Hungry For (mostly Japanese) Words

Heidi, Heidi in Japanese and German

Heidi is a children's novel written by Johanna Spyri, a 19th century Swiss author who lived most of her life in Zürich. Heidi became tremendously popular almost immediately; it's been translated to several languages, made into movies several times (most notabley perhaps in the English speaking world in a rather bastardized version starring Shirley Temple), and there was a Heidi musical that was popular last summer in Switzerland. But in the non-English speaking world, Heidi is probably best known via the anime series produced in Japan in the 1970s called Arupusu no sho-jo Haiji (アルプスの少女ハイジ). (Wikipedia English entry)

It's a bit ironic in a way that a Japanese anime has helped to make a Swiss classic (written in German) so popular. But the series really was of top quality, and it's no wonder that it is still shown on TV all over the world. (Except for the English speaking parts of course. Crap like Pikachuu and Yuugi-Oh can make it on the Toon channels but an old anime of a classic children's story...no no no.)

Since I'm a Japanese person currently living in Switzerland. Heidi is never that far from my mind. Whenever I talk to a new Japanese acquaintance, I can guarantee that Heidi will come up in the conversation. Heidiland, the area around Maienfeld in the Grisons (Graubünden), is a major draw for Japanese tourists. (Don't let that deter you from visiting the area though - it really is beautiful around there.)

Painless as possible Japanese (CJK) input on a mostly non-Japanese Mac

I have been a Mac user since the  late '80s. From the start, Mac OSs  have been very 2-byte character language friendly, unlike Windows. This is one of the reasons that I switched to Macs after formerly being an 'IBM-compatible-PC' user. This 2-byte character friendliness has not changed one bit in OS X of course. However, individual applications handle the issue a bit differently.

I write in Latin characters (English and so on) most of the time, but when I write in Japanese I want to not have to go through extra hoops. I want to concentrate on writing. Here are how some notes on how various text editors handle this issue. My app of choice is at the very end!

One must-have for me for Japanese input is that it has to be inline, within the document. I hate it when the Japanese input pops up in a separate window or popup thingie because it distracts me from my writing. It is inevitable for the conversion (henkan,  変換) popup to appear, but the actual input is another question.

iKnow! - a slick browser based language learning app

The other day, I ran across an outstanding online language learning app/website. I hesitated to mention it here, since at the moment it's only for Japanese speakers who want to learn English. Still, you may know someone who is in that position, so here it is. It's called iKnow!.

Yoroshiku and Osewa ni narimasu, and the Japanese culture of interreliance

Happy New Year! I'm sort of worried about the fact that already like 125 + people have subscribed to the RSS feed for this blog. I suspect a lot of those peeps are leftover subbers from when this was the Just Hungry food blog, who never bothered to check, or something (IT"S MOVED OVER THERE LIKE AGES AGO) but nevertheless. If you were drawn to the boobies, I won't always be talking about titillating (snort, snort) body parts, you know.

In any case, let's get back to the topic of language.

Yesterday, I made my round of phone calls to Japan to say Happy New Year and all. This is the standard way of saying Happy New Year to Japanese people.

Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu. (alternate: Shinnen akemashite omedetou gozaimasu)
Kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegaishimasu.