Pod Cast

What makes a good radio/tv/podcast?

Hm....A very broad question. Probably the most important thing is having an interesting subject to talk about. It can be music, news, talk and debate, whatever, as long as you know who your audience is. It is a very versatile way of communicating with people, and the you should be as creative possible. Thinking of new ways to get your information across to the people, new things to talk about, etc. Of course, I have no background in public broadcasting, so my advice should be taken with a grain of salt. The one professional tip I do know is that there should be no dead air. Dead air is simply a part in the broadcast where no one is talking and there is no music. You need to grab the attention of the listener, and must constantly offer something to bring them in to what you are doing. Since podcast's differ from radio in that you can download and listen any time and multiple times, there should also be some replay value to the content. People should want to listen to it again and again.

Hm, I guess that's about all I can come up with on the subject. I'm guessing we will be doing a class podcasting pretty soon, in which case I think it will be とてもおもしろいです。もうろくじはんにです。そろそろばんごはんをたべます。しつれします

こんばんは

Alright, I finally got my computer to type Japanese. I'm sure most of it doesn't make too much sense, but i'm trying to keep online translation to a minimum since I know so little of the language. Here goes:

みなさん、こんばんは。きんようびからにちようびまでコネチカットへかえりました。かぞくはわたしになつかしむ（I'm trying to say my family missed me). 木曜日に地下鉄でＳＴＭＡＲＫＳへ日本語の昼休みを食べました。らめんとみそをたべました。あれはおいしいです。

I'm still working out the kinks, and I think another Japanese word program I downloaded is interfering with it at the same time because a few of the functions don't work (or I'm just completely incompetent when it comes to computers). Once I get the hang of it, typing will be a lot easier. I also noticed that when i push space before the sentence is done, it converts some of the Hiragana into Kanji. Does anyone know how accurate this translation is?

In other news, I was browsing the blogs of the other だいがくせ and noticed that mentioned the new Final Fantasy game coming out. I'm very excited for that and I think it's going to be a great game.

Anyway, it's getting late. じゃまたあした。いまねます。あした、あといっぽをかきます.

Japanese Lecture

Tawa Sensei's lecture last thursday was a really good guide in helping me approach Japanese. She mainly focused on beginner acquisition of the language, and fortunatly I fit that profile. Her diagram and the way she explained it really showed me that I'm focusing too much on writing, and not enough on connecting the speech. I can communicate a lot of information from earlier chapters pretty well, but I'm definitely lagging behind my expectations , especially since the sentences are becoming much longer. I was really hoping Tawa Sensei would focus more on mneumonics, specifically the most effective way to move the information recalled through the mneumonics into longterm memory. What I find happening is that while I'm able to recall the word, I still have to use the mneumonic many days later. Wven if I study the word very thoroughly, I find myself in the habbit of recalling the mneumonic, then translating, then formulating the structure of the sentence. This delays actual speaking quite a bit. I did however appreciate her focus on chunking as a memory tool. It's really worked for me (kon sen rai and asa hiru ban combination is a good example), and our vocab book is organized so that you can utilize this tool for almost every vocab quiz.

It's really amazing what one more week's worth of japanese can do. The first day of Japanese chatclub, it was almost impossible to carry on any conversation. But just a week later and only a few more verbs nouns and particles, and I was actually able to communicate with people! Test is today and I'm pretty confident about it. Reviewed all my homework, notes, flashcards, audio cd, extra material, nothing more I can do.

audio cd!

Today I just remembered that the romaji copy of the main textbook isn't the only version I have! Going over all the audio sections while reading the hiragana is a lot more help than the Romaji. I went over all the lesson 4 and 5 sections every day this weekend, and it's much easier to recall the entire sentence patterns. Anyway... time to sleep. Hopefully I remember all these date vocab words for tommorow

shiture shimasu