I think the problem is that the web server runs as a different user than my FTP user, so when I installed WordPress some of the files and directories are owned by my FTP user and some by the web server user. This causes problems when the web server tries to run the upgrade scripts.

Probably I should try and get all the files owned by one person, either by downloading the lot to my computer, deleting it on the server, then re-uploading (everything owned my me), or by writing a PHP script that will copy all the files (owned by the web server).

Owned by me is more secure; owned by the web server is more convenient. Choices, choices.

Incidentally, you should be able to see my diary entry here on lang-8.com, together with any corrections, should you feel the need.

Forgot to do my diary sentences yesterday, so let’s start with that:

Wednesday, 9th of November, 2011.

Suiyoubi, nisen jyuuichi nen jyuuichi gatsu, kokonoka.

すいようび、にせん　じゅういち ねん　じゅういち　がつ　ここのか。

水曜日、　二千十一年十一月九日。　（２００１年１１月９日）

At 6:30pm, I went to a friend’s house to play a roleplaying -game.

Watashi wa gogo roku ji han tomodachi no uchi ni rorupuraaingu geemu o asobini ikimashita.

わたし　は　ごご　ろくじ　はん　ともだち　の　うち　に　ロルプラーイング　ゲーム　を　あそびに　いきました。

私は午後六時半友達の家にロルプラーイングゲームを遊びに行きました。

I’m not quite sure I’ve got the grammar right here.  ”Asobu” (あそぶ、遊ぶ）is “play”, and “Asobi ni” is “… in order to play”, so combine that with “go” (iku, いく, 行く) and you get “go in order to play”.  However, I’m combining this with “…to a friend’s house” (tomodachi no uchi ni, ともだち　の　うちに、友達の家に), and I’m not sure that actually works.

It’s actually beginning to be difficult to come up with new sentences, as I’m not doing much at the moment, given I’m taking annual leave just now!  I’d say “on holiday” only I’m not actually going anywhere

Let’s see…

“I didn’t go to the store today.”

Kyou wa mise ni ikimasen deshita.

きょう　は　みせ　に　いきませｎ　でした。

きょうは店に行きませんでした。

So: today.  Well, technically yesterday, as it’s now after midnight.

Thursday, 10th November 2011

Mokuyoubi, nisen jyuuichi nen jyuuichi gatsu tooka.

もくようび、　にせん　じゅういち　ねん　じゅういち　がつ　とおか。

木曜日、　二千十一年十一月十日。（２００１年１１月１０日）

Uhhh, let’s see.   I recorded the latest episode of the Nearly Enough Dice Podcast, but I don’t know the word for “record”.  Shall we go with “make”?

From seven twenty p.m. to eight forty p.m. I made a podcast.

Watashi wa gogo shijini nijyuppun kara gogo hachiji yonjuppun made poddokyasuto o tsukurimashita.

わたし　は　ごご　しちじ　から　ごご　はちじ　よんじゅっぷん　まで　ポッドキャスト　を　つくりました。

私は午後七時から午後八時四十分までポッドキャストを造りました。

I didn’t go anywhere today.

Kyou wa dokonimo ikimasen deshita.

きょう　は　どこにも　いきません　でちた。

今日はどこにも行きませんでした。

I’m going to have to actually start going places, or I’m going to have to start repeating myself  Fortunately I’m going to a wedding reception this weekend…

So:  Today is Tuesday, the 8th of November 2011.

Kyou wa kayoubi, ni sen jyuu ichi nen jyuu ichi gatsu youka desu.

きょう　は　かようび、　に　せん　じゅう　いち　ねん　じゅう　いち　がつ　ようか　です。

今日は火曜日、二千十一年十一月八日です。

Actually, it would be written more:

今日は火曜日、２０１１年１１月８日です。

I walked to the shop at 2pm.

Watashi wa gogo niji ni aruite mise ni ikimashita.

わたし　は　ごご　にじ　に　あるいて　みせ　に　いきました。

私は午後二時に歩いて店に行きました。

I’m not sure how to say “I rendered 3D pictures using DAZ|Studio and LuxRender via the LuxRenderDS plugin”, so I’ll go with:

Today I made pictures.

Kyo wa watashi ga e o tsukurimashita.

きょう　は　わたし　が　え　を　つくりました。

今日は私が絵を造りました。

I think I could use “conpyuutaa de” (コンピューターで）to mean “using my computer”, but let’s not risk it.

Given that I’m actually off this week, I’m going to see if I can do this every day – assuming I do enough interesting things to write two sentences about! And I’m going to do it in Kanji as well.

Typing it up on the Blog is actually a little easier than doing it by hand, as it guesses the Kanji predictive text-style as I type the kana.  But I still have to recognise the right Kanji as they come up, and I plan to hand-write them as well, for practice.

So here’s today’s effort:

Today I went to Japanese Class by bus and subway.

Watashi wa kyou basu to chikatetsu de nihongo no kurassu ni ikimashita.

わたし　は　きょう　ばす　と　ちかてつ　で　にほんご　の　くらっす　に　いきました。

私は今日バスと地下鉄で日本語のクラッスに行きました。

I played computer games today from 4pm to 4:30pm.

Watashi wa kyou conpyuutaa geimu gogo yoji kara yojihan made asobimashita.

わたし　は　きょう　コンピューター　ゲーム　ごご　よじ　から　よじはん　まで　あそびました。

私は今日コンピューターゲーム午後四時から四時半まで遊びました。

Addendum:  I’m sure that I’d already changed the setting that stopped Japanese characters displaying properly.  I wonder if a recent WordPress update changed it back again.  I do hope it’s not retroactively broken previous posts

Listen more. Watch more. Read more (or any!). There’s a lot of resources out there – free audiobooks, podcasts, comics, books, websites, YouTube videos… Really no excuse! The “Read Real Japanese” book comes in here, too.

I doubt I’ll ever go the whole All Japanese All The Time “turn your computer’s language to Japanese, only listen to Japanese music, only watch Japanese TV and movies, only read Japanese books” hog, but there is certainly a lot more I could be doing.

Actually talking to people

Yeah. That. I mean, there’s no realy point learning Japanese unless I can eventually make myself understood, by a real Japanese person. There’s a bunch of hurdles here, including shyness and my pathalogical fear of making a fool of myself! My understanding is that there are folk on Skype who will trade Japanese-speaking practise for English-speaking practice, and there are regular Japanese classes run in Glasgow by the same folk who do the Japanese film season.

Even if I restrict myself to writing (no scary human interaction!), there’s lang-8.com, where users will correct my written Japanese in exchange for me correcting other users’ English writing. I do have an account there, I’m just not confident enough to write my own sentences yet…

In Conclusion

Well, that pretty much wraps up this little mini-series of posts. Past, present and future!? I think I’ve mapped out what I should be doing more, it’s just a question of whether or not I will be doing it!? I think I’m going to have to have a bit of a ruminate over all of this.

But not tomorrow – because tomorrow is my birthday!

The main thing to do is continue with Gradint. I’ve been thinking about perhaps expanding my Gradint listening to two half-hour podcasts a day, calling the second one “Gradint Nights” for my journey home. That way, instead of learning five words or phrases per day, I could learn ten. If I make the two podcasts use separate vocabulary lists, there shouldn’t be that much problem with mucking up the various intervals. The only issue is, can my brain cope with ten new items a day?

Another thought for “Gradint Nights” is to use the “poetry” feature of Gradint – basically, it acts slightly differently if you tell it that a certain set of sounds files are a “poem”, and have to be learned in sequence. I thought it might be fun to learn some of the lyrics of my Anime score playlist so I can sing along. It would be different enough from Gradint Classic that it shouldn’t interfere, but still lead to learning and practice. Plus me looking like a fool occasionally.

The only problem with that is I would have to split up the song file into individual lines, which is incredibly tedious.

While I’m on the subject of Gradint, I might want to set it so that it does recognition rather than production – that is, can I understand a Japanese sentence, rather than try and speak it, at least to start with. There’s a command-line switch for that (well, to go from production to half production half recognition), so it wouldn’t be that hard.

As the daily RTK reps decline, I should have more time to do the Tae Kim and Core Anki decks. That would be a good addition to the purely audio Gradint podcast. Given Anki’s flexibility, I can practice kanji to meaning, kanji to reading, reading to kanji.

And then there’s the All Japanese All The Time Sentence Method, which has always intrigued me. It’s mostly the mechanics of setting it up that daunts me just now. I’m kinda-sorta doing it with Tae Kim, both Gradint and Anki, but is that enough? The Core2K/6K deck comes with 5000+ sentences, but I’m not sure what the best order would be, or how to sort the sentences into that best order. And do I want to make sure I have the vocabulary and grammar down first? Or is it best to learn the vocab and grammar through learning the sentences?

Next post: What I Could Be Doing – Immersion and special bonus section!

A braver person would label this section “What I will do”, but I’m not, so there! So basically this will be a place for me to put down some thoughts about what I could, should, and maybe will be doing in the future.

Kanji and Kana

Continue with the RTK reps, obviously. At some point, I should get RTK Vol. 3, which will give me another thousand kanji, specifically the remaining new Jouyou Kanji that were added in 2010.

The Kana decks now only give me one or two cards per week, so they’re no trouble.

What I really should be doing, however, is actually using Kanji and Kana. I get a bit of practice (especially with Kana) when I do the Tae Kim and Core Anki decks, but I don’t practice going from a Japanese word to the Kanji, or from a spoken sentence to the written one.

I also should try reading actual Japanese – there are raw Manga scans out there, and I have an iPod app that has daily news in Manga form. I do occasionally attempt to puzzle through what one says, but I usually give up fairly quickly. I also have a “Read Real Japanese” book with audio versions of all the texts; that’s definitely a resource I should be using.

Another avenue is finding Japanese subtitles to things, especially Japanese TV and film. It’s been shown that same-language subtitles help with literacy (assuming there’s some there to start with). I’ve found a few (all of Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo and some of JIN), but haven’t really made a point of regularly sitting down and watching.

Oh, and I should learn name and place-name Kanji at some point.

These are my ongoing Japanese learning actions.? Nice short section so everything all at once…

Kanji

I use Anki daily – more specifically, I use the iPhone app on my iPod touch. It’s really handy, especially as my daily commute has specific “dead” times – waiting for the bus, travelling on the Underground – where I can just get out the iPod and do some reps.

Usually I “write” the Kanji with a finger on a nearby surface – my other hand, the iPod, my leg – but when I’m doing reps at home (usually late on a non-work night because without the usual commute to do I forgot) I write them in a graph-paper exercise pad. Sometimes (mostly when I’m role-playing, for some reason) I get out the plain A5 pad from my jacket pocket and my brush pen and try some calligraphy.

I have some other decks in Anki, but RTK is still generating anywhere between 40 and 80 due cards each day, so I don’t often get enough time to do them.

Vocabulary and Grammar

I’m doing my daily Gradint “podcast”, so that’s five words / phrases per day.

When I get my Kanji reps done quickly, I try and do some of the Tae Kim grammar deck (much easier now that I’m learning the vocab via Gradint), as well as the Core2k/6k deck (also helped by Gradint). My Kana decks still occasionally throw up a card, so I do them when they appear.

Immersion

I’m listening to my Anime score playlist on my iPod, and occasionally remembering to listen to Japanese podcasts.

Next post: What I Could Be Doing – Kanji and Kana

Japanese learning sites put a lot of emphasis on “immersion” – listening to as much Japanese throughout your day as possible. Although at the start you won’t understand much (if at all), the idea is that you will “tune” your ear to the language, getting an idea of how people actually speak Japanese, the word choices, rhythms and melody.

For immersion, I have done the following:

• I have watched a few “doramas” – Japanese dramas:

  • Musashi, a Samurai drama about the most famous swordsman in Japanese history.
  • Mr. Brain, an extremely silly but fun CSI-esque police comedy-drama where an eccentric neuroscientist solves crimes.
  • JIN, in which a brain surgeon may – or may not – have travelled back in time to the Edo period, Life on Mars-style.
  • Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo, where a woman who dreams of being a teacher has to teach Japanese to nine eccentric foreigners. A little like a Japanese version of Mind Your Language

  I made a point of only watching JIN and Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo without subtitles – and would do the same for Mr. Brain and Musashi if I could find subtitle-free versions. What I would particularly like is Japanese subtitles for all of them…

• I also watch Japanese movies when I can, including The Samurai Trilogy and as much Kurosawa as I can find. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find unsubtitled Japanese-language versions.

  Glasgow University has an annual showing of four contemporary Japanese films in February, and I’ve been to two years worth of those.

• I have subscribed to a few Japanese podcasts, so I can listen to them while at work, but I often forget to do that.

• Round about the same time I started with Gradint, I switched my iPod playlist to Anime themes. So now if I’m listening to music, I’m listening to Japanese music. I really need to go through and cull the English-language ones (of which there are a surprising number). I think I’ll keep the purely instrumental ones, though.

Next post: What I am Doing

I suppose I should count the Japanese classes I took a year ago (nearly 18 months ago, now). There is some debate over whether taking formal classes is good or not, but as said previously, I definitely think that neglecting my Kanji study for the vocabulary and grammar I leaned in the class was a mistake. I would have taken the Intermediate class this year, but there wasn’t enough interest for them to run one. I’ve not been keeping up with my “Japanese Class” Anki deck since the class finished, so I’ve forgotten most of it by now.

The new thing I’m doing for vocab and grammar is using Gradint, a program that takes matched sound files and creates half-hour “language tapes”. It uses a similar “Graduated Interval” system to Anki, except it’s entirely audio. That makes it ideal for listening on the bus into work – I can’t read on buses without getting horribly motion sick, so I can’t do Anki reps. This adds thirty minutes per day of extra Japanese study, without taking time that I would be using for something else.

I say “new thing”, but I’ve just listened to my 53rd episode this morning. At the moment, it’s loaded up with the example sentences taken from Tae Kim’s Guide To Learning Japanese, with vocabulary taken from Core2k+Core6k interleaved, so that I learn the words that appear in the example sentences before I try and learn the sentences themselves.

The sound files themselves come from the respective Anki decks’ media, and I extracted all various bits of information that Gradint needs via some custom Python scripts. The process was a bit laboured – export from Anki to a tab-separated text file, convert that to a CSV, write Python script to extract data from the CSV and move the sound files to the correct directories.

It would be nice to be able to do this automatically, but each Anki deck has its own structure, so there isn’t really a way of making a generic script that could parse each one and work out what’s the Japanese text, what’s the English text, what’s the reference to the sound file, and so on. But given that I’ve got 6000 vocabulary words and 700-odd grammar sentences, I think I’ve got enough for getting on with for now.

The next thing I wanted to do was to automate as much of the process of generating daily lessons as possible, on the theory that the more I have to do the more likely I am to forget something.

Setting up a cron job to run Gradint daily wasn’t that hard, but I still had to get the resulting episode from my work computer (where everything is) to my iPod. After yet more Python hacking, learning about RSS feeds and iTunes podcasts, I had a script that would take a Gradint episode and create a podcast entry for it in the RSS file. All I need to do then is point my iTunes at home to that RSS feed, and the latest episode automatically downloads. Easy! I even put the kana for each word/phrase in the feed as “lyrics” as a pronounciation guide.

Next post: What I Have Done – Immersion