How about some music to inspire your Japanese learning

I learnt a lot of Japanese, in particular kanji and an ability to read the scripts more fluently, as a result of spending too much time singing karaoke. My excuse, if you'll allow me to go off on a small tangent, was the fact that my host father in Japan owned a Sake shop and we spent many evenings delivering goods to local "Snack bars" (a very mini version of the local pub). My host family lived in what was then the urban fringe and there were very few 'foreigners' around, so during the course of these deliveries I was of great interest to the locals and often called upon to sing; consequently I have no desire to sing "My Way" or "Yesterday" ever again. However, I do quite enjoy a bit of a sing and I began to look for and sing Japanese songs that appealed to me. This was great for my vocabulary and kanji. I would then rent CDs from the rental CD shop (at the time I was amazed that you could actually rent CDs) and study the lyrics. I still do this in a manner of sorts, only now I head to the internet rather than the shop.

So I guess the point I am trying to make is that if you like music, then it is a fabulous means to further engage and connect with a language. As a result, I occasionally throw songs out to my students, with the lyrics, hoping that some of them will like what they hear and explore the language further through song. Although all students will not relate to this I do know that many have and have also gone on to look for more. On top of that, many of them know more of the latest in J-Pop through their interest in Anime, Japanese TV dramas and video games. All in all, listening to music in any language that you are learning is going to help with motivation as well as vocabulary and even grammar. The best videos to find on You Tube are those that have the lyrics as subtitles, something that happens a bit on TV in Japan.

The following are either songs that I have shown to the class and used to help teach a certain phrase or topic or songs that I have recently discovered and plan to somehow weave into a Japanese lesson somewhere down the line...

For time:

For weather and seasons:

Just found this one; will perhaps use it to look at the Japanese syllabry:

And for a little bit of "family" topic related fun, you can't go past this one:

• Do you use music when learning Japanese?

• What Japanese songs do you know that could help with vocabulary, grammar or kanji?

• Please add any in the comments below.

Posted via web from Js Nihongo

Windows Movie Maker

It's holidays here in NSW and holidays means a little extra time to investigate things further. So, inspired by Dianne Krausse's clip Que savez-vous, and compelled by the fact that I needed to come up with some trivia questions and challenges for our Year 7 Languages Day, I sat down to create some simple photo story / movies using Windows Movie Maker. Now, for the seasoned campaigners out there, some of the following may be old news or no news, but lets hope there is some good news in here. Regardless, having found the time to play around in movie maker, I discovered a couple of useful things to share:

Video Effects - In the Edit Movie menu of movie maker is the "View video effects" button. Clicking this provides you with the opportunity to change your photo or video clip in different ways - subtle and not so subtle. If you are using a clip that is not of the best quality, use the "Film age, Old" effect; I found that as it is designed to make it look older, it covers up the fact that the clip is old or pixelated - not perfect, but it helped.

Splitting Clips - The ability to split clips into two or more parts and to take snap shots of movie frames enables you to have some fun with your video clips and edit them. Change the order of events in a clip, place photos or text in between parts of a video clip or simply edit out certain parts of the clip. My first ever attempt at a screencast is at the link here to help you with this - I did try to embed it, but it was huuuge (took over the whole blog). I used jing to create the screencast.

And here is the resultant movie. The finished product: