(keitai-l) Learning Japanese

From: Brian <for_brian_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 03/12/03
Message-ID: <20030312170534.41013.qmail@web10107.mail.yahoo.com>
Sorry to continue the mostly off-topic post about
learning Japanese but I *had* to follow up to the
other Brian's comment that he is a "guy who expects to
become good at Japanese in a year".  Can't help it
but... HA!  Aren't we all! 

To make this post slightly on topic, here's both a
Japanese language learning tip and a comment on using
pictures for memory reasons.  I sometimes use my
keitai camera to take pictures of things I almost
understand except for a kanji or two, and then later
ask a friend to translate for me.  

I have also set up my English PDA so it does kanji
handwriting recognition along with a dictionary, but I
have become frustrated with trying to use that in any
practical situation.  I read one time about a
researcher who had set up a PDA with a cameras to send
pictures of Chinese characters to a central computer,
OCR it, and send back a translation.  I suppose the
same thing could be done some day for keitai phones. 
Looking far into the future, but maybe not too far,
altered reality (sort of translucent VR for those
unfamiliar with it) will overlay the Kanji with the
hiragana, making studying Kanji unessary.  Combine it
with AI driven real time translation of audio in the
much farther future, there is no need to know Japanese
at all.  So why bother now?!  Or at least that is my
excuse for doing it so slowly.


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Received on Wed Mar 12 19:06:01 2003