☆ENGLISH UPDATE☆

I just found these two really cool blogs - one by a girl who did an exchange program to Germany and Japan another vlog about Korean culture etc. 

Firstly the one about korean culture is called Sweet and Tasty. It is really well done and all by one person taking on different comical characters. My favourite is the aegyo girl and 'Taekwondo'. It talks about various aspects of Korean culture, as well as giving a few lessons on the Korean language and about particular words often mentioned in the Kpop scene. If you haven't heard of them yet, you should check out Simon & Martina from Eat Your Kimchi. They also vlog about Korean culture and Kpop, and I absolutely love their stuff.

The second blog I found yesterday is by Vy and called I think in comics. I was particularly interested in the one from Vy's travels in Germany and Japan. I am not so into comics and manga, but found Vy's comics very entertaining and fun to read. My, it must have taken her so much time to draw all those up!

Finally, I had a proper look at tofugu - a Japanese language and culture blog in English. If you're interested in learning Japanese, I had a brief look at their language course intro and it looked really good. One thing that really got me interested was their kanji learning strategy which involves learning kanji from the radicals rather than learning kanji the way most textbooks deliver them which is comparable to the way Japanese students learn kanji at schools. It also encourages the student to focus not so much on being able to write the kanji, but rather being able to recognise them. When I was learning at university, I spent hours and hours writing and re-writing kanji in order to memorise them. I was able to memorise the beginner and intermediate kanji lists, but it only took one year for me to forget about 50% of what I had learned. All that time re-writing them could have been put to better use. ACTUALLY, come to think of it, I DID need to know how to write it as we had dictation tests! Ergh, so if you aren't studying Japanese at university, perhaps try focusing on recognising the kanji rather than being able to write them. After all, everyone uses Japanese text input. The time you save can be put towards flashcards! So, if you are in need of a japanese learning resource, try textfugu. 

Oh, and in case you want to study hiragana and katakana, here is a good resource I found from the textfugu site: realkana.

My heavens, that makes two english updates in two days! How awful. I must write in Japanese next time!