Singularity on the Plane

Everybody knows captcha, the verification image we meet everytime we register something to help keep spammers off the board. It usually involves retyping a badly distorted or other visually-abnormal text. Boring, because What You See Is What You Type (WYSIWYT).

Every once in a while someone came up with a clever CAPTCHA, like those simple arithmetic CAPTCHAs where you are asked to do an addition.

Recently, I registered on a Japanese site FC2. It has this never-before-seen (by me) CAPTCHA:

You, got it right! They spell a series of numbers in kana and we need to retype it using the all-too-familiar 1 2 3. Of course, the image is still littered with those bacteria we’ve been accustomed to.

If you’re studying Japanese, please try to answer in the comments. I’ll give you… a nice reply comment :).

PS: CAPTCHA is actually an acronym so it is written in capitals. However I very much prefer it to write it like: “captcha”.

The useless background narrative

I’m 3 years late, but here it is…

There are indeed chance meetings that are just wonderful. Meetings which upon reflection would make you think, “I couldn’t imagine how things would work out without it!”. A perfect example is when I was hotspotting in Puskom UGM with Karnan and met Adit there. Adit is a fellow Ilkomer, and I had chatted with him through IM about studying kanji. I had told him that I want to copy his study materials some time.

And what a time indeed! After copying the kanji-related files, I was shown quite a lot of mp3s on his Nihongo folder. Not anime soundtracks or jpop whatnots, mind you, but Japanese language lessons! Adit said that you can turn it on and enjoy it while having your Morning Coffee. (or was it another drink?)

My focus was, and probably still, on reading. Therefore I thought some audio learning materials would be a great boon to enhance one of my weakest Japanese skills, listening. I happily copied it.

Most of them were japanesepod101.com podcasts and some nihongojuku. I listened to some of them, and indeed thought it was very great. However, in the end I didn’t have enough yaruki to do a full-fledged and regular listening of it. Probably because a lot of the episodes are missing. I like to study a certain thing thoroughly, from back to back, so those podcasts look like a book with lots of torn and missing pages. Not very appetizing.

Until one day I stayed at a relative’s house in Jakarta with ultra-blazing Internet connection. I wisely utilized it to download jpod101’s audio files (nihongojuku was dead). Collecting all the links and feeding it to Flashget took me well beyond midnight.

The first episode was in 2005. So yes, I was years late and was faced with a 4 GiB pile of digitalized sinusoidal waves. But no worry! They release like 1 episode per day, so one can definitely catch up just by listening to 31 podcasts a month.

About the podcast itself

The essence is simple: The free podcast teaches you Japanese using English. The teachers are Peter-san who is a native English speaker and at least a native Japanese speaker. After a short intro, you will be given a short dialog, then that dialog again in slo-mo, and finally the dialog with the English translation inserted in-between. Vocabulary is given after that dialog parade. Then finally the grammar points.

What’s so captivating about it? Probably because Peter-san is such a skillful and mesmerizing teacher. He gives lots of insights, interesting anecdotes, and Peter-style jokes in the explanation. Or maybe it’s because of the many nihonjin casts with their unique personality. From Yoshi the cool guy to Takase the tough girl. Or is it because the stories are genuinely interesting and most of the time hilarious?

No matter what your level is, if you’re learning Japanese then you should try to tune in to japanesepod101.com. They have a fine gradation of level ranging from newbie to upper intermediate. For those interested in the Japanese culture, they also have weekly Japanese Culture Class podcasts with topics from superstitions to marriage. Advanced students can even enjoy Miki-sama’s full-Japanese audio blog. (the link points to the wrong person, but their nickname are actually same) And if that isn’t enough to assure you, they even have 1 lesson with Morning Musume as the topic!

Currently I try to listen to 2 podcasts per day. I’ve covered 300+ lessons so now my ears can even differentiate the voices of Yoshi, Jun, Natsuko, Sakura, Hatsumi, Naomi, Takase, Chigusa, and others. I’m quite surprised that I found lots of new words even in the Survival and Newbie series because I was well beyond my 3rd year of studying Japanese.

It certainly increased my listening comprehension significantly. Probably my speaking skill too, because I often repeated after the dialogs. At any rate, I’m looking forward for the day I can catch up with the latest episodes.

Closing words

I probably should send Adit a DVD as my gratitude. Oh, and anyway, upon leaving Puskom that day I carelessly left my student card and had to travel all the way from Milan…

And lastly, are you a japanesepod101 listener too?

Probably because of my previous post advertising free Mixi invites, the staff decided to take a measure!

Now to register as a new Mixi user, you need to enter that thing called “handphone mail address”. Simple, except that I don’t even know what it is. I have a handphone, and all I get with it is the “phone number”. You can’t let the field empty. You can’t fill it with a gmail or yahoo address either.

With some chittery-chat on 2ch irc (#japanese), I got someone to tell me that one valid such address is something@ezweb.ne.jp. I put a random “something”, and it did succeed.

Until I realized that other than confirming from your normal email, you need to confirm from that dreaded “handphone mail address”.

In the end, I only managed to invite 1 person to Mixi… He was lucky to sign up fast.

On a previous blog, I discussed how win32 GTK/GTK+ programs are smart enough to choose a Japanese translation by default if your system’s language is set to Japanese. However, there’s one big shame that I concealed: it will not choose the fonts correctly.

Related to this problem is how the Unicode standard handles Japanese and Chinese characters. You see, the characters knows as kanji, used in Japan, historically comes from China. In fact, kanji literally means Han characters. But that happened more than a thousand years ago. Time always brings change, and now many characters are drawn differently in each countries.

On the image below, you can see how some Japanese characters (black) differs from the Chinese counterpart (blue):

You can see that even the stroke count can differ!

Unicode, in its effort called Han Unification, insisted that Japanese, traditional Chinese, and Korean characters which historically were same must only get a codepoint. So there can’t be one Unicode character for the Japanese version of ‘close’ and another for the Chinese version. Any differences then must be achieved by fonts. So yes, in the screenshot above, the Japanese and Chinese characters are actually the same Unicode character, but rendered in OpenOffice.org with different fonts. And yes, that means you can’t display both Chinese and Japanese text in a simple text document (which can only use one font for the whole file), unless you happen to use only the characters which are country invariant.

Now, back to GTK. GTK programs use a configuration file called pango.aliases to select its fonts. Here’s a sample line:

sans = "arial,browallia new,mingliu,simhei,gulimche,ms gothic"

Now that line means that, if a character must be drawn on screen as a Sans-serif character (”sans”), then try to display it using the “arial” font which is first in the list. If the character isn’t on the system’s Arial font, then try “browallia new”. If it fails, try the next one, “mingliu”. And so on.

Problem comes when a static list like that meets the intricacies of Unicode’s Han unification. For probably a random reason, the configuration file of Windows GTK programs put Chinese fonts (mingliu etc.) before Japanese fonts (ms gothic etc.). So there you have it, a user interface of Japanese translation displayed using “Chinese” characters:

If you’re like me, then that extra dot stroke on “chikai” will really get on your nerve.

The solution is a simple exercise of find and replace. Now find all files named pango.aliases on your hard drive, which most probably will be inside your Program Files folder. Each installed GTK program can have one, but they can also use the “shared” GTK’s. If you already know where your GTK programs are, the file is actually located in the etc\pango subfolder. Once found, replace the content with my hand-crafted version:

courier = "courier new,MS Mincho"

tahoma = "tahoma,MS PGothic,browallia new,mingliu,simhei,gulimche,ms gothic,kartika,latha,mangal"
sans = "arial,MS PGothic,browallia new,mingliu,simhei,gulimche,ms gothic,kartika,latha,mangal"
serif = "times new roman,MS PMincho,angsana new,mingliu,simsun,gulimche,ms gothic,kartika,latha,mangal"
mono = "courier new,MS Mincho,courier monothai,mingliu,simsun,gulimche,ms gothic,kartika,latha,mangal"
monospace = "courier new,MS Mincho,courier monothai,mingliu,simsun,gulimche,ms gothic,kartika,latha,mangal"

Now your configuration will prefer Japanese fonts rather than Chinese ones. Talk about font discrimination! Here’s the result:

Ah, Japanese translation in Japanese fonts. No more wrong fonts. That feels better.

Wow… I haven’t done my dump for ages. The last one was around 3 months ago!

But rest assured, since graduation I have been doing lots of real readings. I stil haven’t finished the monstrous Wikipedia WW2 article. I also managed to read some stories from bookstudio, mostly ren’ai stuffs and some adventures. Plus some other random stuffs like newspapers and some physical books I have.

I also still haven’t finished these two textbooks: Routledge and Colloquial Japanese. I’m also still listening to japanesepod101 daily to improve my listening. I’ve finished all survival and newbie series, and now halfway through beginner season 1 :).

But now that I’m now officially working as a programmer whose job doesn’t have anything to do with Japanese, my time to study Japanese has decreased significantly. Let’s just hope it doesn’t die out. Please everyone, pray for me.

Anyway, for this dump I’ve gathered 300 new kanji and 491 new words. Now the total is 2,609 kanji and 10,888 words. Yes, I’ve passed the 2,500 milestone!

Impressive? Well, I think I still need around 500 more to achive the level of literacy I want. I still occasionally find new ones, see? The key here is constancy. If I keep reading and learning new kanji, no matter how slow it is, it will pile up. In my case, the average learning rate between my last dump and this one is only 3.9 kanji per day. That’s not too demanding, right? Couple it with Mnemosyne so you won’t forget kanji you’ve learned.

One tip today for those also learning kanji. Don’t get too caught up in artificial lists (Jouyou, JLPT)! Go find some real reading material and learn the kanji you find there! By experiencing how the kanji is actually used, it will stick on your mind more easily. You might be interested to know that from the 2600+ kanji I’ve learned, I still haven’t encountered three grade 5 and one grade 6 Jouyou kanji. And of course lots of grade 8 kanji. That’s depite the fact that I found lots of “gradeless” kanji! Shows you how useful those lists are…

The only time where you should exhaust an artificial list is when you’re going to take a test with predetermined kanji (e.g., JLPT) soon. Other than that, you can forget about them.

Anyway, here are all the new kanji:

耕俵賃卵憾恨剤剖泥憤窮喪藻准酬酵紡祉劣鯨鋳濫庶忌衰痢弦栓酢沼繕懲閥礁堕諭粘唆朴膜畔虜禍疾較塊稚炊隅彫憂耗爵勲賊糧悦吟穫漸慨隻累霧鎮囚棺愁賄硫鉢窯剛墜狩洪脂昆喬那捷爾鷹彬冶雛匡宏瑚胡鮎蒔晃瑛綺艶杏玲鯛碧倭蓮鶴倖毅茜祐眉袈裟鳳瞭杜耽盧醒嬌倅甥賁躬壺澡嵒癌國對汪峯鍼雚灌旡漑賑榮梁刅桼膝鵜裾氾諜隂榴憐楚諺孚孵芻殲註楯迂坦匛柩匙厷鮪躓珊瞑冥埶藝鼎蹲夋戚尗脆冨撒鞍晦顛顚喩囁妓叱驢哨壽躊躇溌剌悖遜狐與嶼蜂卜頷叕啜雫掬鬯鬱蛤烏曖昧雜囃菱霰俯淵蚤掻怯焚眈窺隙涛偕炸絨毯戮翏耒廻蓋盍牡鴨禽浙咳厠珀奄串魏酎隺堺楔犀蛾皺栖醤籤韱怨杓這睫顰姑舅艮饂飩噤厓弄鯖煎凭吃麺拉軋蕩謨匆枷戎賂櫛凰羔匋掏仇妬耄彔碌抓膠撰洛苔廿燕臙汝鎧

And the words:

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The more our information society progresses, the more we realize the value of having a program available in different languages. The effort towards internationalization and localization is an amusing trend for me, because at childhood I once thought that the existence of multiple languages is a bother, and envisioned that at some age the human civilization will settle on one ultimate lingua-gaea.

I couldn’t be more wrong. Now I realize that each language is beautiful and unique in its own right and every effort must be spent to conserve them, or at least document them sufficiently before its last speaker dies.

Anyway, multilingual programs… People might need a certain language simply because she couldn’t understand any other languages. In this case, the availability of a program in a certain language is crucial to reduce the technological gap. People might also want a certain language simply because she enjoys that particular language the most. Another use is for studying foreign languages, like me who tries to set every possible program to Japanese in order to immerse myself in the language.

With that in mind, we will investigate how Windows programs currently handle the user’s desire to choose her preferred language. (Some of the discussion might apply to other OSes such as GNU/Linux and OS X)

One installer to rule them all

The most convenient case is when a program installer includes all available translations. Examples are Inkscape, Pidgin, Battle for Wesnoth, Paint.NET, and iTunes. For example, when I tried to download the newest Inkscape, there’s only one installer for Windows: Inkscape-0.46.win32.exe. It has English, Japanese, and a myriad of other languages included. Even Indonesian!

The next question is, what language will such programs use by default? Some programs, most notably GTK programs, are smart enough to detect the operating system’s language settings. Where is it set?

In Windows XP, the user can set what language she prefers from “Control Panel” → “Regional and Language Options” → “Advanced” → “Language for non-Unicode programs”, like so:

Note that this setting is actually to enable non-Unicode (e.g., ancient) programs to display its text correctly instead of mojibake. However modern Unicode-aware programs use the value we set here to decide what language it should present to the user.

Mine is set to Japanese, so Inkscape appears like this:

Other programs ask for what language the user would like to use, perhaps at install time or when the program is run for the first time. An example is Paint.NET:

The rest just set the default language to English or whatever else the developer prefers. If the user desires, she can change the language through some means because the language data are already installed anyway. An example is an old version of OpenTTD which defaults to English:

If the default language doesn’t suit you, how do you change it? Some programs offer the convenience of setting it within the program itself. An example is iTunes:

And The Battle for Wesnoth:

GTK programs does not visibly offer any such options, because it assumes that you will in most cases want the language you set on the operating system. However, it atually checks for the availability of the LANG environment variable (probably ISO 639-1 codes). You can use it to quickly try out a language. For example, go to the command prompt and type:

set LANG=th

And from the same command prompt, run the program, say inkscape.exe:

Ah, I feel nostalgic :).

Exceptionally Easy to Extend (E3)

Some programs come with only one language, and to choose another we must download the required language files. Though quite inconvenient, it is not that bad because language files shouldn’t be that large. An example is µTorrent:

Predestination, believe it or not

Other programs offer seperate installer for each language. If you go to their web sites, you will find one installer for the English version, another for the French version, and so on. The concept is very simple: what you download is what you get. Needless to say, it’s a pain the arse for the curious or the language learners out there. Two glaring examples are OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox. Here’s a Japanese version of Firefox that I recently installed:

It’s of course better than no multilingual support at all, but still it’s a waste of bandwidth to download another version and troublesome to actually install it (uninstall the other-language version first).

My take

A modern program should at all cost include all available translations in its installer. It should then detect and display the user’s preferred language by default.

About language-changing facility, I can understand GTK’s decision to hide it from the program’s preferences. They are probably following Gnome’s guideline that every GTK app should look the same (think about themes), and if the user wants to change anything, she can apply a system-wide change. To take things into perspective, it’s bizzare to imagine that every GTK app has its own theme settings, right? At least you can set it per program using an environment variable.

For µTorrent that separates its language pack, I think it’s an acceptable special case because µTorrent aims to be a small no-frills downloadable program. Heck, even the language pack is larger than the core English program itself! However, I think for most other programs the size of the language files shouldn’t matter that much.

So big cheers for GTK apps and other programs that include all translations by default. A big, big boo for OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and the gangs that require a different download for each language.

Friendster. Everyone talks about it, everyone’s in it. However, I thought it was rather useless so I never bothered to make an account. Well, until one day my friend (Firdaus IIRC) pestered me or lets say, forced me to death. ‘It won’t do no harm’, or something like that. Obviously not with a grammatically-unsound (or so they say) construct such as the double negative.

So, to spice things up a bit, I decided to make it a pet social experiment. ‘Let’s see how many friends I can get if I just accept friend invitations…’, I thought. That means all my friends on my friendster list asked me to be friends first. Well, except for one, the almighty guitar kamisama, my high school mate, Andre (who can resist not adding him as a friend?). Right now I have 62 friends. Quite popular, I reckon.

But I jumped from my chair, unliterally, hearing a japanesepod101 podcast talking about Mixi, a friendster-like site but in Japanese. Naturally I was interested to join, as I’m currently a Nihongo student.

Mixi’s registration system is invitation-based, much like the beta gmail (right now gmail should be around version 3). They say that it would allow them ‘to create a comfortable place’, or to paraphrase it, ‘to make you suffer finding someone who owns a Mixi account’.

Getting someone to invite wasn’t that hard for me. Well, if you count several days as ‘not that hard’, that is. On the podcast, Peter and the gang told that one only need to ask them. So I visited the forum and appropriately posted on an already-existing ‘I want a Mixi account’ thread. But it’s a sticky thread so it’s always on the top which unfortunately made it less glaring if a new person posted there. n days passed without a reply.

I was sure I would get a reply by just directly mailing the staff or PMing people that gave mixi invites on that thread, but at that point I couldn’t wait longer and wanted a more real-time response. So I visited the place where one can easily encounter a random Nihonjin and chat with them, irc.2ch.net#japanese (and they actually speak English there if you’re still on your kanas)! a_a was kind enough to invite me, and long story short I’m now a Mixi citizen!

For me, the registration process was relatively easy to follow. The menus are also fully readable. However, the personal content, now that’s where the fun begins! I already found someone using a never-before-encountered non-ministry-approved kanji for eel 鰻 (unagi) on his ‘favorite food’ list.

If you need a Mixi invite, and can assure me that you’re not using it solely for the purpose of finding random Japanese girl pics, I’ll gladly confer it.

If you’re learning Japanese, or if you’re already pera-pera in it, and looking for reading materials, then

bbs.bookstudio.com

is the perfect site for you!

Well, the URL used to be that, but one day the server hard disk crashed. It was down for so long that I had given up my hopes. But now it’s back up again with a brand new URL!!! Ladies and gentlemen, please visit:

http://works.bookstudio.com

(accessing the old URL will bring you to the new one)

So now let’s talk what the site is about…

First of all, I don’t think the site has a name… The big banner on top says “shousetsu & manga toukou-ya” which means “the place to submit stories and comics” but I think that’s more of a description than a name. But who says you need to have a name to be useful?

Well the description sums it all. You can read such diverse genre of novels from SF (sci-fi), douwa (fairy tales) to BL (figure that out on your own). And of course the stories are free! Because the site is just back up, things are filling up from the beginning again. However there are already more than a hundred of stories there.

I’m far from pera-pera, but I’m peko-peko with Japanese. For me, this site is just perfect!

Excuse my laziness of blogging… You see, I’m now in this remote place called Sokaraja and circumstances force me to go to the town Purwokerto to surf the net. That’s quite far for my standard and so… Well enough excuses.

This will be just another monotone dump, but believe me the study isn’t as boring as this post looks. I’ve dumped 92 new kanji and 131 new words, for a total of 2,309 kanji and 10,354 words. Believe me, even with this amount of kanji I’m still humbled by the amount of new characters I found every day. Just keep moving on and know no surrender.

To spice things up a bit, I’ll tell you my current Japanese diet. I’m still trying to finish that WW2 article on Wikipedia. It goes roughly two paragraphs a day, so probably hell will freeze faster. I’m also playing freeciv, an open source game which has a Japanese translation! Not so much playing, but exploring all the text inside and trying to read it. If you’re interested in trying it but has problems, just mail me (for me I can’t just run it and get a usable learning environment, but I’m not writing about it now). Like explained on another post, I’m also still going through “Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar”. All those and randomly leafing through Japanese books I have/borrowed.

Ah, I almost forget… I also now regularly listen to podcasts downloaded from japanesepod101.com. Be sure to visit that site!

So here are the kanji:

肥醸陶婆浸艇殻疫謀喝騰迅肢燥紳捜侯赴薫該貞偵晶拷謹刃彰銃痴斎附帥稼簿弊絞宥邑昌旭禎嘉慧栗堆晒曾傀儡爺塹壕揆簒恫剃蟹宋楷艸已筈馳飴瘡汲釧喉瞿矍攫侭謂唖尖曰籠夭訃凛繚峙骸崖袖嘗袴溺牽溥奢綻

And the words:

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A regular run of the mill dump post. So yeah, I still read Japanese materials routinely to find new words and especially kanji, and right now my main sources are the WW2 article on Wikipedia which is still a long way to finish and starting to get extremely boring and tiresome (勃発、勃発、侵攻、侵攻), an encyclopedic Japanese grammar book “Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar” from “Routlege Grammars” which I like very much because it contains translations and for every example which is written in genuine Japanese characters, and some other reading sources like the various Japanese magazines and books I have on my disposal which I open randomly and by whim (see screenshot above for an example). Oh, and if you think the previous sentence is too long, blame me for reading too much written Japanese in which sentences are unreasonable long which is apparently just for the author’s pleasure to torment foreign readers which are not accustomed for such lengthy parsing using their untrained brain which is actually a very capable biological computer.

For this dump, there are 100 new kanji and 178 new word. Now my kanji count is 2,217 and my word count is 10,223. It might be interesting to know that among those 2200 or so kanji, I still haven’t encountered six grade 5 kanji and three grade 6 kanji! So there you have it for the commonness of Jouyou kanji.

Note about my method of memorizing these words and kanji. When I encounter new words, I searched for it in an electronic dictionary and then put it on my spreadsheet file of Japanese words (and kanji). I just collect it there as much as I find. Then, I separately put the words there to Mnemosyne, first come first serve. These two are not synchronized, so I don’t have to directly put all words I find to Mnemosyne. In fact, I have almost 3,000 words that I’ve put on my word list waiting to be put into Mnemosyne.

Anyway, here are the kanji:

穀律尺酔怠賓克債墨戒併隷循誇呈排斥薪漂錯枠弧賠窒掌覇津襟某斉撲罰封搭溝啓妄祥洲伽麿蘭玖伍綜渚晋叡哉眸鯉緋鳩冴卆蒋并餅孛勃葛盡儘夸牒狼厭猒區謳賭阡萬肆捌陌戊庚癸苺膣腟氐咸股踪幟摺柿匪榧刳肛菐斬荅亢杭釘惧

And the words:

(more…)