanese" for example and then you can easily go back and find all the notes you've taken with Japanese as the tag. It also has a huge range of features which include.

- Syncing across many platforms including the IPhone
- can be used directly in your browser by just selecting text and clicking the little applet in your bookmarks bar
- will save anything from entire web pages and single text and it doesn't save as an image it saves exactly how the page would be so you can select text from within the software excellent when getting round to mining the sentences
- Can take screen shot's of whatever your viewing great for when reading a Manga offline

- and much more!

Below I've created a quick video on how I often use Evernote to collect sentences/vocab for later mining, what I didn't record was the screen capture facility that takes a snapshot of your entire screen as a note great for when working with PDF's etc.

For the full size video click here

One other great thing I forgot to mention is that if you have an IPhone with the Evernote software installed you can take a picture of a sign say a Japanese one while your walking about, which then automatically syncs with your notes on your laptop, so you can quickly collect notes of signs that your yet able to read.

Just a quick update on the savings front which is mostly for my trip to Japan its been going pretty good I've made sure to put some of my money from my wage into a savings account each month although not as much as I would like. Once I've paid of my debts I vow to at least double the amount I save every month if I'm going to save enough for my year long trip to Japan then I really need to save more as at the current rate I'll have only just over half of what I need.

Progress - OK